Guiding Light: Understanding The Death Of Many Through The Lens Of Karma And Sanatana Dharma

Some of my readers ask: How can so many people die simultaneously in accidents like plane crashes, natural calamities, explosions or volcanic eruptions? The human mind seeks to make sense of such tragedies.

We might call these "accidents", but when we examine the causes and explanations, they become incidents. We could label them "random", yet we develop mathematical disciplines to study randomness and identify patterns. The explanation of ‘randomness’ or ‘accident’ is not sufficient to satisfy the human need for understanding.

Another explanation suggests "God is testing us"—a leap of faith without logical support. Why would God test humanity by killing people? This seems almost evil and makes little sense.

Sanatana Dharma offers a different answer: karma of people. When mass casualties occur, we question how all victims could have a similar karma. Yet, we don’t question why many people are born on the same day—that too represents shared or similar karma.

Karma operates as a cause-and-effect extended beyond this lifetime, based on Upanishadic and Vedic texts. This logical extension suggests people shared similar negative karma and were destined to die on a particular day in a specific manner.

Interestingly, you'll always find someone whose karma prevented their death. In the recent plane crash, a woman caught in traffic missed her flight—it wasn't her karma to die. Conversely, someone once missed a train, took a cab to catch up with the train, and died when that train crashed. His karma was so strong it ensured his death regardless.

We are aware of the survivor who jumped from the plane's emergency exit and survived. This represents a mixture of past karma and present effort that helped save his life.

Your present effort can work in three ways with past karma: in harmony (enhancing the effect), in opposition (reducing the effect), or at an angle (creating a resultant effect like the parallelogram of forces we studied in school physics).

Karma provides the framework that satisfies our questioning mind when confronting life's seemingly inexplicable tragedies, even when they appear random or cruel from our limited perspective.

The writer is the founder of Aarsha Vidya Foundation. You can write to him at aarshavidyaf@gmail.com

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