Karma and Control
I've been thinking about control recently. I've been looking at my finances and when you take the time to do that and then sit and think you realise that we actually hand over a great deal of control over ourselves and our futures to other people.
Consider a gym membership, typically a contract. You sign up to a 1 year contract for say, £35 per month, for example. This takes a degree of your freedom and cash for the next year, but what if your circumstances change? You now don't have as much control of your resources as you once did and may even wind up paying for something you don't use (which happened to me).
But what if, as I do, you consider Karma to simply be the long term consequences of your actions, not some mystic balance? Tying yourself into something that has long term consequences like that, is to be avoided. I know that in Taoism, we are encouraged to heed the principle of the Uncarved Block, this advises us to keep our options open and avoid lacking ourselves in a given role or worldview.
Thinking about it now, it seems that the uncarved block is a good way of not only keeping our minds open, but helping to minimise karmic consequences by avoiding us tying our own hands and reducing our options in the future.
3 comments:
It's a tricky one though, by refusing to pay a long-term membership fee in case your circumstances change and you don't use it, you are also limiting your options. The same could be said of any long-term commitment - to a job, or to a formal qualification for example. Would it be wise to turn down a job offer, or the chance of study a skill you want to, in case you decide later that it isn't what you want? Every choice limits, even if that choice is not to make a choice. This is why we're here in space-time, to bring the infinite into the finite for some fun manifestation.
In either case, the long-term consequences of paying for something up-front might be an illusion, a matter of perspective. If you pay it for, it's done, paid for, and perhaps whether you use it is neither here nor there. You made the best choice based on what data you had, and any regret is merely a figment of the ego screaming about the injustice of having paid for it and not using it. It's dragging the past along with you, so that you're also paying for the mistake later on as well. And what could be more controlling than that?
I agree with you about dragging the past along, and I like the way you put the focus more on dealing with the future. I was thinking more about the way we happily tie ourselves into contracts, looking back I don't think that entry was too well worded!
In the gym example, before I had the gym contract I visited a "pay as you go" gym, which I now feel offered me more flexibility, as if I wanted/needed to change gyms, I could do so at a moments notice. I have no problems paying a membership fee, but having my hands tied is another matter.
I like the point about not making a choice in fact limiting our choices, am I right in thinking you mean missed chances unfolding into new opportunities?
Actually no, I meant literally in terms of things where the option is to commit to a set period or not do it at all, such as studying, or for a more money orientated one along the lines of your article, say, a broadband or cable TV subscription. In those cases, you may say, "Oh, I don't want to commit to such a thing", which is fine, but that is a choice as well, and you're missing out on being able to have broadband as a result. That make any more sense? Or have I just repeated what I said before? ;)
Yeah, I can see what you're saying about the gym - but if you didn't stop going then we wouldn't be having this conversation - hindsight is 20:20 ;)
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