Or suppose you have a dream, a lengthy one in which you witness the summarized life of a perfect stranger: This life begins with a normal birth, but muddles through a childhood of opportunities missed and errors multiplied. A random vocation (postal clerk…) follows a moribund marriage and dull-normal children, who, in turn & time, fall under similar wheels of destiny and remorse. More lessons go unheeded in old age, until all is finally sealed in a death without meaning, devoid of connection. You dream it all, the life of this other person, no longer a stranger. Then you wake up, disquieted and grateful to find yourself at home in your own bed.
Has justice been served?
What?
Has justice been served? It's a fair question. After all, isn't this exactly the question we ask ourselves with respect to—if not our dreams—our own real lives? So why in the sum & summation of a real human life must we seek justice at all? Why do we require righteous equilibrium, as clearly we do? (I can't tolerate an unjust universe…) Why does justice in the context of a "dreamed" person make no sense at all when in a "real" life it seems the sole determinant of one's afterlife?
I myself put this lesson to bed once and for all after Scribe & I put the question to Josef during Session 23 in 1994, dreamer and teacher, foremost in our karass: What is karma?
I DO NOT BELIEVE IN PUNISHMENT
I BELIEVE IN TAKING [THE] NEXT STEP ON THE WAY
THIS MAY BE PAINFUL OR NOT
Here's Albion's clairaudience overview of the subject:
I PREFER TO THINK OF LESSONS LEARNED
MOVE ON OR DONT
WHY SUFFER NEEDLESSLY
albionspeak: a draught of language (4.2)
No Eternal Justice (midterm essays)
I am not a flyer. Writing these Lessons really taxes me. Indeed, my tasks are designed by my enlightened friends precisely to stretch & change and – intentionally – to exhaust me, for sadly, I could neither trust nor accept a challenge that proved too easy. So I don't have much "left in the tank" here to write a proper refutation of Heaven & Hell, et al. I suspect my energy flags also at the prospect of subject matter I have long milked dry personally, as I've already written extensively on this subject for My Book. Let me provide, then, two excerpts here from my book's early chapter, "Heaven is Bullshit," and I offer also my full chapter, "Reincarnation & Karma." I'm sure you can connect the dots.
I. from "Heaven is Bullshit"
a) Let's start with something more basic, Hell. I am forever amused by how much more creativity humanity devotes to Hell than to descriptions of Heaven. So many ways to torture people! I particularly think of Hieronymus Bosch, the Dutch artist who gleefully portrays vivisection, cannibalism, birds flying out of people's asses, etc. This is great fun, because it's absurd. Bosch tried hard to paint Heaven, too, most famously in his Garden of Earthly Delights. Nice, but flaccid by comparison. I protest, Come on, people! Paradise can't be a less interesting place than Inferno. Bottom line, no Heaven I've heard of would ever be somewhere I'd want to hang out—that is, forever.
Which is the first fatal flaw in nearly every codified afterlife I've encountered—eternity lies outside of time. This cannot be conceptualized; it can only be experienced. Still, it's relatively easy to figure out what it's not. I repeat, eternity is not forever. But if it were ["forever," "immortal," "undead"], then it would surely not be Heaven. It would be Hell, as many have pointed out. In No Exit Jean-Paul Sartre portrays Hell as a room where three unpleasant people get on each other's nerves forever. Hell indeed. But so would a realm of clouds & angels & talking stuffed animals forever. Even the greatest reward/marriage/orgasm imaginable would prove unbearable after the quadrillionth climax, which, compared to forever, doesn't. Absolutes and oranges…. Why did the gods depart Olympus?
b) Actually my biggest peeve with most depictions of Heaven doesn't involve time specifically. It concerns a core belief so universal among today's religions it's hardly examined, and, on the face of it, it's pure fantasy—crafted from fear, denial, and wistful inertia:
Most non-atheists believe that somehow, just by dying, they'll finally get to
find out the real truth about nearly everything, answers to all the Big Questions:
the meaning of life, what happens in death, Who's in charge, who shot J.F.K.…
everything. And this total revelation comes automatically, instantaneously, with
no strings or conditions, regardless of effort, accomplishment, desire, ability,
fortitude, or turpitude—in short, it has no connection to one's life at all.
Transcendent awareness, therefore, is a free lunch fundamental to being human.
Not a reward or diploma for life, it should be construed rather as a developmental
attribute, like wisdom teeth or pubic fur.
Hieronymus Bosch, The
Garden of Earthly Delights
(details). 1490-1510
Question: Which afterlife just
looks boring as shit?
Put differently: You don't know shit right now, never had a clue your entire life —but wait till you're dead. You'll be practically omniscient. You'll see with pristine clarity that in life you were just an asshole: You hurt the people you loved, cheated yourself of growth opportunities, squandered life's gifts and miracles, and ignored the suffering all around you. Yeah, that's why you're damned forever. It all makes perfect sense.
Most religions actually go much further. The newly deceased is presented (via trial or ordeal or summary judgment) with an exact karmic accounting of his life, generally deed by deed, piled into contrasting molehills of good vs. bad. Some pronouncement is rendered. Is it guided by objectivity & fairness (in Egypt, the weighing of the heart against the feather)? Or is judgment entirely subjective and arbitrary? (God says so.) Whereupon comes another convergence, another galling assumption: Nearly all religions consign the deceased (once and for all) to an afterlife commensurate with his or her performance in life. Western religions present a clear bifurcation, up vs. down, while Eastern faiths go round & round with reincarnation. Either way, divine justice is revealed in the form of reward or punishment, where the afterlife embodies the natural & perfect consequence of how we lived.
Let me confess that I share many of the biases I find in these assumptions. I, too, find myself unable to tolerate the idea of an unjust universe. I also unavoidably conceive of justice as a ledger or scale balance, but (it begs the question) what is being balanced? Surely not good versus evil! We want no evil acts, zero, not a one-to-one canceling of opposites. Perhaps what's balanced is what-you-give-in-life versus what-you-receive-in-death, the law of karma (which I'll address later). And most fair-minded people should be fine with this ethically, maybe aesthetically, but not logically. Any system involving rewards & punishments (in eternity) for actions (in life) forgets that eternity is outside of time, where cause & effect hold no sway, where a sequence of events can be perceived all-at-once or in any chosen order. Consider what happens when events are reversed, and punishment falls before the crime (effect precedes cause). Can there be justice? Shall I, let's say, be consigned to a pit of boiling oil for a murder I haven't committed yet (because I haven't been born)? And if so, then surely an eternity of torture warps any man's soul, so that someday, when I'm born & grown & steered to that pivotal moment thither in the night… I'll make sure to do the wrong thing. Justice made me a monster. The logic of eternity demands such atemporal symmetry, or there is clear contradiction. Recall the Zen koan: What was your face before you were born?
1) There is no way to measure one action or a set of actions against any other. Even if I, let's say, kill you in this lifetime; and you return me the favor in the next, the context and circumstances will have changed enough these cannot possibly cancel each other. They are different acts, and unique acts cannot be categorized or quantified for the sake of balancing a soul.
2) Intent must be a factor in any accounting system of the soul. If I accidentally kill someone, that can't be as heinous as most deliberate murders. A system that looks at actions only is crude enough to be absurd, defying any notion of accountability. But if intent is the basis on which the universe is balanced, then burning heretics at the stake (to cleanse the world) counts as a good thing.
3) No karmic system can survive analysis when considering whether karma is strictly individual or if it applies to entire groups. If I kill you, I affect not only you; I affect your family, your friends, your colleagues at work, etc., each of whom is nudged karmically in the direction of suffering. They, in turn, may upset a slew of other people, even with as little as a frown or a sigh, in a negative ripple that theoretically can circle the planet. Do I get blamed for all of this? Does Jesus, dead now 2000 years, still take the fall for all the killing and maiming in His name? Or, in a famous hypothetical, if you step on a butterfly in Kansas that leads to a typhoon in the Philippines (via a series of cascading molecular interactions), are you to blame for the destruction and suffering that ensue? Suppose you step on said butterfly—the same physical act—but this time with full foreknowledge of the consequences?
The Table of Contents below is too long to display fully. If you click to the right of these Lessons,you'll see the primary source documents displayed under each. These original sessions are a world treasure.
4.2 No Eternal Justice
Images & Attributions (in order of appearance)
1. Banner: Rhiannon C. 2016
a) Jewel Mandala (2): D.C. Albion 1994
b) Albion Glyph: "Glad Day" or "The Dance of Albion," William Blake, c.1794
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/47/William_Blake_-_Albion_Rose_- _from_A_Large_Book_of_Designs_1793-6.jpg4.
2. Hieronymous Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (details); 1490 to 1510, Museo del Prado:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ae/El_jard%C3%ADn_de_las_Delicias%2C_de_El_Bosco.jpg
Home Midterm Critical Thinking Essay #2
Kurt Vonnegut, who gives us our original k-word, karass, also gives us duprass, which is a karass consisting solely of two people (portrayed in Cat's Cradle as a dreadfully boring couple from Indiana). As funny as this is—and as prescient as Vonnegut is on karasses in general—no duprass can exist. It's a fundamentally flawed structure. Why?
Why can't two people, Jane & I, for example, be each other's contact?
For me the easiest way to think about this question is via our base existential metaphor of auroras, which I liken to plankton or flotsam. Yes, firefishes are flyers, which shows an ability to move independently, but does not guarantee any eternal existence, as not all flyers enter a karass. Where do such people fly to? It doesn’t matter; infinity will catch up with them soon enough. No human mind can withstand infinity alone. We need eternal connections.
Our first anchor then, as I’ve mentioned, is our contact—Jane, in my case. But if Jane isn’t herself anchored, then both she & I face infinity together, merely as a bigger clump of flotsam, where “bigger” means absolutely nothing. Even all human souls together still have no chance against infinity without outside help. We need therefore to connect to an eternal center, either the Jewel or another (even if I don’t begin to pretend to know what constitutes such a center; each is very different).
Now consider these human connections linking up around their center. If Jane & I were connected to each other as contacts, then we’d close a tiny circle that would exclude the Jewel. Similarly, if we added Scribe to make a threesome (as Scribe is indeed Jane’s contact), then I could not be Scribe’s contact as that would tie off another circle. In fact, of course, Anand is Scribe’s contact, where Anand alone can see & thus connect to the Jewel directly. I do not know if every learning circle has an Anand, but logic dictates that no circle of humans can be closed off without ultimately linking to their eternal center.
One might ask then, "Why can't everyone link directly to the Jewel?" And while I do think such an arrangement avoids the "flotsam" argument above, it's also the case that infant humans in all but the rarest cases (Anand) aren't capable of such linkage. The Jewel is too far beyond us; we could not interpret it correctly, and it would probably become an idol. We need mitigation, sequenced steps, especially as the Jewel, like existence itself, is much more a process than a physical center, even though it, too, entered spacetime and can be physically accessed by members if & when they're ready for it.
A final awesome datum, then, indeed something I still can’t get my mind around at all: While each Jewel Net member belongs to a mandala, or learning circle, Josef our dreammaster is a member of all of them. He is, in fact, the one person who created all our learning circles. To me, as the ouija transcripts clearly show, Josef is an accessible father figure, personally active in my life & dreams. Still, it’s hard for me to comprehend how such an exalted being could ever have walked among us. I don’t idolize him or think of him the way Christians view Jesus, as a singular savior or messiah. But I do put Josef, Jesus, & the Buddha, among very few others, in the same elite stratosphere. More to come…
II. Reincarnation & Karma
Until I discussed reincarnation with my teachers, I largely considered myself one who believed in some version of it, just not any version officially offered by the world's religions. I suppose reincarnation appealed to my eco-friendly need to recycle. Somehow it seemed more inherently sustainable than other metaphysical systems, in part because it defers the goal and terminus of Heaven indefinitely. That is, I always knew Christian versions (et al.) of Heaven were bullshit, because they offer perpetual stagnation and boredom only. Reincarnation gets around this problem by going around in circles, growing and perfecting ourselves with every turn of the wheel, round & round… (And then what?)
But because I've known since childhood that eternity lies outside of time, I've always known that souls could not improve in this manner. That is, if reincarnation were true, then a series of lives—one after the other, learning lessons and acquiring wisdom—makes no sense, because outside of time before & after mean nothing. I understood that my life as a Cro-Magnon caveman might, therefore, be the wisest of my personal ensemble; my next life after this one, utter foolishness. Thus, the concept of growth itself changes, from one of progression to simple acquisition. We would live many many lives—some stupid, some wise, some rich, others lost to the statistics of infant mortality—until we'd gained enough experience to… to what? I always have the image of a fat, lotus-sitting buddha, smiling because he's so bloated on the sum of the life experiences coursing through his astral intestines, thousands of lives. Life is food. (Burp!).
I also realized, simply as a mathematical derivation, that if forward progress in time is thrown out—that is, once we reject the standard karmic model—then it's perfectly possible to reincarnate oneself as two or more people at the same time. That is, you & your spouse could theoretically be the same divided being (forcing us to reconsider our notions of incest). Or more Sophoclean, destiny could pit two lives of the same soul in epic opposition at the Gates of Thebes. Or maybe the Dalai Lama could arrange to return next time both as Tibetan and Chinese. For that matter, all of us could be a single soul, smiling ear-to-ear, since we're chowing down over seven billion lifetimes at once (which, come to think of it, sounds rather Hindu after all). Burp!
Let's keep it simple and refute reincarnation logically: When we speak of reincarnation, we refer to lives in time. This, right now, is the life I'm living in time. That 18th Century Bulgarian guy (let's say), the one who keeps popping up in my dope daydreams and unexplained music preferences, well, he's a different person, living a different life in his time. He's not me. But reincarnation says, in essence, we're one; we're the same being. So right off the bat we have a contradiction: How can we be the same being, when, by the very definition of a lifetime, we are obviously two different beings?
You could say that actually the greater, eternal soul is the true being, while Bulgarian guy and earthly Albion guy are merely the soul's shadow avatars (which is essentially what most believers would argue). But if this eternal perspective is taken, then not only have we diminished the central notion of a life in time, we must accept that there need not be any continuity between Bulgarian guy and me at all. After all, from this eternal perspective, the soul is huge, undoubtedly encompassing many many lives and much more. There's no reason to think any part of Bulgarian guy has been recycled into me, for the palette of possible life character traits and features—among which, those that make me me—is far wider than the mere handful that make him him. And if there are no common character traits between us, then there's no continuity of character. So lacking continuity, how can he and I count as the same being? I would surely have more in common with many others outside this obtuse soul-connection, those with whom there is continuity, starting with my parents. Reincarnation, thus, is reduced to mere association. Yes, we could say, you aren't the same person, may not share anything at all; yet you're both in the same fraternity. But no, that's not reincarnation. (Could this be a karass?)
Reincarnation, whether or not endowed with a mission (telos) of perfectibility, generally follows the laws & mechanics of karma. Before discussing karma with my teachers, I was attracted to it much as I liked reincarnation. I think what attracted me most is karma seems fair & just, notions that form a knot central to my own self-image (meaning, I have a personal attachment and acknowledge my bias). Of course most people want to see the rewards & punishments of the afterlife correct for the moral breaches of life. Karma, as it applies to reincarnation, solves these issues automatically, much as diffusion equalizes fluids of different pressure or temperature. And you don't need any deity, squatting there indifferently, with nothing better to do than point one toward the good door or the bad. The system is self-correcting.
But for the same reasons that invalidate justice as an eternal ideal, karma, the machinery of justice, just doesn't fly. Again, because eternity lies outside of time, then a person's karma could/would inevitably catch up with him before a crime has even been contemplated, much less enacted. A person could be condemned to live eight thousand years as a Calcutta sewer-rat to account for a crime not committed till the year 10,000, the penance punished in advance.
Okay, I confess. There was a time when I rather bought in to such a system. It made sense. You reap what you sow. You sow what you reap. Can't these be co-identical? Why can't the wheel spin both ways? (Let me here acknowledge another deep bias that favors symmetry over its false opposite, asymmetry—false because asymmetry includes everything symmetry is not, a much greater Infinity.) (That is, I favor order over chaos, anxious like the Greeks that Infinity holds far more chaos.)
I find, however, two principle reasons why karma mechanics can't work. The first & most damning doesn't actually itself disqualify the logic of the argument directly, though it leads there: Karma, as conceived on these lines, obliterates free will. Every thing that happens to us compensates for actions we have taken or will one day take. But life is not just what happens to us; it's also what we make of it, how we react to life. In this mechanical scheme our reactions are themselves enmeshed in the higher algebra of destiny, meaning I have no choice but to act and react in a prescribed & predestined manner. The sewer-rat has no choice in the year 10,000 but to commit his heinous act. For if he fails to do so—if he fails to commit a murder, let's say, for which he's lived 300 lifetimes damned as a pariah—then the karmic scales are hopelessly out-of-whack. Regardless of will or character, he'll commit murder. And because he's been in the sewers for so long, his murder can't be a simple accident or senseless manslaughter; it must be brutal, ruthless, premeditated, predetermined down to his very thoughts. No free will at all. And this leads to the second reason karma can't work.
"All that's fine," say certain serious thinkers, both the scientists and the deeply religious who call themselves determinists. They don't believe in free will. They believe in a single chain of world events, of causes and their exact effects locked into place at every scale from the moment of the Big Bang. The universe, thus, is predictable in the mind of a god or a supercomputer, where within such a mind we might find ourselves exactly as we are, as we will be, exactly as we must be from conditions and equations laid down at the Beginning. Predestination. Free will is a fiction, say the determinists, a false explanation from big-headed robots like us, computers in our own right, who, despite our bright ideas and dreamt-up philosophies, still follow by compulsion the laws of math and physics.
But these thinkers are wrong for a host of reasons, only the simplest and most mechanical of which I can discuss at this time. (The larger flaws I will address in later chapters.) The basic error made by religious metaphysicists—but not necessarily by physicists—concerns Infinity.
Albert Einstein, for one, needed a determined universe and was distressed by the probabilistic mathematics generated in quantum mechanics. ("God does not play dice…") That is, when electrons, for example, can pop in & out of many potential locations and existences, then Einstein's simple universe expands to one of too many outcomes. But that's not infinite; it's not even close. There may indeed be more than one determined outcome, but no matter how many dice are tossed or how many sides each die has, a finite universe has only a finite number of outcomes (i.e., the history of a stone).
One cardinal precept of modern physics is The Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy. That is, the universe started with a finite amount of stuff. You can blow it apart, let it expand and evolve, mess with it in any number of ways; but you can't alter the initial amount we started with. Actually, that's not quite true. As electrons pop in & out of existence, the total amount of matter & energy in the universe does change. It changes by an amount so small and for such a short time that physicists discount it. But, for the faintest flicker, there's a real imbalance seeking correction.
Let's return to our sewer-rat. Karma mechanics dictate that he must commit his murder most foul, lest the universe be more out-of-whack than it already was the moment before he acts. That is, his act of violence itself is the just correction to years of wanton misery, which, accumulating over many generations, have already put the universe into imbalance. And if karma seeks to correct an imbalance, then surely the universe is out-of-whack much of the time. One of the cardinal tenets of karma, in fact, is that we're always subject to correction, because we're never in perfect balance. (Well, maybe the Buddha achieved such balance, but not mere mortals…)
And this is where the divide between physics (in a finite universe) and metaphysics (in Infinity) is absolute. The finite universe has a clearly defined limit to the amount of electron imbalance it can tolerate = so small we just don't care. (The equations involve Planck lengths, zillionths of a second, etc., and are way beyond my understanding.) Eternity, however, can have no such limit, for within Infinity nothing can be said to be "big" or "small" (since there's always an infinity both bigger and smaller). The question is not whether one's karma is out-of-whack (it always is). The question is, just how out-of-whack is out-of-whack? And this is a question that in eternity can have no answer. If eternity can wait 8,000 years to correct accumulated misery, why can't it wait 8,000 more, a billion more? That is, if eternity can tolerate any imbalance, what imbalance could possibly be too big for it to tolerate? Karma is often compared to a debt that must be paid. But in eternity this is more like the U.S. national debt, which feels like it can be postponed ad infinitum.
Beyond these arguments, which aim to bring down karma as an overarching concept, we can also more practically refute it simply on the basis of its own internal mechanics. That is, when we delve into karma's devilish details we can quickly identify at least three insoluble problems, each of which, I feel, deals the larger concept a deathblow: