1 00:00:00,858 --> 00:00:04,333 Why couldn't karma be explained away by probability? 2 00:00:06,824 --> 00:00:08,793 One of those questions that makes me think. 3 00:00:08,813 --> 00:00:09,737 Well, thanks a lot. 4 00:00:14,189 --> 00:00:15,390 No, I mean, it's a good question. 5 00:00:15,450 --> 00:00:18,473 These are the kind of questions that are very difficult to answer. 6 00:00:18,533 --> 00:00:31,366 Because, you know, I'm a very... We are all very poor in the wisdom faculty in this day and age. 7 00:00:32,647 --> 00:00:40,635 So our ability to understand reality... The funny thing is that... The funny thing about reality is you can... 8 00:00:42,033 --> 00:00:47,418 at the very core of your experience, misunderstand reality. 9 00:00:47,438 --> 00:00:49,801 You can totally see things wrong. 10 00:00:49,841 --> 00:00:56,287 You can actually experience something as pleasurable that is suffering. 11 00:00:56,968 --> 00:01:02,774 What you are actually suffering, you can be totally experiencing it as pleasure. 12 00:01:04,435 --> 00:01:07,078 And be clear in your mind that it is pleasure. 13 00:01:08,257 --> 00:01:20,005 because you're not seeing clearly, because you're not looking carefully at it, and because you're not examining it. 14 00:01:21,824 --> 00:01:27,489 So as a result, many things seemed clear to us. 15 00:01:28,470 --> 00:01:43,985 Things like Newtonian mechanics, Newtonian physics seemed perfectly clear to us and seemed to be exactly the way the world works until Einstein came along. 16 00:01:45,206 --> 00:01:51,392 And then Einstein himself rejected quantum physics when it came about. 17 00:01:52,823 --> 00:02:08,149 And now quantum physicists are rejecting the natural next step. 18 00:02:09,817 --> 00:02:13,863 of the existence of the mind and the existence of intention. 19 00:02:16,107 --> 00:02:29,428 There's only one really good quantum physicist that I know of in the sense that he's outspoken and just incredibly bold in the things that he says. 20 00:02:30,640 --> 00:02:35,347 who makes a very, very persuasive argument in my mind. 21 00:02:36,689 --> 00:02:44,500 Of course, I'm not a quantum physicist, but he is, and he's an expert in something called Bell's theorem. 22 00:02:46,824 --> 00:02:58,521 He's a known expert and has written many articles and explains how quantum physics... 23 00:03:03,597 --> 00:03:07,342 something like points to the existence of the mind. 24 00:03:07,643 --> 00:03:32,980 The point is that quantum physics doesn't take into account the mind and leaves explicitly in its orthodox, in the original form, the Copenhagen, whatever it's called, orthodox quantum physics that Bohr and Niels Bohr and Heisenberg and 25 00:03:33,567 --> 00:03:49,483 Wolfgang Pauli and so on, that they came up with explicitly leaves the mind out and says that the mind is not in the realm of quantum physics or not in the realm of quantum probability. 26 00:03:49,463 --> 00:04:04,802 So what it means is, according to this explanation of quantum physics, or explanation of how things appear, or how things work, how our observations work, require our observation. 27 00:04:05,123 --> 00:04:11,050 The point was that the quote from Niels Bohr paraphrases something like, 28 00:04:11,030 --> 00:04:18,056 science is no longer an explanation of what is out there, of entities out there. 29 00:04:18,637 --> 00:04:34,551 It has now become an explanation of observation, of our observation, the human observation or the observer's observation, which presupposes the existence of the observer or the existence of an observation. 30 00:04:35,632 --> 00:04:41,037 So the observation itself 31 00:04:41,017 --> 00:04:45,501 what collapses the quantum probability wave or something like that. 32 00:04:45,521 --> 00:04:48,064 I'm not a quantum physicist. 33 00:04:48,084 --> 00:04:50,386 And I can only understand the general concepts of it. 34 00:04:51,827 --> 00:05:01,036 But I really recommend looking at this guy's articles because the wonderful thing as a Theravada Buddhist that I like about him is he's orthodox. 35 00:05:01,536 --> 00:05:02,497 That's us as well. 36 00:05:03,698 --> 00:05:07,682 We don't go for these newfangled ideas that people come up with. 37 00:05:07,662 --> 00:05:31,729 you know, unless they're well based on facts, but nowadays you have so many different interpretations of quantum physics and theories and so on, that people have lost the very philosophical and kind of down-to-earth, realistic, reasonable and brilliant, you might say, 38 00:05:31,709 --> 00:05:54,752 formations of people like Bohr and Pauli and whoever, I can't remember, all of these guys who put it in this way where the mind was the beginning, the observation was the beginning of probability. 39 00:05:54,772 --> 00:06:00,298 You can't even talk about probability until you answer the question, what is the mind doing? 40 00:06:00,278 --> 00:06:03,524 What is the action of the mind? 41 00:06:03,985 --> 00:06:13,564 Which experiment in their vocabulary, which experiment has the experimenter decided to look at? 42 00:06:13,864 --> 00:06:16,389 Are they going to look at this slit or are they going to look at that slit? 43 00:06:16,469 --> 00:06:18,774 Because if they look at this slit, they're going to see it go through this slit. 44 00:06:18,794 --> 00:06:22,641 If they look at that slit, they're going to see it go through that slit or something like that. 45 00:06:23,212 --> 00:06:32,682 No, this whole Schrodinger's cat, where he ridicules it and says that, well, then if you have this gun and so on. 46 00:06:33,283 --> 00:06:34,664 Anyway, I'm not going to go into it all. 47 00:06:35,285 --> 00:06:49,000 But the point was that even Einstein totally rejected this, that there could be any idea of probability, using the word probability here, 48 00:06:50,802 --> 00:06:51,703 any randomness. 49 00:06:51,724 --> 00:06:52,986 He said, God doesn't play dice. 50 00:06:53,006 --> 00:06:55,349 This is his famous quote. 51 00:06:57,673 --> 00:06:59,536 So we're even going further than that, right? 52 00:07:01,019 --> 00:07:06,568 And saying that there is actually something outside of even probability. 53 00:07:08,912 --> 00:07:13,620 You know, because really probability is a bit of nonsense. 54 00:07:14,541 --> 00:07:15,763 And I think... 55 00:07:17,566 --> 00:07:22,114 I think that's what Einstein was pointing to, is that it is kind of nonsensical to talk about probability. 56 00:07:24,098 --> 00:07:37,041 Probability, I think, I mean, this is really a hardcore philosophical question, but it seems to me to be something that still presupposes Newtonian mechanics. 57 00:07:37,682 --> 00:07:39,726 You know, it still presupposes... 58 00:07:40,803 --> 00:07:50,254 some ability to calculate, some dice, or billiard balls, like for the lottery. 59 00:07:53,538 --> 00:08:03,149 And so I guess for that reason, scientists kind of latch onto this sort of thing. 60 00:08:03,450 --> 00:08:07,975 Yeah, well, probability, that's still something that we can get our minds around. 61 00:08:09,743 --> 00:08:33,810 And they're not able to... Whereas the idea of a mind which you can't quantify, which you can't fit into an equation, it just drives them nuts and makes most of us, sets our heads spinning. 62 00:08:35,883 --> 00:08:43,298 The whole idea of free will, for example, just totally impossible to fathom. 63 00:08:43,358 --> 00:08:46,284 How can you imagine such a thing? 64 00:08:46,765 --> 00:08:51,715 It's something that I've grappled with as well, as a Westerner who has this analytical mind. 65 00:08:53,568 --> 00:09:03,718 So I'm going to get back to my own old dogma, or my own old spiel, which is that reality is experience-based. 66 00:09:04,239 --> 00:09:08,423 This is the root. 67 00:09:09,264 --> 00:09:11,066 It's not the ultimate conclusion. 68 00:09:11,126 --> 00:09:12,227 It's where you have to start. 69 00:09:13,068 --> 00:09:19,474 And this is the very powerful thing that quantum physics originally showed us. 70 00:09:19,454 --> 00:09:25,498 and people like Niels Bohr and the people around him, what they showed us 71 00:09:27,588 --> 00:09:30,111 was that this is where we have to start. 72 00:09:30,952 --> 00:09:34,898 We have to start at experience, at the mind. 73 00:09:35,498 --> 00:09:51,840 We can't begin to talk about the world around us, probability and so on, until we take into account the actions of the mind, or we presuppose, or actually until we take the mind out of the equation, until we say, 74 00:09:51,820 --> 00:09:53,566 The mind chose this. 75 00:09:54,228 --> 00:10:02,455 Once we say that, then we can, from a physics point of view, explain how the physical realm would react to that. 76 00:10:03,920 --> 00:10:14,953 And this is what this PhD, his name is Henry Stapp, S-T-A-P-P, if you want to look him up on the internet. 77 00:10:15,674 --> 00:10:16,094 Excellent. 78 00:10:16,735 --> 00:10:26,046 He's got some excellent articles on the page and seems like a brilliant and wise individual. 79 00:10:26,026 --> 00:10:55,476 He even goes so far, which may make people think him less wise than I do, goes so far as to talk about how, to express the belief that, or the understanding that quantum physics doesn't seem to negate the possibility of reincarnation or the transmigration of the mind or the continuation of the mind after death, let's put it that way. 80 00:10:59,168 --> 00:11:14,697 So, given an understanding or my, you could say, belief, that's not really a belief, my way of looking at the world, that experience, is reality. 81 00:11:18,136 --> 00:11:21,279 Probability doesn't mean anything. 82 00:11:21,699 --> 00:11:29,426 It doesn't have any relation to experience. 83 00:11:30,848 --> 00:11:32,850 Experience goes as it goes. 84 00:11:34,631 --> 00:11:40,457 There are decisions made and there are results that come from those decisions. 85 00:11:41,538 --> 00:11:43,319 And this we call karma. 86 00:11:44,961 --> 00:11:46,202 It's actually 87 00:11:48,443 --> 00:11:49,986 Karma actually doesn't exist either. 88 00:11:50,467 --> 00:11:57,442 Karma is just an explanation of the natural laws of reality. 89 00:11:58,364 --> 00:12:03,094 It's the scientific explanation of what is really real, which is experience. 90 00:12:03,114 --> 00:12:04,196 How does experience work? 91 00:12:04,216 --> 00:12:09,507 Well, it works in very, you could say, rigid ways. 92 00:12:11,410 --> 00:12:16,277 It works based on very rigid laws of cause and effect. 93 00:12:17,379 --> 00:12:25,151 You can't do a deed based on stressful mind states and not have it give rise to stress. 94 00:12:25,271 --> 00:12:32,001 So greed, anger, delusion, these cannot possibly give rise to happiness or any good things. 95 00:12:31,981 --> 00:12:48,320 Because by their very nature they are stressful, they are unpleasant, they are unpeaceful, they are disturbing the framework of reality. 96 00:12:48,900 --> 00:12:50,302 So as a result they disturb. 97 00:12:50,322 --> 00:12:55,828 It's just like if you throw a stone in a pool of water, 98 00:12:57,091 --> 00:12:59,173 There's nothing it can do except make ripples. 99 00:12:59,854 --> 00:13:01,957 That's what karma means. 100 00:13:02,457 --> 00:13:04,700 Karma is cause and effect. 101 00:13:04,720 --> 00:13:09,726 So you're looking at, I would say from asking this question, you're looking at things from the wrong point of view. 102 00:13:10,547 --> 00:13:21,360 You're looking at it from the point of view of Western science that measures results and makes observations based on those results. 103 00:13:21,340 --> 00:13:26,286 This doesn't have any basis in reality. 104 00:13:26,326 --> 00:13:32,614 The reason why they do that is because they're dealing with physical external objects that don't really exist, that aren't real. 105 00:13:33,114 --> 00:13:35,317 They're just supposed to be out there somewhere. 106 00:13:36,539 --> 00:13:41,585 And as a result, they can't be experienced and they don't have anything to do with experience. 107 00:13:41,605 --> 00:13:43,467 They don't have anything to do with reality. 108 00:13:43,447 --> 00:13:55,086 And therefore one has to simply measure the experiences that one gets and extrapolate those experiences to explain away those objects. 109 00:13:55,106 --> 00:13:59,734 So when you say karma versus probability, you're thinking, you know, 110 00:13:59,714 --> 00:14:07,426 It's just a coincidence or as a probability that these people get this result and those people get that result. 111 00:14:07,927 --> 00:14:09,389 Whereas karma isn't like that at all. 112 00:14:09,449 --> 00:14:15,078 Karma just says our experiences change our later experiences. 113 00:14:15,419 --> 00:14:18,544 An experience now will have an effect on an experience later. 114 00:14:18,584 --> 00:14:25,114 The quality of a certain experience will affect the quality of a later experience. 115 00:14:27,423 --> 00:14:28,688 So I hope that helps. 116 00:14:28,929 --> 00:14:33,788 It probably doesn't totally answer the question, but it's some explanation.