Texas school shooting were all victims subject to mass karma?

Podcast:

Are tragedies like the Texas school shooting a result of linked karma or mass karma, wherein all those children at the same time, at the same place, at the same age, more or less, were killed and probably everyone in the village, in that small community knew about, knew about, knew each other? Answer, yes, possibly.

Gahana Karmanogati Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita that the workings of karma are very difficult to understand, the fourth chapter. So, in principle, we could say that it is due to that people, everybody over there had some negative karma which they had to work out and that working out happened through this this tragedy. But in general, when atrocities or tragedies or any form of injustice or anything bad happens, our focus should not be on our karma, on the karma of those who have been victimized, those who are suffering, but on our own dharma. 

Not what they did wrong in the past, but what we should be doing right in the present. In general, in scripture, the response to adversity is never by pointing to the karma of those who have been victimized. That is because that could make us very heartless.

So, when after the Kurukshetra war, there are so many orphans and widows, Deshchandra Maharaj immediately focuses on providing relief measures for everyone. He does not think it is their own karma because of which they are in that situation. So, there is a time when we seek and share philosophical explanations, but there is a time when we offer empathy, we offer support through empathy and assistance.

When Abhimanyu is killed in his explanation, when Krishna is consoling Arjuna, he never once mentions anything about Abhimanyu’s karma or Arjuna’s karma. So, if a community has been hit by a tragedy, then that community will especially need support and solace and strength. And whether it is through practical assistance that we can do if we are nearby or it is through offering emotional support, through at least offering prayers, that is both way is fine. 

But our focus should always be on what is our dharma, not somebody else’s karma. And certainly, our point should not be to make the whole community feel guilty or to paint the whole community in a bad light by thinking that everybody in that community must have done something terrible in the past. We all are finite human beings, finite beings with finite frames of knowledge.

And we are meant to function primarily within those finite frames of knowledge. That means within our finite frame of knowledge, that community is just like any other community in the world and suddenly it has been overcome by this tragedy. So, within the finite frame of knowledge that we have, wherein we have not seen them in doing anything anything especially in us that differs them from any other community, to focus on or to obsess over their, their some collective past karma is, can be not just wrong, but even monstrously wrong in terms of dehumanizing us. 

Thank you.