Maybe I'm missing something. Am I missing something?

I overheard someone at SFZC say, "Doesn't he realize what bad karma that is?", and I just get this queasy feeling in my gut, manifested in an involuntary, pained look of disgust on my face and a roll of my eyes. People throwing around the term "karma", "bad karma", "good karma", like it was the breakfast they had this morning, but maybe I'm just missing something.

I do believe in karma, the metaphysical law of cause and effect promulgated by Hinduism, Buddhism, Hare Krishnas and hippies. But I don't believe in it as simple, humanistic moral law. It's something to be aware of, but impossible to know the mechanics of or to project on other people or situations.

"Doesn't he realize what bad karma that is?" The way I understand it, there are karma creating events and karma manifesting events. What might look like a bad karma creating event because it causes grief or harm (in the Bay Area, it's probably just inconvenience) to another person, might really be a karma manifesting event for the person receiving the grief or harm *ahem (inconvenience) cough*.

In fact, depending on the sum total of the karma of the person creating the event, it might not be creating bad karma at all for him. In conjunction with the sum total karma of the person being harmed, it might even be creating good karma for himself. How much does that suck? Someone screws you over, and in the end it's good karma for them!

Let's say it was a landlord-tenant dispute and the landlord is evicting the tenant. "Doesn't he realize what bad karma that is?" Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Maybe the tenant is experiencing the effect of some previous cause, even if he's been an absolute angel in this lifetime. If the landlord is otherwise upstanding and carries a total sum of what amounts to pretty good karma, and merely becomes the instigator of a karma manifesting event for the tenant, that does not instantly translate to creating bad karma for himself.

Although it may. I'm just saying it's counter-productive to project on another person's karma. Saying, "Doesn't he realize what bad karma that is?" might also be a bad karma creating event, if ignorance was the source of that statement, and I don't know if that was the case.

It might even have been a good karma creating event if it was the landlord's karma to teach the tenant something, or, by evicting him, to open him up to some realization. If the situation caused grief or harm, and that was the result of the tenant's karma, and if the landlord's action relieves some of the tenant's bad karma by how he reacts, that might equal good karma for the landlord. Still suck?

And through this all, I know I might be the one who's missing something. I just feel that much of what happens to us or what we are or become is karmic manifestation, and at the same time, what we do is karma creating. We can keep these things in mind in deciding how to act or react in a given situation, but we should realize that we don't know how the karmic wheels are spinning, so the best thing to do in any situation is to act with the most positive spin possible.