I don't think I believe in karma anymore

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Nope, karma is not real. We live in a world where nasty ruthless people cheat, rape, steal, and kill their way to the top and get praised as heroes in the history books for it.

You can't count on God or the universe for true justice in this world. So you have to fight for your own justice, but fighting monsters often turns you into a monster.

But America didn't get great because of Karma or God, it got great because of ruthless a**holes from Europe who stole this land and continue to destroy everything in their path to this very day.

Karma's probably not real but culture is. I think if I get saddened by anything it's watching the past few generations drop the ball on culture as badly as they have. We create the world children are cultivated in, children become the adults of the future and the integrity of their adaptation or lack thereof has a lot to do with how things go.

Of course - I have to admit, in the face of that I have no idea what to do with my strict determinism. Are my motivations and passions for a better world simply part of the ride that I can't put down? Probably so, but that would also mean that most people's ennui in the face of problems is equally fixed in space and time.

I now think sometimes we have to fight for our own justice in this world. If you never stand up for yourself the bullies will always walk on top of you.

And as a practioner of folk magick it is my new found opinion that sometimes it is ok to cast a curse on evil people. "An eye for an eye".


You can't always depend on God, karma, or even the government for justice. (Especially the government...)

The thing I've learned in the past few years - in the corporate world no one gives an f' about anyone. Aaron Clarey (a***hole Consulting) might be a bit eccentric but he's right on most accounts of it being a social-climber's paradise, a place where high school never ends and where big egos go to live out their fantasies. Those lower in the social caste systems, ie. not lucky enough to be born western Brahman, end up making the sausage and sometimes falling into the grinder themselves when such would be more convenient for those they're working for.

So pretty much - the workplace is a Darwinian life and death struggle, if you don't struggle to be your absolute best odds are someone will cut your throat, throw you out the door, and you'll be left in deeply diminished capacity to take care of yourself or have your life in your hands. I'm taking that challenge up - ie. to be as lethal a professional as I can manage.


Magick seems like it's best served for self-transmutation and self-transcendence. We're under tremendous pressure from the outside world to conform (Conformitas is something like the real Yahweh of the old testament), not all of us are in a place where conformity is beneficial and for most of us on the spectrum it was 'be my footstool or forever be ignored / unpersoned' and being unpersoned was clearly the better of the two options. You can't process and change the outside world, and if there's anything that's like pissing in the ocean it's trying to fix human vulgarity, mendacity, and ignorance. That said the only thing you have any hope of changing in the face of the absurd is you.

If I have a take on the metaphysics of all of this it would be something along these lines - we live in something like an idealist or neutral-monist set and setting where it's brimming with conscious agency and yet has most of the charm and causal fixety of a reductive materialist's universe (I say most because a good ritual can call all kinds of syncronicities, intellectual and emotional commerce with seemingly non-physical minds, but everything else seems pretty well stapled down my the 2nd law of thermodynamics or some similar set of principles).

We get to live in a world with seemingly no meaning, even negative meaning - ie. absurdity, pain, degeneration, etc., and yet go back to some sort of seemingly archetypal plane where the stuff of consciousness isn't in a tortured state. It's something I'd love to get my head around better, there are some people who talk about the holographic 2D view of the universe (projecting 3 or 4 dimensions where entanglement is the tell) and there does seem to be increased scientific interest in space emerging from information rather than information emerging from space. I don't know if we can find anything helpful in that, in the broader sense, that would help with the abatement of human suffering but I at least get the sense that reconciliation with such facets of life rather than carrying a load of cognitive dissonance over it is key. Past that whether it's theistic or atheistic bubbles we're floating one finds their emotional accounts drifting out of balance all the time, constantly needing resets, etc. and I think the more we focus on truth the less resetting and bubble-creation is needed.


When you have an individual person with certain character traits you have a reliable agent who can be trusted to get certain kinds of things done based on those traits. When you set a whole group of people under consideration, especially millions or even billions, you have something much more of a statistical certainty machine for exploitation of opportunity, and that means all opportunity both honest and dishonest, exploitative and non-exploitative. It seems like the best we can do is keep trying to craft legislation that shapes culture like a glass shapes a liquid that it contains. Another scary thought - too much growth and we torch the planet, not enough growth we start killing each other, it seems like a lot of our most wicked problems aren't avoiding one extreme, staying in the clear is more like keeping society on a certain razor's edge between two excesses which is a much more challenging proposition and we get to multiply, really exponentiate, that balancing act across many domains which have that same trait. Keeping humanity from self-immolating seems like it's equatable to spinning and maintaining half a dozen or more plates at the same time.

As for depending on God or karma, I'd lay that with the 99+% of species that are now extinct. I'd leave that with the phenomenal quantity of people who've died without having procreated. I'd also leave that with the hundreds of millions who died in the 20th century under truly hellish conditions. There very well could be something that loosely equates to 'God' or loosely equates to 'karma' but if it is it's alien enough in it's priorities that it's nothing we'd be able to relate to and while some people do seem to think the Universe can be successfully petitioned for justice - I'm either not sold that it's consciously aware in such a way to be motivated on our behalf or, if you are able to pull on the fabric of reality and get what you want that likely has much less to do with you having stirred God or karma into motion and much more to do with having pulled on the right fabric at the right time under the right conditions and just really having lucked out at what could best be described as an intentional or unintentional magical operation.

Are you suggesting everything we do to help improve the world or ourselves is meaningless? I mean we can't change things on our own but surely we can change things for at least the few people and other species we come in contact with? That is to say, supposing for one example we rescue an animal from a shelter, or someone from a bad situation. We then become the universe's instrument of change for that entity?

Certain people such as your "president" seem to embody that destructive corporate spirit you're referring to... who are quite satisfied to be jerks, chewing people up and spitting them out when they've served their purpose.

Humans create karma. I was reading a post on Reddit by a lady who had waited in line at Starbucks for 20 minutes, then this other woman comes in her car and cuts in front of her and this lady tried to move forward (She was leaving a gap for cars to go through because this was in a parking lot) but this cutter wouldn't have it and got in front of her and flipped her off because the OP had flipped her off. When her "turn" comes to order, the OP would honk her home every time the cutter would try to order. She gave up and drove off because the OP wouldn't quit honking whenever she would try to order.

And when bad things happen to sh***y people, we call it karma.

My point is bad things don't always happen to sh***y people, and bad things often happen to innocent people who did NOTHING to deserve it! Did the Native Americans deserve to have their land stolen from them and their people wiped out by smallpox and other diseases? Did the African people deserve to be brought to the US as slaves where they were beaten with whips and their women were raped and forced to produce babies to sell as more slaves? Did the Japanese immigrant families living in the US deserve to be locked away in internment camps just because we were fighting a war with Japan? Did ANYBODY who was executed as a witch during the Salem Witch Trials deserve to be executed?


There is so much injustice in this world and the only true way to stop it is to fight against it. The kid who bullies you on the playground will never stop unless you stand up for yourself.

Certainly they didn't. Perhaps that is a good argument for the possibility of reincarnation - so that they can have a better life in a different dimension. Because justice isn't always served in this one.

We can only hope that there is something better waiting for us after death, but frankly I find the claim of karma to be highly insulting to those who are victims of tragedy and injustice. The idea being that if something terrible happens to you then you must have done something to deserve it. It's really just a form of victim-blaming.

I understand what you mean. We feel powerless as there's nothing we can personally do about the victims of history, for instance. It's the powerful preying on the weak that we hate so. All we can do is attempt to change the things we actually can do something about. But we should leave some fights to those "warriors" who are better equipped to do so.

Karma doesn't work out over the space of one lifetime.

I just don't see it working out at all. If you really want something in this world, you have to fight for it. And I don't necassarily mean fight with violence. There are ways to fight battles without being violent.

But like I said before karma is really just a form of victim blaming. I don't believe in rationalizing the bad things that happen to other people by making them feel like they did something in a previous life to deserve it. That's BS.

Last edited by TheRevengeofTW1ZTY on 26 Jul 2019, 6:47 am, edited 1 time in total.

I don't think anyone on here is saying that at all.

But that's basically what the idea of karma implies.

You’re probably oversimplifying Karma.

It would be productive for you to read up on Buddhism and Hinduism.

I’m thinking you’re applying a “western” mode of thought to your notion of Karma.

Of course we have to work for most of the things we want.

We can’t rely on God, Karma, whatever.