Welcome to Eternal Path! This week we feature: The Mathematics of Karma, Diasporic Comedy, and an aesthetic!
Religion Highlight: The Mathematics of Karma
The below is adapted from Premavardhanam on X where he delves into the mechanics of karma and how bad things happening to people does not mean people getting what they deserve/do not deserve, but are actually the workings of what is essentially a mathematical system that transcends lifetimes and may be beyond human comprehension.
People often think the traditional Hindu theory of karma entails that individuals directly "deserve" the suffering they undergo, but that ignores the fact every individual, due to having lived an infinite number of lives, has acquired an infinite backlog of sañcita karma (heaped/accumulated karma) — and thus infinite amounts of both positive (meritorious) and negative (demeritorius) karma that is yet to be activated.
When an individual uses their free will, constituted by the karmas bearing fruit for their current lifetime, to harm another individual what is actually happening is that the sañcita karma of the second individual is indirectly manipulated by the first's actions into releasing an arbitrarily large amount of demeritorous karma for them in accordance with the harm effected by the first individual.
That release, however, is derived from the infinite backlog of unfructified karma that every individual possesses. It does not necessarily imply at all that the harmed individual had accrued that specific amount of demeritorious karma for any specific past act of theirs.
The harming individual, however, has received a discrete amount of demeritorious karma, proportionate to how much of an outlier their victim's unnatural release of demeritorious karma was, that will be accumulated for them in the future.
Thus, it is absolutely *not* the case that the traditional theory of karma in Hinduism necessitates that victims of heinous crimes must be "deserving" of their punishment in any morally meaningful way, and anyone who suggests it does imply that should be sharply corrected.
Diaspora Highlight: Conversation with Pranav Behari
Hosted by Meru Media and Mukunda Raghavan. “Diasporic Comedy, Shaktipunch and Dharma: A Conversation with Pranav Behari”
Aesthetic: Maharashtra Temple
