Tag Archives: karma

The Karmic Price Tag of a Failed Human Experiment

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“Life is as dear to a mute creature as it is to a man. Just as one wants happiness and fears pain, just as one wants to live and not to die, so do other creatures.”  —Dalai Lama

“There is little that separates humans from other sentient beings. We all feel joy, we all crave to be alive and to live freely and we all share this planet together.”  —Mahatma Gandhi

“Man’s inhumanity to man is only surpassed by his cruelty to animals.”  —George Bernard Shaw

“Anyone who says that life matters less to animals than it does to us has not held in his hands an animal fighting for its life. The whole of the being of the animal is thrown into that fight without reserve.”  —J. M. Coetzee

A relentlessly shameful and detestable practice of constant mistreatment, imprisonment, and consumption of innocent animals has physically and psychologically destroyed human beings and their environment. Still, a species dead set on self-destruction refuses to abate or even entertain the notion that what is generally presented as casual, habitual behavior is akin to torture and slaughter of the highest order.

While obesity buckles our knees, air-polluting ammonia deflates our lungs, and the scorching unfiltered sun sizzles our skin, we blindly force line after line of overcrowded, diseased, and terrified innocent, deeply sensitive creatures toward their inevitable demise at the hands of a stony-hearted, uncaring butcher.

There is no greater greed than that of profit over compassion.

We jam needles into delicate infant animal skin and smear burning chemicals over the eyes of lab monkeys so ugly people with ugly faces can walk around playing make(up) believe. Then we shove toxic, hormone-laden poison down our throats and scream about the excessively increasing rates of depression and cancer.

We incarcerate thinking, feeling, and suffering souls behind glass walls, iron bars, and miniature tanks so we can watch them slowly go mad in what we call their “natural environment.” When the lab results return, we can’t seem to understand why the dolphins are being eaten alive by stress ulcers or how debilitating zoochosis could have possibly developed in an elephant that was most likely twice as intelligent as its handler.

It pains my heart to witness this level of agony.

The prattling pro-life propagandists are more than comfortable murdering certain defenseless souls while constantly preaching about saving others. It’s a master course in hypocrisy. A wildly injurious, manipulated book of mistranslated fairy tales governs their lives by shackling them with the false notion that humans are any more valuable or worthy of safeguarding than any other living, feeling creature. It is a fallacy of unparalleled proportions, and this blind piety to the prison of organized religion is far more detrimental to the public psyche than abortion could ever dream to be.

I welcome the impending, inevitable end to this heedless, self-serving species. Finally, the perpetual war waged on wildlife will cease and the rightful inhabitants of this planet will live out their days in a peaceful, balanced equilibrium and well-earned harmony with nature.

We are the raging virus that selfishly squandered and eviscerated the beautiful gift we were given, and it’s high time for Mother Earth to heal the hurt by ridding herself of the unremitting, punishing plague named humanity.

The end of this utter failure called the Homo sapiens experiment can’t come soon enough.

Adolescence Interrupted  

Scales Without Balance

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“If we think of life as a kind of Olympic games, some of life’s crises are sprints. They require maximum emotional concentration for a short time. Then they are over, and life returns to normal. But other crises are distance events. They ask us to maintain our concentration over a much longer period of time, and that can be a lot harder.”                                                                                                    —Harold S. Kushner

I am deeply troubled these days. I’m blinded by unjust suffering on a global scale and I watch the escalating pain of family and friends from a very personal perspective.

How did our calibration fall so far out of balance? Why must genuinely sweet souls be forced to endure sustained agony while those with evil, black hearts are permitted to swim free in a sea of avarice and insensitivity?

I will never understand the fundamental human hardwiring that values greed and excess over common decency and the general welfare of others. It is a pandemic virus without a cure, and it’s systematically infecting our brains with frightening speed and alarming accuracy.

So…why do bad things happen to good people? Is there really no karmic system in place to level the playing field? Is everything simply randomized chaos without even the hint of some justified cause or effect?

This nightmarish scenario certainly frames society in a context that would cause the vast majority to squirm in their seats, and that’s not even taking into account the titanic religious implications in the lives of those who truly believe there is a grand master plan at play.

As hard as it might be to wrap your head around the fact that we’ll probably not get to the roots of the “meaning of life” debate during this short post, it’s worth considering that our own backyards are the only ones we can clean, and acts of kindness and generosity can easily be distributed one day (and to one person) at a time.

Your pain is never as severe as someone else’s. Your financial situation is never as dire. But your success is never as impressive, and your status is merely an illusion devised by your artificially-inflated ego.

Take a step back and take a step down. We are forgoing a sense of community and compassion at a disturbingly breakneck pace. It might be wise to take stock of what’s truly important…before it’s all lost.

Adolescence Interrupted

Brain Pain

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The pressure is mounting. My skull’s nerve endings are a direct gauge of what’s happening inside, but the psychological sludge is far meaner a foe. I never imagined I would have been so thoroughly thrust back into the guessing game after all these years, but apparently there is no such thing as healed.

Anger has taken occupancy where tears used to reside, and my naked defiance has been a strange bedfellow. As I’ve gotten older and further away from the hospital sheets and question marks, I’ve also become less tolerant of a body that refuses to play nice.

I live in a constant state of mild pain. Tennis, car crashes, too many years spent sliding around on skateboards…who knows? I’m fine accepting the fact that an aging body put through the rigors of extensive activity will show some signs of wear and tear. That’s normal and acceptable.

But after what I had to go through to be free of the daily shackles that kept me clutching CT scans and neurosurgeon phone numbers, this universal slap in the self-esteem seems unwarranted and cruel.

I feel like I’m karmically aligned. I try to treat other people well, give to those less fortunate, and walk a path of positivity and integrity. But there is a devil on this shoulder, and I can’t help but wonder if I’m making up for past transgressions.

I believe we have a series of lives and experiences built into the core of our foundation, and this particular lap may simply be penance for sins from an old story. I suspect I’m supposed to learn some universal lesson as I clutch a head of such unbearable compression that I’m waiting for it to explode in my palms, but it’s hard to make peace with a timeline of souls that I can’t even see.

Some wackadoo massage therapist once said that the tension and strain I carry around my neck and shoulders are from hangings I was subjected to in past lives. She told me all about the villagers who gathered to burn me in the square and detailed the number of times I suffered a fractured spine at the hands of these irate mobs.

I left that day thinking she was quite possibly the most insane person ever to work at a spa. Now I’m starting to believe she was onto something.

Adolescence Interrupted