Daily Reflections

02/02/2022

Moving Forward

“We Spend all of our lives, goin’ out of our minds. Looking back to our birth, forward to our demise.”

--Live—

The thing is, it is really difficult not to do this. Consider the future and re-examine the past. Worry about the unseen consequences of today’s actions. Regret choices of our pasts. It’s an easy enough exercise to repeat. Everything beckons the use of our faculties in this manner. If only I had done this, none of this would be happening. If I do it this way this time, it won’t happen that way again.

Yet, there is no evidence available to us to suggest this is so. No way to predict what might have happened or what will. Not about the big stuff anyway. Our phenomenology informs us that the universe is bound by cause and effect. The popular and rudimentary, if not incomplete, understanding of karma suggests the same. Though, the king of this is causal determination. “Laplace’s demon” being the most notable example.

If someone (the demon) knows the precise location and momentum of every atom in the universe as well as all the forces acting upon them, their past and future values are necessarily entailed, and thus, can be calculated via the classical laws of mechanics. This is probably not true given the modern understanding of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

In the absence of an appropriate Ted Talk on the subject and speaking more practically, the sheer complexity implied in this solution to understanding causality defeats its own plausibility. The level of omniscience required to pull off this feat, is so outside even our conceptualizing of it that it becomes complete absurdity. Moreover, if this is what is required than it shows us how skewed our own attempts must be. If only I had done this, none of this would be happening. How could we assert this if by our own admission, we are missing so many of the required variables to make such a calculation?

The Karmic perspectives people overlay onto the good and bad things that happen to them or the people they know are equally short of perspective. Karma is about balance in the universe. Making it into an agent of cause or effect is putting the cart before the horse. Causality is merely the hindsight of the universe maintaining balance.

Thinking of Karma as causality is, at best a poor explanation of the nature of everything. At worst, it generates a vengeful perspective to those who would do harm and an entitled one to those who find themselves in affluence or privilege. The problem begins primarily with value judgements of an experience being “good” or “bad” (something more unique to our preferences as opposed to the operating system of the universe) and extends outward from this false dichotomy to assign blame or reward for anything that follows.

And of our Phenomenological experience? At present, we do not have a better set of explanations but causes and effects to organize our impression of linear time. To delineate the past, present and future. And it is well that we do. On this level of existence, it is a necessity for us to maintain this kind of explanation. One could not consider oneself a singular autonomous thing moving through space without also defining the time it takes to do so. As such, we must look back to our births and forward to our demise. And we must see this in a line or none of this makes sense.

I suppose, I am not suggesting that we try and stop either. Except the worry. That we should probably stop. We ought continue to organize our memories and hopes in an order of forward progression. We should actively use our memory to learn how to better aim at our hopes. That is the best we can do. But the worry. The regretting. These things are not useful. They neither offer us true insight (quite the opposite in fact) nor do they provide any comfort in our existence.

To this, I should think the only rational response to knowing just how big things are and by consequence, how little we are in that wash of variables, is to relax a bit. Why worry about everything you can’t know is there is no conceivable way to know it? Why regret poor choices once you have done the work and reflection to learn their lessons. Learn what you can, try to be better. You cannot change your birth, nor can you perfectly predict your demise. Would you really want the burden of that knowledge anyway?