Why I Hate Philosophy Students Who Smoke the Pot
1998. I asked a friend for help today moving some boxes. Nothing too involved, a couple boxes of paperbacks from my apartment to my car. He stood there for a moment, narrowed his eyes as he inhaled his cigarette, shook his head up and down as he tapped out his ash. Then said to me that in good conscience he couldn’t help.
I said, “They aren’t heavy, it’s just a couple boxes of shitty paperbacks, I could do it myself but I thought it would go quicker if I had some help.”
He said it wasn’t what I was asking him to do that weighed heavily on his conscience. It was the thought of what the act of helping would do to our karma that concerned him.
He said, “Helping you out would be good for my karma because I would be doing something good for someone else because they needed help. But it’s not really helping you. It’s in fact harming you, for like eternity.”
“You would not be working through your own karma as you are supposed to do so that you can be free of the wheel of birth death and suffering. I would be alleviating your suffering and your struggle, but by doing so I am preventing you from experiencing it, which is what you need to do to be born onto a higher plane.”
“You must experience it! You must suffer in order to be free. It’s the whole 8 fold path; 4 noble truths. Take refuge in the three jewels. By doing this for you I would be taking your suffereing away which would be a momentary blip of happiness on your part. I’m doing some good stuff for my own karma, but leaving you to unknowingly wallow in your bad karma.”
“Holy shit there is no way Im doing this man because if you really think about it, it’s a double fuck! I realize now there is no way Im helping you because if I help you it will further me to my path to enlightment but at the same time it will cost your karmic soul, So… if I were in fact to help you knowing it would be beneficial to my karma and detrimental to yours, then I would be a really evil person working the system. And it would really end up damaging my karma too man. So no, no I can’t help you, not at the cost of our souls man.”
All I can say is that a simple “no” would have sufficed.
It sux that you had to move the boxes by yourself. But, for your readers sake, let’s mention that Buddhism does not, under any circumstance, advocate not helping others.
Pot logic…fail.
when I partake of the pot, I do not help others because I am lazy and want to eat things. I do not philosipize, I just watch tv and go to sleep. I think Buddhism would not advocate helping someone to rob a bank. If I saw a poor crippled robber having a hard time opening the door to the bank, I would not help him. Even if he was stealing the money to pay for the healthcare of 27 indigent children from a small impoverished country, and the money was just coming from the accounts of fat cats who didn’t need it and hadn’t looked at it in years and forgot they even had it. Buddha would never want me to help him.