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
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 5th 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”.
