Choice, Free Will, and Karma: Experience Shows the Way

Let me begin by making three assertions and one prescription.

1.) There is no free will.

2.) The self is ephemeral and does not choose, i.e., choice does not happen in experience. If choice is perceived, then you are not observing experience you are simply inclined to mistake a false narrative as a true one.

3.) The self is an ephemeral manifestation that makes its appearance via a narrative, whether one is aware of its occurrence or not. What defines the self in this sense of the word is purely narrative in nature.

4.) Do not rely on anything that moves. 

The Meaning of Living (or, as they say "life")

The point of it all is it all. The point of life is living. The movement of experience good, bad, or indifferent is the point of it all. And, here is the kicker. The experience is not ours. We, as the self, normal everyday experience, mystical, inter-dimensional, sacred, profane, happy, or sad is what life, as it is lived, is all about. The experience is not ours. That is the point. We do not live. We are merely instruments for that which does. I use the word that loosely. This is not metaphysics or ontology. This is not a statement of conceptual fact. This is what we live every day. No self-continuity is obvious to us in actual, full-blown living. No matter the quality of it, the living is taking place and we are merely a phenomenal component of the movement. Experience is selfing through it all. Selfing is what experience does. The reality of life is experience itself. That's it. The meaning of life is experience itself. That's it. The point of it all is living. Living as experience is all there is. Here is the proof, and watch it happen, after reading this, we will make something of it whether we want to or not. Just watch. We can't stop it. We don't have a choice. We have to act. We must do. It is the first real commandment. Thou shalt act!


The good try to change things for the good. The bad try to change things for the good, for themselves.

--Yogi Ananda Viraj 

On the Nature of Mind

Often, I do not say nor write things that I expect people to figure out nor come to a conclusion with regard to their veracity. What I write, more often than say these days, is what I would like my readers to experience directly and see the truth of. Now, what do I mean by truth? Well, I would like the reader to actually observe what the writings point to because in so executing the same or similar exercises in the type of observation I propose here, one may come to realize the manner in which our common human experience works to generate unnecessary difficulties and open a door to the much-vaunted peace that many have already realized in their navigation of human life on the sea of vast and sentient emptiness. This emptiness is actually brimming with a past that is vectorial in nature, i.e., it is headed somewhere and some time--always in an evanescent present. This present is one that is arising as much as it is dissolving, beginning as much as it is ending, emerging from as it is headed toward, coming as it is going.

With the above in mind, let's look at our use of the word mind in this context, meaningful experience as mind and mind as meaningful experience. Let's take a close inspection of thought as thinking. Mind is always minding. There is no mind; there is minding, in the specific sense that we here and now are conducting this exercise. Through it, we intend to cultivate an attitude of simplicity in watching. At the end of honest observing, i.e., one that is not meant to harvest any theory or general conclusion about anything but to simply observe and by this observation alone free us--in a manner of speaking--from a set of narratives regarding mind that will allow us to simply watch. I know, why should we do that?

Because in doing this, in simply watching, we find release from sticky narratives that cause trouble, which are trouble itself. In seeing narratives for what they are, just narratives, there is release from their gripping effect. So, for the moment, at the very least, while performing this exercise, even if you have to play along, just watch the rising and falling of thinking or feelings or even both.

Mind is desire. 

Unedited and incomplete but still worth your attention if you are the observing type or just plain dissatisfied with life itself. This exercise has another dimension that will be added when I can find the time and situation that elicits it from my life and yours.  

Aphorisms* or now "observations" on Free Will, Ongoing...

*I believe we have moved on from the aphorism stage of this blog posting on free will. Why not call it observations regarding free will or its absence. After all, it is based on observation of our experience and that will remain the source of our language regarding free will narratives. Far too many of us are used by misguided narratives, or to be more precise misguided intentional narratives, regarding decisions and the narratives pertaining to this linguistic nightmare.

I'm sure you have heard the phrase "sentient beings" before, as in "We humans are 'sentient beings.'" Well, forget that. Let's say, arguing against the notion of free will, that there is sentience but let the "being" part drop. So, there is the incarnation of history or karma and sentience. Lose the "being" part--unless you mean be-ing.

*******

7/10/2019--Did you ever notice the fact that when our so-called thoughts are actually occurring or being lived, they are not thoughts? How did thoughts become thoughts? In thinking or, as we wish to say here, in living, there are no thoughts. "Then what is there," you may ask, you tell me. The intention or content being intended in our so-called thought is what is alive. Thoughts are non-existent then. No one is thinking them either, are they? Yet, we have the distinct impression and, most importantly, feeling* that we are thinking them--but in retrospect only. In the movement or living of intentions, we are what is in the thought and who we are is the self that abides as a dynamic person or self or being or whatever one's theoretical language deals in its abstraction-intentions that are, by the way, also lived in.

*This deserves a comment all its own. It's way too important for a mere inclusion.


Those of us who have tried, mostly in vain I might add, to lessen the number of thoughts (felt-narratives) that contain unpleasant and even evil feelings, found that methods or mind-training has failed them. Why is that? Well, to begin with, those difficult thoughts are not yours. Go from that working hypothesis and you may stumble upon some very interesting conclusions. Give it a whirl and test this out for yourself. One is left with the distinct impression, assuming you have exhausted all the possibilities of thinking otherwise, that you have been unsuccessful. That's when a change may occur. Don't believe me, see for yourself. Those of us who are not plagued by unpleasant, shall we say, thoughts consider yourself lucky and forget you read this post--which you may find to be impossible. 

"He deserves the death penalty," you have heard this before haven't you? Was this decided upon by his or her own free will? Was there some deliberation about responsibility or some such nonsense prior to this thought or statement arising? This statement is, most often pure reactivity. What do you think? Did something just "come to mind"? It's always that thoughts just come to mind.



All of a sudden, "I feel like having a piece of chocolate." Again, that pesky free will. 

Here is an example of free will with respect to getting a glass of water: "I'm thirsty; I'm getting a glass of water." The incarnate, i.e., felt narrative is the will. Looking for something outside, alongside, behind, or in front of the feeling-narrative will prove to be futile upon close observation. See for yourself.

Ever watch your hands perform? This kind of watching may take place in, for example, doing dishes or tying shoelaces. We may be carrying the assumption "I am doing the dishes," or "I am tying my shoelaces." However, if we are watching the movement of our hands, very carefully--without suspicions or expectation--you may observe the action is performed without you. Don't believe it? Watch and see. Now, this observation may be made with respect to all acts, even including speaking and thinking. After all, do we ever know what thought will occur next, honestly? Honestly here translates as clear-minded observation alone.    

A Post by Philosopher Evan Thompson, please take a look

Aim: Building a bridge between mind science and Husserl’s genetic/generative phenomenology of intersubjectivity Two central ideas: (i) Self and other. - ppt download: Subchapters: A) Intentionality and Open Intersubjectivity (pp ) B) The Phenomenological Concept of Empathy (pp ) C) Affective and Sensorimotor Coupling (pp ) D) Imaginary Transposition (pp ) E) Mutual Self and Other Understanding (pp ) F) Moral Perception (p. 401f.) G) Enculturation (pp )

Ongoing Experiment (with recurring editing): A New Cosmology Inquiry (or something like inquiry)

This experiment-exercise (EE) may bring on some rather strange and unexpected consequences. It may render your life, as you now conceive of it, to be done. It is entirely possible, if the EE takes root, there will come a transition to a cosmological event that puts an end to seeing meaning as meaning of. All will become clear. However, I invite you to look at this flim and enjoy its meaning(s) as a precursor of sorts, albeit a most enjoyable one, that may serve as an introduction to the need for communication and hence the movement of life itself. The short film is entitled Bahkyt  

https://vimeo.com/howelove/318





The most accurate description of this set of posts--within the overarching theme of the One--is best thought of, initially, as a thought-experiment. As elaborations accrue to each of the movements of thoughts spoken here (through an editing and refining process) it will become evident that this post takes on a more radical appearance and, hopefully, disappearance. This will be made clear if time allows us its hoped for dispensation. Let us pray. 

The following, despite appearances, is intended for use in treating disease. As such, it may be considered medicinal in intent. The disease this medicine has been fabricated to treat is the disease of misplaced ontological loyalties and the substitution of ontology for phenomenology* in the study of Eastern meditation practices and expected outcomes.

If you are following along with me, then you too may take off in any direction you wish while attempting to remain loyal to the stated situation that there is only One. (We shall capitalize the "O" whenever we are discussing this One.)

Despite its immediate logical shortcomings, which are readily apparent, continue on your own to play along thinking "I am that One and only" and imagine what that would be like. 

Our inquiry begins with a question. What if there was only one? Our first impulse would be to ask, "One what?" Well, that question cannot be legitimately asked because there is nothing else but One and to ask "One what?" would imply that there exists a knower and a known. To ask the question is overstepping the limits of our knowledge at this point in time because there is only One. (Part of our exercise, if you are in the game, is making an effort to stay with this apparently impossible rule that we always remember that there is only One. I know, I know, but hang in there, please.) Now, imagine we, each one of us, is this One. Put yourself in its place and imagine, if you will, what it would be like. You would be all, only, and One without a second. But how would you know this? How would such knowledge be possible in this our story or experiment? So, what would be the necessary conditions for such knowing?

First, it requires that we somehow split ourselves in two. So, let us imagine that our division into two would not be an ontological division, or a division of our selves, whatever that would mean, into two--one the knower and one the known. (Akin to Aristotle's Unmoved Mover.) We do not yet know what is but we are irresistibly drawn to consider what is so we know, forgetting the limitations placed upon us in this experiment. Some of our immediately arisen questions and judgments about this exercise must be put aside for now until we get it, the point of the exercise.  

Now, let us say that the One that I am is recognized as such by thought. Thought, therefore, provides a second which only reflects that One itself, for there is nothing else. (At this point, we begin to sound a lot like Descartes 2nd Meditation, but wait.) In our experiment, this One is each One of us, unknown by any others because there is only Me as the One. So, there is an incestuous relationship between Me and the thought that pretends and is pretentious enough to believe it is knowing itself. Let's say the conceptual or fabricated me is the second me the thought of me. So, there is still only Me, One without a second, with the realization that I am also this second me when I pretend that I am knowing me. Me is merely a reflection of Me as the One. For now, let's let this experiment sink in. Meditate on it. Use it as an exercise in imagination. Allow it to take on the ontological sense of really being that One. Find its limitations and contradictions but continue to pretend for the sake of fulfilling the requirements of the exercise. You are playing along, as they say.

(𝘐𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘸𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘭𝘺 𝘴𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘦𝘹𝘦𝘳𝘤𝘪𝘴𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘦𝘥 𝘢 𝘧𝘢𝘪𝘳 𝘢𝘮𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘩𝘢𝘴 𝘣𝘦𝘨𝘶𝘯. 𝘐'𝘮 𝘴𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘺 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘳 𝘥𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘪𝘵 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘧. 𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘢𝘴 𝘮𝘶𝘤𝘩 𝘢 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘦𝘹𝘦𝘳𝘤𝘪𝘴𝘦 𝘢𝘴 𝘪𝘵𝘴 𝘢𝘶𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘳.)

                                       II.

So far we have what you may regard as a rather crude entry into an experiment that has yet to demonstrate, on an experiential level of both understanding and feeling that we are the One, the only existent. The One becomes aware of this because it has the capacity to know with its thought, something this One has always had the capacity to do but starts to do because we are only now engaging this One in our experiment. I know the going is rough but hang in there. Hopefully, the experiment will demonstrate--on more than one level--its raison d'être as we proceed and we take some time to consider, toss around in thought, and see what appears in both feelings and thoughts. 

Please recall that each of us is this One, the topic under observation. The One has come to know that it is (assume we/it knows what exists means) and now we must simply accept that we are the One and only. Think and feel this narrative. It should sound something like, "I am the only One, there is no one, no thing other than me." 

All of the above, in all senses of the term has occurred in and as time. Time is the movement of the One's experience which so far has been only that "I am," and that "I am the only One." Or, we might opt for "I am the One and only, One without a second." How do we know we are one without a second? Well, again breaking rules of logic for the sake of this experiment, I know this because there is not yet any conception of near or far in which something might exist; nor is there any other thought but that "I am" or "I am the One and only"--or something to that effect. Just imagine what that would be like. 

Now, if you have played along, here is a next step. "I am One alone, without a second, and there is no one else but me." Feel this; allow this to sink in. Do you feel the horror? What is? Is there anything at all like me? Is this it? Just me? All alone? Only me? 

Did you feel it? I did mention horror, did I not? If you are willing to indulge the idea of one alone without a second, you may feel horror if you have a past, present, and future in the mix. Imagine being all alone, deeply imagine it. If you can feel horror or fright or something beyond loneliness, you are doing this correctly--or at least doing it along the appropriate lines of this exercise. We may even feel the urge to flee from the aloneness and flee fast very fast. What is it about being alone, now? Even imagining this, if you really give this a test, the horror or some degree of it will be felt.  

The 𝙊𝙣𝙚 and Only Pain

All of us, from the bottom up, ants to divine beings, are facing their own death. This one realization, if truly embedded in our feeling level, is enough to bring on oceans of tears--and yet, we sometimes act with unnecessary cruelty toward each other. This one realization is enough to bring on oceans of blood-tears. It is no wonder tears and tear are of a kind. 

(Certainly needs editing) Subjectivity, Consciousness, Awareness, and the Mirror

Here is a story about a mirror and how we may see life occurring.

It's like a mirror tain, what is put before it, it reflects. In our case, as human beings, our structural configurations dictate some of what goes into the mirror. Structure, along with the accumulated acts of body, speech, and mind--or so we have come to believe--flesh out the images that are placed before the mirror. The mirror then dutifully reflects back what is not only the expected but the novel as well. The novel may be seen as the prevailing conditions of present concerns, anticipations, circumstances, e.g., intention (as desire), lighting, mirror dust, etc., all due to accumulation. This is what we might call, in keeping with the Indian philosophical traditions, karma (action). Past actions plus prevailing conditions--we may draw a fine line between the two--constitute the image. So, the past and present conditions enter the mirror and become a self plus incarnate and meaning-laden circumstances.

The mirror is indifferent to all presentations. The processing of image production is fundamentally important to the intentional concerns only, manifesting as selves who live and die. This body of anonymous intentions driven from beneath us as desire to fill the mirror has no perceivable bottom, no perceivable beginning (an-adi for Sanskritists). Even to ask why life occurs is a question the source of which is on the side of history, i.e., the actions, not the mirror. We find ourselves on the receiving end of the reflection. We are the receiving end of the reflection. What goes in comes out as experience, or more correctly, experiencing. The concern-content has little to do with the mirror, although nothing incarnates, nothing lives, without it. It's a trick, a scam that manifests all the whos, whats, whys, wheres, and hows that history has given each one of us in the movement of living. Yes, it is always and fundamentally each one of us. We believe and live what the mirror reflects. We call this conscious living in meaningful circumstances.

We must, however, realize that we consciously receive and live much less than what goes in, in both human personal terms; it would be quite different for whales and so-called extraterrestrials, individual and species-specific. We are limited to the surface while the depths of history configure in silent and sentient emptiness (shunyata). Our senses of self, circumstances (the lived world) are a reduction of karma to the manageable limits of our historically imposed images. However, we can, with some effort and help, overcome some of the limitations. (This is a discussion, always, for another time.)

Now, as for our mirrors, yes they must be plural despite their common function considered by many to constitute a singularity. Mirrors are often relegated to becoming terms such as consciousness, divinity, sentience, and all sorts of images and estimations. In any case, it is unknowable, futile, and at times, dangerous to characterize with certainty. Oddly enough, the word certain is related to the word crisis--and, as history will testify, certainty has given rise to many. Our mirror only gives us what is put into it. We get nothing from it but life itself, and life is also what we put into it. What's to say? Not much at all. Keeping silent recognition and appreciation, like the mirror itself, allowing it to be present as much as possible, helps us navigate the many realities history lives to become. The mirror mocks it all but provides it nonetheless. Accommodating it is an essential ingredient for the minimization of life's challenges. Call that an epoché or bracketing ala Husserl's phenomenology or just plain meditation.       

Now we have a very basic understanding of the mirror metaphor. There are more subtleties that will be fleshed out as we proceed on this methodos, or way. What goes into the mirror--if you like, call the mirror consciousness or awareness--is both historical and structural. History here means actions of body, speech, and mind that have been constituted by a vast and incomprehensible network of causes that were, at one time or another, embodied in a human form, a universal form. (We will address this universality below.)     




   

Empathy as the Foundation of Compassion

I recommend this slide show very highly. Please pay close attention to the constitution of self/other as an embodied process. This is the key to self-other means of compassionate reduction of suffering. 




EMPATHY AND COMPASSION A Neurophenomenological Approach Evan Thompson.

On the Dangers of Translation

One of the most important texts of Mahayana Buddhism is the Bodhipathapradipam ("Path to Awakening") by Dipamkara Shrijnana Atisha, commonly referred to simply as Atisha (982-1054). In this text, a path to awakening is laid out in a wonderful format which, in my view, promotes a path of empathy. Here are two examples of a possible translation of verse 5 from this text. A well-known translator and long-time practitioner has translated this magnificent text for us--and has done a great service for doing so. 

Here I include his translation first and my corrected rendering of the same verse with a twist. I hope you appreciate the intent of this modification. It has great bearing on how one views and practices Buddhism. I have simply eliminated his interpolated material and kept the rest. His translation may serve, as I see it, to obscure the intent of the verse. It is based on presuppositions, that are axiomatic in our Western philosophical tradition. In fact, I find his interpolation to reflect a Cartesianism that hides in the background serving--in far too many instances of translated, taught, and practiced aspects of Buddhist and non-Buddhist Indian (as well as Chinese) traditions--to reinforce the underlying beliefs that keep human possibilities framed and locked inside of a noose of deleterious limitations as evidenced today in far too many problems from pollution to insane inclinations toward war. 

See if you agree. Husserl would have objected to his translation (interpolation) on the basis of his view of empathy within phenomenological intersubjectivity. 


5) Anyone who fully wishes to eliminate completely
All the sufferings of others
As (he or she would) the sufferings included
in his or her own mental continuum
Is someone of supreme motivation.

Anyone who fully wishes to eliminate completely
All the sufferings of others
As the sufferings included
in his or her own experience continuum
Is someone of supreme motivation.


I sincerely hope you find this challenging, interesting, and helpful. Buddhism needs your help. 

                                                        --Gene Kelly 14 February 2019

Use of the Words 𝙇𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙣𝙜 and 𝘿𝙚𝙨𝙞𝙧𝙚

Experience may be viewed as a sentient, breath-driven, incarnate, vectorial, and recursive impulse of conditioned intentions accompanied by a multiplicity of self-senses and responses that simultaneously manifest as their ephemeral and complementary meaning-laden circumstances fulfilling or obstructing those intentional impulses.
We may legitimately speak of this momentum as living and those intentional impulses as desires. This may be interpreted as the intentional desire-driven momentum of past acts incarnating as a vector: Experience, in use here, is the pregnant present expecting the perfect child of fulfillment in the ardently anticipated future—the only future that may be said to incarnate sentience. This present is not graspable, attainable, nor fulfilling. It is soaked with disappointment, patent or latent, from its roots, arousing vectorial maturity, i.e., anticipation, aiming toward inevitable failure. It is marked by difficulty, a lack of inherent essence of all its phenomena, and ephemerality. Phenomena arise and simultaneously dissolve according to the intentional drives marred by the lack of fulfillment of their expectations.
--Gene Kelly, 12/2018
“...desire is the primal seed of experience,….”
--Rg Veda 10.129.4

Our time is up. Let's be serious about our lives for others. What others are to you is what you are to them. Please be kind. Compassion is the wisdom-filled wish for the well being of all others. 

In constituting ourselves we constitute others; in the constitution others, we constitute ourselves. Be kind and practice it to the end. Our salvation consists in the realization that all otherness--despite the inculcation, sanctification, legitimization, and legislation of the belief in an independently existing reality--is, in fact, granted its very being and sentience through our life as lived. 

Some thoughts--So what is Consciousness and Its Friends?

First and foremost, consciousness is an illusion. Talk of sentience, consciousness, awareness, and phenomena are all words of utility. Words are utilities. These words--and, by the way, there are no words either--are used, as tools in our toolbox. They are the means by which we, in our naivete or expertise, attempt to point back to some fictitious purified form of experience in which we are said to find freedom or some liberation from suffering or difficulty. So, let us set our record straight and declare that all of the entries that appear on this (my) blog are, in this sense, a practice of convenience with little to no pretense of reflecting something we may call, much to our detriment, reality. 

In anticipation of some objections, I will attempt to clarify what I likely did not say. Our saying is just that, saying. Whenever thought is used indexically, i.e., to point to, it necessarily lies. It cannot tell what has already taken place or what truly is a case in the completeness of experience, another vaunted word that allegedly points to the living that supposedly grounds our use of indexicals. We might say that our knowledge--after biting that famous fruit of the tree--banished us from Eden.

Now, with utmost urgency and certainty, we must declare that the possibility of a reduction or minimization of our difficulties is available to us when we come to a recognition that experience is a structured and meaningful movement. Throughout this blog, we have been attempting to index this movement as time.    


As always, much more needs to be said...eventually...

A Dangerous Narrative: "I am looking for happiness."

One of our, call it "epistemic," mistakes is to attribute sentience to our sense of self. To ascribe sentience, as such, to any phenomenon is an error that continues to support the erroneous notions of free will, substantial self-nature, and a denial of the conditioned nature of all phenomena. Sentience--or awareness, or whatever the most apt metaphor one uses at the time--is a distinct non-phenomenon that is a necessary aspect of all experience. One would not be wrong in saying that sentience is pure subjectivity. 

Allow me to add, that this "understanding" demonstrates the simple, yet often difficult to realize, fact that no one gets free nor does anyone get enlightened. It is simply, but not obviously, a matter of a sort of recognition that awareness has never been, nor will it ever be identified with appearances (phenomena). As such, awareness is and what remains the actual freedom that we paradoxically search or yearn for. One might even say that freedom is what is already the case for awareness, or pure subjectivity, and is not and cannot be an attribute of a person. The search for personal happiness is grounded in a misunderstanding of Buddhist or, dare I say, "authentic" spiritual teachings/teachers. Personhood, or selfhood, is a phenomenal and as such an ephemeral appearance only. Like sound or a candle flame, the so-called self or person is merely an apparition. This ephemerality of self-appearance is, in its appearing disappearing. If one cultivates a watchfulness regarding this phenomenon, one may detect the distinct nature of consciousness and realize that "it" has always abided in freedom. The biographical narratives, so prevalent in our cultural-historical reservoir (alaya-vijnana), have a tendency to "hook" consciousness making it appear that sentience belongs to the narratives. So, if the narratives declare that one is unhappy, miserable, suffering illnesses, etc. then the process of identification with phenomena leads to "personal" suffering instead of distinguishing the sky-like nature of awareness from the narratives and, surprisingly, the pain we suffer. (Of course this latter usually requires great skill and yogic practices that most of us have not cultivated. However, there are some few gifted who realize this constitutionally.) The "take-away" for us average folks is "Beware of Biography."