causation as it generally understood consists in energetic physical interactions that are indifferent to any ethical qualities we might impute to actions. — John
For the early Buddhists, karma was non-linear and complex. Other Indian schools believed that karma operated in a simple straight line, with actions from the past influencing the present, and present actions influencing the future. As a result, they saw little room for free will. Buddhists, however, saw that karma acts in multiple feedback loops, with the present moment being shaped both by past and by present actions; present actions shape not only the future but also the present. Furthermore, present actions need not be determined by past actions. In other words, there is free will, although its range is somewhat dictated by the past. The nature of this freedom is symbolized in an image used by the early Buddhists: flowing water. Sometimes the flow from the past is so strong that little can be done except to stand fast, but there are also times when the flow is gentle enough to be diverted in almost any direction.
So, instead of promoting resigned powerlessness, the early Buddhist notion of karma focused on the liberating potential of what the mind is doing with every moment. Who you are — what you come from — is not anywhere near as important as the mind's motives for what it is doing right now. Even though the past may account for many of the inequalities we see in life, our measure as human beings is not the hand we've been dealt, for that hand can change at any moment. We take our own measure by how well we play the hand we've got. If you're suffering, you try not to continue the unskillful mental habits that would keep that particular karmic feedback going. If you see that other people are suffering, and you're in a position to help, you focus not on their karmic past but your karmic opportunity in the present: Someday you may find yourself in the same predicament that they're in now, so here's your opportunity to act in the way you'd like them to act toward you when that day comes.
We take our own measure by how well we play the hand we've got. If you're suffering, you try not to continue the unskillful mental habits that would keep that particular karmic feedback going. — Wayfarer
This is obviously a modern interpretation — John
I agree, Tibetan and other traditional forms of Buddhism have superstitious elements in them but I don't count the idea of karma among them. — Wayfarer
I can't see a more obvious fundamental ethical principle than 'as you sow, so will you reap'. — Wayfarer
Their idea of the operation of karma is most certainly a superstitious one. There may be non-superstitious understandings of karma, but unless it is understood as "instant karma" or the effect of one's actions on ones' actual states of mind, then it is a superstitious understanding. — John
In Sri Lanka, a toddler one day overheard her mother mentioning the name of an obscure town (“Kataragama”) that the girl had never been to. The girl informed the mother that she drowned there when her “dumb” (mentally challenged) brother pushed her in the river, that she had a bald father named “Herath” who sold flowers in a market near the Buddhist stupa, that she lived in a house that had a glass window in the roof (a skylight), dogs in the backyard that were tied up and fed meat, that the house was next door to a big Hindu temple, outside of which people smashed coconuts on the ground.
Stevenson was able to confirm that there was, indeed, a flower vendor in Kataragama who ran a stall near the Buddhist stupa whose two-year-old daughter had drowned in the river while the girl played with her mentally challenged brother. The man lived in a house where the neighbors threw meat to dogs tied up in their backyard, and it was adjacent to the main temple where devotees practiced a religious ritual of smashing coconuts on the ground. The little girl did get a few items wrong, however. For instance, the dead girl’s dad wasn’t bald (but her grandfather and uncle were) and his name wasn’t “Herath”—that was the name, rather, of the dead girl’s cousin. Otherwise, 27 of the 30 idiosyncratic, verifiable statements she made panned out. The two families never met, nor did they have any friends, coworkers, or other acquaintances in common, so if you take it all at face value, the details couldn’t have been acquired in any obvious way.
That is simple materialism. — Wayfarer
Is religion a superstition, in a sense? — Ann
So are you calling most religious people morons? — Ann
This would then mean that you are saying only you are the logical and rational person, which no person can be — Ann
No, I don't agree with that at all. I think there's some means by which the cumulative effects of actons shape experiences far into the future, by some means which is currently unknown to science. And because we can't accomodate it into the procrustean bed of scientific materialism, it is rejected as superstition. — Wayfarer
In any case I don't see how such events if they are veridical would be evidence for karma at all — John
And, say it is 'some kind of clairvoyance'. How would 'some kind of clairvoyance' be any more or less credible? What does that add? — Wayfarer
Well, it casts doubt on reincarnation. These experiences might just be a new person's knowledge and memory of someone else's life, which they mistake as their own. — TheWillowOfDarkness
t doesn't show, for example, that treating others better will mean your future life will be better. All it shows is that someone with particular memories of past life has been caused. — TheWillowOfDarkness
The article from which that passage was quoted acknowledges this point. However, even if that is so, the possibility of there being cause-and-effect relationships between two apparently separate lives, casts doubt on the dogmatic assertion that there is 'no evidence' for such causal relationships. — Wayfarer
I don't believe documented anecdotal evidence is ever good evidence for anything — John
A Turkish boy whose face was congenitally underdeveloped on the right side said he remembered the life of a man who died from a shotgun blast at point-blank range. A Burmese girl born without her lower right leg had talked about the life of a girl run over by a train. On the back of the head of a little boy in Thailand was a small, round puckered birthmark, and at the front was a larger, irregular birthmark, resembling the entry and exit wounds of a bullet; Stevenson had already confirmed the details of the boy’s statements about the life of a man who’d been shot in the head from behind with a rifle, so that seemed to fit. And a child in India who said he remembered the life of boy who’d lost the fingers of his right hand in a fodder-chopping machine mishap was born with boneless stubs for fingers on his right hand only. This type of “unilateral brachydactyly” is so rare, Stevenson pointed out, that he couldn’t find a single medical publication of another case.
secondly because it appears to undermine materialism — Wayfarer
The Buddhist would say that there is no non-physical soul that gets reborn, just the five aggregates reconstituting themselves, which is very close if not identical to a materialist view. — Thorongil
But the point at issue is as follows: you were very quick to state that there could be no evidence of anything like 'karma' on the basis that 'causation as it generally understood consists in energetic physical interactions'. So, the possibility of past-life memories is one subject where there is actual empirical evidence which goes against that. — Wayfarer
I was just wanting to emphasize that karma-as-causation is not in keeping with the modern understanding of causation. — John
We cannot formulate any adequate idea, in light of our general understanding of people and of the world, of how karma could possibly work. — John
I don't accept that these experiences, if they were truly as recounted, are necessarily "past-life memories". — John
“The wish not to believe can influence as strongly as the wish to believe.” — Ian Stevenson
Who is this 'we'? I don't want to persuade you or anyone to accept the idea of re-birth, as it is obviously a deep question and also as I noted, culturally foreign, but for karma is no less real than gravity. — Wayfarer
And yet you give no account of it nor of why you find it so compelling. — John
What difference could such a belief make, is such a belief necessary, a positive influence, or is it perhaps even detrimental, to the actualization of your desire to live a good life now, for example? — John
Even if we had undoubtable memories of our past lives, would that give us any good reason to believe that we would have future lives; or any good reason to believe in karma? — John
It seems obvious to me that if one's life extends beyond the boundaries of this current existence, then there are many possibilities. Conversely, if life is simply a material process, whereby bodies are born and then act out of their various drives and then die, then hedonism and the quest for physical security and pleasure would be the only real goods. — Wayfarer
Don't you think that is a rather silly question?
I didn't get into this to explain or justify my views on this subject. It was simply a matter of rebutting your dogmatic assertion that 'all causation is physical' and that belief in the 'effect of intentional action' is superstitious. — Wayfarer
I just said that our only understanding — John
Interestingly, and contrary to most religious notions of reincarnation, there was zero evidence of karma. On the whole, it appeared to be a fairly mechanical soul-rebirthing process, not a moralistic one. What those mechanisms involve, exactly, is anyone’s guess—even Stevenson’s. But he didn’t see grandiose theorizing as part of his job. His job, rather, was simply to gather all the anomalous data, investigate them carefully, and rule out, using every possible method available to him, the rational explanations. And to many, he was successful at doing just that. Towards the end of her own storied life, the physicist Doris Kuhlmann-Wilsdorf—whose groundbreaking theories on surface physics earned her the prestigious Heyn Medal from the German Society for Material Sciences — surmised that Stevenson’s work had established that “the statistical probability that reincarnation does in fact occur is so overwhelming … that cumulatively the evidence is not inferior to that for most if not all branches of science.”
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