h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Voice of Tibet - A3902456
Author: Blue Bird - U211101

It was inspired by a sad experience of the Bad Karma's activuty.

Eventually the demage was recovered. Like after rain the sun will shine. Blue bird

I think that I will never see
A poem lovely as a tree;
For what immortal hand or eye,
like a diamond in the sky,
Hath framed thy fearful symetry.

My karma, knowing more about trees than poems, can be traced to sunny spring days like today, when I chose to be outside getting an early sunburn instead of being in school.

Now I find myself sitting indoors wishing I knew more about poetry and thinking I really ought to be outside. And my old teachers, most of whom have probably been reborn several times as chalk eating mites of some sort, would probably snicker at my karma... if mites can snicker - I ducked a lot of biology class, too.

Character is what you are in the dark and bad karma is what you get for doing what you did while the lights were out.

JTG

They might also snicker about me spelling symmetry wrong.

I came to this entry truly expecting to be enlightened by some significant and deeply educative Tibetan Buddhist philosophy that would change my 'internal' life.

I am disappointed!

Ron

Not enough equipoise in your diet, Ronbloggs.

I know next to nothing about Tibetan philosophy but isn't it often taught hidden in stories?

Karma's a kind of do as you would be done by thing isn't it?

I went to enough biology classes to learn about porpoises, must have been missing the day we did equipoises.

Otherwise known as sea horses.

Sorry, that's equus-porpoises.

I think I've had a Karma .
I lost my parents' spare car key (long story). They got a spare cut, they left the spare with the car at the garage for its MOT, the garage couldn't do the MOT because the spare key doesn't work properly (long story), the MOT's rearranged for Wednesday, Wednesday my father has an eye op, I'm now going to spend Wednesday chaffeuring to and from the hospital.

I wondered why I was so damned constipated!

I've always found that equipoise goes quite well with a nice chianti.
But others prefer spaghetti.

Howdy Doody Michael; hows yer bin then?
I always thought Chianti went down well with human liver! Ththttt!
What about the new Pope then! German. Pope Benedict the 16th.
Conservative, they say, so not much change there then in the Catholic fold. I'm an Anglican myself, but our eldest lad embraces the Catholic faith, which he became committed to whilst at Uni.

See you around the block,
Ron

Hello my Fellow Hitchhikers around the corner. I was doing other things till I got to answer you All.
Thank you for your replies.

It is sort of diversified answers to the poem dealing with Bad Karma.
Perhaps the Bad Karma did it so that the responses going in so many directions.

My reply to these replies: John-the Gardener as the basic initiator to this Karma poem certainly responded very poetically!

The other Gentleman’s disappointment comes from the fact that mostly expectations do not apply to those expectations what you expect. I accept your disappointment Sir. It is better to live without expectations and you will not be disappointed. ( From my teachers' teachings.)

Further on it is splendid proof for the Bad Karma activity what caused the problems for Waz.

Finally getting involved with constipation not connected with the new Pop and whatever else is there in the Spirit of Bad Karma discussion: it is nice to get together and chat about what ever comes to your mind.
Thank you. I enjoyed your comments. The Bad Karma is sleeping now. Zzzzz Bbird

ahem. *clears throat* I _am_ the dancing buddha around here...

karma is neither good nor bad. it isn't fate/destiny, either, damn the beatles. it is simply conditioned causality: being driven to do something because you were conditioned to do something else. a little like getting involved into a cycle of desire->necessity->fulfillment->more desire... or, like having your instincts solidified into your habits.

~ db

Ah, so...

(bowing deeply to db and bb)

With the greatest respect to _the_ dancing buddha...

Karma (as db has noted) is not fate or destiny at all.

Rather, it is presented as evidence of quite the opposite - that we (each and everyone) act with free will. Karma is variously translated (variety is often the problem with attempts at translation) as "work" or "works," "deed" or "act," "willful action" or, by some, "intention."

You could think of it as a sort of non-mechanical version of Newton's Third Law. Karma is the name of the principle of action and reaction, cause and effect, by which all life is governed.

To quote an (I believe) entirely different "dancing buddha" (one, I'm quite sure, we would never meet dancing in the street), "unkindness yields spoiled fruits and good deeds bring forth sweet fruits." The "good/bad" idea probably comes from another way of describing the idea, that "one becomes virtuous by virtuous action, bad by bad action."

In a nutshell (never a good idea), what goes around, comes around. Though not always quickly, and not always in a way might hope, expect or even recognize.

All of which leads me to wonder whether damning the beatles is really that terrific an idea, all things considered.

m

*a* dancingbuddha begs to (marginally) differ:

conditioned causality doesn't mean 'what goes around, comes around'. karma is a description of one's own thought process.

"Karma constitutes a description of psychological causality--of how habits form and continue over time. The portrait of the Wheel of Life is intended to show how it is that karmic causality actually works. The emphasis on causality is central to the tradition of mindfulness/awareness and as such is quite compatible with our modern scientific sensibility; in the case of mindfulness/awareness, however, the concern is with a causal analysis of direct experience, not with causality as an external form of lawfulness. The concern is also pragmatic: How can the understanding of causality be used to break the chains of conditioning mind (an idea quite contrary to the popular notion of karma as predestination) and foster mindfulness and insight?"
[Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, Eleanor Rosch: The Embodied Mind]

Thus, karma is a description of one's own conditioning of causality: how we interpret out experiences as being causally connected, and thus tend to follow those connections. That has little to do with your actions coming back to haunt you, in terms of setting off a chain of reactions in the world that come back to affect you in the same way that you affect the world.

Given that, I'm not sure damning the beatles makes much of a difference to me. I believe that whatever will come back to me will have had to wander around the universe, by which time i'll be gone



~ db

db





yes


m

Just a note (because sometimes I simply can't shut up) to say I was trying to hint at that very idea of "psychological causality" (albeit not very straightforwardly or well) by including "willful action" in the rambling list of definitions, and with phrases like "non-mechanical."

Admittedly, the reference to the overly pop-babble-ish "what-goes-around" slogan was ill conceived and worthy of a sentence of serious penance.

Re: the beatles, let's damn two and exalt two just in case.

m

Wow. So cool. First he gets into a fight with the pot-bellied one. Then he takes on the Children of the 60s.

Two and two, huh?

OK...

Lennon duly exalted.

Starr duly damned (lovable bloke though he is).

As for the other two, may we be so bold as to request clarification?