Agency (Part 7 of 8)
Discernment and the Moral Ecology of Karma
Welcome back. This is part 7 in an 8-part series about our personal sense of agency. In the last part, we explored agency as a form of participation in a world that rewards us for relinquishing it. We examined how it arises within resistance, takes shape through practice, and expresses itself through attention, volition, and discernment. We saw that in every act, we plant a seed that initiates a pattern of possibilities woven into the causal web of experience. And as we practice attention and volition, we participate more consciously in choosing a way of being – in the garden of agency that we share.
So, what grows from the seeds we plant? This is where discernment comes in. If agency is our capacity to participate, discernment guides how we do it. It’s not enough to simply have agency; we must learn how to use it wisely. And how we use it matters, because every seed we plant conditions the world we inhabit next. This is the moral terrain of agency: not what we achieve, but how we engage.
This part of the essay asks: how do we know which seeds are worth planting? Which movements of attention and intention are skillful, and which are not? And what makes the distinction possible in the first place?
Let’s be clear: this is not a search for certainty, but rather a search for coherence. In this part, we’ll explore how discernment becomes a moral act: not as external decree, but as a logical and relational sensitivity to the kind of world we are shaping through every choice.
Discernment is moral because it reflects how we meet what is, and how we contribute to what becomes. It is the internal compass that turns attention into participation. And in a karmic field, where every action plants a seed, it is the quality of our discernment that determines what grows.
That’s where we begin.
Participation as Moral Act
As a brief reminder, agency expresses itself in two primary ways: attention and volition. Attention (manasikāra) is what we notice. Volition (cetanā) initiaties how we respond. These are the raw materials of moment-to-moment participation that we weave together into the fabric of what becomes. We don’t participate by controlling outcomes. We participate by showing up, with presence.
Mary Oliver once wrote, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” And in a world flooded with distraction, that devotion becomes a moral act. Because what we pay attention to shapes the world we live in. What we ignore does too.
Attention may be subtle, but it is not neutral. It carries weight. When we consistently notice beauty, or suffering, or truth, we begin to condition a world where those things matter. And when we don’t, the opposite is also true. Attention, in this way, is a vote. A vote for the reality we wish to tend.
Volition builds on the vote cast by our attention. It’s not just noticing what is, but choosing how to meet it. It’s the tilt of the will, the impulse toward response. And while we don’t control what happens, we do carry some capacity, however small, to influence how we respond. In other words, we don’t control the weather, but we can shape the climate of our minds, our relationships, and our shared world.
This is where morality begins. It’s not in abstract rules or fixed outcomes, but in the living field of attention and volition. And the more clearly we sense the weight of that participation, the more we begin to recognize: every gesture of care shapes the whole.
Objective Morality Without Decree
For much of human history, morality has been grounded in divine decree. Religious traditions offered commandments, scriptures, and teachings that pointed toward what was right, good, and true. And for many, those systems still provide moral clarity. They are rooted in the belief that morality must be commanded by something higher than us in order to hold weight.
But what about for non-theists? If morality doesn’t come from decree, does that mean it isn’t real or its purely subjective? That’s the challenge posed by secular modernity, and the fear that often accompanies it: that in the absence of a belief in a higher power, all values become arbitrary. That what we call “right” or “good” collapses into personal preference or cultural convention. That ethics become a matter of taste. And in that world, who is to say that a particular political leader is morally bankrupt or not?
I propose a different path: that objective morality is possible without external decree, and it can be understood through logical participatory discernment. This is not something that is imposed from the outside, but rather discovered through how our attention and volition shape reality. As Peter Singer, moral philosopher, animal rights advocate, and Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, put it:
“I don’t think it’s true that you need a belief in god to think that morality is objective. Just as you don’t need to believe in god to think that mathematics is objective.”
If agency is real, and discernment is how and where we direct that agency, then morality is simply the quality of our participation. And this isn’t abstract. It’s observable. Certain volitional states consistently give rise to specific effects that we can witness, experience, and feel.
Take the volitional factor of greed, for example. When we act from greed, there is a contraction – a narrowing of the field into self-interest. Relationships become transactional: trust erodes and empathy dims. Greed fragments the social and emotional fabric.
Contrasting that with non-greed factors: generosity, relinquishment, care. These qualities open rather than close. They soften boundaries, invite reciprocity, and foster connection. The energetic shape of these qualities is consistent across context.
Hatred is another example. It sharpens separation, isolates, and divides. Contrasting that with non-hatred qualities (kindness, patience, forgiveness): these create space, hold complexity, and mend.
While moral norms vary in form across cultures, the structural effects of core volitional states are reliably felt across those differences. This is because discernment is more than conceptual. It’s embodied.
To state the point more clearly, I argue that certain volitional patterns reliably incline reality in certain directions. For example, greed contracts where generosity expands. Hatred severs where compassion connects. These are not subjective projections. They are discoverable through attention, and refined through practice.
And this is where discernment matters because it allows us to notice these patterns, and see how certain states constrict or liberate the world around us. Discernment helps us sense these tendencies, and choose which ones we reinforce in the world we share. But while these moral contours can be felt, they are not always visible. And that raises a deeper challenge.
Private Morality, Shared Responsibility
Not all volitional states are easy to assess. Take, for example, the factor of ignorance. In Buddhist philosophy, ignorance (avijjā) is said to be the first link in the chain of Dependent Origination: the recursive pattern by which suffering (dukkha) arises. However, in this context, this form of “ignorance” is not willful. It is simply the state of non-awareness or insentience. The pali word avijjā literally translates to “absence of sensations.” This is the type of ignorance that we are born into, and has no volitional quality to it.
Willful ignorance, on the other hand, is a volitional act that carries weight. It is the refusal to look, learn, or engage. This kind of ignorance generates consequences that many would likely deem undesirable. Because when we avoid reality that is inconvenient, painful, or otherwise unwanted, we create harm, even if we didn’t intend those outcomes to come about.
This doesn’t mean that we are morally responsible for knowing everything. That’s not possible. However, we are responsible for how we move within our uncertainty – how we attend, intend, and care, especially when the edges of our understanding are unclear. And if we’re truly honest with ourselves, the edges of our understanding are never completely certain. The volitional factor of certainty is what gives rise to ignorance. Whereas curiosity recognizes that there is always more to learn.
Morality, in this view, becomes the discerning quality of our participation that guides our volitional agency. However, like consciousness itself, this quality is private. In other words, no one can peer inside and witness how we arrived at our choices. I am the only one that can experience and know my state of mind, and you are the only one who can know and experience your state of mind. What we mean, what we aim for, how we attend – all of these cannot be “proven.” They can only be expressed or explained. In other words, they are the fingers that point at the moon, not the moon itself.
This fact that no external system can fully access the quality of another person’s intention creates a dilemma. How do we consider responsibility and accountability within a society where the core of morality is hidden? In other words, if morality is real but internal, how do we live together in shared ethical systems?
This is where curiosity comes back into the picture. Curiosity helps us remain humble. And humility is critical here. Specifically, epistemic humility: a recognition of what can and cannot be known. We can observe someone’s actions. We can listen to their words. We can feel their impact. But we cannot directly access the volitional source from which those behaviors arose. The inner discernment that guided the choice, whether it was loving, confused, fearful, or noble, is not ours to know. In other words, we can assess impact, but we cannot fully access interiority.
So while we may judge behavior, we cannot judge being. We cannot reduce someone to the visible expression of a single moment. Their intention, attention, and volitional struggle remain invisible to everyone outside of themselves in this reality.
This invites a clear distinction between morality (the internal terrain of volition and awareness arising from the quality of our discernment) and societal responsibility or accountability (the visible consequences of our actions in a shared world). In a society, accountability must be structured around what can be experientially shared. To be clear, this doesn’t deny interiority, it simply honors the boundary between private truth and public consequence.
This is likely the point where I diverge with the majority of moral and ethical philosophers, and where I think so many confuse morality (internal) with responsibility (external). My view resists moral absolutism: the idea that fixed moral truths can be externally imposed or known apart from context. For example one of the most famous ethical puzzles is known as the trolley problem: a runaway trolley is on course to collide with and kill five people, and you have a choice to pull a lever and divert the trolley to another track where only one person will be killed. What is the correct moral decision to make? Do you divert the trolley to kill less people or do you do nothing where more people will die?
Ignoring the obvious false dichotomy here for a moment, my argument is that neither action determines morality, but rather the intention behind the action. For example, if the person who diverts the trolley does so because he/she has the intention to kill the one person on the other track, then there is a clear moral difference between that and diverting the trolley with the only intention to save the five people. In either situation, everyone has to live with the outcome of the situation. That’s where societal responsibility and accountability come in.
But if you are the one who pulled the lever (or could have but didn’t) you need to live with both the outcome and the way you showed up – the resonance of your own discernment. Morality is not a crown the world can bestow. It is a mirror that only you can face for yourself. Society can only build approximations for morality through systems that enforce or encourage responsible actions. The world holds you accountable for the effects caused by your agency. But only you can hold yourself responsible for the quality of your agency.
This means that attention, when paired with awareness, discernment, and presence can become our most valuable and moral form of agency. It informs how we shape experience, choose meaning, and meet the world with intention. And that intention matters, because every volitional act creates a ripple in the causal web of interactions that we are all part of.
Karma as the Field of Moral Participation
This is the ground of karma. Often misunderstood in popular culture, karma is not a cosmic scoreboard, nor a form of divine retribution. It’s not fate, and it’s not punishment. It’s not “what goes around comes around” as if the universe were a vending machine for justice. Karma is the participatory momentum set in motion by our volitional states – the echoes of attention, intention, and action as they move through the world.
In Buddhism, the word karma simply means “action” or “deed,” but its deeper significance lies in the intentional quality behind the action. In the Nibbedhika Sutta, the Buddha states: “It is volition, monks, that I call karma.” In simplest terms, karma is volition echoed through time.
In this light, karma isn’t stored in the universe like a metaphysical savings account. It is volition in motion. It’s the directional imprint that our attention and intention leave on the world. When repeated, these imprints shape what we feel drawn toward or away from in the next moment. It ripens dispositions and plants the seeds of possibility.
Importantly, you don’t have to believe in things like rebirth or reincarnation to understand karma. You only have to observe the pattern of your own mind. Notice what happens after a kind gesture, or a resentful one. See how those acts reverberate through your day, your mood, your relationships. Watch how certain ways of being make future moments easier, harder, lighter, or heavier.
It’s especially interesting to notice volitional moments that might appear similar from the outside, but feel very different on the inside. For example, my daughter asks me to tie her shoes on the way out the door. I bend down, tie them, and we walk to the car. But on the inside, imagine two scenarios: 1) I’m restless and frustrated, thinking about how late we are for school and what a hassle it is for me to have to tie her shoes, or 2) I’m calm and grateful for a fleeting opportunity to help her in this precious moment of her life that may never come again. Both approaches get the shoes tied and out the door. But in the first case, we may both leave the house tense and disconnected. In the second, we walk out feeling bonded and calm. And that volitional tilt sets the tone for the rest of the day. That’s a lesson the universe tries to teach me almost every school day.
This living pattern of participation and how our inner states unfold into outer consequences forms the karmic web of interactions. Our volitional acts ripple outward, merging with the volition of others, shaping the shared field we all inhabit and experience.
That’s why discernment is so important. When we act with care, we seed resonance. When we act with frustration, we seed confusion. And while consequences of karma are outside of our control, the origin of karma is not. That’s the pivot point. The moment of attention, volition, and choice – the small place where agency resides.
Karma, then, is not what happens to you, but what happens through you. Each act of volition nudges reality, ever so gently. Like compound interest, the effects may be subtle at first, but over time, they accumulate, shaping who we become and the world we share. That is the power, and the responsibility, of agency.
Cumulative Karma Over Time
Karma doesn’t just play out in isolated incidents either. Just like interest, it compounds. Not just in what we do once, but in what we do repeatedly. And those patterns condition the world we inhabit. Just as weather becomes climate, momentary volition becomes cumulative karma. And over time, that shapes everything.
If you recall, back in Part 2 and 3, we explored determinism and the Newtonian worldview: the story of causal chains, where each moment arises from the one before it. That story wasn’t false. It was just incomplete. Causes and conditions are very real. And once volition is set in motion, effects ripple outward in ways we cannot fully predict or reverse.
Sorry to break it to you, but libertarian free will is a myth. If you were hoping this series would argue otherwise, I’m afraid to disappoint. But this is not a descent back into pure determinism either, nor is it an embrace of compatibilism that rebrands powerlessness as freedom. This is a middle ground. A place where agency resides in the moment of volition, in how we meet the world, before merging into the larger momentum of the field. We don’t control what unfolds, but we do influence how we unfold with it.
Every movement of attention and intention leaves an imprint. And those imprints condition the terrain of our lives in three dimensions: inner, relational, and cultural.
Inwardly, our habits of mind create grooves. Fear, if rehearsed, becomes default. Gratitude, if practiced, becomes reflex. We slowly become the climate of our own thoughts.
Relationally, the tone of our participation creates atmosphere. A leader who acts from fear seeds distrust. A parent who acts from care fosters safety. These small moments compound with the felt resonance of presence or absence, openness or reactivity.
Culturally, what we normalize becomes the air we all breathe. Media, institutions, and shared norms shape what’s considered valuable, beautiful, true, or irrelevant. And while we rarely choose the dominant cultural climate, we always contribute to it. Our attention is not private. It is participatory. And over time, it helps condition the shared field of what seems “normal” within a culture of shifting values.
This is why cumulative karma matters. Because we are always conditioning something, whether that is in ourselves, in each other, or in the world we co-create. Even the smallest act of volitional care becomes part of a larger momentum. And so does the avoidance of care.
Yet even as we attend closely to our volition, we remain surrounded by uncertainty. There will always be forces we cannot foresee. And this brings us back to ignorance. Not volitional denial, but non-willful ignorance as the structure of time itself.
As theoretical physicist, Carlo Rovelli, writes in The Order of Time:
“The time of physics is ultimately the expression of our ignorance of the world. Time is ignorance.”
Time, he argues, is a reflection of our limited perspective, a byproduct of the fact that we are living inside a field of “not-knowing” what happens next. And that means we will never have perfect vision. We will never fully know how our choices ripple. But we don’t need to escape ignorance in order to act with wisdom. We need to acknowledge it, and then care anyway.
That is the work of discernment: learning to navigate wisely within uncertainty. The point is not to know every consequence, but to remain attuned to the quality of our participation. Because in a field of interdependence and incomplete information, agency isn’t just episodic – it’s ecological. What we do once may matter. But what we do again and again becomes the climate. The web. The dance. The garden. Pick your favorite metaphor. The point is, all of us must live within it.
The Garden We Grow Together
Personally, the garden is my favorite metaphor. Not just for its poetic flare, but because it feels practical, grounded, and real. It also captures something essential about the way we live, choose, and become. The more I reflect on agency, karma, and discernment, the more I see them as tools for tending, not control. And in that tending, what matters most isn’t speed or certainty, but care.
A garden teaches that control is not the point – care is. You can’t force a seed to sprout. You can’t rush the ripening. All you can do is prepare the soil, offer water, remove weeds, and meet what grows with presence. It’s a relationship with nature and time.
And the nature of a garden is that it takes time. You don’t plant an intention and harvest a result the next morning. The process is gradual. The soil needs to be prepared. The conditions matter. Some seeds never take root. Others grow, but only if there’s enough attention to water them, awareness to notice what’s needed, and patience to let them unfold.
This is how I’ve come to understand agency. Not as the power to dictate outcomes, but the opportunity to tend. We plant seeds every day – through intention, attention, habit, and care. They root in the soil of our reality, and they’re shaped by the climate of our moods, the weather of our relationships, and the nourishment of our presence.
And what we plant and tend to is what grows. If we plant seeds, or tend to them with reactivity, resentment, or self-interest, those are the plants that will flourish. Weeds arise from neglect, not malice, but they can still overrun what we hoped would grow. And the longer we ignore them, the more they shape the structure of our days, making it harder to see where the original intention even was.
But if we nurture qualities like patience, curiosity, and kindness, we plant something different. Something that, with repetition, begins to establish itself. Patterns of kindness, of pausing, of listening before reacting. These don’t bloom all at once. But over time, they become the climate of our inner and outer lives. They alter the texture of our participation.
This is karma as cultivation. A steady return to tending what we can, knowing that not everything will sprout the way we hoped, but that the very act of care is what defines the quality of the field. And discernment is what helps us notice the landscape and choose how to tend it wisely.
But the garden doesn’t end with us. Our actions shape not just this moment, but the moments to come. Karma is both relational and temporal, moving not just outward, but forward. And in that sense, we inherited this garden. We receive the fruits of past karmas: unconscious bias, systemic norms, cultural stories, and even epigenetic imprints passed down through generational trauma.
And yet we are also planters, shaping what future generations will live within. Our habits become someone else’s inheritance. Our attention helps define what seems normal, acceptable, or possible. This is the moral weight of participation. We plant more than we harvest. And some gardens are grown for future hands.
And this brings us to a question that sits beneath the surface of this entire exploration:
What kind of garden are we growing – in ourselves, in each other, and in the shared ground that we all walk upon?
That question isn’t rhetorical. Because we do have a choice. Not in the outcome, not in what the weather brings, not even in what others plant. But in how we meet what’s here. In what we water. In what weeds we are willing to pull. And in what we plant again and again.
And that choice matters. Because over time, it adds up. The way we meet the world doesn’t just change the next moment, it shapes the momentum of the whole. The karmic field is not built from grand gestures. It’s built from accumulated care.
So let’s not mistake moral clarity for ethical certainty. The goal is not to be right. The goal is to participate, to notice, and to shape what we can. Because when we remember the simple truth that everything is connected then every act matters.
Martin Luther King Jr. summed this up beautifully in his famous Letter from the Birmingham Jail:
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
And the inverse is also true: care offered anywhere is an invitation to healing everywhere. Even small acts, when rooted in discernment, ripple through the whole.
So we return again to the garden, and to the simplest, yet hardest questions:
What kind of garden do we want to grow?
What kind of inner climate are we conditioning?
What seeds are we watering, and which encroachments are we willing to weed?
We can’t choose every seed that gets planted. But we do choose how we meet the garden that is here. And every gesture of care becomes a part of what grows.
Practice as Participation
So where does all of this leave us?
We’ve explored agency as attention, volition, and discernment. We’ve seen how karma ripples through time, how moral clarity emerges not from certainty but from coherence, and how the garden we grow, within and around us, reflects how we tend it.
But knowing that isn’t enough. Insight might illuminate the path, but it doesn’t walk it. What we need now is practice. Because clarity, without embodiment, is just abstraction.
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the scope of this. To wonder how a single person’s discernment matters when so much lies beyond our control. But that’s the beauty of practice: it brings us back to what is within our scope of care.
We’re not being asked to fix the field. We’re simply being asked to show up for it. To return to the soil, again and again. Because while discernment may offer a compass, only practice tills the ground.
So the next question isn’t, what should I know? It’s, how will I meet what’s here?
The final part of this series won’t offer answers. It won’t resolve the mysteries of will or consciousness or karma. Because agency isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s a rhythm to be lived. And rhythm, like any embodied knowledge, isn’t grasped through theory alone. It’s learned through practice.
Practice is how we remember. How we return. It’s not about performance or perfection. It’s about participation, again and again. Always in the only moment that’s ever been available to us: this one.
In Part 8, we’ll explore what that looks like in a practical sense – both personally and relationally. We’ll explore the many ways we can show up more fully for what matters. Not to master the field, but to meet it with care.
…more on that next time.
Very interesting, clearly written, and thought provoking. It prompted me to think about the role of pre-conscious awareness and how this will influence not only what is noticed and attended to, but also the nature of the discernment and the resulting choices made. Such a huge topic. I’m looking forward to reading more about how to show up fully for what matters because, for many reasons, and even with the best will in the world, it is not always easy to show up with kindness and compassion.
🙏🙏