Ethics – Karma – The Meditation
by pre.
This month we have examined karma. We have pointed out that in traditional eastern culture it’s a measure of good will in society rather than a given individual’s score, analogous to the total scored in an iterated prisoners dilemma rather than an individual’s score.
Last week we looked at the social emotions which have evolved to encourage the kind of cooperative behaviour which, especially in environments consisting of similarly evolved beings, increase the lot of everyone. The rising tide which lifts all the boats in the harbour.
It would seem, then, that these social emotions are personally beneficial in an environment where defectors are detected and punished, or even noticed and not helped. It’s better for society at large, and for each individual actor, if they act the way those social emotions will encourage them to act.
More personally: It’s better for society at large and you personally if you personally feel those social emotions as relevent and immediate and deep.
This month’s meditation aims to help you to feel and pay attention to those emotions. It aims to encourage you to notice and seek the joy of helping others, the pleasure of increasing your community’s karma, of spreading the love.
As usual, you’ll do this through practice, through visualisation and recall (or precall, imagination if you can’t think of an occasion at all). You’ll focus upon the way it feels to help someone, on the emotional repercussions of that action. On enjoying the smile of the person you helped, or the general increase in karma in your social group.
In doing so you’ll also prime yourself to focus on these things in the future at the time they happen, increasing your emotional reward for ethical behaviour, for increasing your society’s karma.
Of course we’ll also try to make suggestions and give instruction designed to help you to understand karma more thoroughly, to learn to see it as a score for the community rater than yourself.
What you’ll hear
After the usual talk-down and slide into that suggestible state, you’ll spend a few minutes thinking about an occasion in which you helped someone. When you added to the community’s karma. Then you’ll send a couple of minutes thinking about a time when you didn’t help, maybe even when you hurt or refused to cooperate.
Each time you’ll be encouraged to allow the emotional effects on your conscience, on karma, to grow. To feel them more strongly.
Finally you’ll compare the emotions evoked by the two different types of action, impressing on your mind the personal emotional benefit to you of helping others.
Download The Meditation:
| Guided Meditation File 16 – Ethics – Karma Backing Music “Lost Loves In Space” By The Stan Operate |
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