Thought Experiment: Debts & Obligations

Thought Experiments

Thought experiments are a means of trying out an idea as a means of getting a new perspective. They are an opportunity to learn from experience without the side effect of making serious mistakes that result in years of muddled and confused life.

The key to using these exercises is to be able to fully buy in to the scenario. What this means is that you must believe without any reservation that the situation is fact. This takes a bit of practice perhaps, however, it is completely possible. The result is that in your mind-as-such, the scenario is real. It has actually happened, and you get to examine how your, beliefs, attitudes and so forth are shaped by the expectations of yourself and others, which determines your actions, which shape how you live. These thought experiments are a means of creating space between our expectations and our actions, since in a sense, we are playing make-believe.

Make-believe, or fantasy – day-dreaming – have traditionally been only the province of children, with adults generally poo-pooing this mental activity as childish in a pejorative sense. There have even been movements by some adult groups to eliminate any kind of fantasy in the belief that the sooner children are introduced to “reality” the better. In a sense, their belief is that fantasy is some kind of weakness. However, what these individuals really are up to is to inflict their own nihilistic view of the world on everyone else. In this world view there are certain assumptions that simply must be accepted, or their mode of expression in the world would be seen to be completely idiotic.

 

Thought Experiment #1 -- Debts and Obligations

Imagine that everyone you know, everyone to whom you owe any kind of debt or obligation, including all money debts to banks and so forth – everyone, were wiped out in some kind of mass holocaust. What then, of your debts and obligations?

This would include everyone in your family: wife or husband, children, parents. The debts and obligations are not just limited to money and contracts. They include even a sense that you owe loyalty or fidelity. What if all those were gone too? Often we do not even think of how our own lives and values are influenced by the expectations of others. What if there were no one left who had any expectations whatsoever about you?

What would you be if there were no expectations whatsoever for you to conform to?

All of these expectations are conceptions. This kind of thought experiment highlights the power of conceptions.

Think about this: let us say that you felt some powerful obligation to someone who then dies. What then of your obligation? Does it remain with you in the form of some kind of marker on your consciousness? Does it remain with the other person in some like manner? Or is there some kind of storehouse of all these obligations, like a bank computer, that keeps track, and “what goes around, comes around”? Can they be transferred? For example, can the debt or obligation be fulfilled by someone else – whomever is available?

Or, alternatively, does doing some kind of massive good deed wipe out other debts? How many debts do you have anyway? How exactly does something like this work out?

All of these questions are “waves of conceptualizations” that Tilopa talked about in his teaching to Naropa:

Like the morning mist that dissolves into thin air,
Going nowhere but ceasing to be,
Waves of conceptualization, all the mind's creation, dissolve,
When you behold your mind's true nature.

Pure space has neither colour nor shape
And it cannot be stained either black or white;
So also, mind's essence is beyond both colour and shape
And it cannot be sullied by black or white deeds.

The darkness of a thousand aeons is powerless
To dim the crystal clarity of the sun's heart;
And likewise, aeons of samsara have no power
To veil the clear light of the mind's essence.

Although space has been designated "empty",
In reality it is inexpressible;
Although the nature of mind is called "clear light",
Its every ascription is baseless verbal fiction.

The mind's original nature is like space;
It pervades and embraces all things under the sun.
Be still and stay relaxed in genuine ease,
Be quiet and let sound reverberate as an echo,
Keep your mind silent and watch the ending of all worlds.

What all this means is that there really isn't any stain of sin that you have to wash away. There is nothing permanent. If you are always trying to work things out with others, there is no end to it. Karma is endless, because there is no beginning, and no end. Therefore, one should practice to let go of all clinging and grasping to worldly ends, since worldly ends only lead to more worldly phenomena, which are impermanent and invariably, inexorably, lead to suffering.

Locus cloud of karmic chi energies

In Measuring Meditation, by William Bodri on page 546, we find this:

Just as a weather front gives birth to a variety of winds flowing in all directions, there are a variety of chi fronts flowing through all the body’s internal organs, and each of these organs has its own specific, characteristic chi flows.  Here is an even bigger way to view things.  Since we also have our own individual personalities, habits, and forms of behavior, thus, as individuals we, too, can be represented as a unique set of habit energies, or habit chi flows.  There is no such thing as an individual self since all conventional existence is defined through interdependent origination, so what we are can be viewed as just a locus cloud of karmic chi energies.

Keeping this in mind, you can see from yet another aspect how the process of cultivation comes down to the task of transforming your physical and mental habit energies.We must try to purify them and make them more refined.  We must try to abandon any bad habits or evil ways we have become attached to, and replace them with good habits and more virtuous behavior.  Recurring bad habits are like a river of chi that cannot stop, so purifying our behavior can be viewed from the aspect of purifying our chi and its habitual flows.  Since chi is related to thoughts, this really means transforming the mind.

When you think of the individual as a flowing collection of dirty chi streams, you will more readily recognize why we say that cultivation comes down to transforming our habitual mental streams of activity.  Just like the seeds of the alaya, the chi circulations of the personality and physical nature are involved in an endless flow, and if we do not purify these streams or learn how to detach from them, we will never arrive at the ability to see the Tao.

From a humanistic viewpoint, this makes behavior the beginning, the process and fruitional result of the spiritual path as well.  From the standpoint of karma or astrology, this even tells us that when an unfortunate karmic period arises that connects with our chi flows, the only way to change the situation is to detach from the pull of these flows and what they might impel us to do.  Thus cultivation is definitely the only true way to change one’s fortune and destiny—by resisting or detaching from the karmic flows that would impel us into a certain karmic destiny – and the only way to truly actualize the meaning of “free will.”

It is hard to stop something that never ceases flowing, so in spiritual cultivation you learn to purify your physical and mental habits by transforming them at the root, which will in turn cleanse you chi flows and bring them into a harmonious state of balance.  In other words, the proper way to cultivate your chi channels is by cleansing the mind, and the way to purify the mind is to learn detachment through emptiness meditation.