Damn Hippies

So I was in the car plowing down to LA this past weekend and I heard the Indigo Girls song "Galileo". I've sang that song with many jews and campers around a guitar and/or a fire, and never really listened to the lyrics. I guess I haven't really heard it since I've gained a true understanding of what reincarnation is and how it works according to the Vedas.

Basically, it looks to me as though the Indigo Girls missed the point. They give voice to the misgivings many of us may have about living outside just this one life, but don't offer the solution, they don't show what's good about it. Terms like "you squandered big bucks in your lifetime/ now I have to pay" imply that there is fault inherent in the Karma cycle. That it's someone's fault that suffering exists. That's just not true.

Suffering is the state of the world. Energy devours other energy, if it didn't then physics would not allow the universe to exist. Complex energetics are no different than basic energetics in this respect, they still have to obey the laws of cause and effect, of the conservation of energy and mass. So to suffer is to be part of the universe, and to have knowledge of one's own suffering is the first step on the Karmic path.

So we start on the path existence composed of suffering, of energy devouring other energy, needing to eat other life and possibly cause more suffering. But I say again, without that mechanic there would be no universe.

To blame your suffering on your past lives, to actually bear resentment or judgment against those actions is like getting hung up on the time you puked when you were six months old. Those actions in that past life were made by someone mired in the cycle of suffering- you can't blame them, they simply lived out their Karma. They obviously didn't mess it up so bad that you have no knowledge of the divine nature of suffering, so harboring resentment breeds negative Karma that doesn't even get you anything.

Then, if these Indigo Girls really knew and really cared about Karma and the divine cycle of reincarnation, they would have mentioned something about helping others with compassion. Instead we get "But then again it feels like some sort of inspiration/ to let the next life off the hook." This is profoundly selfish. While an end to suffering is a great goal and can help to drive the masses to seek divine knowledge, spreading compassion is really what it's about. Any method of suffering that does not include compassion for others will not get you very far down the Karmic road.

It's this kind of thinking that makes the Hippie movement sound lame and silly. On the surface it sounds enlightened but just under that it's very self-serving. As if eating raw and buying a hybrid will have much impact on the pollution in China. I feel the American New-Age movement offers a quick fix, something compulsive to do that offers only freedom from liberal guilt for the practitioner.