Karma and Me

Do you believe in karma or cause and effect? Well, I do. It has happened to me and I strongly believe that it will go after anyone without fail when the time is ripe. I shall elaborate what I mean here.

I was an Integrated Science teacher when I was teaching in Jerantut from 1974 to 1978. There was one section where students had to study the five sensory organs including the eye. In 1976, when I came to this section, I asked the students whether they had seen cows' eyes. One of the girls whose name I couldn't remember put up her hand and uttered, 'Sir, I see them every day. My dad is a butcher.' Then I asked her if her father could donate two eyes for my Science experiment.

The next day, she brought me two cow's eyes. I used one for the class conducted in Malay and kept the other in the fridge for my English medium class later. In the class, I cut open the cow's eye and showed my students the retina after which I took out the lens. I told them that it looked and functioned exactly like that of the human eye. As it was a convex lens, I showed them that it could magnify words and let them put on top of printed words to prove that what I had said held water. The next day I did the same for my English medium class. This happened about thirty years ago. You see, I had destroyed the retina and taken out the two lenses belonging to two cows. I had committed bad karma!

In 2003, karma caught up with me when I had detachment of the retina on my left eye and it had to be operated upon to prevent blindness. It took me a month to be able to see things again. This is how it was done. The eye specialist siphoned out the vitreous humour and replaced it with sulphur gas to maintain the round shape of the eyeball. Meanwhile he lasered the retina to stick it to the retina wall. Nature is wonderful. My left eye then produced a saline fluid as the gas dissolved in it. The large black dot that I saw initially decreased in size as more and more fluid was produced. Finally the dot disappeared and I could see again. According to the doctor, when laser is done to the retina, cataract will develop in no time. Sure enough, after a few months, I found that light in the supermarket seemed to be dimmer. Actually, this is a sign of cataract. During one of the quarterly check-ups, the eye specialist advised me to have the calcified eye lens removed and replaced with a plastic one. He did the operation a week later.

Three months later, degeneration of the retina in my right occurred and the eye specialist had to laser it to prevent retina detachment, paving the way for the development of cataract. As expected, cataract set in and the lens of my right was taken out just like the lens of the cow was taken out by me some thirty years ago.

Now, both lenses of my eyes were extracted and replaced with artificial ones. Karma really took its course.

The moral is we should culture good karma in order to escape from bad karma. In other words, you reap what you sow.