More remarks on free will and karma, but as yet unfinished...

Some adherents to a free will view may not realize all of the necessary assumptions in place making such a view seem plausible. However, keen or vigilant attention paid to experience reveals that an error is in play. Experience rises and falls, by its own momentum, effortlessly--for good or bad. Its source is unknowable, in a strictly experiential sense. Watch very calmly and closely if you are in doubt, for this is precisely what it takes to come to know this to be an accurate description. A self-sense inheres (as a conceit) in the continuum of experience, not as an agent of actions of body, speech, and mind but as an implicit or explicit component of the continuum. This is often called our karma--because it becomes manifest in our experience with an implicit or explicit attending self-sense. The conceit is what we may refer to as the illusion, the mere appearance of I, me, and mine. However, the vigilant attention spoken of here, while intrinsic to experience, is not a self or an agent of actions. This attention makes the bearer of experience and the contents of experience possible.

What arises as experience results from necessarily incarnate past acts, historical, social, familial, and personal. If experience occurred in any other way, change would not be possible. Thus, change for the better, i.e., change in the quality of future experience is indeed possible through acts taken in the present.

No act (karma) of body, speech, and mind is lost. Meaningful experience, fully human experience, unfolds from the past in the present toward the future. Thus, experience is intentional. Actions taken in the present, providing the deposits for the nature of future experience, include the circumstantial elements of each present moment wherein the past is unfolded as the present toward the future. Thus, the deposits left by the action taken in each present circumstance accounts for the novelty of future experience. Thus, innovation is included in the experiential continuum. If one thinks of this in the manner of geological deposition, such as we see in the sedimentary layers of the Grand Canyon, we must take note of, not only the prior layers of sediment conditioning the structure of the newer deposits, but of the causes and conditions of each moment that also lend to the configuration of each new layer of sediment deposited upon the prior layers. All (and I must stress this word) of these prior layers (the past) are also the conditions which remain to configure each new layer as it is deposited. Thus, each present action, inclusive of all of the circumstances conditioning that present action, will also be conditioned by all prior acts deposited and both the present and the past become the causes and conditions of future experience. This makes the novelty and the continuity of experience possible. In effect, the future is in a sense, but not entirely, present in the past. So, our actions in the present do count. However, they are conditioned acts with the possibility of qualitative change made possible by the manner in which each action taken, not by a free agent mind you, establishes the conditions upon which future experience is created.