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Will Karma come back to bite me?
stevensheef
New
in Philosophy
I put my name down for volunteering two days in a row for an event, I was quite looking forwards to it. Today I checked the date and realised I was meant to have volunteered this week and not next week. I feel sorry for breaking my promise. Happened once before when I was ill. Now I am going to ring up and appologise. Now I keep wondering what the karma is for breaking a promise.
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You lose friends, you lose people's trust, you feel guilty and wonder what the consequences are for breaking promises.
And on the bright side, you will now be more careful with your promises.
That's silly, OP. It was an honest mistake. Karma doesn't nail you for being fallible, unless maybe it's chronic. Karma is based mainly on intention, not accidental slip-ups. If your intent was to present yourself to the organization as a charitable person, knowing that you had no intention of following through, then that would have been a deliberate deception; an ego-based attempt to appear to the world as a Good Guy. But that's not what happened.
Besides, the workings of karma are vague and mysterious, so that none of us have any way of knowing if the consequences of a deliberate act would play out in the current lifetime, or 10 lifetimes down the road. So just do the best you can, improve your mindfulness as you go through life, and your intent to improve will have its own reward.
-36 karma points for playing hookey for a volunteer position
and extra -30 if friends were involved
@stevensheef
The resulting karma will be in accord to the intent of your promise but other results from your actions can occur from factors outside of Karmic consequences.
While your intent was good, your mindfulness was perhaps not. Here, the technical karmic consequences might be nothing but that still doesn't mean no consequences will occur.
If you'd like to lessen the unpleasant consequences for everyone in the future, then your good intent should also be matched with a greater effort at the development of your own mindfulness.
It's not Kamma you have to necessarily be worried about.
It's Vipaka.
Kamma = Action, or cause
Vipaka = Result, or effect.
"How much good merit do I get for building all these temples?" the Emperor asked Bodhidharma.
"None whatsoever," Bodhidharma said.
How could that be? Because the Emperor was concerned with his own karma, not the welfare of the people. His intention was to help himself accumulate merit, not ease the suffering of others.
It's not easy, following a Buddhist path of non-self. When instead of worrying that people think you skipped out on them or your karma took a hit, your first concern is how much harder did people have to work to fill in or if you missed an opportunity to help someone, then you are starting to get it.
"Will Karma come back to bite me?"
@ stevensheef you are just a bundle of vibrating karmic energy...you'll come back to bite your 'self' in the bum
Your worrying about it, is in itself 'karma' ....
Karma has manifested in you writing this post and feeling sorry for your actions. There it is.
It was an honest mistake mate, don't sweat it too much. And certainly don't worry about next lives and karma.
Karma is heavily dependent on intentions. Making a promise that you know beforehand that you can't keep, that's trouble! Honest accidents, not very much trouble.
Bite you? It has bitten others. Feel bad, you deserve to. Will me biting you come back to bite me?
I iz ready
Lessen the pain of the bite by making amends to those who had to go out of their way, by your forgetfulness/error.
You didn't do it on purpose; you made a mistake.
If some lady had to step into the breach for you, buy her a nice bunch of flowers in thanks.
If some gentleman had to step into the breach for you, buy him a four-pack of his favourite beer.
(And please, let's not get into the whole '5th precept' thing, here....)
As someone who previously struggled with an anxiety disorder, I wonder if some who fret about karma like the OP does are not also dealing with some difficulty with anxiety? I can imagine preoccupations with karma masking what is essentially anxiety.
Rehashing the past in your mind, beating oneself up over things in the past, worrying about what might happen because of relatively innocuous things... all red flags to me.
@stevensheef, depending on how much you ruminate over situations like this in your everyday life, I would consider talking to a counsellor about it. No need to mention Buddhism or karma, but just about the fact that you may be overanalyzing everyday occurrences too much.
But of course, if you're not, then that's great! Just a bit concerned for you, is all.
There is a lesson to be learned other than the one you carried out very well (the appology).
And that is that you would need more mindfulness practice.
.
Thank you for helping me to put my finger on it. I have been having similar problems recently. I forget crucial details in processes. Details that totally disrupts the entire process.
In each case when I sit down in contemplation about what went wrong I can clearly pinpoint the error I made and understand how that upset the process.
And in all cases I find that more mindfulness on what I was doing would have helped out.
Do not know if this helps you but these are my thoughts.
/Victor
Say three "Hail Marys" and four "Our Fathers" and you'll be fine.
I think if you generally do positive things and exude positive energy, then you gradually have a positive influence on your environment. That karma benefits the people and situations in your environment. And from time to time it will benefit you, in ways both large and small. But it's random and intermittent. Most importantly, it's a tendency toward the positive in overall cumulative impact, not a defense against negative things. You will still have negatives. There will still be suffering. Karma is a trend, not a shield.
The result of forgetting to go that day is not something that will happen to you in the future. The result already happened. Someone was inconvenienced. There won't be a specific cosmic penalty tied to and tuned to that event. If you generally do positive things and exude positive energy . . .
Well said @Steve_B that is how I experience karma. The idea of a cosmic Judge Dredd tit for tat, an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, good deed for a good reward works only in fantasy justice systems. Generally speaking we do good because it is the better option where possible for all concerned and involved ...
Ahhh...yup!
Oh it's karma time in the city, it's Dharma time in the city, in the country, ...