Q. and A. on Karma
Greetings Eric. In past emails we touched upon the subject of karma several times. For instance, why we view phenomena the way we do, while others do not. I want to clear any erroneous notions I might have, regarding how karma works within the Platonic system. I once heard the late Advaita Vedanta teacher Ramesh Balsekar say, "there is no individual doer of any deed, everything is just a happening. The Will of God or Cosmic law." You also know, the Jains and Buddhist understand karma completely different from him, and each other. Is everything predetermined by karma? What is the difference between fate and karma? Is the human will completely in bondage to karma? I do not wish to sound Augustinian, I just desire clarity. What is the proper hierarchy between intellect and will? Which Ennead and Platonic dialogue should I read, which would point to the correct understanding, concerning freedom of the will or the lack thereof? Thank you in advance for your reply
These are questions of great importance and involved and hard to cover extensively in an email reply, but I will try to do so briefly. Ennead VI.8 is "On Free Will and the Will of the One" and deals with this. You might also want to read the beginning of Ennead V.1. It would take a very long time for me to go through all the Enneads and try to cite all the passages and parts related to this. There isn't a specific Platonic dialogue I can refer you to for this. In passing, let me mention that modern so-called Advaitins are generally most all actually full-blown theists of almost an Abrahamic type and I wouldn't necessarily go by what they say as actually representing the actual earlier Advaita school. Karma is not determinism, fate or pre-destination and we are not Augustinians or Calvinists. The human will is not completely in bondage to karma or else liberation would not be possible. Everything is determined by karma but not pre-determined. At every moment, we have the free will to move either towards liberation and re-union with the One or further into multiplicity and greater bondage. Some of the confusion may be due to a realist (in the modern, not the opposite medieval, sense) and physicalist/materialist perspective on things that conceives of objects and events existing apart from perceiving subjects, where in reality there is just experience and Mind as a unitary whole. Karma is only relevant at this lowest level of Soul and individuated sensate existence in space-time that is a weak projection or faint reflection or darkening of the higher hypostases of Nous and the Good. At this level, subject and object have apparently broken up, but still cannot exist apart from each other, by definition. The Soul of the All experiences this All as a whole and all time and space, which are only created by soul, simultaneously and all our individual souls are within its experiential field. Our individual experiential fields include all our individual relative worlds and experiences that we experience appearing as a temporal and spatial series of past, present and future and translation in space and all our sense-perceptions of objects and events and other souls, etc. At each moment, we experience given things and happenings as our experiential field and we act volitionally on this basis. Our volitional actions and choices and thoughts modify our experiential field and sometimes that of others we are interacting with. All the modifications of our experiential field and those of all other souls modify the experiential field of the Soul of the All. These modifications of the experiential field of the All in turn then modify our experiential field and those of all other souls. The Soul of the All experiences all this in a single moment of time, as it were, and a single place, as it were, but we experience all these modifications of our experiential fields as a temporal series.
Thus, all the modifications that we have done by volitional thought and action in what we perceive as the past modify, through the Soul of the All and its experience of both our modified experiential fields and those of all other souls, what we perceive and experience as our present and future experiential fields. This is what we call karma. There is no such thing as fate in the sense of experiences that don't occur as a result of our volitional choices, but there is providence in that all this works in accordance with righteousness and necessity and is a reflection or unfolding in space-time of the eternal relations of Nous. At each moment, we have the choice of our will being that of the higher soul--of that in contact with Nous and the Good and, ultimately, really of Nous and the Good themselves--which moves us in the direction of divinity and liberation or our will being that of the lower or animal soul bound in with the body and sense-perception and this world, which moves us further into bondage and sense-experience. Even though the conditions, circumstances, perceptions, desires, passions, emotions, defilements, involuntarily arising thoughts, etc., etc. that we experience and that constitute our experiential field at a given time are determined by karma, we always have the ability to whatever extent to then react to them or act and think, even if only a little bit, based on the higher soul and higher hypostases rather than the lower and thus create positive karma and, more specifically, karma leading to release. As I have indicated before, this striving for liberation and renunciation and acting according to the true higher self is really the One acting through us and working to re-realize and re-unify Itself through us, though It has actually never become de-unified and all this is actually only happening or apparently happening at our level which is less real and only a subtraction and darkening that doesn't affect the Light at the level of the Good, which is completely unchanged. Words and purely discursive understanding maybe begin to fail at this point in my explanation. When this happens, when one is truly renouncing and correctly striving for release, the modification of the experiential field of the Soul of the All includes that the Light is starting to reappear in and through a particular soul and its experiential field is being thus modified, and so that soul's experiential field keeps being modified in a way to allow it to keep going to liberation, but also brings forth the deluded modifications that it previously effected and have to be used up, but now in a manner that, while perhaps difficult and not pleasant, doesn't permanently or really hinder its continued progress towards the telos. Ordinary deluded worldlings, on the other hand, just experience modifications to their experiential field based on previous deluded volitions based on the lower self and just react to them again on the basis of the lower self and just then create more such modifications and just keep going in an endless cycle of shifting low level experiential fields of rebirth as humans and non-humans until and if somehow they begin to see through it and begin to act from the higher soul and the Absolute begins to remanifest through them. Why this movement towards release has started in a few souls but not in most at any given point, I don't know. As I have said, this is all kind of involved and not necessarily easily graspable at soul-level. The most important thing is to renounce the world and strive wholeheartedly for re-union with the Good, the source of all knowing and knowledge, at which point this won't be a problem.
I hope this explanation is at least somewhat intelligible and helps to answer your questions and give you greater clarity, at least to a reasonable degree. Perhaps, I should also mention that my answers are, frankly, based on my own contemplative experience and understanding, and I can't necessarily cite written authorities for my way of putting things.
