Podcast
Question: Are our present sufferings because of our past karma?
Answer:
Basically, there is a cause-effect connection in the world. If your child comes back home and got a black eye, you wonder what happened. He says, no, I just got a black eye. No, no, no, you just got a black eye. What happened? Did you get into a fight with someone? Whenever we see an effect, we presume that there must be a cause. A cause-effect correlation is something which we implicitly assume. Even, science operates that way. I had been invited to speak in Cambridge University. We passed by the same tree when Newton is said to have seen the fruit falling. So, when he saw the fruit falling, he asked the question, what made the fruit fall? And that’s how he came up with the theory of gravity. But the idea is when he saw the fruit falling, he asked what makes the fruit fall? That means he is assuming that things don’t happen just by themselves. There is a cause of the connection.
Both in our daily life as well as in science, we presume that there is a cause-effect connection. But there are times when we can’t see the cause of a connection. If a child has come with a black eye, you’ve got to fight with someone. Find out what the fight was. Sometimes we can find the cause. But sometimes we can’t find the cause with our own intelligence. Then we have two options. One is we can presume that there is no cause-effect correlation. Things just happen at random. Second is maybe there’s a bigger picture in which I can see. I need to place this in a broader framework in which I can see this cause-effect. So, intelligence means to frame things in the right context.
Each and every thing can be placed in different contexts. For example, if we start feeling very warm we could say that, am I getting fever? If we were feverish and we are feeling hot, maybe I am getting fever. That could be one context in which we place it. Another could be, oh, maybe the ventilation in this room is not very good, that’s why I’m feeling hot. Or maybe there’s too much crowding here. Too many people. That’s why it’s hot. Or it could be that the temperature has gone high and the summer has become too much now. Or we could say, oh, actually there is climate change. The temperature of the whole world is increasing and this indicates that we humans are disturbing the ecological balance. So, any of these contexts could be true.
Intelligence means we place things in the right context. If there is a problem that we are facing like the fan is not fast enough. We increase the fan and we feel reasonably comfortable. If a thing can be placed in a small context and understood, then it may not be necessary to go to a bigger context. But when things can’t be understood in a small context, like if there’s a heat wave across the country, then no matter how much fan I increase, it may not make much difference. Sometimes when things cannot be explained in a smaller context, we need to place them in a bigger context. Similarly, when in our small context, okay, this doesn’t make sense. Why is this happening? Then we place it in the bigger context. And then we see, oh, could it be from our previous life? That’s how we make sense of things.
Suppose we have a credit arrangement with some supermarket. We go and buy things from there. And then at the end of the month, we pay them. If we go there at the end of the month and we buy a $2 object and they give us a bill that is $700. Hey, what happened? This is not $700 worth. But what are they doing? Yeah, the bill is not for the specific product that we have taken. So, when we see the bill, we have to understand this is not just for this. There’s much more coming.
Basically, the principle of karma and reincarnation plays our present situation in a bigger context. So, when the immediate cause-effect connection doesn’t make sense, then we place it in a bigger context. And that is what we do in various fields. In science, for example, the theory of gravity worked very well and it was considered a bedrock of classical physics. But by the start of the 20th century, especially when scientists started studying very small fundamental particles and very big particles at the cosmic level, they found that these didn’t seem to be obeying the law of gravity. Some other theory was required. They didn’t say there is no cause-effect connection. They came up with a different theory, a different frame of equations. For the subatomic particles, they came up with quantum physics. For the large bodies they came up with relativity.
The idea is that karma gives us a broader framework in which we can see things. So, when things make sense in the immediate cause-effect connection, we just stay at there and take that as an explanation. But when things don’t make sense, then we place them in a broader context.
End of transcription.
The Cambridge body of examination based in UK through which Mauritius gets their Higher School Certificate has included ISKCON as a topic to be studied as from next year in Hinduism. The examinations will be held by 2021. Students aged 17, 18, 19 will be studying ISKCON movements in high school. This is truly an achievement and a step ahead to make students Krishna Conscious. 
Monday, May 20th was the death anniversary of my mom. I usually post the blog I wrote a few days after she “left her body” (as devotees call death of the physical body, since the soul moves on) nine years ago. Today, I would like to express some thoughts for your consideration, and perhaps, for thinking of your own mom, or your relationship to your parents in general. One of the questions I am thinking about is: “How has your relationship with your parents effected your life in terms of your relationships with your spouse and children (if you are married), or to friends, people in general, or yourself?”
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