Karma, state, causality

Your state includes the state of your nervous system, the state of your body, and your circumstances --- that is, the state of the rest of the world.

You do not observe all of these states in sufficient detail. Sometimes you observe virtually the same thing on several different occasions, but the real state of your nervous system, your body, or the rest of the world may be quite different. In this way, life is like a hidden Markov process. Of course, the state in life never repeats, so this is tautologically true, but don't take this analogy so literally.

The concept of karma was introduced to restore causality in what seems to be a random world. If you observe the same thing, but suddenly see different consequences, the concept of karma can be invoked to explain it. Karma simply accounts for the differences in the underlying state that is not observed, much like a hidden Markov model may be in different states while printing the same characters on the output for a long time.

There is no other concept of karma. If something can affect your life --- say, something in your DNA, some person who is looking for you, or a habit that you have --- then this is part of your karma. If something cannot affect your life, then it is not part of your karma; why would it be?!

If the Universe is capable of completely random, unpredictable, noncausal events, whether conceived of as God's will or as a random subatomic event, then such events are not part of your karma either. Though, of course, the idea of random, unpredictable events has been developed out of particular experiences where one was merely unable to explain some particular events. This is hardly sufficient for postulating the existence of such events, even just in principle.  

Towards open-minded science education

I have been recently reading Dalai Lama's reflections on science and spirituality. In fact, I was so relieved to discover that his point of view is very close to mine, and I am so happy to see that he is also one those very few people who take science and spirituality equally seriously. Otherwise I sometimes feel a little bit alone in this respect.

For my spiritually- or religiously-minded friends, I feel that virtually all of you are too excited by the transformation that this or that religion or method of meditation has brought into your life. Just because you know of a few dozen cases where prayer cured somebody from a deadly disease or chanting a mantra brought you love or money, just because we know that things like that are possible, contrary to the "official scientific position" -- as if there were such a thing -- does not imply that everything that we associate with science and technology is necessarily wrong, or is somehow less reliable than your own religious or meditative experience. As Dalai Lama has explained, special states of mind in Buddhism have also been discovered and studied with a particular empirical method. It was only after a person could reproduce a specific state with a specific practice, and if many other experienced meditators could reproduce the same states with the same practices, that such states were taken to be objectively existing and universal, at least for the human beings. Many religious and spiritual traditions also recognize our individual limitations because of the subjectivity of our perception, and also emphasize the need to stay open-minded, and not just blindly trust what feels right or true, no matter how strongly.

For my scientifically-minded friends, I mean that despite the apparent successes of science; despite the existence of antibiotics, airplanes, the Internet, and so forth, spiritual traditions such as Buddhism provide a comparable amount of insight about the world that is different from the scientific insight. In fact, for a person without scientific training, insights from spiritual traditions may be more accessible than a caricatured version of the theory of relativity, stories about black holes, or even oversimplified explanations of entropy and electromagnetism.

That is, I am not talking about the incorrect ideas people had thousands of years ago that were called "the science of the day" - that everything was made of fire, air, earth, and water. I am talking about what spiritual traditions can do for us right here, right now, in this present day, and specifically about the knowledge we can obtain from them.

In fact, the reason that we have airplanes and antibiotics is not that the science is so great. The reason is that we live in a causal world. In this sense sense has no particular priority over anything else; the world belongs to everyone, and everyone has a right to explore it with any kind of tools. I suspect that it is because of the way science is taught that we, many of us, get an impression that it is the only correct way of thinking about the world. I remember, for example, how I was taught the Law of Gravity, or the First Law of Newton. I was taught them as the laws, as the truth. I was taught that this is just so. I was given no experience of reflection or discovery --- something that is, as I understand, an integral part of the Buddhist and Judaic, and some other intellectual traditions.

The irony is that the First Law of Newton, that any body without a net force acting on it will remain still or keep moving at a constant pace in the same direction, is not even an empirical statement. There is no way whatsoever to design an experiment to test it, even approximately, for we have no way of computing the net force acting on a given object from the entire Universe, and if something is not moving at a constant pace, we can always assume that there was some other force that we did not account for.

In the light of Einstein's discoveries, Newton's laws are not even true. I cannot stress this enough: we are teaching in schools a version of the worldview that, we are convinced, is not true, because the full version seems a little bit overwhelming, and because we don't know how to teach it without teaching Newton's laws first. Perhaps this is why we still struggle with Einstein's relativity and quantum physics, that everyone studying physics has to repeat the same past mistakes. Interestingly, Dalai Lama, who was not specifically trained in science, is free from this delusion. He probably knows more about relativity and quantum physics than about classical physics --- and those also make much more sense in the Buddhist framework.

I had the same problem when I learned about electricity. I remember, when they taught me in schools that electricity is balls with plus and minus signs moving around, I thought that that was an oversimplified version for us, the kids, but that the teachers actually knew, what electricity was. In fact, we don't know what it is. Why don't we communicate this fact in our education? Why, instead, do we teach those mindless formulas that most people don't ever understand and won't ever apply, and those who do will have to relearn anyway? I received a large part of my math and science education in a high school and a college that are supposedly some of the best in Russia and, given Russia's position in this field, some of the best in the world.  

Why didn't anyone there teach me to think critically about the laws of physics, chemistry or biology? Why did I have to read Feyerabend, Popper, and texts on yoga, Buddhism, Daoism, and other traditions, to understand that these laws were discovered by people and may, in fact, not be true?

Even when these laws do work, which is quite often, why can't we take them a little softer, with a little less dogmatism? Why can't we wonder at this cause-and-relationship effect every time we discover it?

One thing I gained from Dalai Lama's reflections is a deeper understanding of the role of examples and metaphors in education in the Buddhist tradition. For example, one is taught that when one sees smoke, one can infer a fire and, hence, that people live there, and one can get food and shelter. Reflecting on such examples builds cognitive structures that give one a deep appreciation of the causality in the world we live in -- an appreciation that is enjoyed only by scientists, engineers, and perhaps philosophers of science in the West. Instead of giving instructions on how to change one's mental state from A to B, or instead of giving direct explanations of what one's consciousness is, or how the world operates, students are given metaphors or examples to reflect on, and this reflection changes their thinking, and in this way learning happens. The way I see it, in order to teach people X you don't have to tell people "X"; it won't even work. If you try to express X, in words or in writing it will become Y, and people will interpret it as Z. Instead, you expose people to something completely different - to Q - that has the effect of creating X in their mind.

This is a bit similar to the Socratic tradition, where asking questions is also used to educate. This is also similar to dance education, which is very much built on metaphors. Now some people are trying to incorporate "scientific explanations" while forgetting to consider the effect of these explanations on the consciousness of the students.

The main problem with "scientific explanations" is that the form of these explanations is usually as follows...

  X is true. This is just how the world works.

 ...which, of course, has nothing to do with science, as I have already explained. It definitely helps one to quickly build a model of the world, to know that food is here and danger is there. I might consider the validity of this style in e.g. Thou shalt not steal, or perhaps in The Earth revolves around the Sun. But if this style is employed in science education, science becomes reduced to a set of "laws" that are just true --- until somebody else comes and concludes that they are false. Even some seemingly simple and natural statements such as the Law of Conservation of Energy, turn out, upon closer inspection, to be complex webs of concepts and ideas, and require a lot of training, and a lot of careful attention to use and apply them sensibly. There is an unending stream of patents for a perpetuum mobile, and the reason for that is not that most people are amusing idiots. It is that the Law of Conservation of Energy is not as natural as it seems, and is not as obvious as it seems. In fact, in the future it can well be replaced by some other framework, if we conclude that the concept of energy as we have it is not accurate enough to reflect reality. Instead we are teaching our students to laugh at the ignorance of those proposing another source of infinite energy. Who is more ignorant, after all?

Everything that is taught on a large scale is a religion

Everything that is taught on a large scale is a religion.

It takes time to master anything. Because life is finite, teachers often start teaching before they have mastered their subject. When there are a lot of teachers, a lot of them end up being incompetent. Thus, there is a limit to the quality of public, large-scale education.

Systematic education changes students' thinking. Every subject has a set of postulates, and systematic education projects these postulates over and over and over, changing students' thinking. This is especially true with children; systematic education puts certain principles into their subconsciousness.

Most people are unable to transcend the limits of the view they have learned as children. This is because it takes time to learn to transcend these limits, and life is finite. Also, some of these people become teachers; and when you have a teacher who does not see the limits of the subject, it is so much more difficult to see them for the students.

Therefore whether we have physics, Judaism, democracy, or basic economics presented to millions of students, a certain set of principles ends up being mindlessly drilled into subconsciousness.

We can change our thinking by encountering someone with a different perspective; this is the easiest way. Therefore, the easiest defense against dogmatism is pluralism; having multiple schools of thought, so different children (or adults) are taught different things.

This is why there is no single best system, because any system, when taught on a large scale, deteriorates into near-religious dogmatism, for the reasons already explained. In particular, science needs to have some people educated in a religious way, so that at least we can notice certain tendencies in science, by reflecting on similar tendencies in those who have received religious education. Similarly, democracy needs non-democratic countries, or at least it needs people with authoritarian thinking, so that we can have a sense of perspective.


Everything that is taught on a large scale is religion. It does not have to be so-called. It just has to be repeated often enough.

Every sentence that is repeated extremely often in a given culture acquires near-religious meaning.
Examples: "common sense is not common" (means the world is full of idiots, but I am not one of them),  "forgive but not forget" (which usually means not forgive), "we hold these truths to be self-evident..." (then why say so?), "every man should have a son, write a book, and plant a tree" (not true, and also puts you in a selfish mode of thinking).
 Every word that is repeated extremely often in a given culture acquires near-religious meaning. It starts to appear more significant because there are more and more associations with this word in the mind (or connections in the brain), and it  almost automatically becomes a powerful symbol through sheer repetition.
Examples: God, science, rationality, common sense, law, money, democracy, 9/11, GPA, dating, security, sustainability, healthy lifestyle, work-life balance.


If a word is repeated extremely often, virtually nothing you believe about it is true.

If a sentence is repeated extremely often, virtually nothing you believe about it is true.


Everything that is taught on a large scale is religion.

On patterns, bias, religion, letting go, and the limits of human knowledge

We keep arguing if God has created the Universe, or if it has created itself; if there is life after death, and so on. However, we are so biased, we have so many subconscious assumptions --- that there is always one answer, or that there is always more than one answer, or that everything is relative --- that even if an angel came from the sky and gave us all the answers, we would misinterpret them.

Some say science has proved there is no God. How? Where is the proof? Do you know anything about proofs at all? Kurt Gödel
 has demonstrated by his Incompleteness Theorem that, at least assuming a certain formalism, there are lots of statements that
are true, but cannot be proven. If you claim to have a scientific mindset, then you have to accept the consequences: there may be lots of statements about, say, God, that may be true in a certain formal sense, but not provable from our finite set of premises. Of course, modern science is not written in first-order predicate logic, yet this is hardly an excuse. Furthermore, in the presence of billions of other people following this or that religion, how confident are you that they are all wrong? Do you seriously
think that just because there is electricity, antibiotics, and cellular phones, hence there should be no God?

Conversely, if, say, you really believe in Jesus, do you seriously think that billions of those who follow other religions are wrong? Wake up! It is not that the faith in Jesus is more correct; it is because of your subconscious or conscious bias and fear.  If your parents told you, for example, that you will go to Hell without Jesus, then, of course, you will keep making up all kinds of rationalizations. The bottom line is, it is not the particular religion, or the particular flavor of scientific materialism that is by itself true or false; nor do I see that truth is relative. We choose to perceive those theories as true or false, or likely, or unlikely, or nonsensical, or self-evident because of our beliefs about the world; largely because of the particular culture and the particular family that we grew up in. 99% of the debates about the nature of
the Universe, absolute vs. relative truth, purpose in life, the origin of life, and so forth, are just battles between different subconscious patterns in different people; these debates have nothing --- nothing to do with discovering truth.

The very idea of truth is different for different people, and also depends on lots of subconscious constructs and assumptions, and on what you encountered in the culture and in the family during your childhood, and whatever thoughts and experiences you've had during the rest of your life. Same goes for the idea of the purpose of life. The idea of purpose is also something we've learned; and the very question appears to be nonsensical.
The concept of "purpose" is very much linked with survival; but now we are asking about the purpose of survival --- the purpose of having purposes in the first place.  We are stretching the concept beyond applicability. Just because we can conceive of
something such as "the purpose of life" doesn't mean that it exists or even that it is not self-contradictory. For example, in mathematics we can conceive of a set containing all sets as its element, but such an object is self-contradictory and, we conclude, thus cannot exist.

Most of us most of the time are unable to transcend our own thinking and perception.  We look for "absolute truth", but this very idea was created by our fear of death. We look for "salvation", but this idea was also created by our fear of death.
We complain about democracy in the USA, but "democracy" itself is an idea that we have learned. We argue that North Korea is an evil state, but the idea of "evil" is also something that we have learned. Every human and every state is 99% governed by its habitual patterns, and North Korea is not different; "evil" does
not actually exist, it's just a term habitually used to denote somebody you really don't like. It is learned in the childhood and linked to fear and to the perception of your own weakness as a limited human being.

We don't know if there is God --- even the concept of existence is questionable, as it is something we had to learn, and each of us thus has a different concept of what it means for something to exist --- but we know there are healthy and unhealthy patterns
associated with this idea. This is what we can take care of. There are healthy and unhealthy patterns associated with the ideas of "democracy", "evil", "purpose of life", and so forth. The whole conflict between Israel and Palestine, for instance, is just one huge pattern. It's not that the Jews are wrong, or that the Arabs or wrong, or that some people are making money from the war, or that the U.S. wants the war to continue, or that Russia wants it to continue, or that some terrorist groups want it to continue. Don't take it personally; it's just a pattern.

After reading this you probably still think that, all this not withstanding, you believe in what modern science has to say, that we have to be random collections of molecules governed by the laws of physics and our DNA, or that Israel is right because it is a real, democratic, XXI-st century state, or that life really does have a purpose because "you know there is something out there", or that Obama is really a terrible president because what we have here is not like your idea of democracy at all. Letting go is always scary. It involves saying "I really don't know the truth. Maybe my parents were wrong. Maybe my country was wrong. Perhaps, I was wrong as well."

Remember Romeo and Juliet. There everyone understood that the struggle was just a pattern, and they still carried it on, out of tradition, because it felt so natural.

More on nonduality

Very often the factual content of a statement is less important than the effect that this statement has on a listener. For example, two statements can have the same content, but very different effect on a listener, much like two descriptions of an object can have the same reference, but different senses (think Frege)

(Here give some example of something about Dao... how it does not mean anything in particular, yet has an effect on a listener)


If we talk about abortion, we may start thinking if it is acceptable or not. If we are too logical, too analytical, thinking too much, we will then have to decide, whether a fetus is alive or not. The implications seem to be radically different: either abortion is a murder, or it is nothing at all, perfectly acceptable. The thing is that a fetus is BOTH a human being and not a human being. Both things are
true at the same time. This is precisely why we have a conflict. Some people pick one side, some pick the other, out of habit of always picking one side in a duality, in order to keep what seems to them a "coherent" worldview.

Interestingly, both sides of the conflict miss the point. The point is whether it is good to have abortions or not. Instead, both sides choose to focus on whether a fetus is a human or not --- something that is really a very abstract, philosophical idea --- and totally remove themselves from attending to the real matter at hand. Abortion actually kills this little fetus that is in one sense human, in the other sense is not, so it is equally inappropriate to perceive it in our nervous system as either murder, or nothing at all, a completely ordinary thing.


Whenever there are people passionately taking two sides, there is a good chance that we have a similar situation: there is something that is really BOTH true and false, but people are so used to duality that they are picking one side or the other, and reinterpreting the situation as if it were completely black or completely white.


There is some value in making the options black and white, as it allows for the consolidation of effort. It allows for making decisions. If you are careful, you may notice another dualistic misconception: non-duality is not "no duality", it is not the opposite of duality, because non-duality allows no opposites, by definition.

Zen, creativity, strabismus, and the neurological basis for nonduality

Today I had another great vision therapy session with Dr. Kavner. I was doing a typical exercise: looking at a computer screen while wearing glasses and identifying, which of the four digits looked closer to me. I have been doing this kind of exercises for a couple of years, but today I noticed something new. After an incorrect answer I would ask myself, why I chose this digit, and sometimes I would notice that I have relied on some monocular cues, as opposed to binocular cues. People with improperly developed binocular vision, or with one eye for that matter, rely to some extent on monocular cues, such as shades and background information, in order to judge distances, which object is in front or which, etc. In a normally functioning adult these two systems are fused into one. Today I noticed that I have built some kind of a two-step process: if the binocular cues are strong enough, I use them to judge space. If they are not strong enough, I fall back on using monocular cues.

So now I understand much better, why Dr. Kavner has often said that my kind of perceptual problem is linked to creativity. In the 1970s they --- cutting-edge researchers in developmental optometry, including Dr. Kavner himself --- thought that in order to cure this visual defect, you had to change the whole individual's worldview to make into a more "coherent", more "convergent" one. Later they discovered that it was possible to only change the functioning of the eyes while leaving the rest intact, and this is what he prefers to do, as he tries to not affect the personality of the patient while treating the visual system, and definitely not to suppress any creativity that may be linked to a particular perceptual disorder.

What I have suddenly understood is that this is the ability to simultaneously keep conflicting inputs, without suppressing one or the other.

In visual terms, it means that I can look at two objects and simultaneously perceive two different distances between them: one according to one internal system, and the other according to the other internal system. Now I can even consciously see the difference between those two distances if I choose to, though Dr. Kavner wants me to try to pay less attention to that, so I can allow them to fuse into one sooner. But now I also see that I have a similar skill, or gift, in other areas. I can use prayer, with virtually the same subconscious energy as if God or the Universe were an existing entity for me, as real as this table or that person, and simultaneously reject this existence in another context. When I am designing a computer program, I can ask myself about the benefits of a particular solution, and I simultaneously see its advantages or disadvantages from various points of view, without being pressured to choose a side. In fact, picking a solution and going forward with it can be a challenge for me, as I tend to give almost the same attention to very realistic possibilities and to rare, once-in-a-million possibilities.

East vs. West.

What I now see is that this ability to keep conflicting inputs is also a unique contribution of the Eastern civilization. The mainstream modern Western civilization very much favors the principle of dualism, that statements are either true, or false. Once something seems to be true, there is a subconscious tendency to reject its negation. Conversely, Eastern traditions offer training to directly cultivate the ability to keep the conflicts unresolved. This keeps our choices open, and this keeps us from the unconscious and conscious suffering caused by this yes/no polarity. From Shunryu Suzuki's "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind",

Our body and mind are not two and not one. If you think your body and mind are two, that is wrong; if you think that they are one, that is also wrong. Our body and mind are both two and one. We usually think that if something is not one, it is more than one; if it is not singular, it is plural. But in actual experience, our life is not only plural, but also singular. Each one of us is both dependent and independent.

Let me get back to my earlier defense of religion. Traditional societies had people literally believing in the postulates of various religious doctrines, and thus while getting the benefits of a religious worldview --- deeper insight, lack of anxiety and sense of connectedness with other humans --- people also suffered the limitations. However, there is nothing preventing us from having a split; from literally believing and not literally believing at the same time. Of course, this was also part of the earlier religious doctrines: God was Christ, and his father at the same time, as well as the spirit. After life we were going to die, but also to live and/or to get reborn.

It may sound a little confusing (and it is), because the "Western", single-valued approach tries to unify everything into a coherent worldview, yet it leads us to duality, to splitting things into categories.When we are trying to label things as "good" or "bad", coherently, this the space in the mind into two parts, perhaps with some borderline. On the other hand, when we follow the Yin-yang principle and recognize that everything good has seeds of bad in it, and everything bad has seeds of good in it, then we do not unify our immediate perception, but it is unified on a deeper level, as the brain is not reorganized into polarities, but attempts to keep tracks of all sides at the same time.

Categorizing, splitting into polarities is great for automated responses, such as vision, and is also great for immediate survival. Anxiety, fear or immediate danger probably inhibits creativity by reducing this ability to simultaneously attend to conflicting inputs; this is also in line with my earlier post from years ago, "Why relaxation changes habits".  This is also related to the general tendency to fall into particular unconscious patterns, especially when something "triggers our shadow" or "wakes up our pain-body", and we react with selfishness, hostility, grasping or aversion, in a way that we've been reacting for decades, as a protagonist in a pre-scripted story, before we can realize what is happening. The ability to keep conflicting inputs may be helpful in this context as well, as allowing us to act differently while staying aware of the stronger existing pattern. I am not so sure about this one, though...

On science and rationality - part 1

It is important to remember that "science", "rationality", "objectivity" are just words. Those are concepts that were invented by human beings, and that we have learned at some point in our lives. Those are mental constructs; we do not have any direct experience of rationality or objectivity.

We have to be especially careful when these concepts are opposed to what seems to be "irrational": religion, ideology, etc. Historically people were always trying to look for "solid ground", something that we knew "for real", because life can be so uncertain in this world that is always changing, especially since our perception is always changing as well. Then these words merely describe a certain quality in our attitude to the world, or a certain quality in a description of the world that we are looking to find. But beware of the same terms appearing in a dual polarity. Do you want your children to study the story of God's creation of life, or the rational, scientific version? Do you want to use hypnosis, traditional medicine, or a scientific, objectively helpful treatment?

Notice just how emotionally charged those questions are. Clearly, in such a context science, reason, objectivity, etc. are now being used as symbols, and very irrational ones! There would be no need to invoke such concepts so often except perhaps in a purely philosophical discussion in some academic journal, were it not for all the fears, anxiety, and selfishness that are easily evoked by these ideas in so many people in our modern Western world.

It is so comforting to feel smarter than millions of other people! After all, you are not stupid enough to think that the world was created in seven days, and not delusional enough to think that you will be reborn after death. (Are you sure that those millions literally believe that the world was created in seven days? Can there be something that you miss?) You are a strong, independent person, and you do not need this opium for the masses. It is so reassuring to avoid the anxiety and the responsibility by relying on what it "scientifically proven"! If you are a doctor, nobody can blame you for using a "scientifically proven" method, even if you know it is not going to work, and even though 20 years later, in light of the new evidence, the "current scientific view" may switch to the opposite. Your dead patients may contribute to this evidence, but you will not avoid the responsibility by identifying yourself with "the science".

Some appeal to the "scientific method", but even the work of Karl Popper, who set the foundation for this very idea, shows just how tricky and multifaceted this concept is. The work of others, such as Paul Feyerabend, questions the very viability of this concept. Some appeal to the "logical-mathematical" intelligence, even though it has technically nothing to do with reason or rationality per se. In any case, for all that we know, cutting-edge research is often done via complicated imagery, metaphors, and anything but "sequential logical-mathemtical reasoning", whatever that is.

So next time you start arguing in favor of science, reason, or rationality, see what is more important to you: to be right or to be free.