karma mechanics OR how to surf your brain waves

As a word, karma translates to “action”, but as a concept people tend to have difficulty agreeing on what it entails. Even in India, the Jains, Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs all have radically different explanations of karma. Once decontextualized and transplanted to the West, it usually shows up in appeals to some vague notion of universal justice or in conjunction with a particular species of color-shifting lizard.

In the name of polysemy I’m not going to reconcile these differences, but instead toss a new interpretation into the milieu. It is a neuroscientific interpretation, and argues that karma is an attempt by ancient scholars to describe the brain mechanism now known as long-term potentiation.

I draw the most from the Buddhist interpretation, for three reasons: (1) unlike most sects of Hinduism it requires no God or external arbiter to function, (2) it focuses on psychological motivations and intentions rather than resulting actions, and (3) it is an internal process carried out entirely within an individual’s mind. Both the cause (hetu) and effect (vipaka) occur in a closed system; none of that “today steal a cookie and tomorrow have a piano will fall on your head” nonsense where the “universe” reacts to outwardly projected actions. It’s more like “if I perform a generous act today, then I am more likely to perform a generous act tomorrow.” And that is a good thing.

Our present consciousness rides the crest of a wave, a wave consisting of patterned thought and behavior. What you think or do at a given moment is in large part determined by everything you have thought or done in the past. The Buddhists say that every thought/action is a planted seed, cultivated through habit, that subtly shapes future states of consciousness. Karma, then, is a force of momentum. It describes a mechanism of mental cause and effect.

I’ve got no formal training in neuroscience, but I’ll risk playing the fool because everything seems to fit so well. Arguably the most significant discovery in the field over the past half-century is that the adult brain is not a static entity, but continually restructures itself. The mechanism is referred to as long-term potentiation, and holds that every time a synapse between two neurons fires, that connection is strengthened. It is a process analogous to muscle memory, where the ability to perform physical movements is reinforced with every performance. Likewise, each time I think about love, the neurons associated with love fire and the connections between them (synapses) grow stronger. Thereafter I have a brain slightly more predisposed to think about love, at least when the context matches up. If you need an easy way to remember all this, here it is:

What fires together, wires together.

The important thing to take away from this is that every single thought you have alters the physical structure of your brain.

Skógafoss, Iceland

I shouldn’t have to point out that this is merely the scientific explanation for the process of karma depicted a few paragraphs earlier. Karma is the mechanism whereby past actions shape present consciousness. Because consciousness is at least somewhat a product of the brain, long-term potentiation is the neural analog to that very mechanism. It is also known as enculturation, practice, learning, and conditioning.

Breaking from some traditional views, I see no “good karma” or “bad karma” inherent in actions. My interpretation of karma is morally relative, you could call it a law of nature if you’re into that sort of thing; it’s like gravity in that thieves and saints fall at the same rate.

So what about all that stuff about karma accruing from our past lives?  How is Buddhism, the “scientific” religion, going to explain that? Well, not only were the ancient Indians cutting-edge neuroscientists, but they seemed to have had some insight into a primitive evolutionary biology. If we accept karma to describe the mechanism by which the past shapes present consciousness, then we have to look farther back than our individual histories. The particularities of someone’s brain structure are determined by their life experience, but the basic blue-print is contained in their DNA.

Thus!, my present state of consciousness is in part a product of my own life experience, but primarily a product of natural selection which evolved the human central nervous system. My present consciousness was conditioned first by the history of the human species and then by the history of my individual organism. A product of thousands of generations, of my ancestors, of my past lives.

Where does that leave us, knowing that our “free” thoughts and decisions in the present are determined by a tyrannical past? Is the Here and Now an inevitable consequence of the Then and There? What chance do we have against the waves of karma, the eddies of history, the riptides of conditioning?

Luckily, the teachings tell us that we are riding the wave, not that we are the wave, and therein lies the way out. Matched up against the wave of karma we have two options. One is to close our eyes, pray for deliverance, and allow our consciousness be tossed and buffeted by its conditioning. The other is the Buddha’s escape from the cycle, the Dao’s doing-by-not-doing, the Golden Dawn’s True Will.

It’s the doctrine that when you spot a big wave, the wisest plan of action is not to chicken out, but to get on your board and Surf. That. Shit.