Thailand Notes (Part 2)

Everything Is Linked To Everything. That’s karma and I believe in it, but that doesn’t mean that every action has a significant correlation to every other subsequent action. Wishing something might happen and actually having that something happen may in fact have some (whatever little) correlation, but that doesn’t mean - all other conditions the same - if you didn’t wish for it to happen, that result wouldn’t occur anyway. There could be a much more correlated action tied to that reaction, and the degree to which two things are related is the way we define practical cause and effect.

It’s by this magnitude of correlation between actions that we gauge the world. The definition doesn’t support the pseudo-scientific and often emotional misinterpreting of small correlation as significant reasoning behind an effect. 

Believing in karma doesn't absolve you from looking at reality as granularly and critically as possible. Further more, by the same logic, believing that good begets good and bad begets bad doesn’t mean you can help an old lady cross the road and expect to win the lottery. Good and bad are subjective and can only be applied to a cause-and-effect analysis after the metrics have been collected. In other words, if you measure all the correlations between a set of actions and then observe that two are related, it’s only then that you can deicde wether or not they’re good or bad, and at that point your arguing opinion. It’s irrelevant.

The concept of karma is a call for reason, and I’m seeing it being interpreted as exactly the opposite.