Is the golden rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” a good rule of thumb for avoiding everyday negative karmic entanglements, and maximizing positive ones?

This indeed is a healthy and divine approach to living. We would also recommend people learn and explore the Ten Divine Principles for Living we have given you in the past in response to questions about how best to live one’s life to minimize problems and maximize getting the most out of your life. People confuse the purpose of life in thinking of it as a material quest for fame and fortune, or at least accumulation of material possessions and a source of money to be secure for one’s old age. We see nothing wrong with any of these pursuits in and of themselves. The art of living is looking at the overall balance to understand the consequences of how one spends one’s time and what are the consequences of the choices being made and the actions taken. The energy you put into the world will have a karmic consequence—that is a given. Energy flows somewhere and will come back around eventually and return to the sender something as a kind of echo. If that energy is from a harmful act, there will be something more akin to an explosion where there will be a compounding of the negativity from all the secondary and tertiary consequences of being harmful to someone or something, and that will likely compound in spreading to others, all of which will have your name on it and will come back as a painful lesson of some kind—an obligation, a responsibility to fix something, repay something, or atone in some way through suffering for what you may have done. Good things will come back as blessings and opportunities and good fortune, so following the "golden rule" sets you up nicely to not make a misstep and incur a karmic penalty, but only do things that keep your life, your actions, and what you do and contribute to others on a positive plane, and by causing benefit and not harm, you will only be improving things both for others and yourself. To the extent you depart from this goal, you run the risk of a karmic consequence that may end up being quite painful. There are many acts of neglect simply through indifference and insensitivity to the plight of others that will incur a very severe karmic penalty down the line, so you will pay a high price for tuning out what might be going on around you, thinking it is not your concern and you do not want to be bothered or burdened in any way to take on someone else’s struggle. But the reality is you are a member of a human family. All are your brothers and sisters and you do have a responsibility to help them if that opportunity falls on you because of circumstance. If you do not answer the call, the Law of Karma will recognize this and will assign you a kind of liability energetically, commensurate with what you denied to offer by way of assistance. So keep this in mind as you go forward, to look for ways to be a helper, to be encouraging, and to uplift others. The more you cooperate, encourage, support, and nurture, the more in divine alignment you will be and the greater will be the karmic good and the lesser will be karmic obligation and painful lessons that may have to be endured.