Karma

An Administrative Nightmare

Keeping track of everyone’s karma: an administrative nightmare

Gotama Buddha was born into an Indian milieu where Karma had long since been an accepted part of life’s reality, and He saw no reason to question this; in fact, he took the additional step of clarifying Karma as being based on motive and intention, i.e., not only on action but more on the intent behind the action.

Karma, of course, is also shorthand for “as you sow so shall you reap” a concept no Christian is unfamiliar with (though not many seem to heed the advice these days).

Karma is also something we tend to intuit within ourselves (at some great internal depth) as true: when ill befalls us we somehow seem to know that we “deserve” it; when good befalls us: ditto.

I spent years working with computers and database management so I have the theoretical background to marvel at the incredible complexity and scope of the database that tracks (and later implements the correct “reap”) each and every intention and action of each and every sentient being from, yes, the beginning of time and yes, throughout the universe, the one that’s 90 odd billion lightyears across).

I grew up with a very devout Christian grandmother and she had it all worked out — a solution she shared with the child-me and often: God sees everything and will dish out just rewards at his leisure. He even knows what you think.

Every thought I have?

Oh, yes, she’d inform me; oh, yes.

All the time?

Oh, yes, all the time, she’d confirm.

But there are so many people thinking so many thoughts all the time.

There is no limit to God’s vision, she’d inform. No limit.

In today’s terms: God attention span is what one must term super-impressive, especially if you consider that not only does he track humans but all sentient beings, down to ants and perhaps even amoebas, and, of course, as I said, not only on Earth but on every planet in the universe where sentient life might have a foothold — and they, I am convinced, run in the trillions and trillions.

That is an aggressively impressive attention span.

Or, a capital-G Ginormous database.

Now, stepping back a bit and looking at all this with today’s computer eyes, I must conclude that there is most likely no single database that contains all the bits of intention pieces that come to dictate futures of a near-infinite number of sentient lives — I think we must be talking distributed processing here.

Very distributed.

And when we’re talking distributed, Google Spanner comes to mind. This is what Google Spanner reports about itself: “Spanner is Google’s scalable, multi-version, globally-distributed, and synchronously-replicated database. It is the first system to distribute data at a global scale that also supports externally consistent distributed transactions.”

Today, from what I can ascertain (though this was like pulling teeth) Google is deploying (at an estimate) at least ten million CPUs, all of them networked — i.e., distributed. Each CPU can handle up to 10,000 queries a second, and this is a distributed database that only keeps growing.

And Google Spanner is a distributed database that would wave all sorts of white flags of surrender were it asked to house even a fraction of the Karma application. I don’t think it could carry even the tiniest nano-byte of the Karma tracking task.

That said, I still believe that the distributed model is what makes Karma work, and I also believe that each node, each CPU is in fact the being itself (he, she, or it).

Yes, I believe that we — behind our own backs as it were — keep very good and accurate track of our intentions and deeds and I believe that when it comes to rebirth we do our very best to acquire the situation we ethically feel (as in “know”) we deserve.

In fact, I believe that we, in this very now — and each and every now, each and every micro-now, each and every nano-now — are busy doing a lot more things than what appears on the ego surface as it were, a hell of a lot more than that of which we are immediately aware.

And I further believe that meditation, with its concentration, awareness, and its discernment is what allows us to, finally, see what we are doing, all the time and all of it. And once we know what we are doing, that we are doing, we can stop doing it, and that is the end of Karma.

Another way of putting it: in order to fully let go (which is the universal Buddhist recommendation), one must first know what one is holding on to; you can’t let go of that to which you cling unawares.

In other words, Karma is all up to us, each and every one of us. It’s up to every one of us to meditate, focus, discern, and let go of all that subliminal and apparently oh-so-dear-to-us activity — to then step into the pure stillness the Buddha called Nirvana.

For he did just this, and he dedicated his life to teaching others to do the same.

As for me: work in progress.

© Wolfstuff