It was more than an year ago that Archana and I had a discussion over Karma Vs Chance while holidaying in Goa. It was dej'avu time when I had a similar conversation with her again recently. Only instead of a beach, it was in a crowded CCD in Bangalore.
Through the law of karma, the effects of all deeds actively create past, present, and future experiences, thus making one responsible for one's own life. This is the basic idea of Karma and a minor variation of the concept of 'Determinism'. It implies that Nothing happens to you with out a reason or without a consequence. My view is that some things happen entirely by a much underrated and undercredited phenomenon called chance. The formation of earth and the evolution of humans it self is a series of accidents which happened by chance. Like our earth being hit by the asteroids in K-T period without which dinosaurs might still be the dominant species.
I might do certain things which might not be of any consequence to me, like my throwing a banana peel on the road. It might have a consequence for some body else who steps on it, but not necessarily for me. Sure, we can say that it was the person's karma who steps on the peel but how does it concern me, the Doer of the deed ? What 'Karma' also implies is that there is cycle of cause and effect. However, this poses a problem with this 'cse if every act has a cause and effect, where does the cycle begin and end? It cannot, according to the concept of Karma as every deed WILL have a consequence. It is generally accepted the universe started with the Big Bang. If we go by the same logic, even that must be a consequence of some thing which we have no clue of. “Then why don’t you go an commit crimes when you don’t believe in karma?”, she shot back. My answer is that I believe I cannot get away with committing a crime due to the law of the land. Karma is a lot like that belief, more of a deterrent than anything else but an ultimate deterrent at that. But like any deterrent, it becomes obsolete the moment I believe it to be non-existent.
However, there are a lot of unknowns in this universe that are not explained by science yet. Karma might be an easy explanation to some such unknowns. But like Sherlock Holmes says, every problem has a simple, quick and wrong answer. Any idea as it is said, must be taken as a supposition. Only after all the doubts are cleared, (after due diligence, in Management parlance) will it become a proposition. Karma, is an idea that due to the nature of the concept itself, can always be a supposition at the best. I, would rather choose to be a wary skeptic than to take an idea as fuzzy as this on face value.
