Beyond Karma

[Jonathan Bricklin]

On March 17th, Swami Visparupananda wrote:


>If there was no free will, there would also be no karma associated with
our
>actions.

Not necessarily.  Karma can attach itself to thoughts and desires and the
results of those thoughts and desires--actions--without those thoughts and
desires having been, as they are not, *generated*  by the jeeva/self.

>Freewill exists relative to the individual. I.e. it is as real/illusionary
>as the individual, its actions and the responsibility as well as the
>effect of its actions

One might say that free will is the chief illusion that props up a sense of
the
individuated self, along with the ancillary senses of guilt and pride.

..
>What I mean to say is, as long as we experience ourselves as individuals
>we have a free will

Or, as long as we have a belief in free will we experience ourselves as
individuals


>and we reap the results of the actions this individual is
>performing. Of course from the paramartika level the individual as well as
>its free will, its actions and the results, all are illusionary. So are
>the heaven or hell we create for ourselves

or, rather, that are created

>by the illusionary karma we earn

or, rather, the relatively real karma that attends the absolutely
illusionary sense of an individuated self

[...]


>Though duality is an illusion, the illusionary individual does have the
>freedom of deciding his albeit illusionary karma by his also illusionary
>actions. That is the law of the vyavaharika level. Non existence of free
>will applies only to the 'realm' of nonduality where no action, no karma,
>no thoughts, no feelings, no happiness and no pain exist either.

The non-existence of free will applies to every level of reality including
the one members of this list server are on.  Thoughts arise.  You cannot
make a thought.  Free will is not some state you exist on at the
vyavaharika level, it is a misinterpretation--communicated through such
emotions as pride, guilt, anxiety--of  the feeling of choice.  A thought to
act has an immediate connection to our motor responses unless a competing
thought robs it of its energy.  What seems like the surge of assertion that
goes into a feeling of a willed response is the release of the energy from
the thought that loses out.   What makes one thought linger more than
another and thus dominate a particular outcome is not knowable.  Any
analogy with making something--which a belief in free will demands--does
not apply, since making something implies knowledge of the thing being
made, how it is brought about.

Metta,

Jonathan Bricklin
Brickmar at earthcom.net

----------------
"Nor ever [it] was, nor will [it] be, since now [it] is all together, one,
continuous,"
Parmenides