On Afterlife, Karma, Genes and Right Action
Does hell exist and is the road to it really filled with good intention?
Afterlife, as a serene place in the neverland, is a story that has been used to keep us from going astray.
The duality of heaven and hell is an extension of the binary mechanism of the mind. The good and bad, the this and that. It’s like people’s obsession nowadays with negative or positive impact. But how can one know if their action is positive or negative down the line?
Each is an outcome based on the juxtaposition of an action and an observer. A knife can kill but it can also heal.
Except for a very tiny anomaly of psychopaths, if you asked each person on the planet, none of them would say they view themselves as bad people doing negative things. All of them truly believe they are good people doing things for the greater good.
And yet, how come we have such instability and dehumanization?!
That’s why we have these terms in English: “No good deed goes unpunished” and “The road to hell is filled with good intentions”. That’s why with every new solution there’s always a new problem. There are many examples in history for leaders who have had positive intentions, who in reality have caused their people great suffering.
That is the crux underlining the human condition from time immemorial in which all systems and ancient traditions have attempted, to some extent, successfully or not, to bring Man towards confronting, and by that, reach the possibility of surrender in order to reach right action (or what’s called in the Hindu Brahmin tradition ‘Dharma’)
Right action is not based on morality or societal standards but a derivative of the underlying mechanics inherent in the form. A rat cannot not be a rat. One can’t expect a monkey to be a fish. Trying to be one, however, distorts its being and everything around it. It’s whole life and potential is wasted. Lucky for those species, they are not endowed with a mental agency so they don’t have that dilemma. Anything they do is always a form of right action.
But when we came along that’s when things got messy.
The Dilemma of Mental Awareness
You see, the whole premise behind the mythological story of the banishment from the Garden of Eden is about the emergence of a new bio-form and its attendant new awareness (relative to all other forms of life): mental awareness. And this posed a new problem.
By its very mechanism, anything the mind has observed was immediately bifurcated to a measurement of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, this and that, in order to form efficient strategies for survival. This began to distort the underlying reality, which is more of a gradient between these two polar points. And in the underlying reality everything is interrelated, whereas for the mind everything is seperate.
The mind is very good at analyzing information in a two dimensional format.
It works under the juxtaposition mechanism: 110 degrees Fahrenheit means nothing unless you juxtapose it to something. To a coffee cup, it’s considered ‘cold’. To the human body, as a temperature, it’s considered ‘hot’.
Everything becomes relative.
It’s very hard for the mind to analyze information from a three dimensional medium, even though that’s the medium it basks in. The mind has to freeze everything, break it down to its tiniest parts, isolate them and then take each part and juxtapose it to another in order to formulate a measurement - a conclusion.
If you look at the format human beings work with; a sheet of paper, retina screen - all of them are two dimensional mediums, translating three dimensional information into a length x width format (Y axis juxtaposed to an X axis). And the moment the mind does that, it loses an enormous amount of information.
Physicists like to illustrate the age of the universe as a straight line. But in reality there are no straight lines in the universe and time doesn’t exist, only movement.
Therefore, the mind has no capacity to see the residual effect each decision/action/measurement has across time. It’s not equipped to see the consequential derivatives. And yet, all our life is basically the byproduct of a mind that runs thousands of measurements trying to derive the right decision.
And so to ameliorate and offset the unintended consequences, derived from the new dilemma we were endowed with an “insurance policy”, inherent in our genes: morality.
The “insurance policy” brought us the ability to (unconsciously) form a thoughtform field (egregore) onto which we projected an authority figure in the form of gods, kings and priests, as well as “our country”, “our tribe” and so on. These were emotional principles that created delimiting boundaries for us in the form of values and laws so we would not go astray, in the sense that the mind, and its endless measurements, would have taken us.
It’s like 10,000 years ago we couldn’t comprehend the connection between a hurricane that destroyed all our huts to the fact that we‘ve just slaughtered 100,000 bison in just one year. We didn’t know that having intercourse with one’s sister is a genetically dead end. We didn’t even know what ‘genes’ meant.
As a side note: Richard Dawkins, in the 80’s, in one of his first books came up with a concept called “The Extended Phenotype”. And basically the concept talks about that our genes are more than just nucleotides strung on a DNA molecule affecting our inner biology, but have an extension to them beyond the boundaries of the biological form.
The Chinese, thousands and thousands of years ago, came up with a system in which there were 64 themes for what it is to be a human, and that to each theme there were 6 sub themes (displayed as the 64 hexagrams of the I’ Ching). When they discovered the human genetic code in 1958, lo and behold, they found the same story. They found out that there were 64 different codons to the human genetic code. It’s exactly the same mathematics. In this way, Dawkins' concept is not just a concept but a concretized construct.
My personal note about that is to counter the common opinion by some neuroscientists / novo-historians today who arrogantly quip that “we simply came up with these things in the past as philosophical constructs (as if God and Money are ideas we merely decided upon intellectually). And they’re not. They’re rooted in our genes and they are an extended phenotype. In other words, we had no choice. We still have no choice in anything we think, say and do.
And so this insurance policy was necessary as it protected us until we would be able to come to a place where the mind has been developed to its full potential. To finally come to a place in which we know and understand why “sleeping with my sister is a genetic dead end” and so on and so forth. To know not only the fruit (of the tree of knowledge) but the whole tree and its roots.
So the mythical note that stands behind ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ are the way the tribe has organized its members. We needed a propaganda of delimiting boundaries: “If you follow this pattern and do this, you’ll be rewarded in the next life, if not, you’ll go to hell”. And the propaganda was not just words and ideas, but was something that was substantiated in our biology as: the fear of consequences, the fear of fate and the fear of authority, such as Gods, Priests and Kings, as well as mother and father.
Note: we live in the first time in the history of our species that all of this is going away. The “insurance policy” is taken away from our genes in order to fulfill the next stage of evolution. Just ponder for a moment about the implications of such metamorphosis. Imagine humanity without this thing that has somewhat protected it and given it delimiting boundaries when deriving an action? Imagine what happens when all of that is not there anymore to support humanity? Imagine generations who come to the world without fear of consequences or the fear of authority? Imagine a world with no ethics, conscience and morality? I believe Covid has spreally brought this to the surface. It has revealed what has been percolating in the spirit of humanity for quite some time.
Right Action
In the underlying reality of everything, heaven and hell do not exist or are the same place, depending on how you want to look at it.. Heaven can be seen as the sliver between incarnated lives. But the joke is that like slumber, one doesn't really get to experience heaven; we don’t know that we’re asleep when we’re asleep. It’s where the ‘software’ is in unpotentiated status and there are no worries, pain and qualms. Like when we put a program on a disk-on-key. It’s not loaded into a hardware that can accommodate it and allow it to express its potential.
Hell, on the other hand, is when the ‘software’ takes possession within a vehicle so it can be potentiated (i.e. incarnated life in the world. ‘in carne’ = in the flesh. Or as Shakespeare said in the Tempest:
“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
The reality is that this life is our afterlife and any past life of ours was an afterlife of a preceding life. The ancients used to call our planet ‘the planet of suffering’. And they were right. Life in the flesh becomes ‘hell’ because of the ‘mind dilemma’. All actions are mental actions that are not aligned with the natural order and therefore, their residual effect is recorded as memory. It’s where memory becomes the dominant factor and all actions are the repeat of old patterns.
On Karma
If there was anything close to the concept of afterlife or heaven and hell, it’s karma. If one wants to transcend their pain and suffering they have to be responsible for their lives. And in order to do that, it is most important to understand what karma is.
Karma means 'residual effect' of all the actions you perform. When I say 'action', when you sit, your body is doing certain functions. Your mind does certain kinds of actions, your emotions do other kinds of actions and your energetic body does another kind of action. So we have multiple dimensions of activity going on within us in waking and sleeping.
But if we take only the waking hours - let's say from the moment we woke up until this moment - how many actions took place in the body, mind, emotions and energy, and how much of it is conscious?
If you look at it, for almost every human being, the majority of it is well below one percent. If you want to understand the implications of this, let's say you get into your car and you go for a drive for 10 minutes. Of those 10 minutes, 9 minutes and fifty seconds you closed your eyes.
That's what it means. Right now people feel like life is hitting them from all directions at once. They think that someone from above is punishing them or they think that it is someone else's fault.
No. This is the residual effect of one’s karma.
Karma doesn't say you did good or bad. It has nothing to do with good or bad karma. Over the years, the West has promoted the principle of karma as the shortest distance between two points: a linear line of cause and effect, which is the way the mind takes possession of everything.
But in its origin, karma is more like a wheel. (That's why we have all these paintings from the East that try to illustrate this principle as the Wheel of Samsara; that we are all subject to the forces of karma both in life and in death).
This means that whatever has happened to us in terms of thought, emotions, action and energetic resonance, the residual effect is embedded as a memory. When I say 'memory', our very existence is memory. We are nothing but memory.
If we take that memory there will be no more personality like you. If we go further and take away your genetic memory, you cannot exist at all. If we go one step further and erase the evolutionary memory, there is no possibility of existence for the human species. All of this is based on evolutionary memory, karmic memory, genetic memory and various other levels of memory. In reality, memory can be classified into multiple dimensions.
Inside us - this body is a huge memory bank; levels of evolutionary, genetic, karmic, unexpressed, conscious, subconscious memories. You can split it into many, many more portholes, but basically what we know as ourselves is just a product of the memory that is stored inside us, which is largely out of our reach, but plays out inside us in its own way.
All these memories make up who we are; How we sit and stand, how we look, how we behave, how we speak - everything is controlled by memory. In modern terms, it’s the unconscious program that one has accumulated inside them. Whatever the program is, that's how both the biogenetic machine (the body) and the conscious software (personality) will function.
For example, let's say you have no idea what your great-great grandfather looked like 25 generations ago, but his nose might be sitting on your face now. Even your skin tone "remembers" what your ancestors were like thousands of years ago. So it is this memory bank that makes you who you are and only a little bit of it is actually open to conscious access. The residual effect of the whole process appears as tendencies within us that run in the background.
If we don't overcome these tendencies, or if we don't transcend these karmic tendencies, then all that happens is that the past repeats itself; the dead live through us.
Note: there’s a mini-series in Turkish on Netflix that I came across by accident that pleasantly surprised me. It took this rather deep and not-easy-to-understand subject and translated it in an entertaining way. The show illustrates how karmic memory manifests itself in human life; how do we live the patterns of the past in our lives and why do those patterns repeat all the time. How they’re expressed in our relationships, in our decision-making, as well as in disease patterns that we develop (what’s called in modern jargon: ‘genetic predisposition to family diseases’).
It is very important to understand and accept karma for what it is and at the same time create space from it.
If one wants to own life, if they want to have a fresh life here and now, it is important that they enjoy the richness of their karma and at the same time transcend it. But if it seeps into today, at that moment one no longer has a life of their own. Their parents, their grandparents, their great-grandparents still live through them.
If one wants to go beyond this existing ‘program’, they have to leave or rewrite their ‘program’ or learn to run without a ‘program’ for a while. If one wants to rewrite their ‘program’ into something different from the existing data that is already there, then they need to access another dimension of perception and knowing.
Only then does the closest thing to liberation / afterlife / heaven / freedom. It’s the closest thing, because as long as we are in these bodies we are never truly free. This is what the ancients used to describe in terms of Nirvana. Nirvana is not a state of ecstasy or perpetual happiness but the breaking of the continuous wheel of karmic patterns to which Man is bound.
A human is never free from karma, but once he transcends his karma it becomes his. And it can be seen that in times when everyone blames everything outside of their lives, how bound human beings are by the chains of their past.
Karma means action.
When we say 'my life is my karma', it means 'my life is my doing'.
Whose action? My action.
Whose responsibility? My responsibility.
Any action we take, consciously or unconsciously; everything we experience and everything we observe is our responsibility. When the mind is no longer in charge of the action, only then does the person take full responsibility for his life. Only then does karma become the most dynamic way to exist. Only then does action become right action.