A couple watches the Super Bowl. He is a football fan, and she watches “for the commercials.” Both in their own way are supporting the football franchise with their participation. What are the karmic ramifications for both, and how might those ramifications play out in the form of a future karmic penalty?

We would say they are equal in culpability as being in alignment with an unfortunate enterprise that causes much harm at all levels of society, to the participants as well as the fans, and it is precisely because of the karmic obligations it creates. As with any kind of wrongdoing that causes harm, any witness who does not take some kind of action has a karmic liability from their inaction, and again the fact that they do not see a problem, the husband or the wife, but only a seemingly harmless sport, and some interesting high-level demonstrations of artistic and advertising legerdemain as a form of amusement to perhaps spend a pleasant evening together as husband and wife despite somewhat separate interests, all seems benign and not a source of potential problems for anyone. Those states of ignorance are not a mitigating factor, they are simply the reasons why that the two of them are blind to the travesty being played out on their TV screen, but they are not an excuse for participating as consumers of the product that exploits its membership and causes many kinds of harm to human culture in justifying the brutalization of human beings for the purpose of providing an entertainment that generates huge revenue. Many football players at all ages suffer permanent injuries that are a lifelong liability—bad knees, bad hips, bad backs, and so forth, are just the beginning. The most insidious and devastating are often the karmic liabilities from having injuries that compound a karmic predisposition to have a source of negativity befall a person, and those bad hips turn into a severe rheumatoid arthritis or some other chronic condition that worsens things. The most insidious and horrific of consequences result from the consequences of brain injury through concussions leading to early dementia and truncates the life with a very dismal downward spiral as the end‑stage. That is too high a price to pay for a sporting endeavor, to demonstrate and be paid handsomely for athletic excellence. Those players are being exploited and this is no less true of the fans who watch the games with excitement to soak it all in and have a vicarious thrill in seeing their team win a game and their favorite players doing what they do best. The reason football has preeminence as a national passion is that this is orchestrated to happen by the Extraterrestrial Alliance. They have promoted football all through its history because it is destructive to the players and creates a planned session of savagery that is taken part in freely and carried out with exuberance by the players who are whipped into a frenzy by the coaches urging them to fight. So it is much like a gladiator contest, not immediately about life and death, but over the long-term it is exactly what is at stake and the karmic consequences ensue accordingly for all who aid and abet the enterprise with their participation, actively or passively.