The Law of Conservation of Karma

Karma. The law of cause and effect. Karma literally means action. Everything one does amounts to karma. As the theory goes, positive karma is generated when one does a good deed, and negative, when one commits a bad deed.

The ancient Hindu philosophy (among others) states that karma is always conserved, and the cumulative sum of karma decides one's destiny. Translated to English, it means "Good Karma will return to you as a good turn, Bad Karma will come back and bite you!". This policy is a good rule of thumb for guilt free living.

Many people discard this as oriental hocus-pocus. But on deeper reflection, one can see reason, and a logical explanation. If one does a good thing for someone, the overall goodwill generated (on an average) will be positive and proportional to the goodness of the deed. Inversely, the bad-will generated will be negative and proportional to the badness of the deed.

Good-will or Bad-will is like a gas, in that, it dissipates in the surrounding area fairly quickly. Moods are infectious to some extent and result in creation of a larger area of dissipation of good/bad will. Assuming seven degrees of separation and some threshold chaos, there is formation of non-linear pathways from one point on the globe to another. Dissipation of mood is thus very fast and can be called rapid random mixing.

Thus the overall mood generated by one person quickly dissipates, comes full circle, and affects him indirectly. On analyzing randomized algorithms involving rapid mixing, topological connectivity and social networking, one may, within reasonable limits, show a law of conservation in the long run. This is an interesting (though extremely challenging) exercise in Combinatorial and Markovian analysis, which is left to the reader (It's too hard for me!).

If now, the law holds within reason, to some degree of approximation, we can think of the current state of the universe, and maybe even predict the future, based on the current levels of positive and negative karma, the trends, and the dissipation constant.

The world has been generating increasing amounts of negative karma in this century, than in the last century. There is no quantifying proof for this, but is a reasonable observation based on news, Slashdot and interaction with fellow humans. Given the advent of higher connectivity opportunities like email, Instant Messaging, Cell phones, International travel, the Internet etc, we are decreasing the degrees of separation between two individuals on the globe. This is going to make the effects of the law faster acting and more intense, as the dissipation entropy will be smaller.

Anything man made is clearly karma. But can the law of karma also apply to natural disasters? Is there a logical way to explain this last bout of the manifestation of Nature's fury? Aids, Ebola, Cancer, Tsunamis, Floods, Earthquakes, Volcanoes, Hurricanes etc have been explained by some people as "Negative Karma coming and biting you". Their argument seems to justify certain people's losses by saying that they deserved it. Is that fair?

I think, to some extent, we may be generating indirect "negative" karma by pollution causing the hole in the Ozone layer, global warming which causes hurricanes to gather more power. Diseases are attributed to pesticides, chemicals, immoral physical relationships, and bad lifestyle. Mining activity, nuclear explosives testing, large scale building etc. are apparently causes for earthquakes (and thus tsunamis and volcanoes).

Is accumulating Positive karma the solution to all misery? Is it as simple as building a solid Credit History? I do not have answers to these questions, but just a conjuncture. If everyone starts a "Karma Bank Account", and deposits small amounts of positive karma to it daily (those with a Negative karma balance will have to work harder), at the end of say, an year or so, there will be a large population, rich in positive karma.

Since this karma dissipates fast, an year's time will be enough to observe a marked change in the world. Lets all start the Karma-Account and start making deposits today. If enough people perform this experiment, the world will be a better place very soon.

Happy Kumulative Karma Kollection.