Another conversation with Manu Bazzano, psychotherapist and Zen priest.
I have tidied up the shaky AI transcription below.
The actual recording is available below the paywall.
@0:16 - Tim Lott (timlott56@gmail.com)
Thank you for joining me. I very much appreciate you giving me your time for this 15 minute philosophy discussion.
Now, this week, we are going to talk about a very misunderstood word, think. And that's the word karma.
And other people I speak to seem to think that karma is something that operates in the world. In other words, what goes around comes around.
My response is usually, if that's true, why do bad things happen to good people? Is karmal real?
@1:00 - Manu Bazzano
Yes and no. It is real in the strict literal sense of the word which means ‘action’ . If I have an angry outburst that you would react to in a particular way - that you will walk away or you would shout back at me for instance. Or if I eat too much and drink too much I won't have a good night's sleep. So there is cause and effect which which is immediate and it happens and it's real. Action has repercussions
So, yes, there is such a thing as karma and it makes sense and no, there is no such thing as karma - if by karma we mean a cheap form of cosmology by which to interpret or understand events in a person's life, in an individual existence or in the existence of the world.
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