The buddhists believe in re-incarnation, so it makes sense to them that a person can have acquired little negative karma in their current life yet still be accumulating negative repercussions from their past lives.Winston wrote:There's something about karma I don't get. Suppose I did something wrong to someone, or even killed him. Now if he deserved it due to something he did in the past or bad karma in a past life, then I would have dealt him the karma he deserved. So in that sense, I would have been an agent of karma right? If so, then would I be punished and accrue bad karma for my action too? The thing is, if I was delivering someone his own karma, then why would I be guilty of anything?
But on the other hand, if he had no bad karma, then why would karma let me do something bad to him?
Have any of you ever wondered about this?
We are being programmed by our culture to be totally confused about each and every aspect of life; as odbo said, to believe life's purpose is to seek joy that never really comes. In this one life which is very likely our last, our sole purpose in terms of developing ourselves should be to aim to see things clearly for what they truly are and avoid all forms of confusion. A key to doing this is to understand just how delusional human beings really are by evaluating our daily lives and comparing the wide range of emotions and impulses we experience with the actual physical events that occur. You'll then notice that not much actually happens in the physical sense whatsoever, most of what we experience is predominantly just mental activity. As the hindu teaching goes: mind and body are one of the same, really we are only the awareness that senses and perceives everything, nothing more. If a man has his legs and arms amputated, has he lost any of his "self"? No. But going by the understanding that mind and body are the same, if we lost our whole body including our brains and therefore our mind, at which point would we have lost our "self"? We wouldn't have, because the self is just a concept created by the mind and is the sole cause of most of our suffering.
Once you realize that striving for joy does not carry with it any real satisfaction and everything is just fine how it is, you can then start to think about what our true purpose in life is. The only real and best answer there could be is to help others avoid confusion and achieve clarity, but most people are too delusional to understand these types of ideas, so in my opinion what you should really do is have children in whom you can inherit good values. With the aforementioned realization, you begin to understand how each human's life is equal, although their minds and bodies may not be. So to give another human life is the only real purpose we can have, and to use the sense of clarity we have to help our children be as functional and clear-minded as possible.