Friday, June 10, 2016

Karma: 600 witches curse Stanford rapist

Dominique Sisley (dazeddigital.com, June 10, 2016); Ashley Wells (ed.), Wisdom Quarterly

God will protect me, ha ha.
Hundreds of witches from around the world joined forces to hex [curse] Stanford University rapist Brock Allen Turner on Tuesday night, in a bid to make up for the swimmer’s paltry six-month jail sentence [now reduced to three months when the racist judge could have given him 14 years in state prison].
 
How I dress? Please don't rape me, guys.
Turner, who was convicted of raping [digitally penetrating] an unconscious woman behind a dumpster, is currently scheduled to serve just three months of his six month prison sentence, along with a three year probation period.

Unsuprisingly, his punishment has been widely criticized for its [white privilege, implicit bias-inspired] leniency: with many now actively campaigning to unseat the judge [Aaron Persky of Santa Clara County] who made the ruling.
 
How shall we recall the racist judge?
One of these campaigners is Melanie Hexen. The hereditary witch -- who also works as a bellydancer and midwife [but is not necessarily a lesbian] -- decided to take matters into her own hands this week, when she organized a mass hexing of the Stanford swimmer via a Facebook event page (now deleted).

Despite only being sent to 12 of her coven sisters, the ritual quickly went viral after picking up 600 confirmed attendees.
“Witches doing spells in times when they’re otherwise powerless goes back thousands of years” – Melanie Hexen
“I think it really struck a chord with a lot of women as a way to feel like they had some power in this situation,” she told U.S. News. 

“That there was something [karma] they could do, some way they could come together and focus their rage and their need for justice that wasn’t being met. Witches doing spells in times when they’re otherwise powerless goes back thousands of years.” More

Harming? Karma for witches
Editors, Wisdom Quarterly (COMMENTARY)
Karma (verb): What we DO to ourselves by doing it to others, our actions, intentions (WQ).
 
What we do = our karma = our later results.
Using spells when feeling socially powerless is a common practice ... in spite of the fact that real witches know that doing harm with curses and hexes comes back on the practitioner 10 or even 100 times worse. This is due to the law of karma: Do harm, get harm; do benefit, get benefit. But a familiar sense of powerlessness quickly turns to mad power trip when one suddenly feels empowered by magic, the potential for revenge, or when we get a leg up on someone who's down. Something has to be done to the judge and rapists, but it does not have to harm anyone, least of all those who press for change and justice and an end to our rape culture. Cooler heads/hearts prevail, and a better world is made.

Repaying hatred with hatred, the Buddha taught, only results in more hatred (Dhp. 5). Wisdom, knowing that impersonal karma, will work itself out to rapists' detriment, and compassion, knowing that what WE do comes back to us so that the wisest and most loving thing to do for ourselves is be wise and loving. Do we love ourselves? Probably not, so we harm others and inadvertently harm ourselves even more than the initial harm of being angry rather than seeking an antidote to anger and other poisons of the heart. It's understandable that angry people would attack a pariah like Turner. But would they attack if their karma came back on them right away? Probably not.

Misunderstanding the law of karma (lol)
The problem with karma is that it does not ripen fast enough to teach us the connection between what we do and what happens to us. Moreover, even if a hex or a curse does not work, it is bad karma. It begins as unskillful, unwholesome mental karma. Then we speak it and it becomes bad verbal karma, like encouraging others to do harm. Then if we enact it, it becomes bad physical karma. And Turner may be there none the worse for wear -- or he dies. Either way, we have accrued demerit, fed our anger, failed to find an antidote for the poison in our heart/mind, promoted anger, hatred, rage in an angry world...

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