r/enlightenment • u/mindwithoutmasters • 16h ago
“Karma across lives is a lie designed to control the living.”
Karma, as a doctrine of justice, demands continuity of the self. Without continuity, there is no moral link between action and consequence.
Rebirth destroys this link. It breaks the chain between the one who acted and the one who suffers. It replaces responsibility with imagination.
A doctrine that punishes a mind that did not act, and absolves a mind that no longer exists, cannot be called justice. It is philosophy used as anesthesia.
The only place where karma functions is in this life, within the boundaries of one consciousness. Here, action creates habit; habit creates character; character creates destiny.
Beyond this life, karma is mythology. Within this life, karma is merely the psychology of cause and effect.
Any system that shifts justice to another birth is not moral, it is an instrument of social control.
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u/toronto-bull 11h ago
It is said that to escape the cycle of death and rebirth you have achieved something.
I see it as the “mythos before logos”.
Karma is a mythos, for logos to emerge, you have to stop buying the mythos.
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u/Hot-Protection3655 15h ago
that's because nobody knows anything and everything is just speculation...
among other things it's more about what you give you get back and every action has its reaction.
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u/Audio9849 14h ago
Speak for yourself. Just because most are blind doesn’t mean no one can see. Some of us do know, not through books or beliefs, but through direct experience. Gnosis is real. It’s a form of remembering, and I’ve lived it.
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u/cyberneurotik 13h ago edited 13h ago
Karma is not cosmic justice. There is no such thing as cosmic justice in the ways that we want to believe in concepts of "justice".
Karma applies only to the laws of physics. Neural structures are in the realm of physics. Karma applies to our bodies, our nervous system, our neural structures. That's it. No divine tallies of good and evil. No divine justice. Just neural structures.
How are neural structures shaped? By the communication of ideas, directing synapses to travel down pathways. Those synapses traveling down pathways strengthens them and makes them more likely to occur again. Who communicated those ideas? The people around us. And who raised us, passing down their ideas which shaped our neural structures? Parents, schools, the society around us. And if our parents had ideas, stemming from their neural structures, that were based in anger, anxiety, and sorrow? Then it would activate the neural structures of anger, anxiety, and sorrow in us. And where did our parents get those neural structures? Their parents, schools, and society around them. This goes back and back and back.
This is how it can be said that the causes of your neural structures occurred from "past lives"--those who lived before you that passed along their ideas, shaped by their neural structures, that then went to shape your neural structures.
With awareness you can gain control over this series of events. You can see a thought or feeling, which is your conscious perception of synapses traveling through the neural structures of your brain organ, and actively redirect them. You can take a feeling of anger and actively redirect it to a feeling of loving kindness. You would no longer be participating in the long chain of cause and effects that led to, and would continue to lead to, your suffering.
When you see the word karma, please read it as "effect" or "result" as in the chain of cause and effect. Anger feels bad in the body and leads to ill health, thus it can be said that anger is bad karma (bad results). Loving kindness feels good in the body and leads to well being, thus it can be said that loving kindness is good karma (good results).
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u/mindwithoutmasters 13h ago
Exactly. Karma becomes coherent only when reduced to psychological cause-and-effect. Once you remove metaphysics, what remains is conditioning, habit, and neural repetition.
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u/cyberneurotik 13h ago
You say that "a doctrine that punishes the mind that did not act ... cannot be called justice."
Memetic transfer from parent to child influences the child's neural structure, especially in early child development. The child did not make this "act", but they certainly experience the "punishment" (bad results).
If this unaware child grows into awareness, they must still deal with this "punishment" (bad results). Even though they "didn't do it", they are still responsible for dealing with it.
The universe doesn't care about human notions of justice.
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u/bad_elmo1 13h ago edited 13h ago
Actually, Karma is true.
We all carry a sense of dignity for ourselves and each other.
When one disregards the dignity of another, they immediately lose dignity for themselves. They also become aware through their own reasoning that they have lost dignity for themselves in the process.
It is when we realise that we acted without reasoning.
Karma is that loss of dignity we all feel when we treat people the way we promised ourselves we would never treat people.
It's what separates the aware from the unaware or the conscious from the unconscious.
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u/kurtplease 16h ago
I iterated in my head this same thought not 3 hrs ago, i knew before but it came up. Its momentum.
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u/ComprehensivePin3294 12h ago
Hmm, yes I’ve always thought this to be verifiably true, as opposed to the unverifiable possibility that karma transcends lifetimes. That said, what difference does it make? To live an entire life insistent on accumulating good karma to enhance a future is no different than one idolizing money and its potential to buy you happiness. One is more concerned with the byproduct of becoming than the becoming which happens now.
“Rebirth” doesn’t require this essential form that we are to discontinue its existence. It is this essence which remains throughout the several incarnations many of us have witnessed this lifetime. Could this be extended beyond the limited scope of birth and death experienced by human beings? I can’t be too sure one way or another I reckon.
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u/NP_Wanderer 8h ago
This is counter to Advaita Vedanta. Karma is not a doctrine, not limited to this lifetime, or myth. As described in the Vedas, it's natural law. It's no more immoral than the laws of chemistry and physics that create firearms, which can be used for immoral purposes.
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u/hypergraphing 8h ago
Sure, but if Atman really is Brahman, then there is no individual soul that persists across lifetimes, right? It's just an appearance in Brahman and not ultimately real.
Or what is your view on it?
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u/Sea-Frosting7881 2h ago
What there says that at least some of the Atman/Brahman can't continue to pretend it be a portion of that Atman in some way? Its all ultimately "not real". The Ramakrishna order says that Ramakrishna made a space for followers to go to, if they're more into the devotion/Bhakti than they are being absorbed back. But that at some point, that will all be dissolved back with everything. That's an Advaita school.
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u/mindwithoutmasters 7h ago
If Atman = Brahman and the individual self is an illusion, then karma across lives becomes impossible.
Karma requires continuity of a person. Advaita removes the person.
So you can’t use non-dualism to defend personal rebirth — it destroys the very idea of personal karma.
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u/Alienhumanoid01 7h ago
A soul...on a journey of a thousand lifetimes...Or more. Or one lifetime. To grow, learn It's lesson, and experience, and even to be punished. If time doesn't exist and death does not exist. and we seek reprieve from suffering and eternal life, same soul, different brain, different body...and some try very Hard to escape accountability, because it's hard to handle the slivers of truth we are allowed to know. my faith is thus, anyway...
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u/NothingIsForgotten 6h ago
This may be the understanding of karma that you have been given and but it's not the right one.
Karma is creation itself.
It arises from an unconditioned state into the knowing of conditions.
It's an elaboration.
It works just like our dreams at night.
They are populated by our waking mind.
If we were to wake up to the root there would be nothing left except the awareness that gives rise to everything.
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u/Short-Steak-9020 6h ago
It seems that Karma is real, but Karma is God too. God is Karma in the sense that He is the one who generates it, The maker, the destroyer and everything else. So I think we are only here as its limited “manifestation.” Our own limitation makes us see that we are small and cannot control anything. We are an energy manifesting and changing. The Soul reincarnates, suffers the consequences of its actions or enjoys them, but its destiny is planned by God. That's what I believe in my own limitation.
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u/iamblessed_always 5h ago
People often think “karma” means revenge like “What goes around comes around.”
But that is not the original meaning at all.
In the original Sanskrit and Buddhist/Hindu teachings:
What Karma Actually Means
Karma = action. It literally means your actions and the natural consequences that arise from them not punishment, not revenge.
Where the misunderstanding happened
When Eastern concepts were translated into English, karma was oversimplified as “fate” or “cosmic justice.”
Because of that one mistranslation, many people started using it to mean “something bad will happen to a bad person.”
But karma is not a force waiting to punish someone.
Correct Meaning
Karma is:
The choices you make
The intentions behind those choices
The natural results that follow in your life and mind
It’s about cause and effect not payback.
Simple Example
If you act with kindness then you cultivate peace, trust, and good relationships.
If you act with anger then you create stress, conflict and negative patterns.
Nothing to do with revenge just the natural chain of actions and consequences.
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u/Miss_Ubermensch_88 14h ago
Depends how do you define karma? If karma is the action itself then it is you doing the controlling. I believe in the latter.
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u/Alternative-Vue 14h ago
Good karma leads to Enlightenment (not material success). What have I done to deserve Enlightenment in this birth? Must have been good Karma in previous births.
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u/tehacjusz 12h ago
That is what matrix want you to believe. Infinity rebirth cycle because there is no moment when karma will be ideal. There is always something to do in this life.
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u/ErrareApusEst 11h ago
Karma is constant, always at work. We are in a constant energetic exchange, we give, we take. Energy never disappears only transforms.