January 14th, 2026 | 07:05
Things are only relatively good or bad; they can never be “good” or “bad” on their own.
In any situation where something occurs we have no idea how it could have gone better or worse, nor do we know what its occurrence might have spared us from, or introduced us to.
Maybe you crash your new car on your way to work, but it saves you from driving into an intersection where you’re killed by or kill someone else who ran a red light. You have no idea, so how can you rightly say a situation is good or bad when you have no idea what you’re comparing it to? It cannot be good or bad on its own, as an abstraction, magically floating in space.
Things only occur in their context; perhaps you get a new job with pay and purpose beyond your wildest dreams, but it only ends up introducing you to people who destroy your life and health a short time later. Or perhaps you get so sick you become impoverished with medical debt, but this introduces you to someone who gives you a business idea which not only repays your debt but makes you very wealthy. Or maybe you just get sick, medical debt, then carry on as normal; you have no idea what the alternative might have been; what other outcomes were possible given your karma yet through some recent purification of yours were dramatically reduced in your favor; or what terrible karma you are now being freed from through struggling in this life rather than being reborn in hell.
You have no idea what your karma or the karma of others truly is, so how could you possibly deem any occurrence as independently good or bad? Even at the time of your death, when it seems all this life has been set and done; you (without a profound life of diligent practice) do not truly know the complexity of your karma, nor the exact conditions of your next life; how can you possibly deem any instance as good or bad, even in hindsight?
By: