Karma the Mechanism

Author(s): Hermann Kuhn
Publisher: Crosswind Publishing Germany

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THE MYSTERY
THE MYSTERY
For a long time the West had no karma. Though the concept was introduced to Europe and America as early as the end of the 19th century, it was barely known for another 60 years. Only in the sixties, when a wave of interest in Eastern philosophies took hold, the idea of karma began to capture the people's imagination on a broad scale.
Yet though karma rapidly became a household word, it never assumed a clear-cut or well defined meaning. It was associated with a bizarre potpourri of unrelated themes: - revel in the bad luck of others, excuse for inadequate planning, influences beyond our control and the idea that any positive but unrecognized act of ours would hopefully find reward later. Karma was eagerly used to suggest that any action, - especially those of others that irritated us but couldn't be retaliated - should hit its originators with at least the same negative intensity.
But over and above all it created a vague notion that anything 'negative' we ever did - no matter how successfully we hid it from others - would surely reach and punish us later - even 'in another lifetime'. It conveyed the feeling that all 'negative' deeds we supposedly accumulated in this and 'previous' lives might be 'stored in some impartial data-system to confront us again in a - hopefully - far distant future.