Seeing a video of a woman reading from Life is Fair got me thinking about how I’ve changed since I wrote those words

First time for everything, since I’m pretty sure I never saw a video of someone reading from one of my books until a few days ago, when someone emailed me a link to an Instagram post of a woman reading from the book I wrote in the 1990s, Life is Fair.

The book was published in 1999 by Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an Indian religious organization I belonged to for 35 years. It’s still being sold by RSSB, with this description.

The mystics tell us that the law of cause and effect is the universal principle of justice that holds this creation together. This book clearly and logically presents the rationale of why “life is fair,” and how, indeed, we get what we deserve. It uses the example of what we eat to follow the workings of this law of cause and effect, introducing the importance of vegetarianism. Essays and three short stories by well-known American authors are included to sensitize the reader to the sanctity of life and the logic behind vegetarianism. The book is also illustrated with cartoons and drawings about the law of cause and effect and the vegetarian diet.

After seeing the Instagram post, I picked up a copy of Life is Fair and thumbed through the pages, looking for the passage that she’d read aloud. That took a while, since it was on page 178 of the 252 page book. These were the two paragraphs.

Right thoughts and actions are akin to putting money in a savings account. Wrong thoughts and actions are akin to running up debts. The current balance, or net worth, determines the general thrust of our life.

That is, an excess of good karma makes us wealthy. Not always in a material sense, since true wealth is measured not in dollars but in peace of mind, happiness, health, a sense of meaning and purpose, and in one’s capacity to love and be loved. Similarly, an excess of bad karma makes us poor. This is the poverty that is as likely to afflict the inhabitants of mansions and palaces as the dwellers of mud huts and lean-tos. It is a poverty of spirit, marked by despair, loneliness, depression, anxiety, disease, and lack of purpose.

I vaguely remember writing those words. I clearly remember writing the entire book, because it took so long and required so much effort. But the person who wrote the passage above isn’t the same person who is writing this blog post. In fact, the person who wrote the previous sentence isn’t the same person who is writing this sentence.

Each of us is continually changing. We wrongly believe there is some essential core to our being that remains the same.

Sure, some of our characteristics are relatively stable, especially physical ones. I was born male, grew up male, and will die male. (Some people change their sex, though.) And discovering my high school graduation speech a week ago, as I wrote about on my HinesSight blog in “My 1966 high school graduation speech describes the United States in 2026,” reminded me that from an early age, I’ve been an avid writer who is pretty good at discussing complex subjects in a readable fashion.

Still…

Looking through the pages of Life is Fair, I realized that much of what I said in that book isn’t what I believe now. Yet at the time I wrote Life is Fair, I sincerely believed in reincarnation, karma that survives our bodily death, and other supernatural teachings of Radha Soami Satsang Beas. In 2007 I talked about the fact that while I still believe in the cause and effect aspect of karma, since cause and effect is how the world works, reincarnation and past lives strike me as deeply implausible. See “Life is fair. Here’s why.”

Reading the passage above, what the woman read aloud in her Instagram post, I felt almost guilty that I’d promulgated a conception of the cosmos that presents “bad karma” as the reason someone is despairing or depressed. Now this strikes me as a blame the victim mentality that can make people feel responsible for their unhappiness because of what they’d supposedly done in past lives.

I don’t want people to feel that they’re responsible for their happiness or sadness. After all, I don’t believe in free will. Which fits with my continued belief in cause and effect, the core of karma, minus the supernatural side of karma theory. Stuff happens in our life. We respond to those happenings. Then more stuff happens. And we keep on responding.

That’s life in a nutshell, from birth until death. Life is fair since there are reasons for everything that happens. However, we aren’t in control of those reasons. They are part of the complex, interconnected, impossible to grasp web of life that not only surrounds us, but is us.

On the positive side, I feel good that almost certainly, some people have become vegetarians after reading Life is Fair. I’ve been a vegetarian since 1970. Eating meat or fish is abhorrent to me. Sticking flesh into my mouth seems really weird, almost akin to cannibalism. One of my favorite blog posts is “I changed a Bollywood actor’s life… turning him vegetarian.”