A Nice Example of Karma

 Via Yahoo Entertainment:

Although (Jerry) Falwell Jr. had helped his father save Liberty from financial ruin in the past, he claimed, becoming president of the evangelical school presented a unique challenge. 

"Because of my last name, people think I'm a religious person. But I'm not," Falwell Jr., 59, told Vanity Fair in the interview, going on to call the period after his father's death "the worst three months of my life."

"There was so much pressure on me to become somebody I wasn't," recalled Falwell Jr.

He seems to consider himself an innocent bystander, but the pressure he felt was a direct consequence of the choice he made.

He wanted the power.  He wanted the money.  He wanted the fame.

What he didn't want was to pay a price for it.

Consequences

This was excerpted from The Last Stand by Nathaniel Philbrick, ©2010.  He was writing about the difficulty in finding accurate historical depictions when taken years after an event, but he could just as easily have been writing a treatise on karma:

"We interact with one another as individuals responding to a complex haze of factors: professional responsibilities, personal likes and dislikes, ambition, jealousy, self-interest, and, in at least some instances, genuine altruism. Living in the here and now, we are awash with sensations of the present, memories of the past, and expectations and fears for the future. Our actions are not determined by any one cause; they are the fulfillment of who we are at that particular moment. After that moment passes, we continue to evolve, to change, and our memories of that moment inevitably change with us as we live with the consequences of our past actions, consequences we were unaware of at the time."

 

Karma Chameleon

"Some people think karma is fate. 'It must be my karma,' they sigh, resigning themselves to some calamity. But karma doesn’t have to be bad. It can be good. And we make our own karma. Every thought, feeling, and deed sows a habitual karmic seed in our mind that ripens into a corresponding positive, negative, or neutral experience. Anger and jealousy manifest as painful, unhappy experiences. Selfless, joyful thoughts and feelings flower into wondrous, fulfilling experiences.

"So we don’t have to resign ourselves to 'our karma.' We control our karma. Every moment is a new juncture, a chance to improve our way of thinking and thus our circumstances. This principle of interdependent causation is the bedrock of the Buddha’s first teachings, the four noble truths."  ~Tulku Thondup Rinpoche (via)

My favorite definition of karma is:  "Where you are now is a result of decisions made in the past; where you will be in the future is the result of decisions you make now."

We're not gods.  We don't have complete control.

But we do have quite a bit.

Pendulum

"Our emotions propel us through extremes, from elation to depression, from good experiences to bad, from happiness to sadness: a constant swinging back and forth. Emotionality is the by-product of hope and fear, attachment and aversion. We have hope because we are attached to something we want. We have fear because we are averse to something we don’t want. As we follow our emotions, reacting to our experiences, we create karma: a perpetual motion that inevitably determines our future. We need to stop the extreme swings of the emotional pendulum so that we can find a place of centeredness." ~Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche  (source)

The Push of Karma

The best definition I've heard of karma has two parts:  "The present is the result of decisions made in the past; the future will be the result of decisions made in the present."

Which is the tl;dr of the poem below:

Whiplash
by William Matthews
from A Happy Childhood, © 1984

That month he was broke,
so when the brakes to his car
went sloshy, he let them go.
Next month his mother came
to visit, and out they went
to gawk, to shop, to have something
to do while they talked besides
sitting down like a seminar
to talk. One day soon he'd fix
the brakes, or-- as he joked
after nearly bashing a cab
and skidding widdershins
through the intersection
of Viewcrest and Edgecliff--
they'd fix him, one of these
oncoming days. We like
to explain our lives to ourselves,
so many of our fictions
are about causality–chess
problems (where the ?! after
White's 16th move marks
the beginning of disaster),
insurance policies, box scores,
psychotherapy ("Were your
needs being met in this
relationship?"), readers' guides
to pity and terror--, and about
the possibility that because
aging is relentless, logic too
runs straight and one way only.

By this hope to know how
our disasters almost shatter us,
it would make sense to say
the accident he drove into
the day after his mother left
began the month he was broke.
Though why was he broke?
Because of decisions he'd made
the month before to balance
decisions the month before that,
and so on all the way back
to birth and beyond, for his
mother and father brought
to his life the luck of theirs.

And so when his car one slick day
oversped its dwindling ability
to stop itself and smacked two
parked cars and lightly kissed
another, like a satisfying
billiards shot, and all this action
(so slow in compression and
preparation) exploded so quickly,
it seemed not that his whole life
swam or skidded before him,
but that his whole life was behind
him, like a physical force,
the way a dinosaur's body
was behind its brain and the news
surged up and down its vast
and clumsy spine like an early
version of the blues; indeed,
indeed, what might he do
but sing, as if to remind himself
by the power of anthem that the body's
disparate and selfish provinces
are connected. And that's how
the police found him, full-throated,
dried blood on his white suit
as if he'd been caught in a rust-
storm, song running back and forth
along his hurt body like the action
of a wave, which is not water,
strictly speaking, but a force
that water welcomes and displays.