To Start at the Beginning, with The Fool
The Fool is actually the Soul stepping into the unknown at the moment of reincarnation. And I do mean the unknown. I do not subscribe at all to the view that the discarnate soul chooses (in any sense) its own next incarnation.
Nor, as I mentioned in my previous post, do I subscribe to the notion that there is justice in the sense of punishment involved – punishment for sins committed in a previous life.
Is Karma then simply a matter of cause and effect? What goes around comes around? In any one life – in this life – if you smoke too much, you might get lung cancer. On the other hand, you might not. And someone who doesn’t smoke might. Reckless drivers can live to a ripe old age, while careful drivers are killed every day on the roads – often by those same reckless drivers, who themselves emerge unscathed.
And from life to life? If we were smokers or reckless drivers, there is no reason whatsoever to think we will suffer the consequences of that in a subsequent life. But if we did in fact die as a result of a car-crash or lung-cancer, we might very well be reincarnated with a fear of fast driving or an aversion to cigarette smoke.
In the same way that a fear, an aversion – even a full-blown phobia – might accompany us into a new life, so might guilt. And this is what might seem at first glance to be some form of justice or punishment. But we don’t suffer from guilt, in this life or a subsequent one, if we don’t feel guilty. A Hindu who eats some beef, even accidentally, may be consumed by guilt; may believe that he will be reborn as a cow – or as a pig or a dog. May in fact be reborn as a cow or a pig or a dog, I suppose. But I believe he would be much more likely to be reborn as a human with a horror of eating beef (or perhaps any meat) even if not now Hindu.
This is where we must decide what we mean by “sin” and the significance of a guilty conscience. Eating beef, for that Hindu and all those hundreds of millions like him, is a “sin”. We can all think of countless other examples deeds considered “sins” at various times in history and in different parts of the world today. “Sins” vary from culture to culture and even from era to era. Guilt, then, is subjective. What I might feel guilty about, you might not, and vice-versa.
Like Love, Guilt is personal, not universal, and feelings of guilt not subject to any “laws of nature”.
But is there anything that is always and everywhere considered a “sin”? Possibly everyone everywhere would consider matricide a sin. Note the way Orestes is pursued by the Furies after he kills his mother in revenge for her killing of his father.
What I am getting at here is that while perpetrators of atrocities like genocide and human-trafficking might very well never suffer from a guilty conscience, and such monsters (in our view) as the torturers and heretic-burners of the medieval Inquisition and the present-day ISIS might sincerely believe they were/are doing the will of God/Allah, anyone at all who kills his own mother, for whatever reason, is bound to be condemned, not only by society but by his own conscience.
Guilt is only one aspect of Karma, one relatively minor part of the baggage we bring with us (see that bag the Fool is carrying?) when we step out once more into the unknown. (This is an archetypal image, and must be what John Bunyan had in mind when he gave Pilgrim that burden to bear on his pilgrimage through life.) In that bag, too, are Love and Hate along with traumas like the ones I mentioned earlier. But more of that, and of this whole subject, in other posts still to come.
