Belief in Karma Is Crippling for Modern Buddhists

As a muslim-buddhist, I must confess I'm a little tired of the rhetoric of oppression that's so commonplace in the buddhist community. Many prominent lamas often advise their students that others cannot make you suffer, that you must forgive your oppressors, that you shouldn't blame others for your problems. While I don't necessarily disagree, I think there is a story on the side of the oppressed, and also the oppressed who are fighting back, which is not being told.

I don't like how the emphasis tends to imply inaction in the face of adversity, and seems to subtly imply that we should always blame the victim for their own oppression, and never encourage or help them to fight back. On top of that, there's the added indignity of saying that it's the oppressor's good karma that allows them to be so negative. The indication seems to be that the universe rewards bad behavior and punishes good behavior.

Additionally, the oppressed is in a double-bind: if you do something bad, it's your fault and you get bad karma. If your oppressors do something bad, it's your fault, and you get bad karma. If you do something bad, it's your bad karma, if something bad happens to you it's karma for you to do bad things (because abuse is cyclical). According to this world-view, everything is always bad and it's your fault. I'm surprised more Buddhists don't commit suicide!

The biggest problem with this point of view is that it eternally binds people to suffering, with no hope for salvation. This directly contradicts the buddhist dharma which states that Nirvana is true, attainable peace. It also leads to an isolationist worldview that separates buddhists from those who could benefit from buddhism among the poor and dispossessed. In other words, it enables middle-, upper-middle, and upper-class Buddhists to say to the dispossessed, "I've got mine, screw you." And quite often, this is exactly what they say.

The Dalai Lama himself says that we Buddhists could learn a lesson from Christians in the area of charity. But the root of the problem is karma: the en-vogue definition of karma is one that Christians don't share, and is specifically refuted in many ways in the Bible, which is why they do more charity. What I would like to see more of is an emphasis on the correct way of viewing karma and its relationship to the external world, which is explained in H.H. The Dalai Lama's The Four Noble Truths, published in 1997 by Thorsons. In this book, karma is confined solely to mental activity by a moral agent which leads to emotional experience by the same moral agent. And the external world, by contrast, should not be viewed as "karma," but rather as the sport of Buddhas, which is an idea from a different scripture. Karma means that if you lash out in anger, you will be unhappy. Not, as in all the Internet memes, that something similar happens to someone who does something. Karma, in other words, is pretty much a mental phenomenon, and the physical aspects of it, though not entirely wrong, are vastly overplayed by the Buddhist community at large.

It's really sad that buddhists leave this sort of critical view to outsiders, and don't adopt it for themselves. Perhaps they view their constituency as primarily focused on internal mental development rather than external works of charity. Frankly, though, I see it as a problem which encourages a large and growing section of middle-class Americans and Westerners to view adversity and problems, where real people, perhaps even themselves, suffer, and do nothing. I guess as a muslim / Tibetan buddhist I'm not really an outsider, but I'm also not ordained as a teacher formally in any sect of buddhism. No buddhists have shared my point of view on karma, even though two specific emanations of Tara have come to me and told me flat-out, "I don't believe in karma." One of these women squashed a bug for emphasis, and that bug is now probably in a pure land. I think there is an important lesson in that for both Buddhists and New-Agers. The lesson is that our ideas about karma are totally wrong, and they hurt real people. And the karma for spreading these ideas is that we will end up feeling hurt and oppressed.

Our Culture: Investing in Money

I believe there is such a thing as a perfect economy. This would be an economy running smoothly enough to be incapable of further growth, and not inclined to diminish.

A perfect economy implies that there be full market share of all businesses, especially banks. Banks are particularly important, because they fund new ideas (represented by entrepreneurs), and a full market share in this area implies no new ideas are currently available.

Full market share for businesses also means that business operations are sustainable. This means, among other things, that profits come from robust, sustainable growth. By robust, here, I mean that profits come from genuine market share, and not from, for instance, slashing costs and burning through third-world labor. Such cost-cutting techniques do not produce robust nor sustainable profits. Robust growth comes from opening new markets and increasing shares in old markets.

Now what I'm saying basically rests on what I consider to be a robust assumption: that it is possible to gain a maximum market share. I think not only that this is possible, but also that a lot of companies have already achieved this given today's economy.

Another implication has to do with the value of money. Money, itself being a commodity, also has a maximum share of market. It also must be managed in sustainable ways promoting robust growth. This sustainable growth responsibility lies with all of us, from ordinary consumers to Exxon-Mobil.But this is not to say that we need to be overly concerned with income inequality. Barking about income inequality is largely barking up the wrong tree, because the nature of new ideas is that they tend to concentrate wealth for their creators. However, if income inequality is produced by burning through labor resources by exploiting the poor, your wealth is not robust. I can handle inequality, provided the poor are not exploited. Inequality must be based on the production of new, valuable ideas.

Now all this is not to say that infinite growth is impossible, or that society must be stratified between rich and poor. On the contrary, infinite growth is definitely possible, but it must be robust, and rooted in such things as the continued evolution of the human mind and body, not in exciting, new opportunities, of which there are probably a finite number at any given moment. As for stratification, there will always be motion in markets, which implies liquidity in assets, including human ones. And anyway, I think we owe it to ourselves as human beings to offer the opportunity to all of us to live either simply or complexly, as we choose.

The Value of Bitcoin

I've seen it said one or two places that the value of bitcoin is in its anonymity, or its lack of corruption due to the lack of centralized banking. I don't believe this to be the case. Dollar transactions can be anonymous, too, and gold has no central bank, but the value of bitcoin is different than the value of gold or dollars. I think the value of bitcoin has to do with the nature of the tangible thing which is coined.

Dollars are pieces of paper with art printed on it. The art is printed in such a way that it is difficult to forge. The value of the dollar is enforced by the United States government, and the open market. It can go up or down, depending on the quality of things bought with it. When a thing is put into circulation in the open market, the value of the dollar is affected by the amount people are willing to pay for the thing. If the thing contributes to the value of the economy, then the value of the dollar goes up.

The value of the dollar bill itself that you carry in your pocket depends on its availability for use in transactions. This depends on the armored vehicles, bank vaults, printing centers, and so forth which manage and create dollar bills. As a physical thing, it is very difficult to create and very difficult to transport when compared to bitcoins. Bitcoins are easy to create and to transport. But they are comparatively more difficult to transfer. It is more difficult to pull a bitcoin out of your wallet and hand it to someone else than it is to pull a dollar out of your pocket and hand it to someone else.

The overhead of transportation and creation of bitcoins is very low, while the overhead of transferrence is very high. This indicates a couple things for the value of bitcoins. For one, complex, long-distance infrastructure of transactions are easy to maintain, provided the "buy it now" attitude is not too highly stressed. I believe this means that bitcoins are good for small, independent businesses that deal primarily in quality of service and quality of product, while dollars are good for more simple, standardized businesses like franchises that deal in immediate products where the quality and service doesn't carry too high a premium. Dollars are good where things remain the same, as with MacDonalds. Bitcoins are good for where things are different, as with Main St. Pawn.

What is needed currently for the value of bitcoin to be optimized, I think, is a decentralized banking infrastructure. This banking infrastructure would provide backing for the businesses that choose to use the bitcoin, so that they are all benefitted by the growth of the bitcoin economy. What I'm talking about is a radically decentralized system of investment banking that anyone can use but that promotes wise investment. Something that connects investors in a way that does not require a "stock market" or any other kind of limiting institution which tries to rule out companies to invest in. This would have to simultaneously fulfill the needs of an investment community of small, diverse businesses, and also prevent "boom/bust" cycles in the bitcoin economy. If such a system were developed, bitcoin would be a great boon to the artisans and small business owners that make up the middle class.

Clarification of Psychiatry: What It Is and What to Do About It

Psychiatry is the following two-fold act:

Part 1: Inventing discrimination.
Step 1: The psychiatrist picks out people he doesn't like based on their behaviors.
Step 2: Everything the psychiatrist doesn't like is labelled part of an illness.
Step 3: Every side-effect caused by the medications prescribed is labelled part of the illness.
Step 4: Pretend, with no evidence, that all things labelled part of the illness are a chronic, incurable, biological, genetic disease, and that the only treatment is medications which, in fact, cause all the behaviors described as part of the illness.

Part 2: Brainwashing.
Step 1: Isolate someone from their friends and family. Give them no contact to the outside world. Take away their posessions. Treat them as inferiors.
Step 2: Reprogram them to convince them all pleasure is bad and all pain is good.
Step 3: Hurt them over and over again.
Step 4: Release them into the world, finally, when they have given up on life.

It is my belief that all psychiatrists must be professionally disabled, and disallowed from doing their profession. There are a list of concrete rules, directed at psychiatrists, which would prevent them from doing their discriminatory and harmful jobs and which are based on pure common sense. Here are some:

1. Everyone in a mental hospital must have the same rights as people in a physical hospital. E.g. cell phones, Bible study, hugging, computers, exchanging notes, publishing written material for distribution, etc. are to be allowed.
2. You are not allowed to punish anyone for legal activities. You are only allowed to punish people through recourse to the law, for illegal activities.
3. You are not allowed to claim something is "scientific" or "known" unless it has been shown to be experimentally valid through scientific experiments. Science is in the business of determining causation, not engaging in wild, baseless speculation. Consequently, none of the data in psychiatric journals as of this writing is to be drawn from, because they all postulate biological and genetic causation for behaviors when no causal link has been established.
4. You are not allowed to prescribe medication chronically as the sole treatment for mental behaviors which probably have psychological causes. You are not allowed to cause brain damage just because you don't like someone's behavior.

If we as a society followed even just one of these rules, psychiatry would be completely defanged and psychiatrists wouldn't be able to find a job, because their profession would be rendered obsolete.