Theos-Talk Archives (January 1997 Message tl00034)

Tom,

[Murray]
>And we have to accept, IMO, that some things are not necessarily specially
>caused by some grand thing in the past. They can arise from relatively
>trivial and local (space and time-wise) situations, and even, thinking of
>the chaos/order pair, out of no single identifiable cause at all.

[Tom]
As far as I know, the latest in scientific knowledge is that there is
inherent randomness, which, if true, makes a deterministic
"cause-and-effect" view of karma not the whole story.

[Murray replying]
Yes, there's quite a lot about this around, now, tho' I haven't read much of
it personally. It applies in one way at the quantum level, where it is
related to the Uncertainty Principle, and in another way in large-scale
complex systems where it's tied up with Chaos theory. Certainly, it knocks
holes in the idea that karma is rigidly deterministic.

Jerry Schueler wrote at length about all this on theos-l a year and more ago.

But even just staying with the idea of determinism, when it is opened up to
the possibility of multiple levels of reality interacting with each other,
there could be a lot more determining factors than we currently imagine,
especially in the relatively expansive world view of theosophy.

One mystic has said that everything causes everything else, in a continuous
matrix of relatedness (not an exact quote). I'm thinking of Sri Nisargadatta
Maharaj, in a book of talks called "I Am That".

It wouldn't be too different from what other mystics have said, either, in a
view of the whole manifested universe as a sea of shining light/energy that
is beheld by the ultimate Witness within as something other than that
Witness, yet unified with it.

We can certainly say that some things play a bigger part in determining
certain outcomes than others, but the participatory universe idea is one
that grows in depth, IMO.

I feel that there's a cultural underlayer in the idea of determination that
is inherently too separative and limited to fit reality very well, and clogs
up our ideas on karma. A good antidote might be to bring in some of the
imagery of fluid flow.

For instance, how much does the flow of one cubic inch of water in a river
determine the flow of the next cubic inch just downstream of it? Quite a
bit, of course, but the whole river has a say, really, just because all
parts of the water are in communication with each other. And then there are
the banks....

Murray