Understanding why the Karma doctrine makes sense through a simple analogy of a cricket match

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Suppose you went for a cricket match, to watch a cricket match, and you saw there are two teams over there. But one team has a starting score of 200.
The other team has a score of just zero. Now, you wonder why the difference in the two scores? So there could be three possible explanations. One is the scoreboard works by chance.
The other is the scorekeeper is biased. And is there any other explanation? We will think about that later. Similarly, if we look at life, we see that all of us start with different starting points.
We all start our life with birth chronologically at the same point. But some people are born wealthy, some people are born poor, some people are born with great looks, some people are born with mediocre looks, some people are born with phenomenal memories, others with ordinary memories. And things like this, wealth, looks, memory, they do play a substantial role in one’s future success.
So, an objective, critical look at life would make it seem that there is a lot of discrimination in the starting points we get in life. Now, what could be the reason for this? One thing is what we have got, we have to live with it. But if you could make more sense of it, then it would be easier to accept it and easier to live accordingly.
So, is there any way we can make sense of the inequities of life? So, the same three probabilities, I have not mentioned specifically the third alternative, I will come to that. But if you look, apply these three alternatives, the first would be that the way we are born, the way we start our life, that is determined by chance. Some people are lucky, some people are unlucky.
So, this is the materialistic worldview, where the idea is that we are nothing more than the product of our genes. And somehow the genes come to life, and some people are born in good families, some people in not so good situations. So, now if we look, if we accept this chance worldview, then there are several consequences.
As I said, the chance worldview holds, what we are is the result of the chance interaction of natural forces. Certain molecules came together, somehow they came to life. And then another aspect of this worldview is, one shot at living is all that we get.
This is the only life that we have, and at the end, existence will end, and we will just dissolve back into the molecules of which we are made. So, existence is just some flash between two infinities of nothingness. Before birth we did not exist, after that we did not exist, and somehow for a certain period of time, we exist and then we perish.
And during the short lifestyle that we have, we are successes if we mine the maximum enjoyment from our brief lifetimes. And because the whole worldview is materialistic, so the only enjoyment is materialistic enjoyment. But, when we talk about material enjoyment, whether it is wealth or looks or power or prestige or learning, whatever, the material starting point makes a huge difference.
So, this is the aspects of the worldview, and what are the consequences of this worldview? It makes the unlucky feel wronged and helpless. Those who are born poor, why should I be born poor? They feel unlucky, and there is no more explanation. Just your bad luck, what can you do? And it makes them feel helpless, because not only the differences that we see in life situations are not just at the starting point of life.
Even during the course of life, some people seem to have a healthy life, some people just keep falling sick again and again. Some people live relatively peaceful lives, others seem to be always prone to accidents. So, we see this difference throughout our life, and that’s why a person who accepts the idea of chance will live constantly in insecurity.
What may go wrong? What may go wrong? It’s a doctrine that reduces life to helplessness. It makes even the lucky feel insecure, because I may be lucky right now, but if things happen by chance, any moment anything can go wrong, and then whatever I have, I may lose it. And it is unappealing, because it violates our intuitive sense of order and justice.
We all feel that there is some order in life. We want some order in life. I’ll talk about this topic more, about the sense of order, but whenever something happens, if say, your child comes home with a poor grade, you’ll ask, what happened? Did you not study? Did you forget at the time of exam? Were you not well? Now, whenever we see some effect, we intuitively assume that there is a cause, and we try to make a correlation between the cause and effect by which we make sense of life.
But this is unappealing, because the chance world view says there is no cause and effect, and it’s disempowering, because it just makes one feel powerless. Now, the alternative to this world view, this is a world view that everything happens by chance, and we are just products of matter. So, this is correlating with the scoreboard working by chance.
So, the second alternative was, the scorekeeper is biased. So, the alternative world view is, that there is a God, and God arranges the starting points. So, God arranges that some people are born wealthy, some people are born poor.
But, so this is divine caprice. Caprice means arbitrary will. So, this is the world view that is held by many of the mainstream religions of the world, especially the Abrahamic religions.
Judaism, Christianity, Islam, they hold roughly this world view. My purpose here is not to criticize any religion, but we are trying to comparatively understand which world view can help us to make sense. So, although there are references to karma and other things which I’ll build up, but the mainstream version of these religions have this idea that everything happens by God’s will, and one life is all that we have.
So, why are there iniquities in life? Yes, they are God’s tests. Yes, some people are born poor, that’s how they are being tested. Some people go through sickness, God is testing them.
Yes, that is fine. God can test us, but the problem with life’s iniquities is not the test itself. It is the differential testing.
That means that if a teacher conducts a class and after that has an exam, and the teacher gives different papers to different students. Some students get very easy papers, some students get very difficult papers. Then the student’s question will not be why is there an exam? The question will be why are there different exams for different people? So, if we say that life’s iniquities, life’s problems are God’s tests, and the question comes why does God test different people differently? And often the answer to this is you know God’s will cannot be understood.
God’s justice is different from our justice. Yes, that may be true. God’s will cannot be understood.
God’s justice is different from our justice. But if God is greater than us, then God’s justice should be better than ours, not worse than ours. So, if God is arbitrarily assigning different situations to different people, then that makes God seem capricious.
You know, who would want to love a God who is so utterly arbitrary in doing whatever he wants with whoever he wants? So, many thoughtful people, if these are the only two options that they have, either to believe in chance or to believe in an arbitrary God. Many people would prefer atheism. Why? Because how can one devote oneself to a God who is arbitrary? So, it is not that atheism offers explanations, but it offers a less unappealing explanation than this kind of theistic explanation.
You know, Abraham Lincoln said about democracy, he said democracy is a terrible form of government, but it is the best among all terrible forms of government. So, it becomes like the best among the worst. It neither is satisfactory, if you look at the theistic version, where God is added without any further explanation of life.
This is like, as I said, the scorekeeper being biased. Now, if one team has got a starting score of 0, another has got a starting score of 200, there is a third possible explanation. The third explanation is that it is not a one-day match, it is a test match, and it is second innings going on.
So, one team has got a lead, and that’s why it has got a particular score. So, that is the worldview that is based on karma and reincarnation. Multi-life progression through karma and reincarnation.
So, the scores are different, not because the scoreboard works by chance, or the scorekeeper is biased, but because each team has scored a particular number of runs in the previous innings. So, like that, our starting points are determined, as per the karma and reincarnation worldview, not by any arbitrary chance or any arbitrary God. They are determined by our own past actions.
Some of us have done good. Accordingly, we have got some results. Some of us have done more good than others.
Some of us have done less good than others. And accordingly, we get different starting points. So, this also brings a purpose to life, and I will talk about this purpose more in detail, but the purpose is self-education.
We are meant to learn how to make healthy choices. And life is a university, where as we learn to make wise choices, we progress onwards, towards better and better conditions,