July 27, 2008
The Karma Hypothesis
Where did I come from?
What makes me, me?
Why am I here?
What happens to me after I die?
I’ve spent most of my life not so much avoiding those questions, but denying that they exist. As a Christian it was pretty simple really: do good things and go to heaven or do bad things and go to hell. And it worked better if I didn’t actually read the Bible because there was a lot presented in it that was contradictory and I would have to compartmentalize the information. But I’ve long since gotten into the ritual of pondering my life. Now I think about those questions all the time.
In 1644 Evangelista Torricelli wrote to his friend in Rome, Michelangelo Ricci, to explain an experiment which lead to the discovery of air pressure and the invention of the barometer. It also created something that the Church of Rome claimed couldn’t exist: a vacuum.
“Natural philosophy was dominated for nearly two millennia by the ideas of Aristotle, which were then reinterpreted by the Scholastics in order to bring them into line with the dogmas of the Christian faith. This is the case, for example, with the Aristotelian thesis of the logical impossibility of the void. In the thirteenth century, Scholastic philosophers and theologians debated this idea, in which they saw the denial of divine omnipotence: if God wanted to, he could, in fact, create a void. They reaffirmed, though, that it was impossible to produce a void in nature with "natural" forces.
Developing ideas from the Physics, some medieval authors elaborated the theory of nature's abhorrence of the void: a constitutional horror of the void made nature adapt in any which way to avoid its production.
The theory of the abhorrence of the void was used to interpret various natural phenomena: the difficulty of separating two closely fitting perfectly polished surfaces; the difficulty of opening well-sealed bellows; the refusal of liquid to flow from small holes in the base of a water container whose top is completely closed; and the height limit to which pumps and siphons managed to raise water by suction. The abhorrence of the void was also used to explain why sealed bottles filled with water broke when they froze: it was claimed, wrongly, that when water froze, it reduced in volume, so that nature forced the bottle to break to avoid, as a consequence of this contraction, the creation of a void.”
From The Institute and Museum of History of Science-Florence, Italy
Of course the Church had been using a simple but effective means for putting out fires, which utilized what they claim couldn’t exist, the vacuum. It was a fire extinguisher, which was basically a giant syringe. Stick the nose in a bucket of water, pull back the plunger sucking up the water, and then push the plunger, squirting out the water at the fire. Ricci had to be discreet. Galileo, who had just past away a few years earlier, had been under house arrest the remainder of his life for addressing similar issues. But this line of questioning all started in order to get water seeping into silver mines extracted. Once it started paying off, and the Medici’s started paying off the Church of Rome, the church eventually relinquished it’s hard line stand on the void.
“As science advances, there seems to be less and less for God to do.” Carl Sagan
From the SGI Dictionary of Buddhism:
“According to this concept of karma, one's actions in the past have shaped one's present reality, and one's actions in the present will in turn influence one's future. This law of karmic causality operates in perpetuity, carrying over from one lifetime to the next and remaining with one in the latent state between death and rebirth. It is karma, therefore, that accounts for the circumstances of one's birth, one's individual nature, and in general the differences among all living beings and their environments.”
The concept of karma, as presented to me, was as good an explanation for “why this” or “how come that” as anything I heard in any other religion. And the precepts were not too dissimilar from any other religion: do the right thing and go to heaven or nirvana. Heaven in Christianity being a gilded version of life on earth, and the reward in the karmic sense was either extinction (thank God we don’t have to do this again) or another life on earth with perks. But I never thought about the issue that there really isn’t any proof. I don’t remember past existences so I can’t call upon them for evidence. Looking at my present condition isn’t proof of past existences. I can’t foretell the future either. And in the present day, those who claim to do so, I personally think of as crackpots or charlatans. If someone says “I was Cleopatra in another life” I chalk that up to eccentricity and wishful thinking a la Auntie Mame.
On the other hand, if you’re J.Z. Knight and claim to channel the spirit of Ramtha;
Wikipedia: a Lemurian (Madagascar is where lemurs live) warrior who fought the Atlanteans (you know, from The Lost Continent of Atlantis) over 35,000 years ago (that would make him a Neanderthal). She says that Ramtha led an army of over 2.5 million across the continents, conquering two thirds of the known world (known by Neanderthals in the know), which was going through cataclysmic geological changes. According to Knight, Ramtha led the army for ten years until he was betrayed and almost killed.(I think I've heard this story somewhere) Knight says that Ramtha spent the next seven years in isolation recovering (He must have been so traumatized) and observing nature, among other things. He later mastered many skills, including foresight and out-of-body experiences (Numchuk skills?), until he led his army to the Indus River (In Pakistan?) while in his late seventies. Ramtha taught them everything he knew for 120 days, until he ascended before them;"
I love that he ascended! How original! But people eat this up with a spoon. Why? Why do I accept the concept of karma so readily; because someone said so? Should I also accept Ramtha because J. Z. Knight says so? Should I believe Auntie Mame was the queen of the Nile because she says so? Did Abraham actually hear the voice of God command him to sacrifice his son? Or was he one of the first schizophrenics on record? And why did people believe him?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky from the Brothers Karamazov,
“So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.”
Again from the SGI Dictionary:
“Buddhism therefore encourages people to create the best possible karma in the present in order to ensure the best possible outcome in the future. In terms of time, some types of karma produce effects in the present lifetime, others in the next lifetime, and still others in subsequent lifetimes. This depends on the nature, intensity, and repetitiveness of the acts that caused them. Only those types of karma that are extremely good or bad will last into future existences.”
Unfortunately there is just no way to objectively prove this statement and it is rendered into the realm of supposition.
If I have to take the notion of karma on the misnomer “faith” I might as well get into bed with St. Thomas Aquinas (you have a choice to make), Kant (your choice goes beyond casual experience) and Pascal (hedge your bets).
Aquinas believed that God was not beyond reasonable proof for the common man. That cavalier attitude got him excommunicated posthumously. Kant dissembled Christian dogma and he did it in such a mentally challenging way not even the church could follow it. Then came up with his own. Pascal had a religious epiphany that he never told anyone about, wrote it down, and had it sewn into the lining of his cloths. He also said it’s statistically more profitable to believe in God because the pay off is the same for the true believer and the atheist if he doesn’t exist. If he does exist, then the true believe goes to heaven but the atheist goes to North Dakota. And they all believed that man had a choice about dealing with original sin, which is somewhat akin to fundamental darkness, or primordial ignorance in that it refers to a condition into which humans are born rather than one committed in the present.
The Anthropic Principle
Without getting into the copious examples of the math involved this basically states that the universe is a design by design with an inherent goal of providing itself with observers. In other words, the apparent delicate balance needed to enable life, as we know it, could only be by purpose. The Creationists saddled up their dinosaurs and rode this teleological argument into town, wrapping themselves up in what they claimed to be scientific proof of God through intelligent design. Of course it isn’t science, but pseudo-science because there isn’t any bases for the assumption in the first place.
This has similarities to pañicca-samuppàda co-dependant origination or co-arising, the Buddhist doctrine expressing the interdependence of all things. It professes that no beings or phenomena exist on their own; they exist or occur because of their relationship with other beings and phenomena. Everything in the world comes into existence in response to causes and conditions. That is, nothing can exist independent of other things or arise in isolation.
Or stated another way:
“When there is this, that is.
With the arising of this, that arises.
When this is not, neither is that.
With the cessation of this, that ceases.”
As an egocentric anthropos, I can look at the Buddhist gods, those metaphorical deities, which not only enable me to exist because of the environment I exist in, but because we co-exist/co-arise, they come to my aid when beckoned, as me and my environment working as one. That makes me the co-deity. And this is perhaps a unique area in which an individual may create subjective proof (that's rationale without a visa) of what influence one can have in the here and now. Karmically speaking that is. But it isn’t science.