Rebirth and the Western Buddhist - Khamkoo

54 Rebirth and the Western Buddhist
commonly known, no individual can successfully
act as though this material were not,
he explains the "objective somewhat" as "a collective
phantasy projected from the collective unconscious." 98
Now if karma produces a physical result, this would
seem to be an instance of mind-matter interaction. It
follows from Schrodinger's argument that looked at objectively,
the result must follow ordinary scientific laws.
To take an example, a man is walking through a forest
when a heavy branch falls, killing him. 99 The scientific
explanation that the branch had been gradually weakened
by being eaten by insects to the point where it
could no longer support its own weight, and therefore
had to fall, is quite true. We are taught to be content with
this answer, and accept that the man's being underneath
just at that moment is merely a "coincidence." People
brought up differently look for a different sort of explanation,
one that we would term "magical." Some would say
the man was killed by the branch because of sorcery by
an enemy, while a Tibetan lama would say it was the
man's karma. This karma, of course, does not exist objectively,
at least in relatidn to ordinary beings, so it is
useless as a scientific explanation. But supposing that the
man's consciousness did indeed (subjectively, for him)
carry a karmic imprint tending to attract such a death, we
see that there is no conflict between the scientific and
karmic explanations, and the mind-matter interaction
shows up in the objective world as a coincidence.
Likewise at conception, according to Science, the egg
carries half the mother's genes, selected at random within
each gene-pair, and each of the spermatozoa carries a
different selection of about half the father's genes, and
the egg could have been fertilised by any one of thousands
of spermatozoa, so the resulting genetic constitution
of the baby is determined by chance. As long as