Q: I've heard a story concerning a very high lama whose wife prevented him from being in very serious car accident by smashing up the kitchen pots and pans (the smashing together of the pans substituted or fulfilled the karma for car metal smashing together). 'Can karma be eliminated by magic or physical intervention?'
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A: That's such an interesting story about the smashing of pots and pans. IMO what you're describing is an act of "sympathetic magic". Westerners wouldn't normally think in magical terms. The lama and his wife however probably do think in magical terms. That couple would accept image-matching-intervention as a compelling explanation of why the lama didn't get smashed up in a car wreck.
All sorts of systems work via sympathetic pairing of "matching energies. For example, homeopathic medicine and children selecting their parents! But IMO what you are describing is magic (working with matching images) and this simple tit-for-tat reasoning does not address the deeper level of karma.
(In the Christian tradition see, Matthew 5:17-19 , 1 Corinthians 8:9-13., many more for commercial-material vs. spiritual-ethical interpretations of Karmic Law.)
My own view is that human karma is not primarily a physical law of action-reaction, but it is primarily a moral law of action-reaction. Thus the time-honored rule of Karma can be phrased as "Do unto others as you would have done unto you." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethic_of_reciprocity
That is, it is a Law of Intent.
The purpose of the great karmic machine is to transform ignorance into wisdom. If smashing up pots did effectively eliminate karma, what wisdom would be gained? Very little, except learning to pay more attention to prescient dreams and acting on them in an image-matching fashion.
I'm a big fan of skillful magic but karma is much more serious and important than magic!
"Karma" is primarily a moral system
IMO karma is primarily a moral system, and the greatest of all the great privileges of a human birth is that humans are social animals but with individual souls. Animals and lower life forms have group souls, but humans have individual souls which means that every one of us must make his own choices.
Ignorance of the true value of life causes people to mistreat others. The actions which cause payback-reactions range from the severest ignorance of killing other people to lesser moral errors such as stealing to milder errors such as manipulation and deceit.
Signal and Counter-Signal
In every case, the culprit behind immoral action is the reptile brain. This old part of the human brain constantly signals each individual to survive at any cost, "whatever it takes". The reptile brain is constantly telling us to optimize personal survival. As a counter-signal, the human moral community with its religious traditions is constantly trying to get its members to treat each other with compassion and respect as the best path toward increasing the value of life.
It's a battle! But slowly, surely, the moral intelligence grows, and the native comes to choose the higher path. I personally think this is mainly a battle of the brain regions! Enlightenment actually occurs in the pathways of the brain, when we open up higher consciousness.
People moving forward into the higher paths quickly discover that during those previous lifetimes and lower moments in the current lifetime, many reptile-brain-mandated errors have occurred.
We have mistreated others intentionally or not. The record of that mistreatment of life is permanently stored in pranic form (the "Akashic Record"). The record states what happened and what has to be done to correct it.
Purpose of Karmic 'Taxation'
Now the purpose of correcting karma isn't just to satisfy some robot tax-collector of the Akashic Record. It's to help the enlightenment-bound person to "unburden" some of those old accruals and open up those brain pathways and increase their moral and spiritual awareness.
Some people can perceive the connection between their current events and their past events by this-for-that commercial logic. This type of believer interprets Karma entirely within the operations of human law. Karma is, in some ways, a very simple tit-for-tat exchange system. (That's why the simplistic magical approach can be valid for some believers.)
This level of believer is quite satisfied with the eye-for-an-eye type of justice, whether one is the criminal or the victim. This type of believer looks no deeper for explanations. That is fine until some massive injustice, which can't be handled in human law systems (e.g., genocides) has to be explained. At that point, the explanation of karma has to go deeper, into the realm of moral intelligence and the differences between human law and divine law.
However, most people are so driven by their survival anxiety that they don't think about any type of karma, human law or divine law, until those final 60 seconds before death, when all the connections roll out like a movie right before your eyes and its OMG I wish I had done things differently! At that extreme moment of death, it may become suddently clear how much future-life work one has created for oneself through lying, cheating, stealing, exploiting etc. in the current lifetime.
And some people don't appreciate that every action in the current life sets up the conditions for the subsequent life, until they're clear into the astral plane. Then, forewarned and fore-armed (or so it seems) they set a new agenda for a new lifetime knowing exactly what they're signing up for in terms of payback. One cheerfully accepts the privilege of a rebirth explicitly for the purpose of correcting that karmic backlog. Then one is reborn and promptly forgets the astral promise to fix those errors cheerfully and with gratitude. One slips again into a life of misery, resentment, and "why me?" self-pity.
Oy.
Karma: mechanical or moral?
I believe that while karma is indeed a mechanical system of action-reaction, the actions that karmic reaction is correcting are moral errors.
The purpose of the karmic system on Earth is to transform the destructive ignorance of the value of life - which is embedded in our animal bodies -- into the divine wisdom which recognizes the supreme value of all life (but especially human life!) The final result of a karmic error-correction payback must be the transformation of ignorance into wisdom.
This tranformation cannot be accomplished by magic. It must be accomplished with higher, reflective, rational, moral awareness.
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Hope this viewpoint is useful in furthering a very interesting discussion about tantra, magic, psychic imagery, and transference of subconscious instructions from one form to another form. IMO the magical processes involved are entirely valid, but a deeper conscious moral engagement with the concept of "necessity" (why does the native believe that such a thing "must" happen) should be in place before karma, or "reactivity" is fully released.
Sincerely,
Barbara Pijan Lama, Jyotisha
http://www.barbarapijan.com/
