"Eckhart teaches us that karma is not what happens to you, but rather, how you react to what happens to you. In other words, how you deal with challenges, situations and people in your life can create more karma, if you are reactive. The arising of Presence transmutes karmic patterns."
In other news, all strands of applied philosophy are 99% stoicism.
That experience with rats and prime mazes seems interesting, but it doesn't really show anything. We can observe pretty much everything which is observable, and the extent of things that are observable is the only extent which has any sort of value to us. By definition, something not observable has no effect and is not relevant. Possibly, the things we can observe may not be the most simple structures of the universe and what we see is the result of complex processes that are simply not observable, but in that case the way we model these things doesn't matter in the least as long as it fits the observations. The only limit there could ever be would be a computational limit on the complexity of the hidden processes.
