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A formal definition of karma is ‘(in Hinduism and Buddhism) the sum of a person’s actions in this and previous states of existence, viewed as deciding their fate in future existences’.
Ian Stevenson noted that karma can be used by its believers as a way of avoiding responsibility in their current lives for their fate: it is the predestined result of the malfeasance of a past incarnation and thus cannot be avoided or overcome. Nor does karma do any better a job of keeping humans honest than in Western views of afterlife reward/punishment, an Indian monk cited by Stevenson argues:
"We in India know that reincarnation occurs, but it makes no difference. Here in India we have just as many rogues & villains as you have in the West."
Stevenson is clear in his assessment of the evidence for karma found in reincarnation cases he investigated:
"I have found almost no evidence of the effects of moral conduct in one life on the external circumstances of another."
For instance, he adds, in cases showing a decrease in socioeconomic level from one life to the next,
no pattern of wrongdoing on the part of the previous incarnation has emerged. In a handful of recorded reincarnation cases, the subject felt that karma might have been at play. They include:
Ma Tin Aung Myo, who conjectured that she had been changed from man to woman as punishment for misbehaviour of some kind; this however was a typical Burmese explanation for the ‘demotion’ and also a contradiction of her earlier statement that it had happened
because the previous incarnation had been shot in the groin.
Bishen Chand Kapoor, who attributed his steep drop in socioeconomic level to having gotten away with murder in his previous life.
Wijeratne Hami, who blamed the stuntedness of his right arm and hand on his having murdered his fiancée in his previous life with that hand after she spurned him, but maintained until later in life that he had acted correctly; Matlock notes that there is no evidence that this happened due to an external force
rather than psychosomatic processes.
Ma Khin Ma Gi, who attributed defects in her arm and leg to having hunted and mistreated animals in her previous life, to which Matlock makes the same argument.
Rani Saxena, who thought that ‘God had put her in the body of a woman’ because in her previous life as a male lawyer she had ‘selfishly exploited women.’
However,
these cases are very few among hundreds published in which no mention of karma was made by other subjects, and, as Stevenson states, their attribution to karma by the subjects ‘may amount to nothing more than a rationalization of the differences.'
Matlock notes, in relation to the phenomenon of birthmarks corresponding to injuries suffered by a previous incarnation, and other carryover pain and illness, that researchers have gathered a vast body of evidence that
the victim rather than the perpetrator continues to suffer from harm inflicted. He observes that neither do involuntary memories of the intermission between lives provide evidence for karma: subjects frequently recall choices about future lives made freely by the soul alone, or with the advice of a spiritual entity who is apparently unconstrained by karma (who is this spiritual entity? ~Joe). Matlock points out that this refutes the argument of karma adherents that investigated cases reveal only the life immediately previous, while karma can be delayed for many lives: the soul should still not have free choice.
(If reincarnation is real and karma between one life and the next is real, the soul shouldn't have free choice on how the next lifetime is shaped. But according to memories of people who claim to remember their life between lives, it does. Also, imagine if you're murdered, and in the process, have your arm chopped off. And in the next lifetime, your body has a deformity on that arm. What kind of system punishes the victim of a crime when the next life comes around? One that is mechanistic and NOT about reward for the good and punishment for the bad. Why is it set up like that?)
Reframing karma as an hypothesis, reincarnation researcher Jim B Tucker used Stevenson’s database of cases to test it, attempting to correlate five traits in previous incarnations (saintliness, criminality, tendency to moral transgression, philanthropy and religious observance) with three measures of current-life good fortune (wealth, social status and, in Indian cases, caste).
The only correlation was found to be between ‘saintliness’ and ‘degree of wealth’, which Tucker suspects, being isolated, was a statistical anomaly.
Stevenson, Matlock and Tucker all emphasize that while good actions are not necessarily rewarded, or bad actions punished,
there certainly is psychological continuity across lives. A central category of signs sought by researchers is behavioural memories: correspondences of behaviour between subjects and previous incarnations. These can be
skills, habits, preferences, interests, aversions, mannerisms, posture, retained cultural or religious customs, phobias, attachments, sex roles, language, post-traumatic stress disorder and others. Thus, both choices and harms suffered in past lives can influence the current life
by simply persisting into it. In a nod to Western notions of karma that incorporate these carryovers, Matlock introduced the term ‘
processual karma’:
It would make sense that we would see signs of such ‘processual karma’ if what passes from life to life is a continuous stream of consciousness which is duplex in its nature because the subconscious would preserve the memory, behavioral dispositions, elements of personality, and so on, that comprise a person’s identity.
However,
this phenomenon differs entirely from retributive or, to use Matlock’s term, ‘juridical karma’, in that it can be caused by harms suffered as well as choices, and it requires no external force to occur, only natural psychological processes.
Full paper:
Reincarnation and Karma | Psi Encyclopedia
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