Why do anything? Why go on a three year, three month, three day Buddhist retreat and end up dead as Ian Thorson just did? Why do we think that some choices are better than others? If Ian had sat at home eating Fritos and drinking gin he might have lived a lot longer.
OK, that's stupid.
I do believe in Karma. Everything has a cause and everything has an effect. This concept can not work if we make any exceptions. It is either true or it is not true. No grey areas. I like that.
One difficulty is that many karmic events take many lifetimes to unfold, or work themselves out. This makes life today a bit more complicated. Or not. Because, if by examining, or meditating on the effect of old karma (what we are experiencing right now) we can find the cure and start the remedy, then we can have a huge effect on our karma. And in doing so we will probably look a little nuts, but that is nothing new.
Gandhi looked a little nuts when he sat on the ground spinning cloth in India where there were hundreds of millions of people who would have done it for him- for pennies. The British mocked that "naked nigger" in the dust. But, he got the result he was looking for. His nutty actions precipitated the throwing off of the yoke of hundreds of years of brutal British colonialism.
If we are hungry, we should feed others. If we have no money, we should get money to others. The karmic concept of giving away what you need is elegant. If 'what goes around, comes around' has truth to it, then, let's start now. If there is anything wrong with your life, then activate the antidote.
If this is true, and you can test it in ways small and huge, then joining a convent would just bring me right up against exactly the same things I would encounter on the streets of New York. Life's little ironies.
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