Our life is framed by our past karma-for this idea, what’s the evidence?

This is an AI-generated transcript and it might not be fully accurate:

How do we know that our life is framed based on our past karma? Ultimately, we all have to live with some world views. We all have to make choices. See, basically for us, when we face life’s unfairness, there are only broadly three options.

When we face that life is unfair, why is it unfair? We could say that life is chaotic. That it’s arbitrary. Some people are just lucky and some people are just unlucky.

And now, this is actually a very hopeless idea. Hopelessness-inducing idea. Because nobody lives like that.

Nobody can live like that. That no matter what you do, it’s going to make no difference. Life is just like a cosmic lottery and some people are lucky and if you are unlucky, yes, you are a loser.

Just live with it. So, life is itself chaotic. Everything operates based on chance.

That’s one extreme. Now, this is the atheistic, non-theistic, materialistic, hedonistic philosophy. Some people are just lucky.

That’s all. Now, the other is that God is causing all this. Now, if we say that, okay, why do good things happen to some people and bad things happen to some people? That’s because of God.

Now, that would mean that God becomes discriminatory. Isn’t it? That God favours some people and how does God favour? Does God like some people more and not like some people less? In the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, because in their mainstream versions, they don’t accept the idea of the soul and its reincarnation primarily. Some concept of soul is there but they don’t, in the mainstream version, accept the idea of reincarnation.

And that’s why this becomes a very difficult thing to accept for them. So, if we are supposed to love a person who is completely arbitrary, it’s very difficult. So, in many ways, if we had to choose between life operated by chance or life operated by arbitrary chance or life operated by an arbitrary God, it’s easier to accept arbitrary chance and arbitrary God.

And in many ways, this conception of God is actually responsible for the rise of atheism in the world, at least partly, many causes. Now, in between is the idea that there is a multi-life causation, that God is not unfair, there is a system of cause-effect connection, and it extends over time. So, I have studied quite a bit of philosophy.

I have analysed the problem of evil. So, the specifics can be different but beyond these three, there is no other explanation. Either life is arbitrary or God is arbitrary.

I have to take a cricket example. A team is batting and the team is batting very, very well. And suddenly, the batsman scores a century and they find that the team’s score has become zero.

And what happened? How did this happen? It’s like the scoreboard itself changes arbitrarily. No matter how you bat, the scoreboard is arbitrary. So, what is the point of batting at all? Or the batsman is batting very well but the scorekeeper is biased.

The batsman hits a sixer and the scorekeeper says out. And how could you play a game if either the scoreboard is arbitrary or the scorekeeper is biased? So, if somebody has scored a century and the team’s score is zero, the only logical explanation is that there is a previous innings. And in the previous innings, this team was lagging.

And the runs that you have scored, they are not showing as a lead right now because they are removing the lag from the backlog from the previous innings. So, that’s why the idea of karma as a philosophy of encouragement is, if you are batting well, you are scoring runs, it is contributing, even if it’s not visible. So, eventually, we all have to have some worldview for living.

See, most of us may not even think about what worldview I’m living by. We all have certain framework with which we live and we go on with that till we face some agony in life, some reversal in life where that framework gets challenged. And in one sense, a simple definition of philosophy is what? Philosophy is meant to make sense of things when things don’t make sense.

So, most people don’t think of philosophy as long as life is making sense to them. But when life stops making sense, either we have to conclude life is senseless or there is some bigger sense. So, it’s, I would say, among the options available, it’s the most logical way.

Intellectually, it’s the most logical and psychologically, practically, it’s the most affirmative way of living.