Murphy, T.:
Is karma like a boomerang? What you put out there will eventually come back to you? Does that only work if you believe in it? Is it all bullshit?

Richard A. Nichols III:
I don't think it only works if you believe in it, but also, it doesn't necessarily always work for everyone as a hard and fast rule. I think karma is ultimately a choice, but not one that you make consciously. You subconsciously or superconsciously wish for a certain experience and manifest it and you wish for that as a result of previous decisions you've made or maybe other experiences you've had.

As to whether everything you put out there will come back to you, there *is* the law of attraction, which is related but doesn't necessarily imply that -everything- you put out there will come back to you. Then there's something God said in one of Neale Donald Walsch's Conversations with God books, something like "Everything you cause another to experience, you will one day experience." I don't know if that's true, and if it is I don't think it means you'll necessarily experience the results in the safe lifetime. (I do believe the dialog is a genuine conversation with God, but Neale, being human, is an imperfect vessel of communication so not everything in the books is necessarily true.)

Overall, I think the concept of karma is far from being bullshit but it doesn't necessarily function anything like how people think of it (most people not really understanding much of anything about spirituality), it's not some kind of cosmic scoresheet where any time you do something bad, something bad (which may or may not be related to the original thing you did) happens to you and the same for doing something good. Though i did read once in a book about the afterlife that people who were unloving, cold, harsh, whatever in life tend to find themselves in worse realities in the afterlife than people who were generous and loving, but that even in that case the person ultimately metes out the outcome to themselves. And I don't know how common or uncommon it is for there to be exceptions to that.

Murphy, T.:
what you describe sounds like Catholic purgatory. The cleansing of sins. I find all of it so limiting. I certainly have been conditioned to feel enormous guilt and as a child i asked God to dole out punishments to me if I hurt someone. I would say 'if something bad happens me tomorrow I will know its because of what i did today'. So I was anticipating my own Karma. This alleviated my guilt. Did it help me understand my behaviour and how I could change it? No. Much of my 'bad' behaviour stemmed from trauma in my family and emotional abuse and neglect and the fact that I was left to seek out my own karma to wash away my sins I find abusive to be honest. Hence why I dont buy into the modern notion of karma. Which ironically most people use to anticipate punsihment of others and not themselves as I did. Surely we can learn ethical ways of dealing with each other so we dont have this payback method. I often think well perhaps I have such a strong conscience because of my catholic upbringing. No I now belive I was deeply sensitive and empathic anyway and could have been less tortured emotionally and spiritually if the dogmatic religious propoganda had been non-existent.

Richard A. Nichols III:
I understand. I don't think that everything bad that happens to us is necessarily because we did something bad, that doesn't follow, and there are plenty of a-holes in the world to inflict bad things on people with their own free will.. if everything they did to someone were already coming to them then those a-holes wouldn't have any free will. Maybe -most- of the bad things that happen to us aren't even due to karma? I don't know. And conversely I'm not sure that every time we do something "bad" something bad happens to us, I think karma is ultimately a product of our own subconscious or superconscious decisions to experience certain things, so when it does happen we're basically in control of it and get what we truly want.

I also don't believe that people should ever feel guilt, no matter what, it doesn't help anyone. Regret has a purpose, guilt doesn't. The difference is that guilt is self-deprecating. And I certainly don't relate to or agree with Catholic/Christian notions of sins, divine judgement, guilt, etc. I don't want to inflict that on anyone.

There was the thing I mentioned, "everything you cause another to experience, you will one day experience", but I don't know if that's true and if it is true then it's not just "something bad happens to you", it would be that something happens to you in a way that you actually can learn from it because it's the same kind of thing that you made someone else feel.

I don't really like or agree with the notion of purgatory, but if there's something like purgatory implied by karma then "heaven" is just as much implied, because whatever principles of karma exist apply to the "good" things as well as the "bad" things. (I put "good" and "bad" in quotes because I think probably good and bad are just categories that humans more or less arbitrarily choose to put actions and events and things in, which says something about my view on karma..)

It sounds like I believe heavily in karma but basically I was just elaborating on a few principles that have an effect sometimes that may be weakly related to what we call karma..

of course if there is anything like purgatory or heaven in real life *which there must be, just because of the sheer vastness of all possible things there are to experience), it's different in that it doesn't last forever..

Murphy, T.5:
I have often felt when experiencing something ' ah this is what so and so must have felt'. Often it may be a person I feel I didn't understand at the time or who may have felt misunderstood by me or suffered because of that. So I guess that's what you're talking about. Maybe at the time I am aware I am not seeking to empathise with this person and cutting them off and later I almost experience the exact same thing they were. Perhaps we can't escape these lessons life wants to teach us so the opportunities keep arising. Or more likely it's our sub conscious recognising similarities in situations and seeking to learn. It's a mystery really isn't it.

Richard A. Nichols III:
yeah, i don't have a good guess either way, in this particular case, whether it's a mystical phenomenon, i.e. due to some principle of 'karma', or choosing the experience unconsciously to learn about how you affected someone else, or the law of attraction or something, or if it's just the mind playing connect the dots seeking to learn..

though i think that in general people have a tendency of rationalizing mystical coincidences as being actually insignificant in order to protect a dead, mechanistic view of the world, the status quo view, where nothing magical can actually exist, and i think we do ourselves a disservice that way.

Murphy, T.5:
True. I think I am cynical to protect myself from disappointment perhaps. Or I think I'm protecting myself. Almost as if daring to believe in something is foolish and unfashionable and a sign of naivety or stupidity. Maybe that's the tyranny of excessive rationality and a desire to hold onto the status quo as you say. On the other hand cynicism protects from the blind faith previous generations had in religions and dogmatic beliefs. I heard a very good talk by a physicist a while back who also is a Buddhist and how he can be both. TBH I was more fascinated by the quantum physics stuff he was telling us. Some of that stuff seems so far fetched.

Richard A. Nichols III:
It's definitely unfashionable, and people take it as naivety. Not sure if it's foolish, or I guess that depends on specifically what you're daring to believe. One must have the perspicacity discern the truth from the falsity to dare to believe, I guess. I think I can do this well, but I feel like I'm always having to defend myself against skeptics who don't have that keenness or don't have the imagination or aren't independent enough thinking or aren't open-minded enough to believe in this sort of thing (I don't mean you). They're all afraid of being seen as wrong. I resent living in a society of physicalists who debase everything wonderful about being a living being by believing/claiming that it all reduces to meaningless material. And people who look down on people for believing in things like UFOs or parapsychological phenomena even though there's ample evidence for their existence.

There's a lot of far-fetched stuff out there that's actually bolagna, but at the same time, I think reality itself is mysterious, beautiful, infinitely deep and open-ended and ineffable. We think we understand it because we have a few physical laws we know of, but we don't understand even the most basic things about why there are such laws, why matter and energy exist/what they really are, fundamentally, etc., so it remains wonderfully mysterious despite our gains in specific, surface-level knowledge. The observed phenomena/principles of quantum mechanics and relativity specifically empirically prove that reality doesn't exist in any way that's even remotely classical or intuitive, whatever the truth is it's necessarily mind-blowing.