Spontaneous?

  I wonder if anyone really knows what 'spontaneous' really means. A few weeks ago, someone in my class on Buddhist foundations was giving a report about karma. He was using an example which went something like: "a boy feels pity for a homeless person. Without any prior intention or motive, he spontaneously gives money to the homeless person, and does so in secret, without anyone around him watching." The question then went, is this person generating good karma, bad karma, nor no karma whatsoever?
   One of the ideas I have read about in Buddhism is that enlightened beings act 'spontaneously' in accordance with the moment, without any premeditation on whether or not the action truly benefits themselves. According to this view, a spontaneous action is done completely based on the moment, without the prior thought of gain or loss. But in another sense, one could argue that this simply according with causes and conditions. It may be spontaneous in the above sense referred to, but it is certainly not a random act either. It responds in much the same way that a mirror reflects whatever is coming toward its surface. This is a little bit different from the common parlance, where 'spontaneous' entails just acting according to whim or fancy. In that sense, one can sometimes say that spontaneous might be acting precisely according to the moment, which entails harmonizing with all the phenomena. On the other hand, there is a popular view which suggests that spontaneity means something more random and chaotic, such as going for a drive with no purpose in mind.
    Another meaning of spontaneity I have come across before is to act without attachment to one's emotions and thoughts. Perhaps in the case of the boy above: if he did not feel compelled by his emotions to react the way he did, it might qualify as somewhat spontaneous. In other words, the more unattached I am to a particular outcome or feeling, the more range of choice I have, and there is this experience of just doing according to the moment.
   There are many times when I have felt that I have never been held back to do anything, but that there were always a bunch of thoughts which gave the illusion of barriers. When those barriers are exhausted, there is this clearing in the dense forest, and a sigh of relief: there is nothing expected of me, and nothing barred from me either. The two go together. If even for a moment I felt obliged in some way to be what wasn't inside me, then that would constitute a thought of the self, trying to make an impression on the other. But when I am finally free of having to do that, there is a wide canvas in which to act, and it is no longer driven by trying to symbolically 'act out' one's compliance or rebellion from something. It's tough to reach that clearing, but in a sense it has to happen after a period of intense concentration or focus on something, be it a discipline or a work or project of some kind. This is so because periods of absorption seem to allow the mind to go through a process of channeling desires into something meaningful in order to exhaust them: to see their finitude and their impermanent nature. Once that is really done, the mind realizes that there was nothing to be done in the first place, even though the doing was the process of learning (or unlearning) that there was 'nothing to be done'. Could this perhaps be the mode upon which one discovers spontaneity?