Suppose I throw a piece of trash toward a bin and miss. Nobody sees it. I have taken a few steps away when I notice it. I know whose mess it is. I can keep walking, or go back.
I believe everyone has exactly the same chance at contentment and happiness. I mean feeling connected to other people and less restless within myself.
Life presents us with truth about the harm we are doing, and a choice between the uncomfortable thing we know is right and the comfortable thing we know is wrong. I include people whose lives end early. I think pain is usually what makes us willing to change.
By chance, I mean the opportunity life presents to recognize the harm I am doing and choose a right action through which I can find contentment. I cannot explain its form in a life that ends before a recognizable choice.
Picking up the trash is right because I dropped it. Its being inconvenient does not make it good. Rest and safety can be right too. Comfort here means avoiding something I already know I should do because I want my own way.
Getting what I want can give me pleasure while leaving me disconnected. Constructive, unselfish action, doing something that helps someone besides me, has brought me that contentment.
My change began with pain. I pursued comfort until it seemed that my choices were death or doing the uncomfortable things I knew were right. The damage had to become too hard to ignore before I would stop.
Even then, I did not believe the connection straight away. I kept testing it. I started acting less selfishly and felt more connected. I got some of my comforts back and returned to selfishness. Restlessness returned too. That pattern repeated over a long time. I learned by acting differently and watching what happened when I stopped.
I call this karma, meaning that the harm I do also harms me. Reverse karma is my name for unselfish action bringing connection and contentment. I believe it is a consequence of our belonging to one spiritual world. Nobody has to catch me for the choice to affect my life.
My freedom is a daily reprieve, some relief that depends on continuing to act this way. I can return to the old way at any time. The person who picks up the trash today can leave tomorrow's trash on the ground. Knowing the theory has never made tomorrow's action automatic.
Helping can become another way of chasing my own comfort. The person I help has interests of their own. Their good has to matter when helping fails to make me feel better. Demanding that result would bring my own comfort back to the center.
I believe a spiritual compass, a sense of right and wrong, belongs to life itself, including life beyond people. A person can sincerely believe something harmful is right. That could be part of any of our journeys. Their mistake does not place them outside the connection. My own certainty can be mistaken too.
Suppose someone is telling me how I hurt them, and I am preparing my defense while they speak. I can stop talking long enough to hear what I already suspect is true. I can also discover that I misunderstood the situation. Disagreement with me cannot prove refusal of the truth. I cannot make every objection evidence that I am right.
Genes and upbringing are part of the journey. We begin in circumstances we did not choose, with different capacities and different help. I picture those different lives as waves within one ocean. I believe what we are is fundamentally the same, however different our experiences look. That conviction is why I do not divide us into those offered the chance and those left outside it.
My belief goes beyond belonging: the opportunity for contentment is exactly equal. I have no way to compare it across lives, and no account of how differences in capacity, help and time leave it equal. Complexity describes my limit; it does not explain the equality.
Jens Ludwig and colleagues' housing experiment puts pressure on that belief. Adults randomly offered help to move later reported greater happiness on average. These were low-income families who volunteered for the program. Changing where someone could live affected the outcome I am claiming we have the same chance to reach.
Emmy Werner followed children born on Kauai in 1955. Some children with several early risks grew up without serious coping problems. Many troubled adolescents who survived had stable jobs and relationships by middle age. Education and stable partners were among their turning points. A difficult beginning did not decide every later life.
The help matters. The study cannot isolate a moral decision as the cause. Someone who recovered had time to recover. Their story cannot establish what was possible for a person whose life ended earlier.
Pain can be part of a turning point. Helen Matzger and colleagues followed people already drinking less. Those who reported rock bottom, trauma or a spiritual awakening were more likely to sustain improvement. People gave those explanations after they had begun drinking less. The study does not show what everyone needs.
There is evidence against a simple more-pain, more-change account too. Carlo DiClemente and colleagues found that treatment seekers who acknowledged consequences were more ready to change their drinking, while greater stress was associated with less readiness. Readiness and stress were measured at the same time, so the study cannot show which caused which.
I still think pain is usually what turns people around. I expect this happens to most people, but I cannot show that it does. I know what happened to me. These studies concern particular changes in drinking, rather than all constructive change. They give me no basis to say that most people must first hurt as much as I did, or that more suffering will help them.
Viktor Frankl wrote about choosing one's attitude under suffering. He also said avoidable suffering should have its cause removed. I would not ask someone to wait for a worse life before accepting help. Recognizing harm and making it stop can be the right action for the person watching, regardless of what lesson the suffering person might eventually learn.
Karma must not become a way to explain somebody else's pain from a distance. Their distress cannot tell me whether they refused the truth. Even knowing a wrong they did would not establish why they are suffering. My restlessness cannot explain their life.
If goodness guaranteed visible happiness, suffering after right action would put the guarantee in doubt. I cannot promise a happy result from any particular act. I believe in an exactly equal chance at contentment while lacking an explanation of how it works. That gap belongs to my claim, not to the sufferer's character.
A harmful action can belong to someone's journey and still need to stop. People need protection while the person causing harm learns. The person causing harm may need to repair what they can. I do not want punishment to be the point. A spiritual consequence does not repair the present injury for us. Returning for the missed trash is the small version of doing the repair ourselves.
I suspect the connection reaches the quantum level, the physics of atoms and particles. It is my hunch. The Royal Swedish Academy's account of the physics experiments describes tests of how particles behave together. They do not test a spiritual compass or equal chances at contentment. I have no physical result linking those things.
I cannot test the equality, and I would keep the spiritual commitment without proof. I cannot name an experiment I have promised would make me abandon it. Learning more could change my explanation of why helping has changed my own life. It would not make me exclude a person whose life ends early.
An infant who dies before being able to recognize a moral choice is the hardest case. So is a life that never develops that capacity. I believe those lives received exactly the same chance too. I cannot describe the choice or explain how it could be equal to mine. Calling it spiritual supplies no answer to that.