Wisdom Munches 19: Different world view of karma

Transcript

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that there are certain understanding this it’s to just get a better understanding of how to function in the world so broadly in the world there is there are two world views we could say there is broadly what is the western world view and there is the eastern world view now the western world view is more karma centered that means that if I do actions I will get the results you are the maker of your destiny if you work hard you will succeed and this this world view at a positive level has led to a lot of material development work hard and you will make things better now there is definitely truth to this but the problem is that there will always be times when we work hard and don’t get the desired results and within a karma centered world view there is no place for such people if you didn’t succeed that means there is something wrong with you only you should have worked and you should have succeeded if you have not succeeded there is something wrong with you and not being able to accept that sometimes actions don’t lead to results and that doesn’t necessarily mean something is intrinsically wrong with us how do we process it? not being able to process it leads to a lot of mental health issues the mental health issues in specific can have many reasons but underlying all mental health issues is an inability to accept reality that is the common denominator when there is depression there is an inability to accept that bad things have happened to us when there is anxiety there is an inability to accept that we live in an uncertain world and things can go wrong but that doesn’t mean we have to live in constant fear that things will go wrong so I am not going into specifics of mental health issues over here but we will see this irony in the western world that although there is a lot of progress at the material level that progress has not translated into happiness we could say that when there is a karma centered world view people end up being comfortably unhappy at a physical level we have a lot of comfort but at the level of mind there is a lot of anxiety now as contrasted with this karma centered world view that is there in the western world the eastern world views are often daiva centered now when I am saying the eastern world views I am not necessarily talking about the teaching of the Gita but I am talking about how it has been understood and applied in today’s world which is often different from what the original teaching is so because things are too destiny centered oh this was meant to happen only this at a negative level leads to a lot of material passivity for example when the British ruled India and say there were some famines or there were some diseases in general poor conditions during the colonial rule many British people observed that if people, if the conditions were like this in our country there would immediately have been a revolution but there was no revolution because this is our destiny let us accept it is it that this was the tenting of all people? no, not necessarily but over acceptance of destiny or over reliance on destiny having a destiny centered world view that leads to accepting of even unfair things acceptance even of injustice, of atrocity and that leads to a certain level of material passivity however at a positive level there is greater mental resilience that means even when people are going through tough times they don’t break down that even if somebody is living in poverty if somebody faces some resilience the inner strength, the mental strength of people that is much greater because they are not defining their worth by how big success they achieve in the world so because of that even if they don’t achieve success it’s ok and we see even today it’s not that mental health problems are absent in the eastern world but compared to how much at a physical level there are discomforts the mental health problems are not that much