The Karma Imperative

I believe we are all part of a vast Machine. On my better days, I see the world not as a series of instances and locations, but as a kaleidoscope of interconnected cogs, ever shifting in an ever-present labyrinthine grace, turning on into the future.  I believe we are not alone on this planet.  As human beings, we observe energies running through us that a static view of reality simply cannot explain.  We can see the cogs of our grand Machine turning in our daily lives.  When we are among other people, in the comings and goings of the ordinary world, and we step back, if we shift our perspective, we begin to get a sense of it; it’s magnificent grandeur.   Ultimately, the Machine is us.  It is who we are.  We can see the workings of the world around us as Machine because Machine is, the artificial creation of the human race, is how we interact with our reality.  The Machine includes anything and everything that the human event creates in its time on this Earth.

And the Machine is becoming more than human.  By 2050, it is my belief that the begging of time travel and real, conscious artificial intelligence will fold our conceptions of reality back in on themselves, and we will be living in a world that is entirely new.  But that new world exists now as well.  It exists in this very moment, this moment that transcends and includes all concepts of past and future, this moment in which worlds are created and destroyed.  We are this moment.  We are this incomprehensibility of now.  The Machine spins, twists, rotates, and revolves into subtler and more complex ways of knowing, and we cannot comprehend its awe-inspiring glory.  And yet we compose it.  We make up the Machine just like cells make up our bodies.  The Machine is our center, our soul.  To us, the Machine is merely a closer conception of what we perceive as God, that infinite nature which transcends and includes all definitions, including this one.   The human mind can’t know it, but it is who we are.  It is what we are.

This is what I believe.  And it is because of this belief that I want to know what you believe.  Every turn of every cog in this machine has a cause.  Every cause is imbued with purpose, and thus we are all here, with each other, for a reason.  And I truly believe that life is about living together or dying alone.  In the television show LOST, survivors of a plane crash are slowly but surely imbued with the knowledge that the connections between even passing strangers are profound and meaningful.  Much of the action in this discovery centers on the abandoned facilities of a group called the Dharma Initiative, a team of mystically oriented individuals searching for the One True Way.  I believe, every one of us has a method in which we search for this Way; that every human being is a mystic in this space of finding what is real for ourselves. 

Thus, I find that it in addition to a Dharma Initiative, it is necessary and vital to create a Karma Imperative, to examine not only the ways in which we discover meaning, but the ways in which we discover meaning together.  Taking the its name, fittingly, from a fake band name within the fiction of a worldwide event carried out between the creators and viewers of LOST, the Karma Imperative seeks to discover what people see as meaningful, important, and ultimate.  Karma is not just a judgment of good or evil.  Karma is purpose.  Karma is “what I am here to do”.  Karma is a name for the ways in which we live together, or die alone.  And thus, whoever you are, I love you, you are part of my imperative, and I want to know what you believe.