lorenzop wrote: ↑Sun Feb 04, 2024 1:21 am
Perhaps in a purely materialist\physicalist POV we can't account for the difference between a bullet passing through an orange vs passing through a person . . . but my suggestion that karma is mechanical doesn't mean events in consciousness or events that effect consciousness don't have consequences. We all know that speaking ill of someone has consequences, and these consequences can be explained mechanically (at least in principle) without adding an intermediary archetypical being.
That's good. But let's see how far these mechanics can go. Because if we take as an example ill speaking, as far as we can clearly trace the cause-effect chain through billiard balls (larynx, sound waves, ears, etc.) things are practically
indistinguishable from physicalism. Consider this quote:
Around that time (1914-1915), there dwelt in Dornach a young woman who lived in severe conflict with her husband and sought to divorce him. Moved by compassion, Rudolf Steiner helped her out with much kindness and infinite patience. Gradually, the young woman reached a state of inner balance and wrote her husband asking to return to him. However, the man rejected her request, in a cold dismissive tone. She came to Rudolf Steiner with her husband’s letter, in a state of despair.
“Yes,” he said, “You see, that’s only the result of all those reproachful, angry, and hostile letters you wrote him.”
“But, Herr Doctor!”, she exclaimed, “I never sent the letters, but always tore them up! I only wrote them to ease my pain!”
“Yes,” said Steiner, “but his soul received them all.”
Is such, in modern terms we can call it 'non-local', influence plausible in your view?
It should be noted that this is still only
half of the issue. We're speaking about effecting something, but the other half has to explain why such effects can have
later karmic compensation (possibly in a future life), which is simply incomprehensible outside the question of what is moral and immoral. See, what makes karma challenging for the modern mind is not that actions have consequences. This is an obvious fact. The strange thing is that actions can have
consequences for their issuer (not only for the one we act upon) in mysterious and roundabout ways, based on the
moral value of the action. Also note that what we're now discussing is not some SS musing. The Upanishads that you often refer to, rest upon the question of karma, how moral and immoral actions determine the next life, and so on. But we can leave this second half for the next iteration. Because if our outlook turns out to be indistinguishable from physicalism, then the second half becomes completely bogus.