collective karma

two nights i was over at a friend's house, and after our weekly meditation group brouhaha, she said something that piqued my curiosity. i don't remember the exact words, or even if it was the words. it might have been an inflection; it might have been an in...

tonation.

whatever it was, this is not uncommon in my interactions with her, and i often find myself thinking about the topics we touch upon for day to come. yesterday was one of those days, and i like to think of the following rant as the punch to a joke that begins:

"Patanjali and Karl Marx
Walk Into a Barr..."

approaching the One without the Other fails to account for our collective karmas, the lives we are born into the instant we take embodiment. a child born as a male in this society, for example, is dressed in blue from the delivery room door to the living room floor, and the first years of this child's life – years largely without language, months that precede even the formation of the I of ego identification – are marked by how others treat this child.

the color blue signifies: "treat me as a male."
the color pink signifies: "treat me as a female."

we obviously have no control over the decisions; but, moreover, we also have no control on how we become shaped by them. the identities we form in relation to these external stimuli predate our ability to speak, and it is simple hubris to believe that we can know how much of who we are is an act of agency as opposed to a reaction to the circumstance of our birth.

race, ethnicity, wealth, gender, nationality – these are very real, very transient, very material constructions that shape who we are. for the most part we are born into them, and we take on the advantages or disadvantages associated with these traits. this is our collective karma.

our collective karma not only influences our ability to pursue (or in the best instances practice) the metaphysical, but even our ability to conceive of the transcendental. for example, the Tao says to model oneself after water, while Moses was told to climb the Mount Sinai – does this mean that mountains are more holy than water?

no.

our ability to think about the transcendental is obviously overdetermined, encompassing both agency and will, but it is the conditions of our material existence that weigh most. i, for example, receive all the benefits of my male-ness, my American-ness, my White-ness. i was born into the most powerful country in the world, a nation that chose winning sides during the past century's two World Wars. our geographic isolation allowed us to avoid the destruction of Europe, and our militarism allowed us to spend the next fifty years unconcerned with any threat save that of our own Cold War atomic neurosis.

Robert Oppenheimer, father and apologist of the Bomb

i benefit from these things, and i do so without my consent. i reap the benefit of the world's inequities through the mere happenstance of my birth. others reap the afflictions, and still others enjoy more benefits than i can imagine. the "self-made" technocrats of Silicon Valley and the Beijing plutocrats of New China are part of the same wheel of karma, spinning on the axis of globalization and the unchallenged logic of Capital.

how do we explain these things? how do we justify to ourselves the privileges we inherit? how do we rationalize the hardships placed upon us by nothing more than the y-chromosome, or the color of our skin, or the political regime we find ourselves living under while we still inhabit the womb?

i find attributing these things to my (always 'my', always 'me') past life karma unsatisfactory. making this argument would require the conscious knowledge of not just one past life, but of every incarnation. how many perfect lives would we have to live to enjoy the blessings most of us take for granted?

saffron robes and white collars provide only the shallowest soil, no more bountiful than the superstitions surrounding the number "13" or the Fridays that coincide. ultimately, for those of us who took birth on this particular plane of existence, we cannot rise above our responsibility to others, or go beyond the social ties that keep us bound to every other human on this planet. we are not merely One on the level of the transcendent, but also within the maya, within the manifest world so easy to mistake for reality. we share karma with our families, our friends, our employers, our nations and planet.

to approach One without the Other is meaningless. or, in other words, the folly of Patanjali is no less than that of Marx: