What might become of your reluctance to give of yourself to others if your fear of being taken advantage of was replaced with an absolute certainty that you would receive in kind and proportion to what you give no matter what other people do?
Conversely, if someone did something to cause you great pain, how might you react differently if you knew with absolute certainty that they would suffer greatly for doing so without any action being taken by anyone?
The purpose of this article is to give you a scientific basis for establishing the conviction that the amount joy or suffering we experience in our life is a direct consequence of the amount of joy or suffering that we bring to others.
Justice
The desire for justice is innate and universal. The force that gives rise to the desire for justice within us is the same force that ensures that justice will be done in the minds of those who have violated it. This force is biological. It exists within all of us – without exception - and it is absolutely undefeatable.
There is no need to inflict justice on others because they are already inflicting it on themselves. This is true even if we can’t see any evidence of it. This is true even if they are not consciously aware of the fact that they are doing so.
In this article I will demonstrate why all perceptions of injustice are misperceptions. Therefore all of the systems of coercion and punishment that we establish to constrain behavior are based on the fundamentally erroneous belief that injustice exists. It does not. Injustice is an illusion because karma is inviolable.
Here’s why …
Like all animals, we homo-sapiens are driven to pursue happiness, but the biology of the human brain is such that the happiness/unhappiness we experience ourselves varies in direct proportion to the happiness/unhappiness that we bring to others.
There is no need to inflict punishment or threaten to inflict punishment on people for acting in disharmony with their conscience. Such actions actually serve to sustain and perpetuate the disharmony. Instead, what we should do, is to help them to understand clearly why the path to happiness that they have chosen to walk is actually responsible for their unhappiness if it has lead them to intentionally bring harm to others.
This can be a difficult argument to make because the chain of cause and effect can be very difficult to see – especially for those who do not want to see it. However, understanding how the brain works to unconsciously enforce karma can help to lift the fog of confusion and replace it with the light of clear understanding that can shine the way to a brighter future for us all.
The amygdala hub
The neurological roots of the desire for happiness lie within a structure in the most evolutionarily ancient part of the brain called the amygdala hub. Inside the amygdala hub is the amygdala. You can think of it as an alarm bell. This alarm bell rings at a range of intensities. When it is not ringing at all we are completely relaxed. When it is ringing at maximum intensity we are in a state of total panic. Most of our lives are spent somewhere in between these two extreme states.
The amygdala hub is where primal impulsive fear-based decisions are made.
Evolution has naturally endowed us with a tendency to be overly fearful because being extra-cautious in a predatory environment gave our ancestors an advantage in the battle for survival. This is why our alarm bell tends to ring a lot more than we would like it to and why we often suffer from unnecessary stress. Consequently, most of the time our desire for happiness is a desire to reduce the rate of the ringing of the alarm bell.
But this is not the whole story. When the alarm bell has been silenced for an extended period of time we may suffer from boredom and desire excitement. At these times our desire for happiness is a desire to increase the rate of the ringing of the alarm bell. The enduring happiness that we desire is in reality a mind-state that achieves perfect balance. It is the perfect combination of a state of deep relaxation mixed with excitement. We are driven to pursue, attain and maintain this state of mind.
Positive psychologists call this “flow” or being “in the zone”. It is in this state of mind that we are able to utilize the full intellectual capacity of our brain. It is in this state of mind that we are most creative. It is in this state of mind that we are most alive. It is in this state of mind that we are capable of achieving greatness.
Although we are biologically driven to pursue this state of enduring joy we cannot do so when the amygdala hub is in charge of making decisions because of its overly fearful nature. Fear prevents us from achieving this state of mind. Fear prevents us from sustaining it once we have achieved it.
What is needed is a means to regulate our fears so that we are only fearful when we truly need to be.
The anterior cingulate cortex hub
The ability to self-regulate is a function of a second center of decision making called the anterior cingulate cortex hub. It is connected to the amygdala hub and serves the function of regulating it.
Every decision we make, we make twice. There is the initial fear-based decision of the amygdala hub that is made quickly and then there is the sober second-thought decision that is made in the acc hub that is made more deliberately.
A crucial point to understand is that the emotion of empathy is absolutely central to our ability to self-regulate our fears and maintain the state of enduring joy that we desire. Mirror neurons enable us to connect with others and feel as they do.
We evolved this ability because it enabled us to more accurately ascertain the true intentions of predators in our environment. Those amongst our ancestors who evolved the ability to connect more deeply and thus more correctly judge the intentions of other beings were better equipped to decide when they should stay in the safety of the trees and when they should take the risk to venture out to pursue opportunities for food or sex.
Neurologically when our empathy leads us to believe that our environment is safe the acc hub tells the amygdala hub to ease up with the alarm bell. Conversely, when our empathy leads us to believe that our initial decision to be fearful was correct, it will tell it to intensify its ringing to gear our body up for the fight or flight response.
The emotion of empathy is absolutely crucial to our ability to accurate ascertain the intentions of others, to self-regulate our destructive emotions and to achieve and maintain the state of enduring joy that we desire. Anything that we may do that hinders our ability to live our lives with an open heart – where our ability to fully connect with others in our environment is constrained – limits our ability to attain and sustain the enduring joy that we seek.
Delusion
In the pursuit of happiness we have all wired ourselves uniquely as to the things that we believe will bring us happiness or unhappiness. The stronger these neuro-associations the more these beliefs serve to guide our actions.
However, if we are honest with ourselves, and look more deeply, we will see that all of those things that we wish to obtain are merely means to enable us to achieve and maintain a deeper underlying desire - connection with others.
We are driven to connect. Above all we are driven to pursue love. That which we call “love” is in reality the experience of a state of deep empathy with other human beings in which we can feel that they care deeply about our well-being and they can feel that we care deeply about theirs.
But in our desire to pursue the things that we believe will bring us happiness we mistakenly make decisions that lead us to bring harm to others. When we do so, and we refuse to atone for our misdeeds, we purposely limit our ability to empathically connect with them or anyone who reminds us of them. The more people that we hurt, the more deeply we hurt them and the more we refuse to make amends, the more we reduce the number of people with whom we can safely connect and the darker our world becomes. The irony is that it is our desire for happiness that drives us down the path that leads us to unhappiness. But we often do not see this chain of cause and effect clearly because our attention is focused on the immediate gratification we obtain by acting in disharmony with our conscience. And because we do not clearly see the true cause of our unhappiness, we often compound our error by blaming others for it.
Neurologically, if we are in disharmony with our conscience, the acc hub sends a powerful signal to the amygdala hub to force us to experience the searing pain of guilt whenever our thoughts lead us to feel empathy for those we have harmed. There are a variety of methods that we use on ourselves to war with our conscience but they all boil down to different approaches to restrict our ability to feel empathy for those whom we have harmed so that this painful signal is not sent. In so doing we are pursuing the same behavioral pattern of seeking instant gratification that led to the pain to begin with. But these approaches do not and can never achieve the desired effect because our brain is designed to prevent them from doing so.
Karma
It has now been well established that what we call morality is but a product of the emotion of empathy. When we are empathically connected to another we feel their joy and suffering as if it were our own and thus naturally “do unto others as we would have done unto us”.
While it is now widely accepted that the golden rule has this biological origin, what has not yet been widely accepted is that its converse – the “law of reciprocity” or “karma” – does as well. When we do not “do to others as we would have done unto us”, our brain will work to ensure that we will “have done unto us as we have done unto others”.
The enforcer of karma is us. We do it to ourselves, but we do it unconsciously. Our unconscious mind knows that our happiness requires us to not bring harm to others and will work relentlessly against us if we consciously decide otherwise. Our conscience is the agent of self-sabotage. It will work to prevent us from achieving the object of our desire. If we achieve it, it will work to prevent us from enjoying it. If we enjoy it, it will work to ensure that we feel guilt for doing so.
Conscious decisions to violate our conscience to pursue happiness are made in the amygdala hub. The battle within is a battle between the more evolutionary ancient amygdala hub and the evolutionarily newer acc hub. To the extent to which the amygdala hub wins these contests all such victories are pyrrhic because the cost of winning is the loss of the ability to regulate our fear. And if we cannot regulate our fears, we cannot achieve the happiness that we seek. We are less able to accurately judge the intentions of others. Even acts of kindness can be perceived as threats. When we war with our conscience we create our own hell.
All attempts to overpower our conscience are futile because to the extent we are able to do so to achieve immediate gratification we are destroying our long-term ability to attain and maintain the enduring joy that we really desire. This is why you can be absolutely certain that those who purposely pursue a course of action which leads them to bring harm to others will suffer greatly; even if they try to hide it; even if you see no evidence of it. There is nothing that they can do to escape their fate because their brain is designed prevent all such attempts from succeeding.
This is why all desire for coercion and punishment is misguided and should be dispensed with. In their stead we should cultivate compassion for those who have caused their own suffering and help them to understand its true origins so that they can voluntarily choose to walk a different path to happiness in the future. We cannot control the actions of others nor should we desire to do so but we can, in the spirit of satyagraha, encourage them to do the right thing by offering them the gift of forgiveness.
For a more detailed description of how our brains unconsciously enforce karma, see “A proof of the inviolability of karma”: http://bit.ly/aadYZC
