Meat Worker falls in Meat Grinder: Karma?

Seven (Wisdom Quarterly)

Would a family that kills together die together? Not likely. The results of karma are varied and highly individualized.

But nothing welcome will come of "bad" actions when the results ripen -- even if it appears that there are benefits before they have had a chance to ripen.

This is key to understanding what karma does and does not mean. If all actions had immediate and apparent results, who would engage in misconduct?

Karma brings (immediate and eventual) results. Whereas the mental-resultants (vipaka) may be immediate, the fruit (phala) may take many, many lives to ripen. This is not a metaphor. Bad karma is opportunistic, bearing its result as soon as it finds disadvantageous circumstances. The same is true of good karma -- the results of which are always welcome. Note that performing "good" deeds may not delight one, but receiving the results certainly will.

What is to come for what one has done? It is difficult if not impossible to say. For there are many kinds of karma, some that intervene, frustrate, undo, amplify... Because there are so many variables, only trends can be discerned. This is the most obvious trend: Bringing what is welcome to others brings what is welcome to oneself -- not right away, but when those actions ripen, which may take a long time.

Butchers, hunters, bloody-handed consumers (whether we pay a butcher to kill for us or go out and do it ourselves), dissectors, and slaughterers of animals, we all harvest what we plant. It really happened: a meat processor met his end just as he had rendered the flesh of slaughtered beings.

Q: But how about if someone kills an animal (or better yet pays someone else to kill it) to feed his/her family, does that make the killing good?

A: No, it does make killing or causing others to kill good:

Feeding others is skillful and will bear a welcome result. That's one action. But killing or causing others to kill is unskillful and will bear a very unwelcome result. They are two separate actions (intentions). They are called karma because they are carried out as deeds-guided-by-intentions (defined as skillful or unskillful depending on the moment to moment intention of each act).

Good deeds are not called "good" because they feel good. Good deeds are good because their results feel good.

What is "good"? What is profitable and welcome when it finally ripens? NONGREED (unselfishness, contentment, generosity, nonlust) is good. NONHATRED (friendliness, kindness, compassion, sympathy, fearlessness) is good. NONDELUSION (wisdom, understanding, direct-knowing, clarity, sobriety or nonintoxication) is good.

What could be better? When one meditates, the time between an action and its result is shortened. It therefore becomes easier to see how causes-and-conditions are connected to results-and-fruits.

So eventually it starts feeling good to do skillful acts. And that feeling, far from being experienced as a hardship, becomes preferable: Sharing becomes preferable to stinginess; peace and forgiving become preferable to anger and resentment; understanding-reality becomes preferable to clinging to our delusions. This joy is on top of the joy-to-come when profitable actions bear their fruit.

Is it the result of karma?

Wisdom Quarterly (Feb. 28, 2011)

HANFORD - California state authorities are investigating a meat company that was the scene of a horrific accident. The industrial meat grinder there took the life of butcher Leopoldo Gutierrez.

He was cleaning the inside of an enormous meat grinder when it was turned on. The company is reviewing what went wrong. The man was killed instantly, smearing his corpse, fat, and blood all over the internal working of the machinery. Was it then used to go on grinding other corpses for human consumption? Presumably it was thoroughly cleaned first or cannibalism ensued for those purchasing from this processor of animal flesh.

The location of the accident was the Central Valley Meat Company in Hanford. The plant has been investigated for several violations in the past by the state division of Occupational Safety and Health as this was not the first [reported] violation. But in a previous case, the worker managed to turn off the machine before any human was ground up.

This forces consideration of avoiding the use of animal bodies for food. It leaves a bountiful vegetarian diet looking very innocent and satisfying. It is less likely that this is the result of deeds in this life so much as the ripening of similar deeds in the past that have carried on as habit in the form of wrong livelihood in this life. Instant karma, while it carries the intellectual satisfaction of poetic justice, is in fact rare.