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Originally Posted by kennedy123
AriesIntrovert
If you ask me, I don't even think internal states should matter much when we do good things. I think the necessary test should be whether or not our actions benefit someone else or not. Say if someone gave you $10000. Do you honestly care if he gave u the money b/c he was 100% altruistic or whether he wanted to accrue some good karma for himself? Either way, you get the $10000, are better off for it, and a benefit has accrued to you. Hence, the giver should accrue the positive benefit. I think positive karma should be viewed from the POV of the recipient - if that person got a benefit, then you should too.
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You have some great deep thoughts about this, I love it. :)
I agree with most everything you wrote based on several principles. The first is that philanthropy without any reward to the giver is difficult because if the ego is not fed by feelings of "what a good person I am for doing this!" then the heart is fed with feelings of love given and received. The latter reminds me how energetic healing work (like Reiki) works in that healing comes to both the healer and the one being healed.
Another principle is based on the one constant in all spiritual theory that "we are all one" and this isn't a philosophical theory, this is a truth and shows how karma works. What I do to you, I do to myself.
Picture yourself standing on a theater stage. You "give a gift to another" by handing a gift to an unseen someone behind the left curtain and at the same exact time (is if by cartoon magic) a gift appears from hands behind the right curtain stretching out to you. Through the illusion of time these appear to come as separate events but in reality there is no time and there is only one of us appearing as separate so the theater model holds as true.
Shakespeare pointed to this with, "All the world is but a stage and the people only actors." (I doubt I quoted that correctly, but that's the gist.)
What I still don't know about is the soul intention. I am going to drop the Hitler example because that is too difficult to work with... Instead I consider the difference between killing numbers of people for pleasure, sport, or profit versus killing numbers of people in situations of defense against an immediate threat in unprovoked aggression. In my head this seems like a math equation where the first would be weighted more heavily with negative karma and the second would be lighter... but without having case studies to analyze it is impossible to know for sure.
I doubt we will ever meet someone who openly publicly admits to having a past life regression that points to their being Hitler, and every person we could point to as a possibility as being Hitler reincarnated is typically based on repeats of horrible behavior (which I don't think would be correct, I think it would be someone suffering instead), but that would be the true litmus test for how karma works if we could!