Are our present sufferings because of our past karma?

Podcast

If we are suffering now is that a repercussion of our past actions it can be see basically there is a cause effect connection in the world if say your child comes back home and got a black eye you wonder what happened he says no I just got a black eye no no no what happened did you get into a fight with someone whenever we see an effect we presume that there must be a cause isn’t it so a cause effect correlation is something which we implicitly assume and even science operates that way I have been invited to speak in Cambridge University so we passed by the same tree when Newton is said to have seen the fruit falling so he saw the fruit falling he asked the question what made the fruit fall and that’s how he came up with the theory of gravity but the idea is when he saw the fruit falling he asked what made the fruit fall that means he is assuming that things don’t happen just by themselves there is a cause effect connection so both in our day to day life as well as in science we presume that there is a cause effect connection but there are times when we can’t see the cause effect connection say if a child has come with a black eye you got a fight, fight with someone find out what the fight was sometimes we can find the cause but sometimes we can’t find the cause with our own intelligence now then we have two options one is we can presume that there is no cause effect correlation things just happen at random or maybe there is a bigger picture in which I can see I need to place this in a broader framework in which I can see this cause effect connection so intelligence means to frame things in the right context so the same thing right now each every thing we could place in different context say for example if we start feeling very warm now now we could say that am I getting fever if we were feverish and we are feeling hot maybe I am getting fever that could be one context another could be oh maybe the ventilation in this room is not very good that’s why I am feeling hot or maybe it’s too much crowding here too many people that’s why it’s hot or it could be that the temperature has gone high summer has become too much now or we could say actually there is climate change the temperature of the whole world is increasing and this indicates that we humans are disturbing the ecological balance so now any of these context could be true so intelligence means we place things in the right context so if a problem that we are facing if say if we can if it’s just that the fan is not fast enough and we increase the fan and we feel reasonably comfortable so if a thing can be placed in a small context and understood then it may not be necessary to go to a bigger context but when things can’t be understood in a small context say if there is a heat wave that is there across the country then no matter how much fan I increase it may not make much difference so sometimes when things cannot be explained in a smaller context we need to place them in a bigger context so similarly when in our small context this doesn’t make sense why is this happening then we place it in a bigger context and then we see oh could it be from our previous life so that’s how we make sense of things so suppose we have a if we have a credit a credit arrangement with some supermarket so we go and buy things from there and then at the end of the month we pay them now say if we go there at the end of the month and we buy a 2 dollar object from there and they give us a bill that is 700 dollars hey what happened this is not 700 dollars worth but what are they doing yeah the bill is not for the specific product that we have taken so when we see the bill we have to see it ok this is not just for this there is much more coming over there so basically the principle of karma and reincarnation plays our present situation in a bigger context so when the immediate cause effect connection doesn’t make sense then we place it in a bigger context and that is what we do in various fields in science for example the theory of gravity worked very well and it was considered a bedrock of classical physics but by the start of the 20th century especially when scientists started studying very small fundamental particles and very big particles at the cosmic level objects at the cosmic level they found that these didn’t seem to be obeying the law of gravity some other theory was required so they didn’t say there is no cause effect connection they came up with a different theory a different frame of reference for the subatomic particles they came up with quantum physics for the large bodies they came up with relativity so the idea is that karma gives us a broader framework in which we can see things so when things make sense in the immediate cause effect connection we just stay at there and take that as the exclusion but when things don’t make sense then we place them in a broader context does that answer your question? you have something else on your mind?