Karma?

I think that starting a post and calling it karma, about karma, might be wrong simply because the same reason people might misrepresent karma, and indeed have others then misunderstand it, is actually, within what karma is, exactly why it is misunderstood.

Mainly in the west it is understood as cause and effect which is quite good except the way in which we come to our sense of how things work, through Christianity and an all powerful God, has so permeated all cultural 'action', with even those whom might call themselves atheists being so inclined, that how a Buddhist might understand karma simply cannot easily be understood by a westerner.

But there is hope and especially within the science of psychology and most determinately within the study of trauma which, in it's simplest form, states that traumatic experiences reconfigure both the neural cortex and nervous system to the extent that action in the world is from this default status.

Though to even give psychology a context we have to go back to the age of enlightenment and even, perhaps, a little further into the beginnings of liberalism and the reformation and not for the advances it gave us as regards progress so much as what we brought with us without regard as to the underlying perceptual framework in which we saw the world.

This is to say that even as more people learned to read, which essentially was the reformed church and the printing of bibles which allowed anyone with extra currency, and that in itself is a telling story which needs some expansion but I'll leave it for now, to have their own copy of that book and study it beyond the system of Catholicism which determined how it was understood from the pulpit yet that determination of authority, the pyramidal structure of leaders at the top, was ceded into even as information and ideas worth discussing started to move alongside currency and trading of commodity which interestingly, as scientific exploration began to make it's mark, it too was unquestioned as to the pyramidal structure of what authority is.

And then if we, and it isn't really much of a jump, apply the same set of principles of trauma that psychologists are advancing as to how trauma resets the neural pathways and nervous system it isn't at all difficult to apply the same sense of the resulting liberalism which created the age of reasoning, the birth of science called the age of enlightenment, was quite basically a societal reaction to the trauma inducing action of the authoritarianism of Catholicism and it's modelling of the human psyche of God as all knowing.

This though allows us, somewhat, to blame the church, have them as responsible, though what was it, what is it, within this dialectic of the singular and the group which keeps what is essentially the power of decision going upwards, a passing of the buck as it were, that responsibility, and even what that is becomes a trickle down effect?

So this is principally why something like karma is misunderstood in the west simply because how we see our ability to effect change and view consequence is always mostly about determination beyond us. Because authority is always beyond us and our sense of action is always little more than a allocation of what is allowed, a reflection of ultimate authority determined by our own sense of what we can and cannot authorise, then we are only able to see cause and affect at the level of the physical which, within the modern world, is compounded by the nature of consumerism to the extent that cause and effect is yet again mirrored outside of ourselves as choice commitment to our ability to acquire.

But what happens now is that we'd actually have to go further back, possibly look at how the Christians came, as it were, to found the Roman Catholic Empire as a building consensus within what could have been the dissolution of the Roman empire, keep going back to some original experience of the western human family but what is really happening is that I'm am being authoritive and telling whom might be reading what I believe is this or that. I am essentially creating a fabric of potential, a construction designed to be stable, to take all the various pieces and lay out a table of contents which can be understood within an already relative set of intellectually understood as useful frameworks and added or subtracted, as needed, to the overall construction of human understanding.

I am basically bargaining what I have constructed, my not necessarily original set of fabrications, as a depiction of what my authority might be. Now, within our understanding of this consuming, we all have the given right to pick and choose what we add or subtract to our own sense of what reality is, but often completely unquestioned is that we all do it, we all keep looking for the authority, the authoritative, and this, in essence, still completely and utterly is the building of pyramidal structures of what power is and can be.

And then what modern psychology might be getting around to telling us, if and when we get around to provisioning the singular as the group and vice versa, is that this is our ongoing trauma, that this always alluding to what authority is, always being told and acquiring the told at our discretion is merely recreation of the trauma creating our world in reflection. Therein not the fault of authority itself so much as how we view what authority even is.

Which brings us right back to karma which, in eastern philosophy realises, as psychologists are beginning to give much more credence to, that the principal cause, which creates effects, is subconscious and that all practise to understand consciousness is to render that which is subconscious and unconscious of conscious awareness.

And then too it isn't authority within the modern western or our lack or own authority so much, as the authority is merely a polarisation, but that other pole of the subconscious, both singular and at levels of what group is, potentially needs us all reckoning of the pivot on which it all swings.