Does karma truly exist, or is everything just circumstance and luck?

it’s human nature to look for connections, karma exists only in the human mind.

I believe in “karma” on the sense that if you do someone a favor, they will do the same, but as it is widely viewed, that part is bulls**t

I have seen bad things happen to good people and bad people.
The good people can deal with it.
The bad people are crushed and shattered.
It gives the impression that Karma is real. I guess it is.

Everything is meaningless, random and soon to be annihilated. Sorry.

karma is just a religious term for “cause and effect”, so yes, it does exist.

On one level karma does not exist and on another level it does exist.

If you are looking for karma to provide a one-for-one, tit-for-tat response to each action a person takes, then you will not find karma, and conclude that it does not exist.

If you are looking at life in general, and you look how people live their lives and the results of different decisions people make in life, then it is easy to see that karma does exist.

Karma simply means “you reap what you sew.” If you plant corn, you will get corn. It never comes up daises.

If you lead a life of lying and greed, you will have superficial friends who want you for what you have, not who you are. If you live a life of gentleness and love, you will have friends who have affection for you. If you live a life of drunkenness and squalor, don’t be surprised if you have no job and find yourself sleeping on the street.

Of course, karma is real.

scientifically known as Newton’s Third Law. It’s physics, so it must be real.

Just circumstance and luck. Why do people feel there is some sort of order to things when simple observation shows otherwise?

I believe it exists. “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” -Gal. 6:7

@PerryDolia Hmm, really? I know people who live lives of drunken squalor but who are also very successful. I also know people who are completely awful and superficial who seem to get by fine. Perhaps I do not notice what they reap or perhaps it has not come upon them?

Actions have consequences and people reap what they sew, but is there a supernatural agency that makes sure that what goes around comes around? Not likely.

If we are all shards of the same consciousness, so that in another incarnation (or in another parallel universe) we live our lives over again, only I am you and you are me, maybe then there is something to Karma.

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/33005

“I have tried hard to live a life of values, without lying one bit and trying to be truthful, but I have found that this does not seem to really matter”

I’d say karma doesn’t exist. I’d also say that it shouldn’t matter whether it exists or not. If you’re living an honest, ‘good’ life, but only because you want good things to come your way, then your motives aren’t pure and it kind of defeats the purpose.

I just reread that and realized I understood it kind of wrong at first. I still think that the reason you should try to be honest and whatnot is because that is what you believe in, not because you want other people to view you as being that way. (I was wrong in saying it was to reap good rewards). It says a lot about the jerk who is calling you a liar. I wouldn’t worry about them. Well, unless you had a situation like mine where a cop implied I was lying about having my seatbelt on the whole time by writing me a ticket even though he was wrong.

Sometimes bad things go unpunished, just as sometimes good things go unrewarded. Its life.

I kind of agree with what @PerryDolia is saying, but kind of don’t. I don’t think that lying & greed always equals superficial friends, but it is likely.

I wouldn’t call it karma, I would call it consequences. For everything we do, there is a consequence, and sometimes it is good, and sometimes it is bad. If you lie all the time, and are caught, it will likely have negative consequences, but not all the time.

Not a believer. I believe there can be bad consequences for bad actions. I also think there can be good consequences for bad actions, bad consequences for good actions and good consequences for good actions. I believe if you keep a positive mental attitude which is fostered by doing good things, then your perception of the world becomes a bit more rosy…you ten d to overemphasize the good and underemphasize the bad, which surely must look like karma.

Having said that, if karma is real, then whatever network bonehead executive chose to take My Name is Earl, a show about karma, off the air, ought to get a boil on his ass.

Everything operates by cause and effect. This is not mystical at all. Action has consequences.

— I pick up a glass and let it go. It falls to the floor and breaks. Cause and effect.
— I leave the window open. Rain comes in. The floor gets wet. Cause and effect.
— I injure someone. The person is angry. The person harms me back. Cause and effect.
— I plant a seed and water it. It germinates. A shoot sprouts and a plant grows. Cause and effect.

Cause and effect is not about the universe exacting justice or about retribution for our deeds coming to us in another life or by some roundabout pathway. It is just about a logical chain connecting one event to another. It functions whether we believe in it or not, like gravity.

Karma is the Sanskrit word for “action.”

karma is finding patterns where none exist. Humans are great at finding patterns where none exist. Entire civilizations and popular religions are based on finding patterns where none exist.

If you look at big fluffy clouds and see dinosaurs, or unicorns, or people’s faces or anything non-cloudlike, you have just experienced somethign akin to karma, which is finding patterns where none exist.

I think it is natural to want to believe that bad things will befall bad people, but the reality is there is no mystical evening out the score.
See ya….Gary aka wtf

karma’s bullshit… next time I find a wallet full of cash I am taking it. To explain I recently found a wallet full of cash. I am broke as fuck. I could have taken said cash and been ok this month but instead I had to borrow money to pay my bills. This shit sucks. I then work as a waiter. I have been stiffed more in the past month than I thought was possible. There’s your fucking karma, eat it… I for one won’t be eating anything because I am broke :)

@whatthefluther if life was fair, you’d be the millionaire and Rush Limbaugh would be in the wheelchair.

@madcapper – On the first day of 1998, I entered a contest to win $98…I had to be one of the first 1,000 people to buy 10 of something I use already and mail the cash register receipt, UPCs and contest blank to the company. The company was in my home state, maybe 60 miles from my house, I found the contest blank published in that morning’s paper first thing that morning and had my entry in the mail in time for the first mail pickup of the day. I can’t imagine how more than 1,000 people could have beat me to the punch here, but I didn’t win. That same day, I happened to find, floating around in a parking lot, a $98 check that was endorsed so as to make it the same as cash. Someone who believed in Karma might think I was meant to keep that $98 check, since ultimately I didn’t win that $98 and it was the first day of $98. But morality said, the money isn’t mine. I had to contact the maker of the check, who treated me like I was trying to pull something and wouldn’t give me the phone # of the person to whom the check was made. She had that person call me, and when that person called me, they also seemed a bit suspicious. I got their address and mailed it at my own expense. I never got a phone call or a letter or an offer to pay for postage…she could have even told me to rip it up and have the friend write her a new one, but nothing. I didn’t get that, I didn’t get the other $98, the fact that it was ‘98 was meaningless…all shallow coincidences that I could have chosen to read into but did not.

Right now in fact, I have been out of work myself for 7 months. I’ve done nothing to bring this on, my company shut down. I can’t find another job. I maintained an excellent credit score forever so I had tons of credit if something like this happened. But first I couldn’t refi my house because all the equity I had vanished. Then one credit card company reduced my credit line from $33k to $3,800…even though I’d paid them on time in full every month and had a 720 credit score. And when they did that, every other credit card company I had a card with, if I hadn’t used the card in a year, they closed the account. Then as I had less available credit, cards started to get closed because my total used credit was too high as a percentage of my overall available credit (which was not true 6 months ago, not because I borrowed a ton of money, but because they all decided to slam me at once for decisions I had no say in). Then I started to get the “we’re raising your rates and there ain’t a damn thing you can do about it” letters even though I’m still current on everything. I’m at the point where I have very little available credit, a 7 month gap in my resume in the worst job market I’ve seen in my 15 year career, I’m 2 weeks into emergency unemployment benefits and the phone hasn’t run in at least 3 months for as much as a telephone interview. Plus we have two broken doors on our minivan, mold growing on one water damaged wall, a toilet that rocks back and forth, two huge rooms with wallpaper we could only get half way off and just a myriad of other things that have broken or kind of broken.

My point is though, if I found a wallet with money in it, unless that wallet belonged to someone I know is an asshole, I couldn’t keep it unless I’d starve to death if I didn’t. I’m not angry with some guy who lost his wallet, he didn’t put me in this position. However, some of these banking execs who walked away with as much a 9 figures after causing this mess that could leave someone like me, who has a college degree and 15 years of experience and a credit score of 720 with no job opportunities and no ability to borrow to tide myself over until things get better, and to realize that compared to millions of others, I’ve got it pretty fucking good, that’s a pretty good rebuke of Karma. At the same time, I do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do. If I had to go back 11½ years and make the choice whether to contact that person to get them their $98 check, throw the damn thing away, or actually cash it, I’d still contact the person, jump through the hoops and send it back at my expense. I’m angry too, but if I run out of money, I’d probably me more apt to steal some bank exec’s BMW than I would to keep a wallet some working stiff lost, and Karma has nothing to do with it.

I believe that karma does exist, and what goes around comes around. All these people with the wonderful lives you hear about, wait a bit and you’ll see how unhappy they end up in a couple of years. Socrates used to say “never envy someone before you have seen their end”. Many people suffer horrible deaths. Of course they might not always be the people who deserve them.

Even among the religious traditions that recognize karma, there are very different ways of understanding it. I’ll join my voice with those here who’ve said that the idea of a tit-for-tat universal accounting system is overly simplistic.

There is a tradition of looking at karma from a psychological perspective, though, that I fully endorse. In this view, our intentional actions change the mind. Morally negative actions—self-serving actions that harm others—have the effect of reorienting the mind in a way that’s more likely to make selfish choices in the future. In other words, our present actions have an effect on our future course of action.

Likewise, selfless actions taken for the benefit of others change the mind by loosening the influence of one’s own selfish interests. In the future, because we’ve learned how to set aside our selfish interests, we’re more likely to make choices that benefit others.

Those changed mind-sets will then have repercussions on our overall life experiences. This doesn’t necessarily mean that “good” or “bad” things will start happening to us (though it’s not unreasonable to think that might be a consequence); but certainly how one is affected by life’s vicissitudes will, to a large extent, be determined by how attached one is to one’s own interests.

@dalepetrie I totally agree with you. I don’t think I would make a different decision given the chance, I’m just saying if karma did exist I would hope it would help my ass out so I don’t starve this week haha

@madcapper – may things turn around for both of us (and millions of others who have been blindsided by this horseshit economy) very shortly.

I I do not have the answer as to why this question and I have spent over a half a day together, and this day in particular, without me generating an answer worthy enough for the collective.

Everyone has been awesome on this one, by the way. On point, my friends, and as the wave of the thread has grown, stunningly representative of the potent power of this site. Bravo!

So, this will be difficult…

I guess that is, because, last evening, I received news of the passing of two old partners of mine from the days of glory. We parted ways, unhappily, in a chaotic, messy, series of events, which, at the time, was simply a failure as a group to achieve one goal among many required of us. And what it all ended up becoming, for me, was a small wound that I used to justify imbuing the entire episode with a curse. I vowed never, ever – wow – to grant them my friendship ever again, as a way of offering up a lesson for their lack of faith and support in the mission, at an important moment, when we had all set forth upon it together. A commitment. A trust. It meant a lot to me at the time, and now, well, given the recent events it means even more. Only different…

The lesson. Wow…

So, to arrive at some clarity, I am well aware, I need to embrace the simple, yet incredibly powerful law of cause and effect. Because, I know, that is what it is. Nothing else. How I am feeling, right now, the suffering, the guilt, the shame, the conflicted emotions spewing about my room are so incredibly difficult to bear, and to endure, that I am finding writing about it, here, a necessary cathartic experience. Thank you. Thank you for being so gracious in providing this space. Now. Right now. And, you see, because I am a poet, and I am a dreamer, a composer, and a maker of docu-memories derived from life’s wondrous abundance of souvenirs, I feel compelled to visit the word of poetry residing amidst the careful crafting of the question above, as a way to underscore my acknowledgment for the significance of this day.

Karma.

Defined beautifully by the collective above as to” what is the what”, and “what it is, is what it is” – I can say thanks to you all, for your brilliance, and ask for your acceptance of me, the poet, who will apply a word to his acceptance of the “effect” brought upon himself by something he “caused”, a long long time ago. A word to place at the foot of the journey forward from here, or possibly a light above the walk, to remain forever as a signal, a reminder, a lesson… Karma.

@dalepetrie I appreciate your positive attitude very much. It’s getting hard to have one of those these days haha. But things did get a little better for me today, at least for a little bit anyway :)

Glad to hear it!

It’s all just random chance. Sometimes it comes up good. Sometimes it comes up bad. I don’t believe in karma but I often comment on how doing a good deed raises my karma or fills my karma quota for the day, that is I use it in a joking manner. There is simply no evidence for its existence, and I’m an evidence loving kind of gal.

@pdworkin geez, morbid much? :)

I dont believe that literal karma exists, but maybe you subconscious keeps track of some of the “good” and “bad” actions that you take and you feel some of the wieght of that.

Karma is a metaphor; not magic. It’s a way of talking about things, or expressing things that are difficult to express. The way I see it, Karma is a way of putting a kind of energy into the world and being an example—positive or negative. When you return a wallet that fell out of a pocket, or give food to someone hungry, or drive without responding to others’ road rage, or put trash in the garbage and pick up after other people; when you never say, “that’s not my job,” other people see it, and it becomes easier for them to do the same thing. People are nicer when they believe others will be nicer to them.

Malcolm Gladwell, of “Tipping Point” fame, suggested that courtesy is something for which there is a tipping point. Also crime and cleanliness, I think. If you reach a critical mass of people behaving a certain way, all of a sudden everyone starts doing it. It becomes part of the culture.

Tipping points actually are something that can be measured. It might take enormous resources to do it, but it can be measured, because there are specific behaviors you are looking at, not some magical concept of what goes around comes around.

However, if tipping points are real, then what goes around does come around. Everyone should be a model for others, or think of themselves as a model. What you do and how you behave matters. You help someone in need, and then, some day, someone helps you when you need, because the culture has turned into that kind of attitude.

Generosity and kindness and politeness make a huge difference. It can be helped along with a little moderation, as we see on this site, but it comes just as much from people providing a good example as it does from moderators removing comments.

I act out of good intentions, although I doubt it will make any difference. That doubt doesn’t stop me from trying. Even so, I often feel like I am a fool. Banging my head against a wall is normal for me.

My feeling about my inadequacy to make a difference changes depending on my overall mood. When I’m depressed, I figure I’m worthless for being so ineffective. When I’m happy, I just feel foolish for being so ineffective.

I don’t really think this is my karma—as if it were something given me by invisible powers. But it’s a good metaphor for what I hope will happen. I’m doing my best to help. It may not enough, but maybe the energy I put into the world will make a small difference. And who knows? Maybe my little bit will come at the tipping point, making it seem like what I do matters a lot.

all I know is that karma i believe it does not exist due to the fact if something bad happens it’s not because something you did it’s fate it happened really not your fault that’s what i say bad things happen to me all the time i live with it and i do good things doesn’t really mean anything bad stuff will always happen to everyone good or bad

@shkmru3 Welcome to fluther. Lurve.