So – how does karma work?
The actress Sharon Stone has rightly been criticised for her utterly insensitive and totally ridiculous suggestion that China’s earthquake was the result of that country’s treatment of the Dalia Lama through the medium of the concept of karma.
In this report, it is argued that Stone does not understand how karma works:
“None of us fully understand the concept of karma unless we are wise, so to use it in this context is ill-advised. The concept of karma is that you are sowing seeds that come back on yourself, but for Sharon Stone to suggest the earthquake was caused by bad karma is unthinking. Things don’t work in such straight lines and she seems to have neglected that Tibetans suffered in the quake.”
So – how does karma work? According to this explanation, the essence of karma is :”if you do good things, good things will happen to you – if you do bad things, bad things will happen to you”. But there is simply no evidence for this and indeed it is self-evidently untrue.
Bad things happen to good people (the victims of the Holocaust were good people) and bad people can (literally) get away with murder. To suggest that we are responsible for what happens to us, including illness and misfortune, is a cruel deception. We only have limited control over what happens to us and but more control over how we respond to what happens to us. Life is not logical and life is not fair and we all have to live with that – including Sharon Stone.