Karma in Everyday Life: Part 1

Welcome everyone to Philosophy @ DP for 2009! We hope you've had a good break and are all refreshed.

The first topic for this year will be Karma in Everyday Life and we had the first part Saturday just past. We covered a brief definition of karma and what constitutes the creation of karma.

We also covered a basic understanding of cause and effect using the very accurate analogy of growing fruit tress. This included the three basic but important points summarised below:

1. Every effect must come from a cause. The fact that there is a "fruit" means that at some point, the seed must have been planted.
   
2. There can be a period of time between planting the seed and for the fruit to ripen.
3. The nature of the fruit is the same nature as the seed. The potential of a seed is to bring forth more of the same kind.
   

We finished with the following:

If you want to know your past, look into your present condition; if you want to know your future, look at your present actions.

The result of our karma is all our circumstances, situations, and experiences. This gives us the opportunity to reflect on our own lives; on all the experiences we've had and all the things that we have done; and come to the realisation that:

We ourselves are responsible for our own happiness and misery. We create our own Heaven. We create our own Hell. We are the architects of our own fate.