As long as we’re dealing with the issues of karma, the issue of fucking up – making errors with catastrophic results – needs to be addressed. You see, people usually have it upside down; they think fucking up comes first, and karma comes knocking on your door later. In fact, the point of a karmic lesson is very often to allow you to fuck up, often very badly, in order to shock you out of your inertia-induced stupor.

There’s a Hindu story I heard, I’m not sure how accurate it is but it illustrates the point I’m trying to make. Kali is usually depicted amidst a murderous rampage, stepping on Shiva, and with her tongue out. The tongue out gesture, as I was told, means embarrassment, an “oops!”, and the story goes like this: Kali was on a destructive rampage and instead of stopping after having destroyed whomever she was supposed to, she went completely out of control and threatened to destroy everything and everybody, and the Gods got concerned. Shiva volunteered to solve the problem, by allowing her to step on him in her murderous rampage, at which she instantly understood she committed an insult against Shiva and was embarrassed to the point where all her rage instantly vanished.

So, the point of the story is that sometimes you need to induce someone to make an error, of the kind that they themselves would find shocking, because that’s the only way to make them stop whatever destructive thing they are doing in their inertia of self-righteousness. Such karmic lessons can seem very harsh, but considering what would have happened without them, they are actually very merciful. A mild case is having a careless driver almost hit a pedestrian, because that will awaken him to the consequences of what he’s doing. A more extreme case would be to participate in genocide in order to realise the danger of just following orders and thinking that the “higher-ups” know what they are doing and you can abdicate moral responsibility.

A typical case of this would be following your beliefs right into actions that you recognise as mortal sin. Then you wake up and smell the coffee, so to speak – you understand that your actions, as well as the beliefs they were based on, are so fundamentally flawed, that they either caused, or would have caused a great evil. At that point, you stop and reconsider your entire existence, as well as the foundations of your entire personal universe.

So, the point of those extreme karmic lessons, that take place after all kinds of milder warnings have been exhausted, is to allow you to fuck up in a major way, and face the consequences of what you did, so that you would wake up enough to understand that something in you is built so wrong, that you would do terrible things while in deep sleep of the inertia of self-righteousness. Karma, in that respect, isn’t something that punishes you for fucking up. It enacts a wake up call by allowing you to fuck up hard enough that you would stop and think.

One could say that a person who fucked up needs to be punished for it, but that’s not how it works. At that point, that person likely already experienced severe spiritual degradation and was on the verge of destruction anyway, because punishment is not something some external force does to you when you’re on a wrong path; punishment is an automatic consequence of walking the wrong path. Punishment for smoking is that you get cancer; you don’t get slapped on the wrist by karma, or some similar foolishness. Punishment for a drunkard who mistreats his family regularly is that his family wants to have nothing to do with him and his life is ruined by his actions. At the point of a wake up call, one is usually so far removed from their ideal state, that additional punishment would look like giving someone a ticket for speeding after they crashed into a tree and killed themselves. Basically, an extreme karmic wake up call is something that has a function of preventing culmination of a fatal course of action after it had already gone on for quite a while, and, basically, you’re forced into a situation that will limit your self-destruction at 75% or 90% rather than just allowing you to reach complete destruction.

One would ask why are there no warnings at 1% or 10%. There are. There wouldn’t be a need for extreme shock therapy at 90% if those were heeded, unfortunately. It’s words first, then stronger words, then a bullet to the knee, basically.

Another question would be whether this is a normal course of action – whether everybody gets a warning to save them from themselves. No. I think it’s a special case that happens when God actually wants to save you. I think there are terrible people who are allowed or even encouraged to proceed further on a course that would result in their complete destruction, because they are completely rotten to their core. Basically, there needs to be something good about you that will make you worth saving, and it’s always grace, and not something that happens automatically because there’s some karmic law or a mechanism that mandates it.

Doom happens automatically, as a result of inertia of wrong action. If nobody intervenes, you find yourself at the bottom of a very deep hole holding a shovel, and there’s nobody there to hear you or to save you from what you did to yourself. An intervention, however, is personal. It doesn’t happen because there’s a law mandating it, because there’s no law mandating actions of free and unconditioned beings. It doesn’t take place if there’s nothing about you that will make someone want to make an effort to save you. So, when an evil person asks, “what kind of a God would allow me to fail so completely”, the answer is “a good one”.