MY PONDERINGS ON KARMA

MY PONDERINGS ON HOW IS IT POSSIBLE FOR “KARMA” TO AFFECT A LIFE TO BE BORN AND IF SO TO WHAT EXTENT.

Mahendra Gonsalkorale. 21.05.2025

 

Time	Heriditary	Environment	Culture	Life style	Diseases	Life Partnerships	Chance factors
Life Time	Genes Parental	Family born to	Customs	Diet	Hypertension	Married or single	natural disasters
	Genes Species	Period born in	Religious	Exercise	Diabetes	Friends asscociated	random occurences
		Country born in	Family
			Group
At Birth	Genes	yes	yes		congenital		yes

The above table is a very simplified (over-simplified) way of showing the main factors that influence a life over a lifetime and what factors affect a life that is just born.

To start with, we know that life starts when an ovum is fertilised by a sperm, resulting in a zygote which continues to multiply and grow in size and, quite miraculously, forms a foetus which matures and prepares to lead a separate life outside the mother’s womb. While it is in the mother’s womb, long before it can be held responsible for any “actions”, its future is greatly influenced by the genes it has inherited, and by the health of the mother (and these genes go back multiple generations). I cannot see a foetus having a “personality” and having the ability to make “decisions”. For example, it cannot decide to be aborted, or induced to be born earlier or to be born by caesarean section. If the delivered baby has after-effects because of the manner in which it was born, then the parents, healthcare workers, healthcare facilities, etc, will have to be held responsible; certainly not the foetus/baby!

If we entertain the concept that a past life (of this newborn) is in some way affecting its future by having an influence on all the factors given above, I cannot see any conceivable or even a highly speculative and imaginary way it could happen. You are talking about the karmic influences of the parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, family, medical personnel, health care facilities, all being intertwined in an unimaginable way to produce a scene where all these operate to produce the final effect. To me, this is impossible.

Let us now get to the genetic stage and a possible way of the foetus’s genes being affected by a past life (stream of consciousness). Firstly, it is then necessary for causes and results of actions in any birth to become encoded in the gene. To the scientific mind, it cannot be accepted that a “spirit” carrying vital information passes into the foetus. At a less detailed level, if some key features (to be defined) can pass through an identifiable energy form, yet to be discovered, then we have an answer. The fact that none has been discovered so far is not evidence against it.

(All living things, including humans, constantly emit a ghostly glow – and it appears to vanish almost as soon as we die. Monitoring this signal could one day help track forest health or even detect diseases in people.

The existence of this barely perceptible glow has been controversial, but it is thought to be the result of a process called ultraweak photon emission. Mitochondria and other energy-producing machinery in our cells involve molecules gaining and losing energy, in turn emitting the equivalent of a few photons a second per square centimetre of skin tissue. However, these “biophotons” are extremely difficult to detect and disentangle from other biological processes or light sources, such as the radiation produced by any warm object.-New Scientist May 5^th 2025)

I don’t know but if the “glow” at death could be harnessed and examined in detail, it may yield some answers.

Let us imagine that some form of energy escapes as death occurs. If we take Karma as operational in the next birth, there are huge problems with making it a viable hypothesis. Some questions are:- how far can this energy travel? Just within the immediate environment or across the seas, across the universe? How does the stream “know” when the ideal candidate foetus is found? Not only that, the ideal candidate for rebirth could be a non-human animal or even a deva in another realm!

Even if we, for the sake of argument, propose that this is possible, it is unimaginable to think that this extruded energy form is transmitting billions of encoded data through space and time, to an infinitesimally tiny target, potentially millions of miles away. It could be argued of course, that our concept of space and time is flawed, and there is a big rethink about space and time at the moment.

Even if that is a possibility for the sake of carrying on this thinking, look at all the factors that determine or affect the future life of a person as I have outlined in my table. If, for example, we say that the person who died in the plane crash did so because of Karma, then an interminable series of events must be brought in. He was in the plane because he was taking up a new job for which he owed much to many people (his karma determined his success), his plane was delayed because the plane was waiting for a delayed passenger who got delayed because the taxi he took met with an accident which happened because the taxi driver was tired because he hardly slept worrying about his new born unwell child (Karma of taxi driver, his wife, his child etc)… etc., you get the gist?

Random events do happen in Nature and people living at that particular time and area can be affected by it, sometimes to the extent that they lose their lives, as in a volcanic eruption. To postulate that you were born in an area when volcanoes can erupt unexpectedly and you happened to be there when the volcano erupted unexpectedly because of your karama, is the height of fanciful thinking.

I don’t know the answers but to postulate that your future life events are determined by data carried in your genes which came to you by some form of complex energy from the being that preceded you as it died and passed on to you, requires considerable faith.  That your life is affected by your genes is of course a fact, and you have no control at all on your genetic inheritance when you were born.

The question of why some people recall a past life remains to be explained. I don’t dismiss these stories as fantasy, as some scientists do. They need intense scrutiny to rule out fraud and explainable factors such as, a lot of stories being too general and easily applicable to many in a nonspecific manner. But there are some which have passed this test and remain a verified story awaiting a scientific explanation. It is a pity that a global scientific experiment has not been mounted with well defined protocols and methods which are acceptable to the most sceptic mind. If such an initiative is launched and incontestable evidence is found, then we have to find an explanation for it and one experiment I would love to see is a very intense and high powered one to find out whether some form of energy is emitted as we die. This would still not explain how intricate data is transmitted but that would be the next step.

To my mind, all these are interesting questions to an inquiring mind. To have too much faith in a past life and past karma is not a good thing. It can lead one to a deterministic and fatalistic way of thinking. On the other hand, if you believe that your actions do have repercussions and it is good to be mindful about what you do, just as you avoid the action of smoking cigarettes to avoid the risk of heart and lung disease (the result), it is a good thing.

I am a firm believer of the process of Evolution. It not only explains the diversity of life on our planet in a beautiful and methodical way, but also forms a good basis for morality. Successful species were successful because they collaborated and cooperated. They learnt that without love, empathy and kindness to other living beings, they would disappear. This love however is conditional in the sense that as animals need to survive, they had to kill some animals at times and also had to defend themselves by attacking  and killing marauders. The universal love which we value, evolved as a later development. The starting point was love for their offspring, mates, close associates and “herd”.

The Good Enough Life by Daniel Miller

The Good Enough Life byDaniel Miller.

I found this review quite challenging and interesting. I shall place an order for itsoon.

Mahendra

Daniel Miller’s book ‘The Good Enough Life’ is an original exploration of what life could and should be, based on his study of the residents of Skerries. We had the chance to ask him some questions ahead of his appearance at the We Invented the Weekend Festival on Sunday 16 June.

 

Q: Does the ‘good life’ as typified by the residents of Skerries represent a transplantable model or framework that might be applied elsewhere? Or must a truly happy community reach an equivalent equilibrium independent of outside influences?

A: In my book I detail the many factors that have come together to explain why people praise their town as the basis of a good life. For example, it is a town large enough that people feel some autonomy and small enough to expect to greet friends when they go out for a walk. I show why it was important that the community was largely created by migrants (blow-ins) rather than its historical population. I examine their deep commitment to family and the community. There is an egalitarian ethos and for the retirees I worked with, a freedom from obligations that may last now for decades. I assume that other places favoured by their residents share some of these traits and lack others. While entirely other factors may be relevant.

In considering outside factors, for Skerries, as an Irish town, this includes a relatively stable government, and a sense that they have benefited considerably from the EU. I also noted a marked desire to differentiate themselves from what they see as the divisive politics of Northern Ireland, as opposed to their highly consensual local politics. So yes, an equivalent place elsewhere is likely to require its own equilibrium of both inside and outside influences.

 

Q: How should we measure success and happiness in a society that often equates these concepts with wealth and consumption? What alternative metrics could be more meaningful?

A: The key point here is that we should not be imposing our criteria for what makes a good life onto another population. My book is not based on my judgment that this was a happy place. I wrote this book because the people of the town went on and on about how much they loved living there and saw it as the source of their happiness. My job was to find out why?

With regard to wealth and consumption, the standard of living in this average Irish town is now slightly higher than the UK and it may be significant that most of the people I worked with were born in poverty and appreciate the benefits of living what they would call a comfortable life. But status in the town today comes almost entirely from public commitments to environmental welfare and sustainability, while conspicuous consumption is scorned.

“For these reasons the key metric is whatever the people themselves use to measure their sense that they are living the good enough life, and then the task is to explain why they favour this measure.”

 

Q: How do different cultures define and pursue a ’good’ life? Are there universal principles, or is it highly context-dependent?

A: I have worked as an anthropologist in places ranging from India and London, to the Caribbean and Ireland. The universal that lies behind my book comes from the observation that many societies have a similar term to our word good. A word that links being a morally upright (good) person to the idea of having an enjoyable (good) time. Linking these two seems to be an ideal, irrespective of whether one does in fact depend on the other.

But both senses of this word, what makes a person moral and what makes life enjoyable, will be highly context dependent. The farmers I lived with in an Indian village would look aghast at the criteria that I found in secular Skerries.

“My discipline of anthropology is committed to reminding people of just how distinct each population remains with regard to such judgments. We need to respect the degree that things we assume are obvious and neutral are actually nothing of the kind.”

 

Q: How does our environment, both natural and built, shape our happiness and quality of life? Are there particular types of environments that are universally beneficial?

A: I have lived in several places where people depended mainly on what they grew as farmers or fished and had very few commodities. Some were mainly content and others mainly miserable. I don’t romanticise the condition of peoples who have limited access to medicine and education, whose economic security depends on the weather and whose lives are generally shorter than ours. In turn I suspect you have been to cities you really would rather not live in and some you find attractive propositions. Clearly living in a city is no guarantee of a good life either.

One thing about the environment is for sure –  if Skerries is a happy place, it’s certainly not because of the weather (!). There are elements of the environment most of us enjoy, such as beautiful landscapes while few find inspiration in an industrial wasteland. But more generally I think it is social and cultural values that have much more influence on happiness and the quality of our lives.

 

Q: How has technology changed the way we form and maintain communities? Can virtual communities offer the same depth of connection as physical ones?

As with many populations, people in Skerries tend to be very negative if you ask them about social media and smartphones in general. But the same people can be quite positive when I discuss particular apps, or how Facebook has become a community platform. Older people suffer greatly from a digital divide if they feel unable to use these technologies but may then enjoy a reconnection with their youth if they do subsequently master them.

What we need right now are not quick judgments suggesting these technologies are good or bad, but long-term scholarly observations of the hundreds of ways these technologies impact our lives.

That’s why I lived in Skerries for 16 months before thinking that I had any understanding of this question.  Dividing the world into the physical and the virtual doesn’t work either. Hardly anyone lives just online or without any online. It a constant blending of the two.

Our team has written thousands of pages based on our observations around the world. You can read about the results of this research through our free books, such as The Global Smartphone, or How The World Changed Social Media. The point is that discussion of this question needs to be evidence led