Hi Earnest,
I found your deliberations and reflections useful and of importance. I hope that my understanding of your meanings is clear.
It seems you are finding it necessary to distinguish between conscience and Karma. The first place I’d go with that is to back off the planet and think about this: The globe is covered with people who are made from a common mold, i.e. the image and likeness of God. And yet, they are dispersed through time and space, needing in their particulars to deal with conditions they are born into according to predilections of their culture, history, geography, etc. Though there’s been a degree of inter-cultural communication throughout history, at this point all the local mentalities of the world are confronting each other more than ever even thought possible. And yet, essentially, we are from the same mold.
It is this sameness that might be our hope in reconciling our differences, if we can but see it, and distinguish clearly between essence and content. By essence I mean the soul factor, or image and likeness factor, By contents, I mean all the things we learn that we think we are and use to get along in our daily life. It is these things, our “daily life” things, that are the source of our disagreements. They are so, because since we have globally different conditions, we have needed to emphasize different ways in order to cope. The way of the Eskimos and of the Tuareg are not interchangeable, and neither of those might do well in a cross cultural port city. And yet there is a sameness in all humans. We recognize each other as such.
Remembering that Christianity is only a fairly late development compared to the history of the race itself, it might be fair to understand that many people, having been made essentially as the image and likeness of God, might make an attempt in their own way to understand, know, and relate to the Unknown and the Invisible God. So we have, then, thousands of years of people who are the image and likeness of God attempting to know God “on their own” as we might infer from today’s Christian viewpoint.
Yet, we have to grant, I think, that if we accept that we are all, and always have been, made in the image and likeness of God, then it follows we ought to be able to glean something about God by looking at ourselves. If you don’t have a love done next to you, you might look at a picture of them and remember. I guess that is why we have statues and such in our churches.
So what all this has to do with karma and conscience is this: they are dealing with the part of us that has to do with responsibility for our actions and with the understanding that our actions have consequences for ourselves and others. This is so by whatever means we use to assess those actions.
I think what the difference might be in your perception and that of some others is that “conscience” as understood by Christians has to do with judgment by God as to the ultimate disposition of the soul. “Karma” as understood by Christians seems to have to do only with personally experienced results of actions without reference to God as we understand God. How that might include the idea of reincarnation is another matter.
But it kind of boils down to this sort of analogy: If you are baking a cake, you either know or don’t know a recipe. In either case, if you mix things in a bowl and put the result in an oven, you get a result according to what you put in the bowl. Christians claim to “know” the recipe as a teaching handed down over time from the original Baker. Christians also feel that non Christians, even non-Catholics, don’t have the recipe.
Since we are all made in the image and likeness of God, and salvation is possible “outside” the Church, there must be degrees and kinds of recipes, resulting in everything from cupcakes to wedding cakes, eg. Nevertheless, they all fit the idea “cake.” In other words, there may be other recipes for “salvation.” The Church does not claim that all those who do not know of Jesus’ teaching are damned.
This is where the article you cited might come in. I read it, and having been both a staunch Roman Catholic and currently being an adherent of Adavita, an ancient Way relative to the Root of religions, I have a bit of perspective on this matter. The article is clearly has emotional/alarmist elements, for one, and second, the author has no clue as to the actual meaning and intent of practices that are allegedly only Eastern in origin. She is condemning them on the grounds of her strictly Evangelical Christian ethic, being concerned more with ideology than accuracy.
First, let me say that as far as I can see, religion and goodness have little, if anything to do with one another except coincidentally by way of intellectual explanation. Second, the roots of Christianity are in the very practices she condemns. This is history, if one cares to look at the origins of the Church beyond the Catholic revisionist version. Third, though there is a deal of confusion that might result from introducing original practices into more recent and far more limited understandings, those practices have to do with the oldest, most valid, and demonstrably experiential way of knowing God in existence, namely: “Know Thyself.”
If you do not intimately know experientially who and what you are, how you think and why, and where the contents of your awareness comes from, the practice of any religion, however allegedly true, is only of limited efficacy. One might as well take a telescope out of focus and thus study Nature. The results will be distorted according to the degree of lack of self knowledge, or proper use of the instrument.
This is why the understanding of conscience as the realization that the seeming “other” is actually in essence yourself, is crucial. Without such nuanced understanding it is easy to fall into complications of distinctions that are not pertinent to soul.
) seems to say it ought to be so as well. However, being that I think most of our moral descisions are made by this faculty which is better developed through formation (practice and contemplation), ** why should we obey/listen to our conscience**? Perhaps it is akin to (or even part of) reason in that it is self-justified/intuitive?
In all honesty, it seems that truth is denied in favor of the will. Truth is an integral aspect of conscience, as related by the pope below.