Sorry ji, I must have missed this response so far. Thanks for taking the time.Sudarshang wrote: ...
Crystal,
Think of it like this - Atma is the seat of knowledge. It is the sentient being within the insentient body. Pleasure or Pain is a type of knowledge - Favorable knowledge is pleasure, unfavorable knowledge is pain. Who is the knower? The Atma. Therefore Pleasure or Pain is always to the Atma and not to the body. Same way, Atma is the decision maker, a decision that it implements using the body. Being the decision maker, if it decides right, and acts right using the body it gets punya. if it decides wrong, and acts wrong with the body, it gets papa. So the karma is attributed not to the body but to the Atma, the decision maker. Balance of papa/punya constitutes the Karmic Balance. Karmic balance decides what one is born as in next life.
I was not implying that the body has the karmic debt, but rather the mind where the knowledge, experiences, memories, pain and pleasure etc are felt! Even physical pain (diseases, etc) are *felt* at the mental level.
Mind is a functional concept and not a homogenous singleton unitary entity and some think of it as the interface between the physical and the spiritual-philosophical *entity* known as soul or perhaps a limited representation of soul.
Clinical information (including objective F-MRI observations) have indicated that patients in COMA and deep general anesthesia, unlike previous beliefs, remain aware of their surroundings and exchanges (conversations etc) in progress while the patients were clinically in coma or anaesthetized. So obviously, lights are not *out* even when they seem to be so to an observer.
Mind can be viewed as the fingers-hand of soul whereas the glove is the body, using a surgical analogy.
Regards,
Rohiniranjan