what's the karma of an atom? Or of mosquito? Or the fly? Or of the sparrow? The fish? Do they even know it?
Is this an invisible ongoing never stopping review in progress? By the subconscious? What if I lose all my subconscious? Can I get free of karma?
If there is karma, the free-will is illusion. And vice versa. Because its the free-will that will lead me to results of my deeds. So not exactly free.
How has karma gotten evolved, I wonder.
Is following instincts good karma? Or is thinking good karma? Is sleeping and doing nothing good karma? What is bad afterall? Anything that comes to mind and doable is good.
6 comments:
The concept of Karma came from Indian philosophy. Most of which has roots in the Bhagwat Gita.
In the beginning of chapter 3, Krishna says that the man is created to run the system, on the other hand, all other creatures, whether conscious or unconscious, including demigods(devi/devtas) are created to help the man run the system. Only man of all creatures has the privilege of free-will!
There is a thin line separating the karma and the free-will. Say a mosquito's karma is to bite a man. God has created the mosquito to do this job. The mosquito does the job without any consciousness whatsoever and plays a certain role in the system. On the other hand, say a man's karma is to kill the president of USA. This is the destiny, the karma, the inevitability. The man can either accept the karma and just do it OR contemplate about the good or bad results BUT the man no matter what has the karma to kill the president.
So the karma is the actions you do and free-will is the judgment process of your consciousness. Free-will never manifests itself in the physical world. Whatever manifests in this physical world is the Karma.
Now answers to your questions:
The results of karma for all creatures (atom, mosquito, fly or sparrow) except man are pre-decided. All 'yonis' except of man are 'bhog yonis', which means you have to go through them without accumulating good or bad results for your deeds. For example, a pet dog that never bitten anybody has the same good or bad results in afterlife as a stray dog that mutilated a child.
Karma is the destiny. If you lose your consciousness then you will be free of your free-will but not karma. Being free of your free-will saves your from accumulating any results of your karma.
The free-will certainly leads you to the results of your karma. The results however are again non-physical. As the Krishna says in Gita, good results will lead you to your salvation and bad results will lead you to mental pain/agony and which are all non-physical.
Following your instincts can be good karma or bad karma, depends on how you judge it in your mind, again an act of free-will. If you kill the president of USA and believe that it was your karma then it is a good karma. If you feel that you did something wrong, something bad, which your shouldn't have done, then it's a bad karma.
Sleeping and doing nothing can be good karma as long as don't feel a bit bad about it. However, Krishna says that doing nothing is a tough path a soul can take to achieve salvation because you can't even maintain your body without doing nothing and soon your free-will will fill you with guilt and remorse that you are doing nothing which will lead to bad karma.
The atoms of my mind are still trying to understand what Mishraji explained. It may take a while before I reach that higher state. And come up with something.
'Karma' literally is 'Action' and as there is no existence without 'action', every moment of any entity's existence is its karma.
So the Anoop's free-will discussion answers following question - Is 'karma' pre-determined (destiny) or does the entity play any role in its 'karma' (free-will)? Let us leave this question open for now.
To come back to your quesions -
karma of an atom, mosquito, fly exists! And they do know about their karma (electron cloud spin, blood sucking and rubbing their feet respectively). It is more of a recording process than review, a trail left on the sands of time. A history of the individual, more like your credit-score. And here, I disagree with Anoop, because I don't think any entity can get rid of its 'karma'.
If there is karma, the free-will is illusion?? I don't think so. It is the belief in destiny aka pre-determinatio of 'karma' that would kill 'free-will' (and all the fun about free-will!). Fatalism would kill free-will.
Let us assume that we have free-will. You go out, drive around, run someone over and come back. Now, it is recorded on your karma book. What Bhagwat Gita's karma-theory says is that you this event will come back to take its toll (assuming it isn't the nicest thing to do) on you. It does not necessarily say that you will not get dinner that day or you will be run over by someone else that week. No fatalism! Point being, fee-will does not mean you apply it on all your karma and so anytime you leave some karma to go 'automatic', your earlier karma may come to decide its route. (Oh, I am not really sure I make any sense here!).
Karma is always there. It is existence! It is the Karma-theory that evolved over a period of time much like any religion. Notice that how every single religion says humans have free-will and so they ought to choose it the right way. Rings any bell? Just notice around and you will find all good karmas are taught.
What is free will first of all?
I choose, then what is I? Alias for self. Not the atoms of my body but some invisible self. The cells of our body constantly get replaced, but our concept of self doesn't change. Some non-material thing is self.
Now how free am I? Means how difficult it is for me to overcome the evolutinary instincts which other animals cannot. How varied can my response be to stilmulus. We are animals too, so lets not separate ourselves out. We just happen to have highly evolved frontal lobes that enable to be aware of millions of choices, where the rest of animals may only have 1,2,3.. or a few in a given situation.
Frontal lobes may give me choices, but still I got to choose. Still back to I. Free will must be property of I. So, free-will must come from non-material universe. There must be non-material counterpart of all material existence. As all manifestation is orchrestrated by opposites.
Lets think of univese as some arrangement of particles. Which constantly changes form, manifesting the maya, the visible world. The Leela. Now someone must effect the change of form, pattern of these particles. Some material actions which took birth in our thoughts, in I, or in any conscious enitity. These actions predcisely are the karma.
Any karmic action must precede a free will choice. However limited. We are just on the better side of the spectrum of choices that any conscious enity can make.
The free will choice is mine. No choice is good or bad inherently. It is totally upto me how to attribute the choice as. So its possible you can do a bad act with very good intention. And do a good act with bad intention. Or good with good, bad with bad. So long as there is "good" or "bad" comes in, karma takes birth. If you did an act without good or bad intention, it will be the case when you don't mess with karma at all. This may explain why lower Yonis are rid of karma because the can't think or intend good or bad.
Thus good or bad intentions, which were present in our choices, manifest themselves. Because whatever we think we manifest.
This makes us think in retrospect, that our karmas are takeing revenge. But its just that our intentions are manifesting full scale. Our free-will's choices.
So in effect I am trying to conceptualize free-will as really free. And karma as just a side effect, material manifestation of our free-willed choices.
I will give my words to Sandeep's karma's theory - Karma is reflections of one's actions (by free-will) on one's consciousness. The various shades of karma are decided by the analysis of that action by same consciousness. And so, good karma and bad karma will exist. Some corollaries of this theory would be -
1. Getting rid of one's consciousness will get rid of karma.
2. Getting rid of one's judgement will get rid of karma.
3. Getting rid of all the action will get rid of karma.
This will definitely explain karma theory in practice. Personally, I do not believe in hypothesis that free-will actually exists. But I am not a fatalist either.
First, getting back to the question of self, and as I undoubtely believe animals also have concepts of self, judgement, emotions and to a certain extent retrospection (and who knows, maybe blogs also), I don't think humans are any more evolved than animals but only a superior variation. And this makes me believe that self is analogous to a disk checking utility on XP which can check the surface on which it resides (and actually fix the check sum errors!). And the self does not give one power of P4 2.8 GHz but can only give a sense of security and checking all the time.
Free-will does not exist for humans, in the sense that given one's history, anatomy, surroundings and problem description, it should be possible to create a machine that will be able to predict one's response to the problem. When response is made realized to the 'self', that gives the the illusion of free-will. I believe it because it is obvious to see predictability of humans (and for that matter any organism).
Good example of free_will can be a cow tied by rope to hood.It is destiny of cow to be tied and length of rope tells her free will to move.I somewhere don't agree that that just thinking that what i did was not wrong can't free men from his actions.Bhagvat says all actions done by man bear fruits. We are nobody to justify our wrong deeds as deeds done through good intentions.We can only fool ourselves but not that resides in us.
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