Instant justice is not instant karma (video)

Karma can be understood as just being us.

There's justice because KARMA (the regularity or law of the universe that unskillful actions motivated -- those motivated by greed, hatred, or delusion -- and skillful ones motivated by nongreed, nonhatred, or nondelusion) brings about appropriate resultants.

When a farmer plants rice, it's no use to pray for mangoes to come up. Having been planted, rice will come up. How could it be otherwise? There is no need to pray for rice (though that may help), and there's no need to wish for mangoes. Plant sweet fruit if sweet fruit is wished for. Mango seeds are always available to us if we only knew it.

It is so fun and funny to watch "instant justice" videos. It seems to "prove" that karma is true. But these videos do no such thing. Moreover, they mislead us about what karma means.

We are all interdependent. So what shall I DO?

Karma means "action," and what kind of action it is is determined by the intention behind it. Stabbing someone is a good example. What is the karma being made? We do not know. Let's ask a psychic or seer (rishi). What is that stabber's motive when she raised that knife and brought it down on that man in the dark alley?

Psychic says, "She was trying to save his life because he could not breathe, so she thought she would make an opening in his throat like she saw on NCIS one time, and she did, and it worked, and he's alive and not at all mad about the little scar that saved his life." Ahh.

Psychic, what about that doctor in the operating room whose patient ended up dead during surgery? "That man is a murderer. He did not make a mistake with his scalpel, but thinking that the patient was cheating with his wife, he nicked an artery and made it appear like an 'accident,' which everyone believed, and he got away with it. But, like an all-knowing god, Karma knew."

How does Karma know when we humans, who stand in judgment in courtrooms every day, get it so wrong so often?

Tell us something we don't know! - Of course.

The answer is found in the Abhidhamma (Sanskrit Abhidharma, English "Higher Doctrine" or more precisely the Teaching of the Buddha in Ultimate Terms"), a body of literature on Buddhist psychology and physics that explains mental and physical phenomena in incredible detail.

Very briefly, when an act (a karma), a deed, a doing is being planned, it has a motivation that ordinarily people cannot see from the outside. With practice, the doer may be able to see it from the inside. (And there are psychics and seers, light beings and other types of beings who might be able to see it from the outside).

Easy Abhidhamma (Susila and Seven)

This motivation or intention (cetana) colors the deed as it is laid down in impulsions (javanas) and mind-moments (cittas) with attendant mental concomitants (cetasikas). It is as if there were only two kinds of cows, reds ones and black ones, but they were all white.

• The upshot is these mind-moments lay down a track (plant a seed) capable of coming to fruition later. There are trillions of such moments, so even a slight misdeed has the potential to produce many unpleasant results. "It's not fair!" we'll complain. One skillful deed has the power to produce many pleasant and welcome results. Others may say, "It's not fair" as we enjoy ourselves. Dharma is the best thing for beings, so Wisdom Quarterly exists to give dhamma-dana.

Huh? White cows in a pen, having only two exits available to them, either tread through red paint or black paint. One need not see which way a cow exited or why, yet one can immediately know which exist it was by simply looking at the cow. Is it stained red or black?

The Bible speaks of knowing people by their actions (reaping as they have sown), which are imperfect indicators of character. Why?

We all have mixed karma. And though a person is mostly good, it is no surprise that such a person is not perfectly good all the time. Likewise, though a person is mostly bad, it is no surprise that such a person is not perfectly bad all the time.

We judge by a preponderance ("know them by their fruits"), and it does not do us much good to judge. We may want to avoid certain people and not surround ourselves with unskillful friends, companions, or associates. We may want to associate with the wise. That is wise. And we will become wiser for doing it if it rubs off on us (that is, if we absorb their good influence and not if we don't. It's hard not to, but many of us are slow on the uptake).

So, okay, who cares: What's the harm in enjoying these instant justice videos or concluding that that's how karma works?

There's one great harm, and that is to come to believe that that is how karma works. And we very clearly can see all around us that that is NOT how karma usually works. It might never work that way, John Lennon's "Instant Karma" notwithstanding.

If one were to believe that this is how karma works, what is one to determine after a thousand times seeing something shabby going on with no apparent comeuppance, result, reward, or consequence. I saw, and have you never seen:

• A woman with a kind heard gave a dog some food, then it bit her. (After all, it is a truism in our society that "no good deed goes unpunished").
• Some guys robbed a bank and now have all this extra money to show for it.
• The drug dealer at our high school never got caught, and he drove a really nice car.
• Trump is not rotting in jail -- and neither are Biden, Bush, the Other Bush, Obi Won Jabroni, Tricky Dick Nixon, Johnson who helped in the killing of JFK, Dick Cheney, et al. ad nauseum.
• I was asked my opinion on the size of a butt by a person about to go out and, wishing to warn that person that her butt looked ginormous in those pants and she would be the victim of ridicule and laughter, I said so. The blowback was tremendous. (Okay, that one's on me. When asked or told anything on the topic of fashion by a significant other looking for a little boost, the only correct reply can be, "Yes, Dear" or a very enthusiastic, "No, those pants don't make your butt look too big" while never adding, "It's mostly your butt making those pants look too small." *Rimshot*

Karma does not need your help. Let it go. Trust.

The point is, there is something called "poetic justice," and what's poetic about is that it is idealistic, wishful thinking, true in a perfect world, would be true if we didn't have such a backlog of karma to clear.

Finally, it's wrong because "karma" NEVER means the result. Remember, karma means "deed" or "action." It's the doing. What results is called phala (fruit) and vipaka (resultant). It's unclear what the difference is, but it seems it used to be the distinction between the physical fruits and the mental resultants. It doesn't seem to mean that anymore.

It seems it used to mean that consequent emotions, feelings, or more immediate worrying and scruples, say, of being caught and the very definite circumstances one later found oneself in.

Skillful actions, or what we call "good," certainly do not immediately produce a ripened result. Fruit does not sprout overnight, or even years later, or even lifetimes later. It could be a while, quite a while.

Does Dr. Bruce Goldberg understand karma?

If one were to conclude that nothing wished for, pleasing, or profitable comes from sharing, giving, helping, offering, sacrificing (our own benefit for the benefit of others), gratitude, serving our parents, repaying our friends and beneficiaries, and so on, who would recommend doing it, and who would do it?

It's exactly because what we do seems to have no impact on the world -- or at least no "fair" one -- that a buddha arises, makes known the Dharma, and leads others to abandon and renounce what leads to harm and to cultivate and develop what leads to contentment, prosperity, sufficiency, and pleasing results.

These are of two kinds, the here-and-now and the hereafter. Given that many modern people cannot bring themselves to believe or have confidence that there will be a hereafter, a tomorrow, a world (and many worlds) to come, results of actions, pleasing and unpleasing results of our deeds, how can anyone tell them otherwise?

Many people did not believe the Buddha, and one has to imagine he was pretty convincing and charming and oozing with compassion as he spoke. He knew these things directly, whereas we only have our limited life experience, our warped and misshapen views, the opinions and preferences we cling to, and minds so tainted by our experience and identifying with the things that happen that we have hardly even begun to purify our view, our minds, our hearts, or our conceptual grasp of the reality around us.

This reality is like a house of mirrors to us, and we are like blind judges trying to describe an elephant by our limited touch to someone who has neither seen nor touched it. Whatever we touch, we will make much of that in our description. What we have not seen, we will likely neglect to mention (even if someone else touching that part tells us to mention it).

We form our concepts then, due to our limited experience, the recency bias, and other distortions (perversions, vipallasa), we report that when asked.

We must know our chances of knowing are very limited. Then, not having read the Kalama Sutra or the sacred scriptures of our spiritual tradition nor asked the wise to explain them or give guidance on how to purify our third eye to see things directly, we give faulty opinions. Preferring our own views, our own traditions, our own teachers, we refuse to give ear to others. So we neither grasp our own teachings nor theirs.

Hollywood, to be popular, will frequently give us poetic justice (to feed us what we do not get in real life). The "evil" landlord coming to evict a poor, hardworking family down on their luck gets hit by a flood on the way. (It's as if the God of the gaps steps in).

The white hat shoots the gun out of the black hat's hand so as to disarm that agent while not becoming the sort of person who shoots people. When the robotic Stormtroopers attack, the "good guys" shoot'em up. No one in the audience is alarmed because "they have no feelings," "they're not actually human," "they deserve it," "they're evil," "they're minions" "they work for the empire..."

This is all well and good on screen with a gob full of popcorn, but try to take that out into the real world, and we get endless war, closed off opinion, us versus them thinking, black and white thinking, Hollywood-influenced fantasizing, and lots of delusions and rationalizations to justify our positions.

• H (Video 1); Akimbo (Video 2); Dhr. Seven, Ananda (Dharma Buddhist Meditation), Bhante, Wisdom Quarterly