I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions, as I wrote this time last year.
I’ve believe — and have experienced — that once karma has been created, you cannot undo it. It has to come to fruition.
My New Year’s Day aspiration is to relate in a deeper way to my own karma so as to
In this post, I will deal with number one.
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(Prologue: I’ve got first-hand experience that a real understanding of the laws of karma can substantially change our lives for the better. I created this weblog to share information and personal experience with others. May it be of benefit!)
This post follows the one of December 11, 2011 immediately below.
In the Shambhala teachings, what are called the Four Dignities describe four stages in a process of realizing our basic goodness.
We want to live good lives. That involves making the right decisions. We ask ourselves:
“What is it that I want to do? What would be the right decision? I have the opportunity right now, what am I going to do? If I make certain decisions, I will get certain outcomes. That is the law of karma.”
Karma is the basic flow of nature, so — not to be too heavy — I think we need to really consider our actions, because we get into a lot of entanglement when we do not have this ability to be discerning, knowing what to do. We bumble into things and hope they work out. Dharma and the Shambhala teachings are saying that the first quality is Tiger — that quality of mindfulness, is meekness, not being overly arrogant. (Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche: The Four Sessions of Basic Goodness)
So we practice discernment.
Then what? Read the rest of this entry »
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(Prologue: I’ve got first-hand experience that a real understanding of the laws of karma can substantially change our lives for the better. I created this weblog to share information and personal experience with others. May it be of benefit!)
Every day I get an e-mail called Rigpa Glimpse of the Day. Up until now it has been a kind of sleepy Sunday. But today’s message woke me up because of my lifelong interest in the outer, inner and secret aspects of karma.
We must never forget that it is through our actions, words, and thoughts that we have a choice. And if we choose to do so, we can put an end to suffering and the causes of suffering, and help our true potential, our buddha nature, to awaken in us. Until this buddha nature is completely awakened and we are freed from our ignorance and merge with the deathless, enlightened mind, there can be no end to the round of life and death. So, the teachings tell us, if we do not assume the fullest possible responsibility for ourselves now in this life, our suffering will go on not only for a few lives but for thousands of lives.
It is this sobering knowledge that makes Buddhists consider that future lives are more important even than this one, because there are many more that await us in the future. This long-term vision governs how they live. They know if we were to sacrifice the whole of eternity for this life, it would be like spending our entire life savings on one drink, madly ignoring the consequences.
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(Prologue: I‘ve got first-hand experience that a real understanding of the laws of karma can substantially change our lives for the better. I created this weblog to share information and personal experience with others. May it be beneficial!)
Part of a world-wide “going green” effort is the recycling programmes that many cities have put in place.
This webpost is how we can go further by “greening” our thoughts by recycling them, so to speak.
Following on the last post (dated September 11, 2011 immediately below this one), we learned that genuine spiritual guides and teachers avoid following a thought “down the road” so to speak. They let it go as it arises.
Why do they do this?
Because thoughts lead to volitional action. Which leads to the creation of karma.
How do they do this? By many years of participating in a fitness regime for taming and training the mind — meditation practice.
Meditation practice provides instructions — labelling and letting go — whereby I can relate to thoughts and the emotions they evoke in a way that does not lead to action. (That’s why it’s said that meditation is one of the few times that we are not accumulating karma.)
But how about in everyday life? How can we recycle thoughts back into primordial energy? I’ve developed an exercise that helps me deal with the thought as soon as it arises in my everyday life. In my city our recycling programme involves three bins — green, blue and grey — for a variety of items, e.g. garbage, paper, glass, and food etc. etc. etc.
There’s now a fourth “bin.” The city didn’t provide it. I created it. It’s virtual. It’s for thoughts. As soon as I can see the thought — either as it arises, or, more likely (at my early stage of development), when it is full blown — I “put” the thought in the thought recycling bin where it is transformed back into pure energy from which it arose. You can create your own virtual thought recycling bin. Mine is just vast space, like the sky.
The idea of “recycling” thoughts follows the second law of thermodynamics. Put very simply, it says that energy (in whatever form it has taken) returns to its original state as soon as the form decays. In terms of thoughts, the energy of a thought is released when we let go of that thought. If we grasp, attach and fixate on the thought, the opposite happens. We get caught up in a karmic chain reaction. It is described here.
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(Prologue: I’ve got first-hand experience that a real understanding of the laws of karma can substantially change our lives for the better. I created this weblog to share information and personal experience with others. May it be beneficial!)
I love Vermont.
To me, it’s always been a magical place since I first went there in January 1974 to hear Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche speak on Zen and Tantra at what was then known as Tail of the Tiger land centre (now part of beautiful Karme Choling).
I travelled there again on September 02, 2011 for six days to participate in a retreat around Tibetan King Gesar of Ling lead by His Eminence Namkha Drimed Rabjam Rinpoche. On Tuesday, September 06, His Eminence gave about eight of us an interview — arranged for us by his student Gary Mass — that lasted for one hour!
We were invited to ask one question each. In this situation most of us ask questions around the dharma teachings.
This webpost is around the simple yet profound personal question asked by Shambhala Buddhist student Leslie Witt from Vermont: how do you see the world? This is what I remembered the next day of His Eminence’s answer — PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS NOT NECESSARILY WHAT HE ACTUALLY SAID.
Highly realized persons have thoughts and emotions like
everyone else. The difference is that they do not follow those thoughts. And because they don’t follow the thoughts, they do not engage in liking or aversion. So they they do not perpetuate negative karma of the three poisons.
As my weblog is around an in-depth exploration of karma, I appreciated this simple yet very profound description.
As I sat writing this post at the computer in the dining room at Karme-Choling, one of the programme participants suggested I speak to the translator, Vanessa Turner from Los Angeles, to get her recall. (Vanessa tells me that she has been speaking and translating for a number of years for her Tibetan teachers, one of whom is His Eminence, since she was 16.)
I hit the jackpot! This wonderful translator remembered what His Eminence said almost verbatim. [Please note that words in { } are mine.] Here it is, unedited so that the reader can get the full flavour of His Eminence’s answer:
I’m really just the same as you. I too have thoughts and emotions just like you do. But the difference between you guys and myself is that I have thoughts but I recognize the thoughts {as thoughts} and I don’t follow after the thoughts. Actually this is the fundamental difference bewteen ordinary people and lamas. Both of them have thoughts and emotions. The process of thoughts and emotions arising is the same for ordinary people as it is for lamas. The difference is that ordinary people follow after the thoughts and get caught up in them whereas lamas recognize the arising of the thoughts and do not follow after them. (He thinks for a moment.)
When I was young, I remember finding this uncontrived, spontaneous deep level of compassion that was like this feeling of compassion for all sentient beings that was not constructed or forced. It was like something that is always innately there.
I know all sentient beings. I know the way in which they are confused and lost in samsara {the world of confusion created by ego, our manufactured self} and when I see sentient beings lost in their confusion and out of that confusion engaging in creating more negative karma because of their attachment and aversion and ignorance, I genuinely feel just a sense of loving care for all of them. I really feel for them. It’s like they can’t help it. They’re confused. I see it. I see how they create suffering for themselves. I feel so much love and caring for them. So there is this feeling, this compassion, where it’s like I can see that the sentient beings and the nature of their confusion but I myself do not follow after that confusion. But I can see it!
And also some lamas who have really high level of realization they actually don’t see impurity anywhere at all. They don’t see impure sentient beings. They see only deities {wisdom beings}. They see only the display of the deity mandala. Everything that appears to them appears as the expression of wisdom as a display of the deity. Everything they hear (all sounds) arise to them as the sound of mantra. But to have that kind of view one would have to be really high level of realization.
However, I will say that when we are all gathered together in puja and sometime I just look out at all of you and I only see your goodness. It’s like I look at you all and I don’t see any faults in anyone. When we are in the puja together, all of you are wholly good. So maybe that is some reflection of a pure view because really don’t actually see any flaws in you when we are together in the puja. For lamas of really high realization everyone appears as the deity {wisdom being} and anyway I too have thoughts but I recognize the thought. Recognizing the thought I do not follow after it. Or become entrenched in it.
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Location: Roy Thomson Hall, Toronto, Canada
Event: State funeral for the Honourable Jack Layton, leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition
Date: Saturday, August 27, 2011
Jack was always an innovator, a creator, often ahead of his time, as the expression goes. Click here for summary of career.
But he outdoes himself on August 27, 2011 when he uses his own funeral as the setting for his last political campaign!
Let’s go back a bit.
May 02, 2011 Canadian Federal Election: Jack, 61 year-old leader of the federal New Democratic Party, had just brought his party to its highest political status in its history on the federal level: he won enough seats to become Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.
August 22, 2011 – 04h45: Jack dies from cancer. Prime Minister Stephen Harper, understanding the great affection Canadians have for Jack, regardless of their political affiliations, announces that Jack will be given a state funeral — most unusual because state funerals are given if a former prime minister or cabinet minister dies. Jack has been neither.
August 22 – 26, 2011: Tributes to Jack come from some of the many people he worked with and knew over his lifetime. The one I like is given by Robin Sears who makes a point that no one else I am hearing has made: how Jack evolved as a politician. The concepts of evolution and transformation appeal to me. And that was my experience of Jack. When I first met him in the 1980s he seemed defensive and somewhat aggressive. Now he has the stature of a bodhisattva, those who serve others out of compassion without thought of what one can get for oneself.
August 27, 2011: The day of the funeral. Only 600 members of the public were allowed into Roy Thomson Hall for this event. There are 1,700 invited guests including the Prime Minister, other elected officials including mayors and cabinet ministers etc. etc. etc. I managed to be one of the 600.
Here are a few of my off-the-cuff notes from this past week of mourning and grief:
Dear Jack,
Just a few last thoughts…….
I’ll bet you are making your journey through the after-death bardo on your bicycle! That is fitting, as you promoted the option of riding our bikes rather than riding the transit rails or driving our cars in the city of Toronto long before anyone else.
You’ll always be on my ballot whenever there’s an election.
Well done, our good and faithful servant.
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This past Thursday, my sister Stephanie Andersen came to visit Mum and I from Florida. We went out for Father’s Day brunch today at the Bloor Diner in Toronto — albeit without my late father who died on November 06, 2004.
Around 1969 Dad sold the family business that his grandfather had started several decades earlier. And at the age of 50 Dad began to sell commercial real estate.
He won numerous awards year after year as top salesman in his company. How? He told me his “secret” — he sold without selling.
The young salespeople in the company always tried to make a quick sale. I didn’t. I spent a lot of time with the clients to assess what their needs were.
It sounded very Shambhalian to me.
Mum and my sister and I clincked glasses in a toast of gratitude to Dad.
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(Prologue: I’ve got first-hand experience that a real understanding of the laws of karma can substantially change our lives for the better. I created this weblog to share information and personal experience with others. May it be of benefit!)
This weblog is dedicated to the subject of karma and its many facets and factors. Today is “Milarepa Day” in the Buddhist calendar. Milarepa, a murderer and saint is, for me, the best object lesson for karma!
When we hear the name Tibet, many people think of His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. Gentle. Compassionate. Humourous. Loving. Wise.
Milarepa, one of the greatest figures of Tibetan Buddhism, couldn’t present a better contrast to the perception we have of the Dalai Lama.
Mila was one bad dude. Got into black magic in a big way. Murdered his enemies to avenge some wrong-doing done to his family after his father had died.
But he is favourite of mine. Why? It’s really quite simple. He was a very naughty boy who went from sinner to saint. From a murderer to a magician and mystic. And did it all in one lifetime.
Milarepa’s message to me is: “I transformed a great deal of negative karma into enlightenment. So can you.” Well, it’s taking me many many lifetimes. But Mila is my inspiration.
Let’s start at the beginning of his story. Read the rest of this entry »
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It’s March 05th, the Tibetan New Year, a time for celebration within the worldwide sangha (group of practitioners).
Every year the students of the Sakyong [Earth Protector] Mipham Rinpoche gather in their respective shrinerooms to hear his address through an onlinehook-up, which includes centres and groups from six continents and over thirty countries around the world .
But this year is even more special because Rinpoche [the Precious One] has just completed a year-long retreat.
As the Sakyong enters the shrineroom in Boulder, Colorado, 8,000 students stand up in their respective shrinerooms from Argentina to the United Kingdom. The bagpipes are played. Rose petals are tossed into the air.
The Sakyong takes his seat.
He looks well. As sangha member Madeline Conacher said in an e-mail message to me “Did the Sakyong not look radiant and peaceful!”
He begins his address:
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We live in interesting times. Tunisia, and now Egypt, have overthrown their respective dictators. Natural disasters seem to occur with frightening regularity. No less than the karmic streams of these countries have been changed.
We are encouraged not to resist change by living in our cocoons and clinging to our own little lives caught in the vice of self-cherishing.
Join with others! Form communities so that we can be alone together and work for healthy changes. Just as we cannot find happiness in some external circumstance outside of ourselves, we cannot depend on others to “lead” us. We are our own leader!
Create your community.
Be good to each other.
And do not look outside yourself for the leader.
…….
…….At this time in history,
we are to take nothing personally,
least of all ourselves,
for the moment that we do,
our spiritual growth and journey come to a halt.
The time of the lone wolf is over.
Gather yourselves.
Banish the word struggle from your attitude and vocabulary.
All that we do now must be done
in a sacred manner and in celebration.
We are the ones we have been waiting for.”<source: paragraph of a speech given by a Hopi elder in Oraibi, Arizona to the Hopi Nation circa October 28, 2001>
Here are two more calls to action from The Sakyong (Earth Protector) Mipham Rinpoche:
Especially recently, we have seen a series of natural and manmade disasters. It is as if the earth is asking us to be kind to each other and to itself. Now, more than any other time in history, the fate of our own planet is in our hands. (Sakyong Mipham, Rinpoche, letter to sangha, June 28, 2010)
……….
“If we expect somebody else to create peace in the world, we’re going to be waiting for a long time. We’ll become even more angry or anxious, because our unmet expectations will bring frustration, disappointment, and inevitably, more instability. But if we can stabilize our motivation and learn to cultivate peace and compassion, our willingness to take responsibility for changing the environment will inspire many others.”
© 2005 by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, from his address to the Sit for Change Meditation Marathon 2005. This excerpt first appeared in The Shambhala Sun.
We are the one’s we’ve been waiting for. We can change the karmic stream of our planet. Indeed, we will have to. Why? Because we are beyond the proverbial Eleventh Hour.
You have been telling the people that this is the Eleventh Hour, now you must go back and tell the people that this is The Hour. <source: section of a speech given by a Hopi elder in Oraibi, Arizona to the Hopi Nation circa October 28, 2001>
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What do sneezing and unexpectedly slipping while walking on ice have in common? We’re in the NOW. No discursive thought whatsoever. No concepts. Just the NOW.
Friends who’ve been in bad car accidents tell me that “everything stopped” while the car rolled over and over. They experienced NOW, a kind of stunned constancy (term from the Ocean of Definitive Meaning).
Another term for NOW is “the fourth moment,” the other three being past, present and future.
The past is all of the things that have already happened and no longer exist. The future is all of the things that have not yet happened and don’t yet exist. The NOW is like the edge of a razor blade: so short and so sharp that there is no time for anything to exist in a substantial way. We see that there is no time, and no substance, only clarity-emptiness, the nature of mind. <source: e-mail from Shambhala Buddhist student sent March 18, 2008>
My New Year’s Resolution is to be in the NOW as much as possible. My question is: how can I do that without nearly being killed?
Here’s what happened exactly three years ago today.
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(Prologue: I’ve got first-hand experience that a real understanding of the laws of karma can substantially change our lives for the better. I created this weblog to share information and personal experience with others. May it be beneficial!)
We do not have to believe in reincarnation to benefit from this post or weblog. We only have to agree that present volitional actions have consequences in the future.
Prologue: Based on my weblog page called Actual face of karma,what would the life of someone who is the present (fictional) incarnation of Queen Tiye (mother of Akhenaten), Queen of Sparta (aka Helen of Troy), Queen Jezebel, Cleopatra, St. Teresa of Avila and Sigmund Freud actually look like? In other words, what is the fruition of the karma (past volitional actions) of this portrait gallery of six historical figures when certain causes and conditions meet and the seeds of their past virtuous and non virtuous action ripen in the present? To try to answer this question, I use diary entries like the one below.
* * * * *
I, Rainbow Desert Flower, enter these accounts of the last 40 years into my private diary. May it benefit all those who are trying to understand their own karmic package.
While it’s extremely helpful— indeed, necessary — to deconstruct the laws of karma, I started this weblog to demonstrate through real-life examples how karma actually works — manifests — in our present lives.
Here are some examples of the negative karma I had accumulated over many lifetimes through the ten unvirtuous actions that manifested in this present lifetime.
I went from
In short, I went from abusing the power I had by virtue of the extremely high positions I held in previous lifetimes to being powerless for 22 years in this lifetime.
In that sense it has been the worst of lives.
Simultaneously, while the karmic s— — t was hitting the fan in this lifetime, I met enlightened, awake spiritual guides.
Learning about, inter alia [among other things]
In that sense it has been the best of lives.
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It’s 06h15. I’m listening, as I do everyday, to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio One, and hear about the website that encourages people to sit at their computers and do nothing for two minutes. You cannot touch your mouse or keyboard. You get a Pass or Fail grade.
It is almost impossible to meet the challenge. We tend to go AWOL. Even for two minutes!
We’ve neglected mental fitness. We’ve been brought up on a diet of action, doing, going. We’ll get physically fit. But we don’t make time to practice fitness for the mind where we could actually meet our own minds directly and reclaim them.
Try the challenge! When you get a Pass grade, I’ll meet you here.
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Confined in the dark, narrow cage of our own making that we take for the whole universe, very few of us can even begin to imagine another dimension of mind. Patrul Rinpoche tells the story of an old frog who had lived all his life in a dank well. One day a frog from the sea paid him a visit.
“Where do you come from?” asked the frog in the well.
“From the great ocean,” he replied.
“How big is your ocean?”
“It’s gigantic.”
“You mean about a quarter of the size of my well here?”
“Bigger.”
“Bigger? You mean half as big?”
“No, even bigger.”
“Is it . . . as big as this well?”
“There’s no comparison.”
“That’s impossible! I’ve got to see this for myself.”
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It is now January 01, 2011. Many of us will have made or will be in the process of making New Year’s resolutions!
My New Year’s resolution is to NOT make any effort around “self-improvement.”
Why?
As long as you’re wanting to be thinner, smarter, more enlightened, less uptight, or whatever it might be , somehow you’re always going to be approaching your problem with the very same logic that created it to begin with: you’re not good enough. That’s why the habitual pattern never unwinds itself when you’re trying to improve, because you go about it in exactly the same habitual style that caused all the pain to start. (source: Pema Chodron: Start Where You Are)
I want to unwind my habitual “self,” not improve it!
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(Prologue: I’ve got first-hand experience that a real understanding of the laws of karma can substantially change our lives for the better. I created this weblog to share information and personal experience with others. May it be beneficial!)
Many of us have found the concept of “emptiness” difficult to understand, to “get a handle on,” to “come to grips with.” Not surprising, as even the concept of emptiness is empty!
Why would I want to write about it? Because it describes the true nature of our minds, of reality, of the universe. Put another way, what we think exists is just an appearance.
It’s like a firecracker. It flashes (appears) in the sky, stays for a second, and then passes away. It has no inherent existence apart from the causes and conditions that produced it. You may have heard the phrase “the world of appearances.” That is what I am referring to here. So everything that arises in our lives is actually an “appearance,” not some solid, permanent reality.
I have come to believe that without an understanding of this true nature, we cannot really live the best of lives. Why? Because we are fooled, deluded, duped. That’s what is meant by the phrase “we are fooled by our own projections.” The problem isn’t so much that we project, but that we don’t acknowledge it. Personally, I do not want to live in this state.
We experience this “emptiness” everyday: things change all the time, manufactured items like cars, a supper plate, etc. etc. fall apart. But while we understand the concept intellectually, it is emotionally difficult to accept. Why? Because our ego resists this truth.
So what? Who cares?
What possible usefulness is it to understand ideas like emptiness, appearances, the 12 factors of dependent origination, cause and effect. Read the rest of this entry »
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It’s Spring, 1976. I am the sole support mother of a beautiful four-year-old son.
The doctor says my son has to have his tonsils out.
Every night for one month I read a book to him that takes a child step-by-step through the process of what happens when the child enters the hospital for the operation. I hope that this information will calm his fears.
When my son is rolled through the hall on a gurney towards the operating room, he says to me “I not only love you. I like you.”
Even 36 years later, I am struck by the wisdom in this remark.
But what does it mean?
We talk about love a lot. But this remark suggests that somehow you might love someone, but not necessarily like them!
In order to gain some clarity, I did a contemplation exercise on loving and liking. (Instructions for how to contemplate are provided in Appendix C, Turning the Mind Into An Ally by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche)>
Here’s what arose for me: Read the rest of this entry »
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(Prologue: I’ve got first-hand experience that a real understanding of the laws of karma can substantially change our lives for the better. I created this weblog to share information and personal experience with others. May it be of benefit!)
“The power of Nature is that it has no kleshas.”
Apparently, the Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche used this quote in one of his talks and attributed it to his father, the late Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.Does anyone know where this comes from?
thanks,leila
I replied:
I don’t know where this comes from.
But I began to contemplate its meaning.
This is the best I can come up with:
Nature’s actions — wind, rain, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, sunshine etc. etc. etc. — while the result of cause and effect, aren’t “volitional” (not by choice). They are not underpinned by the kleshas (poisons).In other words, Nature’s very power lies in the fact that it is free of
volition and the kleshas that underlie volitional action.
Something else to note: Because’s Nature’s actions are not volitional, Nature does not create karma for itself!
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(Prologue: I’ve got first-hand experience that a real understanding of the laws of karma can substantially change our lives for the better. I created this weblog to share information and personal experience with others. May it be beneficial!)
My previous post detailed the incident of my hanging up on my 88-year-old mother .
Having now created negative\”bad” karma for myself by my desire to ignore and avoid, where do I go from here?
Or as Shari, who left me a comment on that webpost, said “…. I guess now the question is.. how are you going to reconcile??”
Indeed.
I have spent the 10 days following the incident sending e-mails back and forth with one of my sisters.
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(Prologue: I’ve got first-hand experience that a real understanding of the laws of karma can substantially change our lives for the better. I created this weblog to share information and personal experience with others. May it be beneficial!)
When I was about four years of age, my mother would put me in my bedroom by myself when she could not control my energy. I was, apparently, like a “bee in a bonnet.”
Funny thing, I’m still getting put in my room – with a couple of differences: I am now an adult and presumably have control over my actions. And I’m the one placing myself in that room by myself — an unintended, but very real, consequence of one volitional action.
It’s November 22’10. That date in itself should have been an early warning system to me: JFK was assassinated on that day in 1963. And my ex-husband died on that day in 2004 from cancer of the oesophagus at age 61.
On this particular November 22nd in 2010, I take my 88 year-old mother to see a gerontologist at the “Elder Clinic” at one of the hospitals in our city. She is not happy about being at the clinic. She becomes irritated, then angry, finally physically pushing me away, and continuously repeating “I don’t know why I’m here” — even though she had agreed last June to follow her best friend’s advice to get a second opinion. (Previous tests have found nothing seriously wrong. And yet, my mother doesn’t look well.) Read the rest of this entry »
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(Prologue: I’ve got first-hand experience that a real understanding of the laws of karma can substantially change our lives for the better. I created this weblog to share information and personal experience with others. May it be of benefit!)
Two young Canadian women were brutally murdered on or about November 24-25, 2009, and January 28, 2010 respectively. On February 07, 2010 Canadian Col. Russell Williams was arrested for the torture, rape and murder of the women.
The colonel pleaded guilty and avoided a trial. But that wasn’t the end of the drama. In October, 2010, the colonel went to court to hear the prosecution’s evidence against him. It was chilling.
We follow the timeline of events that starts in 2007 and ends in 2010 – two young women murdered, and 82 houses broken into and lingerie stolen and meticulously stored in the colone’s home in military duffel bags.
Among all the events, I couldn’t help noticing the shattering juxtaposition of two
of them:
We wonder “what kind of person could murder a woman under his command on a military base on Nov 24-25, 2009 and then write a letter of condolence to her parents on December 01, 2009?”
We wonder “what kind of person would rape, kill and even take pictures of the entire sadistic event, including pictures of himself in the murdered women’s lingerie? How do people come to this point?”
This is where the 12 factors that create and maintain our karma may help us gain some insight.
In previous posts we have looked at the 12 factors in terms of past lives and how they influence our present one.
In this post, we’ll look at the factors in terms of one particular action. Killing. Read the rest of this entry »
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Teachers tell us that how we perceive things is an indication of the karma we brought from our past.
Even within the human realm, all of us have our own individual karma. Human beings look much the same, but we perceive things utterly differently, and we each live in our own unique, separate, individual world. As Kalu Rinpoche says:
“If a hundred people sleep and dream, each of them will experience a different world in his dream. Everyone’s dream might be said to be true, but it would be meaningless to ascertain that only one person’s dream was the true world and all others were fallacies. There is truth for each perceiver according to the karmic patterns conditioning his perceptions.” (italics mine) (source: Rigpa Glimpse of the Day, April 16, 2011)
I’d like to tweek this slightly to express an insight I’ve had over the years that keeps returning to me: perception is karma! The fact that I perceive something in the way I perceive it is my karma.
The universe that we inhabit and our shared perception of it are the results of a common karma. ~ HH XIV Dalai Lama
Example: If I perceive some situation to be an obstacle to what I want, that perception is my karma.
“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” – Shakespeare
Another way to put this? We are fooled by our own projections into thinking that what we perceive is solidly “real.”
Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche – re dreaming together = reality: perhaps dreaming together is what we all agree to call reality! (Twitter msg. Aug 15’10)
And:
“It was a shared dream we agreed to call Reality.” <source: from the preface of the play called “Doubt” by John Patrick Shanley; now, a movie starring Meryl Street and Philip Seymour Hoffman>
The mantra of some politicians is “Perception is reality.” In other words, if they can get us to perceive an issue in a certain way, that becomes our reality. And if we take the next step and cling\get attached to this perception, it then becomes our karma.
That’s why it is said “change your mind and you change your karma.”
What has been described above is what we might call the profound level of the understanding of karma. If we can attain this profound understanding, then we can cut through our karma and be liberated from it.
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Even if you do not believe in reincarnation, live as if you do!
Why?
Your perspective gets much larger. More spacious. Less crowded. It’s easier to sort out what is important and what can wait.
On a light note, there’s also what I call the “just-in-case” principle: live as if you believe, just in case you find out that it is true when you die…..
My son pointed out some specifics of the benefits of acting as if we believe in reincarnation:
Post Script: you might find a transcript of Suzuki Roshi’s comments interesting – please click here and scroll about half-way down the page.
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A woman dreams every night that she is being chased through an old haunted house by a huge, hideous monster. Night after night, it endlessly chases her, coming so close that she feels its icy breath on the nape of her neck.Then one night, though she runs madly, the monster corners the terrified woman. Just as it reaches out to tear her apart, she turns around, finds her voice and screams, “What are you? Why do you chase me? What will you do to me?”
At that, the monster stops, straightens up, and with a puzzled expression, shrugs and says, “How should I know? It’s your dream.” <source: click here>
Apparently, our waking life is the same as a dream……
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We live in the mundane world, the relative world, the world of phenomena.
We do not live on the ultimate plane.
Nonetheless, we can make use of the ultimate plane in problem-solving.
How? Read the rest of this entry »
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Whenever I write about kindness, generosity, compassion etc., someone will ask me “Before we help someone, shouldn’t we be asking ourselves if the person deserves\is worthy of our help, generosity and kindness”?
Here’s what the Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche (SMR) tells his students in response to the view — (that our help should be conditional) that underlies that question:
Especially I think these days it is a sense very much of materialistic culture where everything is appealing to our sense of satisfaction and us wanting. And often when we need to give we become uncomfortable. We might actually feel like whoever we’re giving to is not worthy….. Being kind to another person doesn’t necessarily mean, or be determined by, the action of the other person. It’s just that kindness is appropriate. In fact, the more the other person is suffering or irritating, in a sense, the more kind and compassionate we should be. <source: from Seminary at Shambhala Mountain Centre, Colorado, July 17, 2010>
In short, while we usually practice conditional (“what-can-I-get-out-of-this”) kindness, we can now practice unconditional kindness. And while we might feel uncomfortable at first, we get to like it!
The benefits of practicing unconditional generosity:
There is no better reality than the one we live in – where a good heart can be realized. – Khyentse Yangsi Rinpoche
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The karmic system, comprised of causes, conditions, circumstances and effects, is, for me, the most definitive proof of the teaching that we are fooled by our own projections.
In other words, we create our own reality. And from that flows what we call our karma.
How?
By concretizing our thoughts, emotions, values, and beliefs. We make them solid — and call it reality!
And when something happens — pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral — to us in our lives, we again call it reality! “That’s life,” we’ll say.
But it is just our own projections, our own storyline, coming back to us. These projections are in fact the karma produced by our creating, and then believing in, those projections.
In short, the whole karmic system of causes, conditions, circumstances and effects is manufactured.
The way to liberate ourselves from the “reality” we have created for ourselves? Meditation practice. Only this practice allows us to work with our own minds to let go of the fixation on our thoughts, emotions, values and beliefs and experience freshness.
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On June 28, 2010, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche addressed the Shambhala Buddhist Community on the disasters that the world has been recently experiencing. Here is part of the address. The highlighting and images are mine. The terms “warriors” or “warriorship” refer to courage, not aggression.
bird covered in oil from BP oil spill 2010
…….This has been a powerful and meaningful time. More than ever, I feel
how fortunate we are to have these teachings. Especially recently, we have seen a series of natural and manmade disasters. It is as if the earth is asking us to be kind to each other and to itself. Now, more than any other time in history, the fate of our own planet is in our hands. Read the rest of this entry »
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When I wake up, I often experience depression. It’s different from chronic depression or even “daily-variety” depression.
Why?
I have been sleeping.
So?
My defences are down. It’s not so easy to get back into my comfort zone. Ego is threatened.
Why?
Because it’s about to come face-to-face with the truth, namely, that it is not solid and has no permanent self-existence that is independent from the causes and conditions of daily life.
I’ve found an antidote!
When I wake up and am experiencing depression, I remind myself to call it “discomfort” rather than “depression.”
This is not some word game. It believe the word “discomfort” is more accurate than “depression.”
After applying the label “discomfort,” I then do a very short exercise to connect in with the energy of awakened mind and set my intention for the day.
We can appreciate depression as being like a wobbly staircase. When you put your foot on the first step, you wonder whether it’s going to hold you. You might fall. But as you take further steps, you realize that it’s going to carry you upstairs.
We learn to reject the terror of morning depression and to step into morning basic goodness, right on the spot.
From Ocean of Dharma: The Everyday Wisdom of Chogyam Trungpa. # 77.
Originally condensed from Great Eastern Sun: The Wisdom of Shambhala, pages 30-31.
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How often have we heard “It’s the thought that counts”?
For example, if we couldn’t get someone the expensive gift that we would like to have given them, we can comfort ourselves with the belief that “it’s the thought that counts!”
That’s the use of the word “thought “as in “intention.”
But believing this phrase It’s the thought that counts is also how we can get ourselves into trouble.
If you have no interest in a thought, it has no power.
You oxygenate them with your beliefs and interests – Mooji
How? Read the rest of this entry »
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We shall fight on the beaches – <source: Sir Winston Churchill>
When we talk about the fear of death, I believe that it is really ego’s fear of its own destruction.
Ego struggles to maintain its solidity. But it is a battle that it can never win because it fights to maintain a solidity that is illusory.
Whenever there is any threat that might expose the shifting sands that underly ego, this ego tries to secure a “beach-head” — like the beach-heads at beaches code-named Juno, Omaha, Sword and Gold, in Normandy, France on D-Day, June 06, 1944.
We might habitually drink alcohol, take drugs, eat, stop eating, call friends, ignore friends, sleep, play sports, have sex, manifest self- righteous anger etc. etc. — anything to restore a feeling of comfort with who we think we are.
These habitual patterns contribute to both creating and maintaining our karma. Sometimes this produces negative effects, as described in previous posts, namely, Deconstructing The Karma of Alleged Killer….; and I’m-just-a-link-in-your-chain.
On “D-Day” — which stands for The unnamed day on which an operation or offensive is to be launched — the terrified teenage warriors provided target practice for Nazi guns perched on the cliffs high above the beaches on which the soldiers landed.
We shall never surrender <source: Sir Winston Churchill>
I noted above that ego tries to secure a beach-head like those beach-heads on D-Day.
But that’s where the similarity ends. For on June 06, 1944, these warriors, with invincible courage, set aside ego and surrendered to big mind. They sacrificed small, self-centred, “me first” mind on the altar of basic goodness.
I cannot think of a greater tribute to those of you, “dead” or “alive,” who fought there, to say, with heartfelt gratitude that, despite being on what amounted to a suicide mission, you established a beach-head — both literally and spiritually — from which to conquer hatred in all its forms.
Wherever you are now, I thank you.
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What does it mean to say “change your mind and you can change your karma?”
What creates karma? Volitional action.
What underlies volitional action? Afflictive emotions, poisons (known as the root kleshas). These poisons — passion, aggression and ignorance — are based on ego. They are what ego feeds on.
These three root kleshas are the basic fuel for the karmic
chain reaction. <source: page 3 of syllabus for course on Karma and the Twelve Nidanas>
So if we can refrain from acting on these poisons, then we start to cut the chain reaction spun out by the ego-based mind that both creates and maintains our karmic stream.
For more on this topic, please click here.
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It’s winter, 1984, Pennsylvannia. I’m waiting to enter the shrine room for another day of eight-hour practice.
I have some kind of flash about the nature of karma: my mind seems to click into a sequence of stages that I can only describe as “going back and back,” until I get to some kind of root, where I realize that karma is nothing but our own mind.
Person X commits an action.
Person Y has one interpretation.
Person Z has another interpretation.
Why? Because what we perceive is a function of our own personal karma.
So karmic consequences are in fact a product of our own mind. It’s not some
objective karmic swat team that delivers our karma to us! It’s us.
Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think. ~ Buddha
That’s why it is said that if you change your mind, you’ll change your karma (karmic stream, or some variation on that message, to be more precise.
To change your life [karma, karmic stream], change your attitude [mind].
<source: Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, Contemplation for September 03,
2008>
Update: If karma is nothing but our own mind, then what does that tell us about those tables of consequences for virtuous and non virtuous action
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Ten seems to be a power number.
In the post called The Power of Ten: Part One, we saw, in precise terms, what consequences arise for us if we engage in any of the ten non virtuous action.
On the other side of the coin, there are ten virtuous actions that will create positive karma (consequences) for ourselves that will ripen in the future.
From the buddhist point of view, gewa, or virtue, is connected with the
strength of the mind as opposed to being moralistic. The word virtue
comes from the Latin root virus, which means “strength” or “bravery.”
<source: Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche: Taming the Mind and Walking the Bodhisattva Path, p. 69>
Here is the chart of the ten virtuous volitional actions. We noted in a previous post that the ten non virtuous actions have self absorption in common. By contrast, the ten virtuous actions all arise from thinking of others <source: teacher Jay Lippman, Talk 5 of the weekend seminar on Karma, March 13-14, 2010, Toronto, Canada>. Read the rest of this entry »
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(Prologue: A deep understanding of the laws of karma can substantially change our lives for the better. My life is proof of that! I created this weblog to share information and personal experience with others. May it be of benefit!)
In Tibet we say: “Negative action has one good quality: it can be purified.” So there is always hope. Even murderers and the most hardened criminals can change and overcome the conditioning that led them to their crimes. Our present condition, if we use it skillfully and with wisdom, can be an inspriation to free ourselves from the bondage of suffering. <source: Sogyal Rinpoche from Glimpse of the Day>
You’ve just done something you wish you hadn’t. Perhaps it caused suffering to someone. We know that the seed we’ve just planted will ripen at some point in the future.
Is there anything we can do to lessen the future, negative karmic impact on us?
Fortunately, yes.
The antidotes to future negative consequences are at the heart-level — nurturing of compassion and purification….. an appropriate topic for a Mother’s Day
post.
There are probably many antidotes. Here are a few: Read the rest of this entry »
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We do not have to believe in reincarnation to benefit from this post or weblog. We only have to agree that present volitional actions have consequences in the future. What we call our past history was once the future that was caused by previous “present” volitional actions.
Prologue: Based on my weblog page called Actual face of karma,what would the life of someone who is the present (fictional) incarnation of Queen Tiye (mother of Akhenaten), Queen of Sparta (aka Helen of Troy), Queen Jezebel, Cleopatra, St. Teresa of Avila and Sigmund Freud actually look like? In other words, what is the fruition of the karma (past volitional actions) of this portrait gallery of six historical figures when certain causes and conditions meet and the seeds of their past virtuous and non virtuous action ripen in the present? To try to answer this question, I use diary entries like the one below.
* * * * *
I, Rainbow Desert Flower, enter this into my private diary on the 25th day of the month of November in the year 1975 CE. May it benefit all those who are trying to understand their own karmic package.
In Part One of this series, we see how our actions are tied to certain results.
Today, I will demonstrate this link between past actions and future consequences by reviewing some real-life examples that involve Freud, Cleopatra and Helen of Troy. Read the rest of this entry »
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If I make certain decisions, I will get certain outcomes. That is the law of karma — the basic flow of nature. <source: Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche – The Four Sessions of Basic Goodness and here.>
In the post of March 28, 2010 we heard the story of Sariputra, the monk, who roared with laughter. We saw that once the consequences from our past volitional actions ripen,
we cannot change them. So it would be a good idea to get familiar with the
10 non virtuous actions and the karma accumulated from having engaged in them — especially as one of those non virtuous actions is not understanding how karma works! Yikes!
As Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche puts it, karma is tit for tat. <source: description of One of the Four Reminders: Karma, its cause and effect. For full quote, please click
here.>
Here is the chart of the 10 negative consequences that arise from ten past volitional actions. The one thing they all have in common is that they spring from self-absorption <source: teacher Jay Lippman, Talk 5 of weekend seminar in Toronto, Canada on Karma, March 13-14, 2010, Toronto, Canada>:
| RESULTS OF PAST NON VIRTUOUS ACTIONS |
||
| ACT IN PAST |
RESULT IN PRESENT |
ENVIRONMENT |
| Killing | Short life | Little vitality |
| Stealing | Poverty | Meager harvests; hurricanes etc |
| Sexual misconduct | Unfaithful spouse | Unclean |
| Lying | Slandered – heap blame on you; deceived | Bad odor |
| Divisive talk | Arguments; fighting; friends untrustworthy | Difficult place |
| Malicious talk | Criticized | Difficult place |
| Empty talk | People won’t listen to you; lack self confidence | Barren place |
| Greedy thoughts | Great attachments; never feel satisfied | Worse conditions |
| Malice | Great aggression; avoid what is beneficial | Wars, diseases, etc. |
| Wrong view (i.e. don’t understand how karma works) | Stupidity | No help; best sources of health dry up for you; everything you do turns to dust |
In a future post, I will demonstrate the information in the chart by using real examples from real lives.
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Thinking I have problems.
Thinking I have.
Thinking I.
Thinking.
There can be many meanings for this verse.
Here’s one:
If we follow thoughts back, we can see that they stem from an embedded karmic situation that has gone on for a very long time. <source: Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche)
The point of the practice is to stop being the person who has problems, and instead to abide fully in the nature where there are neither problems nor a separate individual to struggle with them. <source: Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche>
It is often thought that the buddha’s doctrine teaches us that suffering will disappear if one has meditated long enough, or if one sees everything differently. It is not that at all. Suffering isn’t going to go away; the one who suffers is going to go away.” < source: Ayya Khema: When the Iron Eagle Flies>
Leave the mind in its natural, undisturbed state. Don’t follow thoughts of “This is a problem, that is a problem!” Without labeling difficulties as problems, leave your mind in its natural state. In this way, you will stop seeing miserable conditions as problems.” <source: Lama Zopa Rinpoche: Transforming Problems into Happiness.>
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(Prologue: I’ve got first-hand experience that a real understanding of the laws of karma can substantially change our lives for the better. I created this weblog to share information and personal experience with others. May it be of benefit!)
In the March 21, 2010 post, we discussed what we can do once the consequences of our previous actions ripen.
Unlike Erica in the popular Canadian TV show “Being Erica,” once the seeds from past volitional actions have ripened, we cannot go back and change the consequences.
The only choice we have at this point is how to relate to these consequences. Are we going to dwell in anger, bitterness, resentment if we see the consequences as negative? Or gloat, bask in ego-pride because we see the consequences as positive?
Many of us think of Cinderella as a “fairy tale.” But I like to think of it like this: while we may not have a fairy godmother upon which to call, if we relate to the obstalces in our lives as teachers rather than demons, something magical happens. Just as Cinderella’s fairy godmother produced a beautiful ball gown for Cinderella to wear to the royal ball, and turns a pumpkin into a magnificent coach, and transformed weak, tiny mice into swift steeds, our inner splendour can be released.
When we meet obstacles (that which prevent us from fulfilling our expectations or desires), we often look around for someone or something to blame. Or we may withdraw, or try to somehow seduce the obstacle. These responses keep us imprisoned in our habitual patterns and create further obstacles.
A few years ago, I started to save some of the quotations from daily e-mails I receive from Rigpa Glimpse of the Day to which I can refer when I need help to turn ugly rags of a mentality of poverty into ball gowns, to turn a feeling of being stalled into a handsome vehicle to take me somewhere, or to turn a feeling of powerlessness into a way to energize that handsome vehicle.
Here is my favourite:
Pain, grief, loss, and ceaseless frustration of every kind are there for a very real and dramatic purpose: to wake us up, to enable, almost to force us to break out of the cycle of samsara and so release our imprisoned splendor. <source: October 24, 2004>
This next is a rather graphic description of an enlightened approach to the obstacles in our lives: Read the rest of this entry »
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The men I love always seem to die at 19h00.
The common cold had turned into pnuemonia and my beloved grandfather lay dying. I was in university at the time. But my time was devoted to my grandfather. Not my classes. I was getting ready to go to the hospital. It was 19h00. The telephone rings. My grandfather has just died. And I hadn’t gone to visit him that day….
Today is Sunday, April 04, 2010. But I am remembering when it was April 04, 1987,
It’s 19h00. We are meditating in the shrine room.
The telephone rings. We have been dreading this call from Halifax, Nova Scotia. It means that our beloved spiritual guide Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, crazy wisdom master, has died.
I was inconsolable. I could not stop crying.
It didn’t take long for the rest of the world to pay tribute to this great mahasidda (teacher who has great spiritual abilities.)
Here’s an example from one of Canada’s major newspapers, The Globe and Mail, April 06, 1987: Read the rest of this entry »
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Doesn’t every good story start with “Once upon a time……..”
Well then, once upon a time, Sariputra, a highly-realized student of Sakyamuni Buddha’s, is travelling with some of his (Sariputra’s) students when they come across a family who has just sat down to supper on the lawn. The supper table sits between a pond and the house.
The fish that had been swimming in the pond has just been caught by the father and is now being eaten by the family for supper. The father, sitting at the head of the table, has his baby son on his knee. As soon as the father finishes eating the fish, the family dog runs up to the table, grabs the fish bones and begins to eat them.
The father is very angry. He beats the dog.
Sariputra laughs. His students ask him “What’s so funny? What do you see that we don’t see?”
Sariputra explains.
- In a past life the father thought that is wife was cheating with on him with the neighbour. So he killed the neighbour.
- The father’s parents — the grandparents of the father’s children — are deceased. But while alive, the grandmother was a real homebody, very attached to her home, her children, and everything connected with her home. The grandfather loved fishing.
- In this present lifetime, the grandfather is now the fish who has just
been caught and eaten by his son.- The grandmother has now been reborn as the family dog!
- So the grandmother (now a dog) is now eating the grandfather (the fish) and she is also being beaten by her son in this lifetime.
This story expresses the reality of suffering. It demonstrates how the attachments of a previous life are now expressed in the circumstances of the present lifetime.
Source: material based on weekend seminar on karma by teacher Jay Lippman.
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Unlike Erica in the popular Canadian TV show “Being Erica,” once the seeds from past volitional actions have ripened, we cannot go back and change the consequences.
Our past lives karma might be determined but in this life we should always try to remedy it, make efforts to make it workable.” <source: “His Eminence Namkha Drimed Rinpoche, January, 2011 in reply to a question that I sent to him.>
The only choice we have at this point is how to relate to these consequences. Are we going to dwell in anger, bitterness, resentment if we see the consequences as negative? Or gloat, bask in ego-pride because we see the consequences as positive?
Byron Katie’s book Loving What Is nudges me off my psychological default position (ego) and helps me to respond to consequences —that I myself have brought about — in a much more spacious, graceful and positive way.
Here’s a book review: Read the rest of this entry »
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I’m on my way to meet a friend at a restaurant. It’s raining. So I take my umbrella along with me in the car. We meet. Eat. And leave. I then discover that I do not have my umbrella. Return to restaurant. Return to the table at which I was sitting. No umbrella there. Ask the hostess whether anyone turned in a black umbrella. She checks. No.
I demand to speak to the manager. In harsh language, I tell the manager that the restaurant is bad news. In fact, maybe one of the staff stole my umbrella.
When I get home, I’m still fuming.
(source: modified version of original by teacher Jay Lippman)
What just happened?
In the next scenario, the situation is the same — someone has stolen my umbrealla — but I respond differently:
What’s the difference between these two sets of responses? Read the rest of this entry »
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(Prologue: I’ve got first-hand experience that a real understanding of the laws of karma can substantially change our lives for the better. I created this weblog to share information and personal experience with others. May it be of benefit!)
On subway cars in my city, there’s a sign on the door saying “Mind the Gap.” Love it! I need to be constantly reminded to let go of all the subconscious gossip and discursive thought going on in my head and just mind the gap.
The gap to which the transit company is referring is that gap between the platform and the subway car.
The gap to which meditation instructors refer is that between one thought\emotion and the next. That’s where primordial awareness and intelligence lie. That’s where the unchanging essence that underlies all changing things is. This unchanging essence is sometimes described as being as vast as the sky where “nothing but everything arises from it.” The spaciousness that lies beyond the claustrophobia of our conventional minds. Beyond judgment, contrivance, change, accepting and rejecting. Just beyond….
I know from personal experience how, in a nano second, I get caught up in thoughts\emotions and how easily I get “hooked” if one of my painful “buttons” is pushed. e.g. if someone is extremely aggressive towards me. One of my spiritual guides used the example of walking along the street and a stranger looks at you and shouts “F — — K YOU!” Or my child does something that really upsets me. What’s my usual reaction? How can I avoid going on automatic pilot? Read the rest of this entry »
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This weblog is dedicated to the subject of karma and its many facets and factors.Today I write about Milarepa, a murderer and saint, who is, for me, the best object lesson for karma!
When we hear the name Tibet, many people think of His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. Gentle. Compassionate. Humourous. Loving. Wise.
Milarepa, one of the greatest figures of Tibetan Buddhism, couldn’t present a better contrast to the perception we have of the Dalai Lama.
I mean, Mila was one bad dude. Got into black magic in a big way. Murdered his enemies to avenge some wrong-doing done to his family after his father had died.
But he is favourite of mine. Why? It’s really quite simple. He was a very naughty boy who went from sinner to saint. From a murderer to a magician and mystic. And did it all in one lifetime.
Milarepa’s message to me is: “I transformed a great deal of negative karma into enlightenment. So can you.” Well, it’s taking me many many lifetimes. But Mila is my inspiration.
Let’s start at the beginning of his story. Read the rest of this entry »
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We do not have to believe in reincarnation to benefit from this post or weblog. We only have to agree that present volitional actions have effects in the future. What we call our past history was once the future that was caused by previous “present” volitional actions.
Prologue: We are told that karma is carried from one lifetime to another and from one situation to another in this present lifetime. It’s much like passing the torch in a relay race. But what does karma actually look like “on the ground” in our daily lives? Put another way, what are the consequences of our past volitional actions when certain causes and conditions meet and certain seeds ripen in the present?
Based on my weblog page called Actual face of karma,what would the life of someone who is the present (fictional) incarnation of Queen Tiye (mother of Akhenaten), Queen of Sparta (aka Helen of Troy), Queen Jezebel, Cleopatra, St. Teresa of Avila and Sigmund Freud actually look like? In other words, what is the fruition of the karma (past volitional actions) of this portrait gallery of six historical figures in areas like money, sex, friendships, career, family etc.? To try to answer this question, I use diary entries like the one below.
* * * * *
I, Rainbow Desert Flower, enter this into my private diary on the 05 th day of the month of December in the year 1970 CE. May it benefit all those who are trying to understand their own karmic package.
Over the last few years, there have been reports about the possible reasons that King Tutankhamun died at the age of 19. The latest was this past Tuedsay, February 16’10, one of which is entitled King Tut Mysteries Solved: Was Disabled, Malarial, and Inbred. It says that the young pharoah died of malaria and mentions that his father and mother were brother and sister. The diary entry below tells the real story…..
I am a slave in the court of Tutankhamun. Tumult in Egypt. Akenaten has disappeared. Tutankhaten (later changed to Tutankhamun to appease the priests of the old school), a physically disabled lad of nine or ten, came to the throne in 1333 B.C. His uncle, the High Priest Ay, is the power behind the throne and is plotting to have his nephew Tutankhamun murdered so he, Ay, could ascend the throne.
It happened this way: Read the rest of this entry »
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(Prologue: I’ve got first-hand experience that a real understanding of the laws of karma can substantially change our lives for the better. I created this weblog to share information and personal experience with others. May it be of benefit!)
For me, it’s a delicious juxtaposition when Valentine’s Day + the Tibetan New Year fall on the same day as they have this year on February 14, 2010.
What follows are my notes of Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche’s address to his international Shambhala Buddhist sangha at 13h00 EST today.
Let me stress that this is merely what I heard — not necessarily an absolutely precise transcription of what was said. But I believe it’s close enough to share its inspiring message.
The words in { } are my interpretation only. Words in ( ) are from Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the Sakyong’s father.
The complete address can be found here.
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The telephone rang at 06h00 on February 5, 2010! I’m an early bird. But not that early!
Ferhan, a former workplace colleague, apologized for calling so early. And then got down to business:
“I feel extremely negative lately,” she said. “I don’t understand what’s happening. There seems to be a lot of discord around, my mind seems even more discursive than usual. I feel dragged down by heavy emotions. Like they’re almost taking me over.”
“Donovan’s Season of the Witch is upon us,” I replied.”
“What? What witch?” she said.
“Oh yes I forgot. You would have been in diapers when that song was popular. Well, the ‘witch’ in this case is called Mamo.”
“Specifically,” I continued, “it’s the Dön [pronounced "dun"] Season. From February third to the twelfth. A lot of negativity built up over the past year gathers together now. Maybe you’re picking up on that.”
She asked if I could send her an e-mail with more explanation.
Dear Ferhan,
The Dön (obstacles) Season comes at the end of the Tibetan year, which changes every year, unlike the Western New Year, which always takes place on January 01.
Here’s a sort of “nutshell” quotation from Harald Dienes, Blue Lapis Clinic:
Accumulated negative karma tends to ripen towards the end of the lunar year. It is a time when we are more susceptible to seemingly external influences such as distractions, illness and collective upheavals. According to tradition this is a time when we allow for closure of the expiring year and do not embark on any new projects…..
The Tibetan New Year is sometimes in January, sometimes in February or March. This year it is February 14, 2010. Valentines Day! So, before this date, negativity is heightened for about two weeks.
Because of our lack of paying attention to the conditions of our life, obstacles sneak in, says Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche.
Here’s an analogy: You’re a knitter. If you drop a stitch and don’t notice it, just keep knitting, then drop another stitch and on and on in this way, when you have the finished product, you’ll notice the holes. So you have to pay attention. A line in Donovan’s song Season of the Witch puts it this way:
You’ve got to pick up every stitch.
Now for the good news!
…..what is it we can do as antidote for obstacles?….engaging in practice …… restarting and rekindling our ….. mind of enlightenment. Loving kindness and compassion………
- We can work with obstacles, understand them. Then they can help us to become more aware of what is happening moment-to-moment as much as we can every day of the year; become appreciative of the life force.
- We can slow down right now, reflect on what’s happening; a time to amend relationships and friendships, quarrels.
- This is the time to “hold your seat” and just be aware of the negativity that arises, rather than indulge in it. If we indulge then we have to be aware of that also. Awareness is the antidote.
<Source: Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche: The Dön Season; my unedited transcription of an online talk in real time; January 27, 2008; Halifax, Canada>
FYI…Buddhists, besides practicing mindfulness and awareness of situations, also practice something called The Mamo Chants to pacify the turmoil of the Mamos.
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Humtpy Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
All the king’s horses, and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
I’ve had lots of experiencing falling off the wall.
In the context of this post, Humpty Dumpty refers to our manufactured self (ego). It’s not a stable structure because none of the “parts” exist in any solid, permanent way independent from the causes and conditions — that we call “our life” — which themselves are constantly changing and shifting.
I spent a lot of time in a never-ending cycle that looks like this:
Then the two stages of this cycle would start again.
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If you don’t know it’s a thought it becomes your reality. <Anon>
There seems to be as many “causes” for depression as there are people who experience it.
Having suffered from chronic depression in the past, I finally came to a stunning realization. None of the above cause depression. It’s the way I relate to what is happening, not what happens in the world “outside” myself, that causes depression.
“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” – Shakespeare
and
We don’t attach to things; we attach to our stories about them - Byron Katie, author of Loving What Is
In other words, ego is the basic cause of depression, whether chronic or otherwise!
Put very simply, habitual patterns arise from grasping at a manufactured self, ego, that doesn’t actually exist.
Supporting this habitual grasping is an ego-mind produces thoughts, discursive chit-chat and subconscious gossip and afflictive emotions of of all kinds based on its original mistake: the creation of a Self. And then, by extension, the Other. And we believe it. That’s the problem.
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Lifetimes of ignorance have brought us to identify the whole of our being with ego. Its greatest triumph is to inveigle us into believing its best interests are our best interests, and even into identifying our very survival with its own. This is a savage irony, considering that ego and its grasping are at the root of all our suffering.
Yet, ego is so terribly convincing, and we have been its dupe for so long, that the thought that we might ever become egoless terrifies us. To be egoless, ego whispers to us, is to lose all the rich romance of being human, to be reduced to a colorless robot or a brain-dead vegetable. (source: Rigpa Glimpse of the Day, March 16, 2011)
The “show trial of the ages” has been a long one. As the spectators expected, Ego put up a spirited and clever defence. As one media headline put it, “Ego unmasked as manufactured self – trying to pass itself off as something it isn’t.”
Now the jury trooped back into the courtroom.
Have you reached a verdict, intoned the judge?
Yes Your Honour, replied the foreperson.
Read the charge, says the judge.
Ego is charged with masquerading as something it is not.
It is charged with vainly struggling to prove something unproveable, i.e. that it “exists.” To quote Byron Katie “The ego is terrified of the truth. And the truth is that ego doesn’t exist.”
Ego is further charged with duping human beings into believing a huge lie, namely, that it is real, solid and permanent, when in fact it is manufactured, like a car or a toy. The bureaucracy it has set up to protect its interests surpasses that of the largest international corporations.
Ego has misled us! Thus, Ego wastes vast amounts of time that could be put to better use, that of waking up from its delusion. As the expression goes, “Get a life, Ego” instead of wasting ours!
How do you find the defendant? Guilt or not guilty?
We find the defendant guilty as charged.
The courtroom erupted. The judge bangs her gavel. Silence.
The foreman continues:
Because of this vain struggle to prove that it exists, and the suffering that struggle produces, Ego is charged with the following counts:
- Count One: being self-absorbed to the extent that it prevents us from going beyond neuroses and becoming fully human – We find the defendant guilty as charged;
- Count Two: obesity from its insatiable hunger to convince us of its own importance – We find the defendant guilty as charged;
- Count Three: dabbling constantly in poisons. Poisons cause suffering. They sometimes kill – We find the defendant guilty as charged;
- Count Four: believing itself to be the centre of everything, just like the Middle Ages mistakenly thought the earth, not the sun, was the centre of our galaxy. Because of you, Galileo was thrown in jail – We find the defendant guilty as charged;
- Count Five: creating barriers between people by setting up “self” and “other.” Therefore, there is discord, suffering, war, hunger and poverty. Even the “happiness” we experience is just another form of suffering, because it is fleeting and based on illusion. We quote the Dalai Lama on this topic: Many problems due to demarcation of “we” and “they.” Shortsighted. Narrow minded.”
- a by-product of this need to cut up humanity into “self’ and “other” is Ego’s ingrained tendency to engage in any action that will prove it is “better” than others by putting others down;
- Ego encourages us to compare ourselves to others;
- Ego depends on “external” conditions — which it itself has created — to get a sense of confidence and self-esteem;
- Ego creates obstacles for us by spinning a story-line around our experience, including blaming others for our suffering.
- Ego creates a bag of tricks (paragraphs 16 + 17), e.g. habitual patterns, to cover up the pain and suffering and discomfort we experience from trying to prove something unprovable.
We find the defendant guilty as charged.
- Count Six: believing whatever it thinks to be true! As a result, it is fooled by its own projections (thoughts about things) and distort the truth; from this follows karma, karma that keeps us imprisoned in a treadmill life and robs us of our free will – We find the defendant guilty as charged.
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(Prologue: I’ve got first-hand experience that a real understanding of the laws of karma can substantially change our lives for the better. I created this weblog to share information and personal experience with others. May it be of benefit!)
My son lives in the north part of the city. But he likes the downtown. He just doesn’t like to pay the new, increased fare to get there. I suggest to him the he not begrudge spending money on a transit ticket. It’s literally and figuratively his “ticket to ride,” as the Beatles’ song put it.
It’s his ticket to having multiple choices of where he wants to go and what he wants to do. In other words, it’s his ticket to relative (conventional) freedom.
How about the ticket that takes us beyond the myth of freedom? For me, real freedom is to go beyond the karma we have created and constantly and unwittingly maintain by our actions.
How do we go beyond? Cut through? Change?
In short, we need to change our attitude, our perspective.
How?
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(Prologue: I’ve got first-hand experience that a real understanding of the laws of karma can substantially change our lives for the better. I created this weblog to share information and personal experience with others. May it be of benefit!)
Throughout my life I have had some dreams that explained certain ideas and concepts. This doesn’t surprise me as I’m not primarily an intellectual. I’m an intuitive. So I’m grateful for this type of dream. On the last day of 2009, I got this succinct message:
I had written a book or an essay called All in One.
Notes on the interpretation of the dream
- All in one = We all share the same (primordial) nature as the universe itself: unmanufactured, ungraspable, beyond concept.
- Astronaught Eugene Cernan, a member of the Apollo 17 crew of 1972, spoke of seeing the planet Earth, which he described as a blue-green ball surrounded by black. “An infinity of space. An affinity of time,” he said in awe. To me, he is also describing the nature of the mind itself.
- Ego = our planet (as seen from a space ship): a tiny speck in the infinity of the space and time of our primordial mind.
- poet William Blake: “to see the world in a grain of sand” (Auguries of Innocence)
- Compare the descriptions of the astronaught and the poet: one talks about something immeasurably and unfathomably huge. The other talks about something very tiny.
This clear, luminous space — which is the nature of both our universe and our primordial mind — is untainted by self-absorption….and therefore is beyond karma altogether.
But it is not unknowable. We can know our own nature by touching it directly, for example through the sitting practice of meditation. Science uses concepts. Our primordial nature cannot be known by concepts.
[The fox talking to the little prince] Here is my secret. It’s quite simple. One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes. (The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
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On December 26, 2004, a earthquake surged under the Indian Ocean in what the National Geographic claims is probably the world’s most destructive tsunami in history. It is an example of cause and effect, but not the karmic kind.
(CAUSE:) Giant forces that had been building up deep in the Earth for hundreds of years were released suddenly on December 26…..
(EFFECT:) ….shaking the ground violently and unleashing a series of killer waves that sped across the Indian Ocean at the speed of a jet airliner.The earthquake that generated the great Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 is estimated to have released the energy of 23,000 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).
By the end of the day more than 150,000 people were dead or missing and millions more were homeless in 11 countries, making it perhaps the most destructive tsunami in history.
There are times in our lives when we feel we’ve experienced “killer waves” or what I’m calling tsunamis of the karmic kind.
We rush to put our lives back together.
That’s understandable. We just want our “old lives” — which rest on old habits — back.
Nothing is stronger than habit ~ Ovid
I’d like to tweak that to say “Nothing is easier to fall back on than habits.”
Having experienced a number of karmic\psychosomatic tsunamis of different sizes and various degrees of destruction, I finally came to the point where I stopped trying to put my life back together again.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
All the king’s horses, and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
I grieved. But rather than fall into the usual habitual patterns and rush to glue everything back together, I instead tried to simply look at the ego-mind’s tendency to fixate on, obsess about, and cling to, my expectations.
Another way to put this is that when the gap occured between the tsunami and the next moment of my life, I didn’t jump back quite so blindly onto the treadmill of fixation that would have simply maintained the same karma that produced the psychological tsunami in the first place!
Instead of rebuilding, I tried to re-direct my life.
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One of the readers of this weblog was asked by her father when she was four years old “what’s your favourite colour?”
“Plaid,” she replies.
This same Plaid, 58-and-a half-years later, sends me a message on December 15’09 that I want to pass on to you. It raises a number of nitty-gritty questions and issues around karma to which I try to respond. (Come to think of it, the nature of karma might well be characterized as a kind of plaid fabric with strands knitted together from different colours and textures….)
In the quotations from Plaid below, I have added the numbers in parentheses.
I am more and more perceiving what may appear to be (1) real bad luck – bad karma, whatever you may call it – as (2) hidden gold (3) when looked at upside down – kind of hard to explain,
(1) “real bad luck”: Apparently, the result (vipoca) of an action (karma) is actually neutral in its essence, just like gravity. If we move too far in one direction, we have to be brought back. This is what I call the compensation aspect of karma. If we perceive the result of our previous action as “unpleasant,” ego calls it “bad” or “negative” karma.
(2) “hidden gold”: It seems that we spend thousands of lifetimes in this struggle. But it is not “useless” if we regard our experience as a teacher. What does our experience teach us? Well, for one thing, it teaches us about cause and effect. “What goes around comes around.” As I mentioned above, it is ego that calls the effects “bad” or “good” etc., because ego bases all its evaluations, perceptions etc. on dualism, this and that. Of course, it is easy to be fooled into thinking we are “solid” and “permanent” because we have individual bodies.
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We do not have to believe in reincarnation to benefit from this post or weblog. We only have to agree that present actions have effects in the future. What we call our past history was once the future that was caused by previous “present” actions.
Prologue: We are told that karma is carried from one lifetime to another and from one situation to another in this present lifetime. It’s much like passing the torch in a relay race. But what does karma actually look like “on the ground” in our daily lives? Put another way, what are the consequences of our past volitional actions when certain causes and conditions meet and certain seeds ripen in the present?
Based on my weblog page called Actual face of karma, what would the life of someone who is the present (fictional) incarnation of Queen Tiye (mother of Akhenaten), Queen of Sparta (aka Helen of Troy), Queen Jezebel, Cleopatra, St. Teresa of Avila and Sigmund Freud actually look like? In other words, what is the fruition of the karma of this portrait gallery of six historical figures in areas like money, sex, friendships, career, family etc.? To try to answer this question, I use diary entries like the one below.
* * * * * *
I, Rainbow Desert Flower, enter this dream into my private diary on the seventh day of the month of September in the year 1993 CE. May it benefit all beings who are trying to understand their karmic package.
Am with some members of a royal family….We are at supper. Then move into another room. The room is beautifully decorated. One of the princesses is known for being a good bridge player. The princess and I play two-handed bridge. She wins the contract — diamonds are trumps.
I think I have very little of value in my hand. But after playing a few rounds, I notice that I have all four aces! Something I hadn’t noticed before. I knew I could get four sure tricks with the aces. I have a two of diamonds as well. I expect to lose that trick.
But the princess begins to play sloppily. So I win all five tricks.
My Notes on the interpretation of the dream:
- bridge = getting from one place to another
- hand = what resources are available to me in my life
- beat the princess — a royal, a person in a “superior” position, at her own game — by (1) recognizing that I have winners and (2) by her playing sloppily, without attention to detail or focus – I am focused.
- playing my hand = living my life
- four aces = I’ve got the best resources! I didn’t I know I had them when I first started playing my hand. Even my lowest card, the two of diamonds, takes a trick because the other player plays sloppily.
- two of diamonds = even though it is a low card, diamonds are trump here.
- diamond = clear mind; primordial intelligence.
- I am focused = what is the focus here? I am carrying the karma of my “ancestors” (my past). But, once I purify the negative karmic consequences of past actions, there is also great positive potential in terms of the abilities, talents, skills etc. Read the rest of this entry »
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We’ve heard the term carbon footprint. I have adapted that term and created a new one: karmic footprint.
(Our) actions…make imprints…whether we are acting physically, verbally or mentally. <source: 12links chapter 2, pages 11-12 >
We’ve all seen children’s colouring books where, if the dots are connected, they form a picture.
Same thing with our lives, or even one action.
The “dots” (factors) in this case are the 12 interlinked factors that create and maintain our karma, which, when “joined,” in the sense of cause and effect, paint a picture of our karmic footprint. In other words, this “dot” leads to this “dot” leads to this “dot” and so on.
Each of the “imprints” below, if put together, might form at least a good, workable — if not necessarily complete — picture of the nature of karma.
In terms of our own lives, we could contemplate these imprints from the perspective of our own personal experience and see as much as possible what the karmic package of our life looks like and how the habitual patterns that are created leave our own karmic footprint.
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We do not have to believe in reincarnation to benefit from this post or weblog. We only have to agree that present actions have effects in the future. What we call our past history was once the future that was caused by previous “present” actions.
The popular view is that the placement of our planets in our natal chart “causes” our behaviour. I have long believed that it’s the other way around: our actions from past lives create the placement of our planets. In other words, our natal chart in this lifetime reveals our “karmic package” brought from the past.
John Heisler, a physician with a practice in Schubenacadie, Nova Scotia, expressed this view in an article called “A Comparison of Western and Vedic Astrology, ” in a newsletter called Banner, Vol VII, No. 2, April 1994.
The position of the stars and planets do not cause illness in our body or changes in our state of mind, rather they reflect our own karmic patterning, whether it is group or individual karma.
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When we don’t like what someone is saying about our behaviour, we may say, in defensive tones, “Oh you’re just projecting.”
They’re right! But it goes well beyond mere defensiveness. What’s more important is that what we call “reality” is made up of our projections.
What exactly does this mean?
First, what are projections? They are our thoughts about things. We see a dog and immediately project “nasty” onto the dog.
Second, what’s the problem with projections? Nothing really, until we confuse our thoughts about things with the things themselves! In other words, when projections become our reality. And it happens so quickly that we are not aware of it. Put another way, we believe that what we perceive is inherently “real.” So we fail to realize that what we call “reality” is actually our own projections coming back to us.
“It is not getting rid of our projections, but copping to the fact that we are projecting. Then we can leave space for things to be as they are.” (source: Jim Lindsey, student, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche)
For me, the episodes from the old television series called The Twilight Zone, now out on DVD, represent projections in their extreme form.
Example: take the episode called “Nothing in the Dark.” An elderly woman has, she thinks, kept Mr. Death at bay by refusing to open her front door for years!
How do we get out of the Twilight Zone of our daily lives and live directly in the sun? Another way to put this is: what can help us see projections as projections? Click here.
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There are probably millions of “recipes” for happiness. Based on a dream I had and His Holiness The Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s explanation, I personally find the following recipe the most accurate. And certainly the easiest because it has only two ingredients!
Part One: The Dream
Wrote down the following dream I had on September 15’07:
We were driving in a small car. We felt safe in this small car. You [a friend called Pat] were in the passenger seat.
Young girl in back seat behind you. She was hovering over a cut-up, bloody chicken. Protecting it.
Then everything fades, except you.
You turn to me – your eyes very clear. You say “I now am beginning to understand transformation.”
My Notes on the Dream:
• chicken in this dream thought to be a delicacy, thus young girl protecting it.
• chicken = ego; we prize it
o therefore, cut-up, bloody chicken is very good news!
• Blood = life blood of ego cut off
• Chicken in back seat = ego now relegated to back seat
• Small (car) = hinayana path; 1 ½ fold egolessness = egolessness of self
• Small car was safe = no life-threatening accidents on the hinayana path
• Young girl = the “youthful” student in us still wants to protect ego but as “adult” student it is no longer possible
• Transformation = metaphor: turning water into wine (to serve with the cut-up chicken!): two “ingredients” in transformation, viz.
(1) wisdom: we realize that we all share the same basic nature, i.e. basic nature is universal – that universal nature is the vast, unbiased essence of mind; out of wisdom comes the second “ingredient” of transformation, compassion;
(2) compassion: just as sugar helps to transform water into wine, compassion [or bodhicitta, awakened heart] is the active agent of transformation and enables us to go beyond ego and “translate” ultimate, universal, basic nature into helping others
The Dalai Lama says it much better than I.
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On Friday November 06 Iras and I drive to the St. Lawrence Market in Toronto to participate in the Light Exchange. Bring in old Christmas tree lights and get the new, energy-saving led ones.
About six months ago, Iras has a change for-the-better in her financial situation. So as we drive back home, I asked her how that affects her life. She makes an interesting statement:
I can’t change my life. So I just made it better. Not in any big way though. I just paid off my debts.
The big question we all have is: How can I change my life (karmic stream\patterning)?
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A few years ago I noticed that certain music evoked a kind of bittersweet longing, a particularly difficult emotion for me. It was causing me suffering.
I discovered that this particular music — a kind of Top Ten on my own personal hit parade — turned out to actually trigger deep-seated habitual desires, cravings….and it was mainly the negative ones that were triggered. So everytime I listened to these songs, it strengthened negative habitual tendencies.
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You have access to two homes that you can’t sell, take out mortgage on, trade, give away, change the structure of ….
What do these homes look like? What is their location? Actually, there’s no shortage of explanations, descriptions, analyses — both ancient and modern — of these homes. I’d like to share a description I read two days ago. For me, it’s moved into first place!
(The emphasis is mine.)
Scientific research reveals that the universe is a wonderful and mysterious place. Indeed, modern physicists sound more and more like ancient mystics as they describe its nature. The seeming vacuum of “empty space” is now portrayed as being filled with immense amounts of energy; our vast cosmos is viewed as profoundly interconnected in ways that transcend all apparent separation in space and time; despite its monumental size, our cosmos is thought to have emerged from an area smaller than a pinpoint; matter is no longer viewed as being “solid” but, instead, is thought to be composed of whirlwinds of energy that flow together with such precision that they give the appearance of solidity…. <click here for source>
For me, the good news is that there is no separation between this fabulous universe and our own minds.
In short, our mind shares the same nature as the universe. And the universe shares the same nature as our mind. And they are both our homes.
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July 1971 visiting HH Dalai Lama XIV, India
Amidst all the suffering — which I knew was somehow connected to my karma, but didn’t understand much more than that at this point — in the 1970s, there were a few beams of light in my life. One of them was meeting His Holiness the Dalai Lama XIV at Brock University in the Fall of 1967 and my pilgrimage with 108 others to India to see His Holiness the Dalai Lama XIV, among other teachers. The trip took place from mid May to mid August, 1971.
India and Pakistan were preparing for war. Before reaching India, we disembarked from the ship and took a sight-seeing trip to Tata to see some historial ruins. My friend Mary and I were almost kidnapped by the taxi-cab driver and his friend.
It was not uncommon to see tanks rolling along the roads in Northern India, where we spent most of our time. We arrived in Bombay in mid July. The transit system was on strike.
The trip was like a fiction story because the cultural differences appeared so vast between Canada and India: black market money exchanges; railroad stations that bring Dante’s Inferno to mind; babies purposely deformed so someone will have pity and give the mother money; and a bureaucracy that made Canada’s look like a “love-in” scene…
I kept wondering how India could go on existing one more day — the continuing, grinding poverty; the 7,000,000 refugees; the monsoon floods; the eastern tidal wave; people who never leave the floor of the train stations. At some point the aware traveller is going to start to raise some questions, the type that never seem to have any answers as we conventionally think of them, despite all our sophisticated social scientific explanations.
Why does one country have so much suffering?….Actually, it can be difficult to compare the Indian experience with any other. In order to compare and contrast there at least must be a shared human experience.
There is: human suffering.
The following account is from a diary entry circa August 05, 1971 from my Trip Journal.
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We do not have to believe in reincarnation to benefit from this post or weblog. We only have to agree that present actions have effects in the future. What we call our past history was once the future that was caused by previous “present” actions.
Prologue: We are told that karma is carried from one lifetime to another and from one situation to another in this present lifetime. It’s much like passing the torch in a relay race. But what does karma actually look like “on the ground” in our daily lives? Put another way, what are the consequences of our past volitional actions when certain causes and conditions meet and certain seeds ripen in the present?
Based on my weblog page called Actual face of karma, what would the life of someone who is the present (fictional) incarnation of Queen Tiye (mother of Akhenaten), Queen of Sparta (aka Helen of Troy), Queen Jezebel, Cleopatra, St. Teresa of Avila and Sigmund Freud actually look like? In other words, what is the fruition of the karma of this portrait gallery of six historical figures in areas like money, sex, friendships, career, family etc.? To try to answer this question, I use diary entries like the one below.
* * * * *
I, Rainbow Desert Flower, enter this into my private diary on the 28th day of the month of April in the year 1999 CE. May it benefit all those who are trying to understand their own karmic footprint.
All my desires around relationships, career, money, friendships etc. are thwarted. I spend a considerable amount of time during my life asking “Why?” No matter what I do, it is unsuccessful. I try many methods. They fail. About the only thing I understand is that it is some karma I have brought with me from my past. Results coming due from seeds planted long ago. But what kind of seeds? What kind of karma? My desires in past lives were ego-based. In those lifetimes “I” was used to being famous and powerful and had abused that power. Actually, it’s not so much “bad” karma as it is frustration with not getting what I want now. Karma is a balancing act: “I” was powerful at the expense of the well-being of others. Now I feel powerless.
Update: Sunday, October 04, 2009:
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I don’t know why I can’t listen to the whole book-on-tape from beginning to end. Jeffrey Archer is one of my favourite authors. And his book A Prisoner of Birth — given my interest in the nature of karma and “mistaken identity” — is certainly right up my alley. But I can’t get beyond the first CD. I’m a prisoner of my habitual pattern of fear.
Seems I’ve downloaded a habitual pattern that is so imprinted on my consciousness that, even knowing the ending, my fear prevented my moving beyond the beginning and the end! I am frightened of the details of the plot.
The beginning of the story — an innocent person convicted of a serious crime he didn’t committ — triggers my own anger, fear and a sense of powerlessness. I become frightened for the main character. So frightened that I cannot listen to the rest of the CDs in order to learn the whole story.
So I go to the last CD to hear the end of the story. Am reassured by the “happy ending.” But I find I still cannot listen to the rest of the CDs. So I get a hard copy of the book. I reason that maybe if I play the disks and simultaneously read-along, I’ll be able to cut through the fear and get the “meat” of the story.
Didn’t work. Can’t get beyond my fear. I want to ignore the details of the story, the plot, in other words, I try to ignore the “middle” part – between the beginning and the end – of the story. But I’m not prepared to give up. I listen to the CDs in reverse order: number 13 (the end) first, then number 12 and so on. But I give up on that. I still do not know all the details of the story.
What’s going on here? All I know is that the story triggers a very solid pattern of mine, a pattern I seem unable to cut through. Contact with this story is downloading my habitual fear.
The only thing I understand is that my ego has solidified itself vis-a-vis the story. Ego has made a sharp distinction between self and other: Ttere’s me. And there’s the characters in the story. I can’t seem to bridge the gap, the duality, I’ve created.
Let’s deconstruct this pattern of fear.
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True freedom, true liberation, is going to come from egolessness, selflessness. <Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche: Shambhala Day Address, 2004; paragraph 23>
In the post on September 06′09, part 1 in a series of 3, we raised the question of whether there is really such a thing as “free will.”
In part 2 we pointed out that as long as ego is our default position, we only have relative freedom i.e. the freedom to choose how to respond to the consequences of our past actions that have now ripened. We cannot change the consequences. In part 2 we examined a few of the 12 factors that create and maintain our karma, and where we could cut the links of the chains that bind us.
But that is just dealing with what we “see,” as it were, above ground.
How about the roots?
In this post, part 3 of 3, we will deal with the root of why were are not really free — Ignorance. That’s the most crucial factor of all. Ignorance here doesn’t refer to some mistake that we made, like a a case of “mistaken identity” where we think that ego, our manufactured self, is who we really are. For sure, that is a problem. But not the most fundamental one.
To repeat, our lack of ultimate freedom goes back to the ignorance described in the first factor.
…why does conditioning [and our karma] arise in the first place? How did the whole process ever start? The Buddha traced the root cause back to ignorance, the mind’s ignorance of its own awakened nature—the final and original link in the chain. This is the farthest back we can go within the circle of samsara [the world of confusion based on ignorance; ego's creation]; this is where everything begins. …Ignorance means ignoring the truth of reality, shutting one’s eyes to the awakened state. Although the light of reality is ever-present, ignorance chooses to remain blind. The nature of this blindness is to believe in the existence of a separate, independent self. (source: Francesa Freemantle: Luminous Emptiness, publ. Shambhala 2003, page 28)
“…The nature of this blindness is to believe in the existence in a separate, independent self.” I was wondering what example I could use from daily life to underscore this idea when I came across a wonderful story:
…on my high chair at the dining room table, I would stare at a candle flame, seeing that it was always changing. I’d stare right into the centre of it, and even though it always had a yellow color, it was always vibrating ever so slightly. There wasn’t anything constant there that you could call the flame, as if it actually existed for some time. These childhood perceptions…led me to realize that nothing remains. The stuff of ourselves is like the flame …. What existed a few moments ago is not somehow sitting on top of the present.” (source: Jeffrey Hopkins: A Truthful Heart)
Once we’re caught up in the deluded belief in some permanent, independent self and some corresponding permanent, independent other, then “the full catastrophe,” as alluded to by Anthony Quinn in the movie Zorba the Greek (1964), follows.
So we have to replace ignorance with knowledge in order to be free. Otherwise, the only “freedom” we have is to choose now this poison, now that poison, or chose to follow this disturbing thought rather than that one!
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In the post on September 06’09 we raised the question of whether there is such a thing as “free will.”
Generally speaking, as long as we are in the grip of an almost 
irresistible, spinning undertow as described by the 12 factors\links, there is no ultimate freedom.
Specifically speaking, there is no freedom without understanding the concept and reality of dependence and interdependence i.e. this leads to this leads to this and so on. On and on. It’s like links in a chain. Each link produces (makes
possible) the next link.
Why? Because we are just following the habitual patterns that have been imprinted on our minds from previous actions. Continually acting on these patterns both maintains our current karma and creates further karma. To repeat, no ultimate freedom to be found here.
Only when we go completely beyond karma (cause and effect) can we be truly, ultimately, free. That takes time. Lots of time. But we live in the relative, conventional world.
So what do we do in the meantime? That is what Part 2 of this series about free will is about. Read the rest of this entry »
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I wish I knew how it would feel to be free.
I wish I could break all the chains holding me.
I wish I could say all the things that I should say.
Say them loud, say them clear
For the whole damn world to hear.
by Nina Simone.
As long as we are in the grip of the consequences of the karma that we have produced in the past, the only freedom we have is how we choose to relate to these consequences. We cannot change the consequences at this point. the seeds from past volitional actions have ripened.
The question of Free Will has occupied an important place in Western thought and philosophy. …But…If the whole of existence is relative, conditioned and interdependent, how can will alone be free? Will, or anything for that matter, …. is within the law of cause and effect. (Rahula, Walpola: What the Buddha Taught, 1974 ed; page 54)
While caught in a life based on what I call “mistaken identity” (i.e. ego), the most we can attain is relative freedom. Your next move is up to you.
ChogyamTrungpa: Karma is like a game of chess. Your particular position at any point is determined by where you were, what your moves were; but after that point, it is up to you.
Student: Then is there a continuation of karma or the effects of karma?
Chogyam Trungpa: It’s up to you.
<source: Karma and the Twelve Nidanas: A Sourcebook for The Shambhala School of Buddhist Studies, page 13>
We think we have control over our lives. But in terms of karma (actions) that we have already created, we have no choice about the consequences — except the attitude that we manifest when that karma ripens in our future.
When is free will really free? Ultimately only when we go beyond creating karma (cause and effect) can we be truly free. That would mean that we have a thorough understanding that there is no independent or permanent self, and therefore no permanent, independent “other.”We and others exist only as a product (outcome) of the coming together of certain causes and conditions in our lives.
But the point we want to stress is that in the conventional (relative) world in which we live
……we are creating future actions. We can change the course. We are not stuck in our karma. (Class Four, page 86 of the Sutrayana Transcripts
…..to be continued in Part 2 on Sep 13’09
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<Please note: the word “thoughts” in this post include emotions.>
There are many books with titles similar to “change-your-mind-and-you’ll-change-your-life.“ The theme of these books is, essentially, that mind is the pre-eminent cause for how we experience life. Why? Because mind produces thoughts. And thoughts are all-powerful.
Your experiences will definitely change as you change the way you think. <source: Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s book Transforming Problems Into Happiness.>
But what if we find that — for whatever reason — we cannot “change” our minds? We feel too stuck sometimes. Pema Chodron calls this situation shenpa. We can tell ourselves to “stop thinking this negative or destructive thought.” But that just emphasizes the thought even more. It’s like saying “Don’t think of an elephant.”
So we think of an elephant.
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Readers do not have to believe in reincarnation to benefit from this post or weblog. We only have to agree that present actions have effects in the future. What we call our past history was once the future that was caused by previous “present” actions.
Prologue: We are told that karma is carried from one lifetime to another and from one situation to another in this present lifetime. It’s much like passing the torch in a relay race. But what does karma actually look like “on the ground” in our daily lives? Put another way, what are the consequences of our past volitional actions when certain causes and conditions meet and certain seeds ripen in the present?
Based on my weblog page called Actual face of karma, what would the life of someone who is the present (fictional) Cleopatra actually look like? In other words, what is the fruition of the karma of this historical figure in terms of money, career, sex, family, friendships etc. To try to answer this question, I use personal and private diary entries like the one below.
* * * * * *
I, Rainbow Desert Flower, enter this into my private diary on the 25th day of the month of November in the year 2004 CE. May it benefit all those who are trying to understand their karmic footprint.
June 21’01 – I notice a sore on present-day incarnation of Marc Antony’s lower left leg. Ask him how long he’s had it. Two years, he says. I try to hide my shock. That’s a long time for a sore not to heal. I ask him to go to the doctor, something he doesn’t like to do. Doctor sends him to oncologist who digs out the cancer from “Marc Antony’s” leg.
February, 2002 – “Marc Antony” misses follow-up appointment with the doctor. Doesn’t book new one.
November 27, 2001 – I am very fussy re locking door tonight. Keep checking it before I go to bed.
November 28, 2001 - Have premonition of “Marc Antony’s” death in what I call the “Shroud Dream.”
Dream: I hear someone in the hall outside my bedroom. A long piece of wood materializes beside my bed that I can use to protect myself. A figure shrouded in white from head to foot enters my room and walks over to “Marc Antony’s” side of the bed near the window. I try to scream or shout in fear – feel constricted.
May 06, 2002: “Marc Antony” leaves his jewellery — the gold ring I gave him on September 5, 2001 and the Cleopatra medallion on a silver chain that I gave him in July, 2001 — when he leaves my house to go to his office. I speak to him later in the day — he does not realize that he is not wearing his jewellery. A reflection of his feelings.
July 15, 2002: “Marc Antony” writes me a letter to say that he is in crisis and has gone into isolation. I leave him a voice-mail message to say that this is the kind of situation where you call on your friends to help. I am taken back to September 02, 31 BC — Marc Antony is so severely depressed after losing the battle of Actium that he leaves Cleopatra’s palace to live in isolation on the beach of Alexandria.
July 28, 2002: “Marc Antony” telephones to tell me that his cancer has reoccurred. Has three months to live. Says that on July 7th he could not swallow food at supper. Went to the hospital emergency department. Waits for nine hours. Diagnosis: cancer of the oesophagus from smoking. I realize that his not taking me with him to the hospital or communicating with me until July 28th reflects his lack of interest and love in our relationship in this lifetime.
November 24’04 – Walk into store that sells old records. Felt the presence of ”Marc Antony” on my left shoulder while looking at old George Carlin albums. “Antony” likes Carlin. Haven’t spoken to “Antony” since July, 2002 when he told me that the cancer had travelled up from his leg to his throat.
November 25’04 – 06h30 – don’t usually check my e-mail before going to work, but I did today. E-mail from “Marc Antony’s” son re death of “Antony.”
This death is a kind of suicide. In other words, instead of falling on his sword as Marc Antony did, in this lifetime he traded one killer (sword) for another (smoking), and died at age 61 of cancer of the oesophagus on November 22, 2004. I mourned not only his death, but our lifetime together. From having once been his “queen,” I was firmly relegated to second place in this lifetime. From the greatest lovers in history to….a “recreational relationship.”
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Readers do not have to believe in reincarnation to benefit from this post or weblog. We only have to agree that present actions have effects in the future. What we call our past history was once the future that was caused by previous “present” actions.
Prologue: We understand intellectually, conceptually, that karma is carried from one lifetime to another and from one situation to another in this present lifetime, much like a torch is passed from team membert to team member in a relay race. But how is that karma actually experienced “on the ground” in future lifetimes? Put another way, what happens when certain causes and conditions meet and certain karmic seeds ripen?
Based on my weblog page called Actual face of karma, what would the life of someone who is the present (fictional) incarnation of Queen Tiye (mother of Akhenaten), Queen of Sparta (aka Helen of Troy), Queen Jezebel, Cleopatra, St. Teresa of Avila and Sigmund Freud actually look like? In other words, what is the fruition of the karma of this Portrait Gallery of six historical figures in areas like money, sex, friendships, career, family etc.? To try to answer this question, I use diary entries like the one below.
* * * * * *
It’s a very hot summer evening in July 2001. My life partner and I are sitting on my back porch chatting. I’ve come to the conclusion that sexual attraction seems to be some sort of a cosmic joke. But not in any cynical sense. Just as part of a “cosmic plan” for human beings. After all, Earth is the planet of desire. And it’s desire that propels us into relationships. And we need relationships in order to evolve, to “wake up.” It’s hard work. Most of us wouldn’t do the work if we weren’t seduced into it. This is where attraction generally and sex specifically comes into the picture.
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…There is always something missing. If you examine your mind in everyday life, you can see that something is missing all the time No matter how much you try to enjoy different places—living in a city or on a mountain, going to the beach or to a beautiful park; no matter how much you try to enjoy food, clothing, anything that can be obtained on this earth, there is always something missing in your heart. No matter how many friends you have or how long you enjoy their company, there is always something missing. All the time there is something missing in your heart. You are never really happy.
Even when there is excitement in your life, if you carefully examine the nature of your mind, you will find that there is still something missing. You are not completely happy. Watch your mind closely; examine it well: “Is this happiness complete or not?” It is not complete. There is still something missing. (source: Transforming Problems Into Happiness)
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uccess (in conventional society) = inner happiness?
Fools don’t know the source of happiness. Because they are mystified as to how happiness comes about, they’re always just chasing after happiness with the idea that it depends on other people or things like food and clothing. A wise individual knows the source of happiness: the mind. Thus a wise person knows that the mind needs to be
developed. <source: Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche: The Legacy of Shambhala>
Many of us have been trained to think that financial success and high social and occupational standing leads to happiness. 
Success (material) = happiness. We are dismayed to discover that it doesn’t.
I think it’s the other way around: happiness = success. If you are happy, then you are living a successful life.
There is no way to happiness, happiness is the way. ~~ Buddha
Many of us have been trained to think that happiness is “candy floss.” Not realistic. I don’t. I believe that it is our “birthright.”
So what does lead to happiness?
We hear that it has to come from inside ourselves, not from the outside, not from being led around by the nose by our society’s definition of “success.”
But, again, what does this mean, exactly?
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For me, meditation practice is like coming home.
We’re on overload today. Too much information. Coming from too many directions. Look here! No, look over there! We feel angry. Fearful. Stressed out.
We need some first aid for the mind if we are going to engage life in a clear, knowing, awake way; if we are going to change our own karmic stream. There’s an important ripple effect of which we must now become aware — by changing our own karma, we help to change the world’s karma. This makes life more uplifted for everyone. And it is here that the role of meditation practice is so vital.
There are so many views today about what meditation is and what its purpose is. For example:
I like to think of meditation as an exercise in focusing. We focus all day long! But on what are we focusing? It’s usually on constant stream of negativity. On our own story line.
To repeat, meditation is a form of focusing. But now we are gently focusing on our breath, and simply noticing the thoughts that arise. And then returning to gently focus on our breath. We can read about mind in myriad books and articles. But there’s only one way to actually get in touch with our own mind: through an exercise that shifts our focus. I call that shift “meditation practice.” It’s the shift that undercuts our habitual patterns, which cuts through our karmic stream.
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What we contemplate, we sit in for the rest of the day. If we wake up with fear, and do not shift our mind, this fear might manage our day, rather than us managing our day.
I find it very helpful to do a particular exercise before I even get out of bed. It has two purposes:
Before arising from bed
Contemplate the tiger.
Colour: orange
Area of body: legs and feet
Qualities: meek in the sense of discrimination (discerning, clear-seeing); we calmly reflect on our lives and the situations in which we are involved; we know what to accept and what to reject – this brings confidence; totally aware of law of cause and effect: whatever we do has repercussions for the future; the tiger is careful (not to be confused with paranoia).
Contemplate the snow lion.
Colour: white
Area of body: just below the navel
Qualities: perky in the sense that we can determine our own actions; joyful because not burdened by bewilderment: we know that helping others leads to happiness; we see confusion for what it is: the outcome of the mistaken view that putting ourselves first leads to success; decisions made on basis of whether our actions will benefit others
Contemplate the garuda.
Colour: red
Area of body: chest and arms
Qualities: outrageous because we appreciate what we have, which brings joy in our lives; move beyond conventional way of doing things, which is based on fixation and attachment to me; true freedom comes from understanding the deeper nature of reality <impermanence; insubstantiality>; by moving beyond ego, we know who we actually are!
Contemplate the dragon.
Colour: blue
Area of body: head and shoulders
Qualities: inscrutable because we have wisdom beyond concepts, because we have moved beyond the reference point of a solid self and are therefore not caught up in habitual thought patterns; we are fundamentally enlightened. We are here living a good life trying to help others.
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The point……is that we are creating future actions. We can change the course. We are not stuck in our karma. (Class Four, page 86 of the Sutrayana Transcripts)
In previous posts (March 1, 8, 15 and 22, 2009) and on my webpage called Karma’s Big 12 I have discussed the factors that go into creating and maintaining our personal karma.
But we also need to know how we can change our karmic stream.
There are many ways to talk about how to do this.
For today’s post I have chosen what are known in Shambhala Buddhism as The Four Dignities: Tiger, Lion, Garuda and Dragon. To me, they represent the power of good intention.
The role of intention (our motivation, purpose is central in creating our karma – without intention there is no volitional action. Without volitional action, there is no creation of karma. There are only two situations where we are not creating karma: sleeping and meditating. Otherwise, we are engaged in volitional actions.
We can have positive intention or negative – each type produces corresponding karmic effects. <source: Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche>
and
Our intentions create our reality. We each create our own personal realities by what we focus on and intend to happen for our experiences. Therefore we have an enormous responsibility to choose our intentions carefully.<source: Wayne Dyer>
Without intention there is no volitional action. Without volitional action, there is no creation of karma. There are only two situations where we are not creating karma: sleeping and meditating. Otherwise, we are involved in actions.
We need a kind of “insurance policy” so that when we meet with negativity, we meet it with the Four Dignities.
There are many descriptions of the Four Dignities. The description I offer here is taken mainly from a document I received in May 2004 and reflects the theme of this post: how to change our karmic stream by consciously setting our intention every day from one based on confusion to one based on wisdom. The words in < > are my notes.
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We do not have to believe in reincarnation to benefit from this post or weblog. We only have to agree that present actions have effects in the future. What we call our past history was once the future that was caused by previous “present” actions.
Prologue:
Prologue: We are told that karma is carried from one lifetime to another and from one situation to another in this present lifetime. It’s much like passing the torch in a relay race. But what does karma actually look like “on the ground” in our daily lives? Put another way, what are the consequences of our past volitional actions when certain causes and conditions meet and certain seeds ripen in the present?
Based on my weblog page called Actual Face of Karma what would the life of someone who is the present (fictional) incarnation of Queen Tiye (mother of Akhenaten); Queen of Sparta (aka Helen of Troy); Queen Jezebel; Queen Cleopatra; St. Teresa of Avila; and Sigmund Freud actually look like? In other words, what is the fruition of the karma of this Portrait Gallery of six historical figures in areas like money, sex, friendships, career, family etc.? To try to answer this question, I use diary entries like the one below.
* * * * * *
I, Rainbow Desert Flower, enter this letter that I sent to the present-day incarnation of King Menelaus of Sparta\Mark Antony into my private diary on the 11th day of the month of August in the year 1991 CE. May it benefit all beings who are trying to understand their karmic footprint.
Thanks for taking the time to recover the silver chain. The spring lock was missing. So I took it to a repair centre and am enclosing the invoice for reimbursement.
(Update May 09, 2009: note the reference in 1991 to a “silver chain” [protection cord blessed by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, circa May 31, 1979] in the first paragraph. It’s like I was unwittingly referring here to the 12 interdependent links that imprison us… And “the spring lock was missing” = the karmic stream between Antony and Cleopatra took another turn in this present lifetime.)
Read the rest of this entry »
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Readers do not have to believe in reincarnation to benefit from this post or weblog. We only have to agree that present volitional actions have effects in the future. What we call our past history was once the future that was caused by previous “present” volitional actions.
All the world’s a stage
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances
And one man in his time plays many parts.
<Shakespeare>
On June 24, 2009 the King of Pop left the world stage.
But as the philosopher-poet Kahlil Gibran noted:
Death changes nothing but the masks that cover our faces.
Question: What kind of future lifetime might Michael Jackson have?
We do not have to believe in reincarnation to benefit from this post or weblog. We only have to agree that present actions have effects in the future. What we call our past history was once the future that was caused by previous “present” actions.
As Michael Jackson put it:
Everyday creates your history.
We could add “Everyday also creates your future.”
Please note: the description of Michael Jackson below is not meant to be judgmental of him as a human being. It merely characterizes how his energy manifested in this lifetime. In other words, we are not our characteristics any more than we are our illnesses.
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Readers do not have to believe in reincarnation to benefit from this post or weblog. We only have to agree that present volitional actions have effects in the future. What we call our past history was once the future that was caused by previous “present” volitional actions.
Prologue: We understand intellectually, conceptually, that karma is carried from one lifetime to another and from one situation to another in this present lifetime, much like a torch is passed from team membert to team member in a relay race. But what does karma actually look like “on the ground” in our daily lives? Put another way, what are the consequences of our past volitional actions when certain causes and conditions meet and certain seeds ripen in the present?
Based on my weblog page called The actual face of karma: a portrait gallery, what would the life of someone who is the present (fictional) incarnation of Queen Tiye (mother of Akhenaten), Queen of Sparta (aka Helen of Troy), Queen Jezebel, Queen Cleopatra, St. Teresa of Avila and Sigmund Freud look like? In other words, what is the fruition of the karma of the Portrait Gallery of these six historical figures in terms of money, career, sex, family, friendships, etc.? And what would today’s (fictional) incarnation have to do to change the karmic stream so that future lives would not just be a repeat of the past? To answer these questions, I use diary entries.
* * * * * *
I, Rainbow Desert Flower, enter this dream into my private diary on the 1st day of the month of July in the year 1970 CE. May it benefit all beings who are trying to understand their karmic footprint.
……..
I think I was born with a state known as chronic depression! I believe I have been carrying this habitual way of relating to the world with me from lifetime to lifetime.
Last night I had a dream that has given me a wider perspective:
Dream:
I am in a very, very large theatre. It is empty. Nothing in it. No chairs. No actors. No audience. No musicians. No props. No sets. But I know right in the dream [as opposed to thoughts upon waking from the dream] that the space is a theatre. I also know that the theatre is space! I rest there. Then a black cloud floats in from stage left. Right in the dream I think “This cloud is depression. But it wasn’t there in the beginning. Just space was there. Then the black cloud moved in.” I notice that the cloud is not affecting the space around it in any way.
Notes on interpretation of dream:
Update June, 2009:
We experience depression as a solid thing. I think that “depression” is comprised of a bundle of habitual patterns which have both an action and an emotional component, which contribute to creating our karmic stream and maintaining it.
Fortunately, just like a theatre provides an unchanging stage for the actors to enact the play, our primordial nature is vast and provides an unchanging space for a multitude of changing, temporary, unsolid, impermanent, insubstantial — ie. empty — conditions like depression.
The pure nature of mind beyond the intellect, beyond all of these ordinary mental operations and activities, is not affected in the slightest by a dense state of mind.
NOTE: I am grateful for this message on Twitter, July 17’09 from N_Odzer: #FollowFriday @ExBP_Buddhist Great in insight in depression, & Bipolar Disorder with a Buddhist perspective, @Margaret_Scott 4 Karma blog.
Update January 24, 2011
Here’s a quote, from Rigpa Glimpse of the Day, that describes, in different words, my interpretation above of my dream:
In Tibetan we call the essential nature of mind Rigpa—primordial, pure, pristine awareness that is at once intelligent, cognizant, radiant, and always awake. This nature of mind, its innermost essence, is absolutely and always untouched by change or death. At present it is hidden within our own mind, our sem, enveloped and obscured by the mental scurry of our thoughts and emotions. Just as clouds can be shifted by a strong gust of wind to reveal the shining sun and wide-open sky, so, under certain circumstances, some inspiration may uncover for us glimpses of this nature of mind. These glimpses have many depths and degrees, but each of them will bring some light of understanding, meaning and freedom.
This is because the nature of mind is the very root itself of understanding.
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It doesn’t really matter what causes us to reach our limit. The point is that sooner or later it happens to all of us. <When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron>
If I am Susan Boyle, I reach my limit when I go from being a “regular” person, unknown except to my family, pet, neighbours, shop keepers and friends, and doctors and other service-providers to having every one of my actions scrutinized. I thought I was just providing entertainment for a talent show. Instead, I become the entertainment! I become anxious, fearful, nervous.
Our habitual assumptions, all our ideas about how things are, keep us from seeing things in a fresh open way…[But] There’s no certainty about anything. This basic truth hurts and we want to run away from it. …things like disapppointment and anxiety are messengers telling us that we are about to go into unknown territory.<When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron>
Habits are comprised of two aspects: an emotional aspect, and our habitual ways of reacting (karma). Ego, our manufactured self, uses habits as one of the items in its arsenal of weapons in its battle to maintain its (illusory) solidity, to bolster its mistaken belief that it exists unconditionally, that is, beyond relative causes and conditions. But when ego is “unsuccessful,” and the ground under our habitual patterns shifts, we feel like the rug has been pulled out from under us. We feel like things have fallen apart.
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We shall fight on the beaches – <source: Sir Winston Churchill>
When we talk about the fear of death, I believe that it is really ego’s fear of its own destruction.
Ego struggles to maintain its solidity. But it is a battle that it can never win because it fights to maintain a solidity that is illusory.
Whenever there is any threat that might expose the shifting sands that underly ego, this ego tries to secure a “beach-head” — like the beach-heads at beaches code-named Juno, Omaha, Sword and Gold, in Normandy, France on D-Day, June 06, 1944.
We might habitually drink alcohol, take drugs, eat, stop eating, call friends, ignore friends, sleep, play sports, have sex, manifest self- righteous anger etc. etc. — anything to restore a feeling of comfort with who we think we are.
These habitual patterns contribute to both creating and maintaining our karma. Sometimes this produces negative effects, as described in previous posts, namely, Deconstructing The Karma of Alleged Killer….; and I’m-just-a-link-in-your-chain.
On “D-Day” — which stands for The unnamed day on which an operation or offensive is to be launched — the terrified teenage warriors provided target practice for Nazi guns perched on the cliffs high above the beaches on which the soldiers landed.
We shall never surrender <source: Sir Winston Churchill>
I noted above that ego tries to secure a beach-head like those beach-heads on D-Day.
But that’s where the similarity ends. For on June 06, 1944, these warriors, with invincible courage, set aside ego and surrendered to big mind. They sacrificed small, self-centred, “me first” mind on the altar of basic goodness.
I cannot think of a greater tribute to those of you, “dead” or “alive,” who fought there, to say, with heartfelt gratitude that, despite being on what amounted to a suicide mission, you established a beach-head — both literally and spiritually — from which to conquer hatred in all its forms.
Wherever you are now, I thank you.
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With the publication of his book My Remarkable Journey, Larry King loosens his suspenders and dips his toe in his own karmic stream.
During his book tour, I heard Jian Ghomeshi interviewing him on May 26, 2009 on CBC Radio One
Among other things, Larry said that throughout most of his life he hasn’t engaged in “introspective thinking” because he “lives in the moment.” (I myself don’t think of the two as being mutually exclusive.) Larry never asked himself “why?” or checked the connection between cause and effect in his own life – i.e. he didn’t interview himself! He didn’t explore his own karma.
Larry’s famous suspenders kept him together — kept his manufactured self (ego) in place —until now. The man whom many consider the king of all interviewers is finally interviewing himself.
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Eight-year-old Victoria (Tori) Stafford went missing on or about April 08, 2009. On May 19, 2009 two people — Michael Thomas C.S. Rafferty, 29, and Terri-Lynne McClintic, 18 — were arrested for the abduction and murder of Tori.
Rex Murphy, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)-TV, on “The National,” May 21, 2009, eloquently gave his point of view about the murder.
We all wonder “what kind of people would abduct and then murder a child? How do people come to this point?”
This is where the 12 factors that create and maintain our karma may help us gain some insight.
In previous posts we have looked at the 12 factors in terms of past lives and how they influence our present one.
In this post, we’ll look at the factors in terms of one particular action. Killing.
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© The New Yorker Collection 2000 David Sipress from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.
Meditation is no longer a strange word. Scientists have done many studies recently to show the benefits of meditation on our health, both physical and mental. Stress reduction.
This post is, however, not directly about the health benefits. It is about the way meditation can help us to cut through our karmic cycle, to change the course of our karmic stream.
We cannot avoid karma as long as we have continual thoughts and continual subconscious gossip. As long as we have a liking and disliking state of mind happening all the time, we cannot avoid karma at all. I think it is quite straightforward. The idea is that virtuous karma, good karma, produces good situations. It’s sort of predetermined. And bad karma produces bad results, which are also predetermined. (Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche)
and:
But at the same time we can prevent sowing further seeds of karma altogether by realizing that there is a level where karmic seeds are not sown, the nonthought level. That is why we meditate. It has been said that sleeping, dreaming, meditating, and developing awareness are the only states in which we do not sow further seeds of karma. <emphasis mine>(Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche)
√It is said that the mind that created our karma is the same mind that can change its course.
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On Sunday, May 03, 2009 I watched a television programme on the world’s oldest living conjoined twins on The Learning Channel. On Mother’s Day, May 10, I want to pay tribute to their step-mother Mary. Their biological mother rejected them.
With their bodies fused at the lower chest, doctors didn’t think that conjoined twins Ronnie and Donnie would survive through the night. But the twins have confounded everyone by living to the ripe old age of 57. <source – The Learning Channel)
I was so moved by Ronnie and Donnie’s story. Besides feeling great appreciation for their step-mother Mary, I want to honour the twins for demonstrating in a physical way that we are all spiritually, emotionally and psychologically interdependent in this world. That we are not separate or independent from others.
They illustrate in such a heartfelt way the notion of skillful means and compassion.
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My friend Marigold sent me a copy of actor Gwyneth Paltrow’s online newsletter Goop, edition April 16, 2009 in which Paltrow asks: Why are people delighted when bad things happen to other people?
Possible answer: we feel better about ourselves. Why? Because we can “shore up” what we mistakenly believe is our own independent, ongoing, permanent identity.
At the end of her article the actor asks:
I’m curious about the spiritual concept of “evil tongue” (speaking evil of others) and its pervasiveness in our culture. Why do people become energized when they say or read something negative about someone else? What does it say about where that person is? What are the consequences of perpetuating negativity or feeling schadenfreude?
While contemplating Paltrow’s question on her Goop website, I thought of the nursery rhyme about the Goops written by Gelett Burgess and published in 1900.
The Goops they lick their fingers,
And the Goops they lick their knives;
They spill their broth on the tablecloth –
Oh, they lead disgusting lives!
………
……..
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© The New Yorker Collection 2000 David Sipress from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.
Meditation is no longer a strange word. Scientists have done many studies to show the benefits of meditation on our health, both physical and mental.
This post is, however, not directly about the health benefits. It is about the misconceptions around meditation. It is necessary to deal with this because meditation is one of the tools that can help us to change the course of our lives, our karma. And if we are operating on misconceptions, then we cannot make proper use of this valuable tool.
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche provides the context for this post
“If we follow thoughts back, we can see that they stem from an embedded karmic situation that has gone on for a very long time.”
“The point of buddhism is that we are creating future actions. We can change the course. We are not stuck in our karma.” (Classes 4 and 5)
By meditating, we see how the mind that created our karma is the same mind that can cut the creation and maintenance of that karma.
Before we get into details about how meditation can cut karma and allow us to control our lives, I want to first dispel some common misconceptions: Read the rest of this entry »
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I remember when my parents took me to the three-ringed circus when it came to Toronto.
The world of suffering and confusion seems to me to be like a three-ringed circus. But instead of the circus barker introducing the lions, elephants, and high-wire acts, he shouts:
Ladies and gentlemen, in this corner we have the rooster, representing the poison of passion. Over in that corner is the snake, representing the poison of aggression. And over in this corner is the pig, which represents the poison of ignorance.
The poisons are interrelated. That is why the tail of the rooster is grasped by the pig, and the tail of the snake is grasped by the mouth of the rooster.
The role of the three poisons? To make us (our egos) feel solid, permanent, ongoing, unchangeable.
They work together. They each act to assist the others. They are partners. And for that reason I liken them to a three-ringed circus. There are three different acts going on in this ring, but at the same time they all mesh together to produce an integrated “show,” an effect.
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We do not have to believe in reincarnation to benefit from this post or weblog. We only have to agree that present actions have effects in the future. What we call our past history was once the future that was caused by previous “present” actions.
Prologue: We understand intellectually, conceptually, that karma is carried from one lifetime to another and from one situation to another in this present lifetime, much like a torch is passed from team membert to team member in a relay race. Put another way, what are the consequences of our past volitional actions when certain causes and conditions meet and certain seeds ripen in the present?
But what does karma actually look like “on the ground” in our daily lives?
Based on my weblog paged called Actual face of karma, what would the life of someone who is the present (fictional) incarnation of Queen Tiye (mother of Akhenaten), Helen of Troy, Jezebel, Cleopatra, St. Teresa of Avila and Sigmund Freud actually look like? In other words, what is the fruition of the karma of this portrait gallery of these six historical figures in terms of money, career, sex, family, etc.? To try to answer this question, I use diary entries like the one below.
* * * * * *
I, Rainbow Desert Flower, enter this into my private diary on the 29th day of the month of June in the year 1971 CE. May it benefit all beings who are trying to understand their karmic footprint. This diary entry deals specifically with the romantic relationships that arose out of the kind of past karma carried by the present incarnation of our portrait gallery described above.
Part One:
You needed to see me as
rough
but my kiss told you as
tenderYou needed to see me as
critical
but my words told you as
helpfulYou needed to see me as
formidable
But my eyes told you as
searchingYou needed to see me as
having left you
But my presence told you as
hereYou needed to see me as
You needed to see me
You needed to see
You needed to
You needed
YouBut where does that leave us?
Part Two:
rough kiss tender
critical words helpful
formidable eyes searching
left presence here
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The story of Helen of Troy, with its combination of sex and violence, has endured for over 3,000 years since Homer wrote about it. There have been movies on the big screen. Movies on television. And scores of books.
Helen was the Greek version of Marilyn Monroe. Her story, as told by one of my favourite authors Margaret George, is a dramatic illustration of the laws of cause and effect, afflictive emotions, grasping and craving. In short, we watch with fascination as the karma unfolds. (For an historical account, based on The Illiad by Homer, you can read the first three chapters of Helen of Troy by Jack Lindsay.)
Helen was Queen of Sparta, married to King Menalaus. While Prince Paris of Troy is visiting Sparta, he meets Helen and the rest, as they say, is history.
Agememnon, King of Mycenae, and older brother to Menalaus, creates alliances with other Greek kings and they set sail — in the fabled 1,000 ships — to make war on Troy. While Agememnon is in Troy, his wife takes a lover. After ten years, Troy is sacked. Helen returns to Sparta with her husband King Menalaus. When Agememnon reaches Mycenae to take up his throne again, his wife stabs him to death.
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To further demonstrate the 12 factors (links) that create and maintain our karmic stream, I’m going to use a true situation as described by author Ann Rule in her book Too Late to Say Goodbye .
All lives, no matter how prosaic, have their secrets, and we never know what is actually going on in even our closest friends’ worlds. Jennifer Corbin was no different. Her involvement with someone outside her marriage began quite innocently.
In the spring of 2004, Christopher and Jenn meet on Sony PlayStation’s game called Everquest. Jenn plays a Wizard called “wizwiz148.” Her online partner signs on as “sirtank1223.”
A few weeks before Jenn Corbin is murdered, she discovers that her virtual lover “Christopher” is in fact another woman whose real name is Anita Hearn. Anita is the last person to speak to Jenn Corbin in the early morning of December 04, 2004, the day she, Jenn, dies.
Her husband Dr. Bart Corbin, not realizing that Christopher is in fact a woman, has discovered steamy emails between his wife and “Christopher” and thinks his wife is involved in an affair. He murders her while their two young sons sleep in their beds.
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In previous posts, we came across terms like the
Here’s a Plain English way to understand these terms: if you have a project to do, you first break it down into small tasks. Let’s say there are 12 of these tasks. They are all linked, interlinked, with task one leading to task two leading to task three and so on until finally we have completed the entire project.
It’s the same with the 12 links etc. And the project described by these terms is nothing less than the creation of a “self” and its karma.
I like to use the word “factors.” But no matter what term you use, all these terms explain the dependent relationship — the INTERlinking —between the factors that create our karma :
…[In short] how we are born, how we create karma, how we die, and how that all revolves. <Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche>
and why we experience the world the way we do:
…the ego-self is ungrounded, and as a result we experience an uncomfortable emptiness or hole at the very core of our being. We feel this problem as a sense of lack, of inadequacy, or unreality, and in compensation we usually spend our lives trying to accomplish things that we think will make us more real. <author: David Loy>
If we want to understand why we suffer, then we have to understandthe process of causes and conditions that underlies the suffering. Only then can we begin to undo these causes and conditions.
Up until now, I haven’t listed the 12 links. Over the past 30 years, whenever I tried to study them in depth, I got dizzy. I felt badly about that.
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In the March 01, 2009 post entitled Life is [Like] a Dream – am I missing something?, I offered this description of our ignorance of our true nature:
We’ve been caught up in some major mistake. But not the kind of mistake where we show up at somebody’s house for a party on the wrong day…..
Actually, I realized as I was walking south this past Friday on Yonge Street in Toronto that our mistake is in “showing up” at all!
“Showing up” in the sense that that we confuse what is a manufactured ego — created out various causes and specific conditions that themselves can change at any moment — with who we actually are, a collection of moments that are fleeting and impermanent. The image that I find helpful is fireworks. They arise, flash in space, and then die.
The unchanging space that underlies all changing phenomena is vast like the sky. Ego tries ad nauseum to carve out a little piece of the sky for itself. Then it has to defend this little piece of the sky. This leads to all sorts of confusion. And wars. Wars on both the personal and national level. Wars for more territory.
We can see this very clearly in what we call The Terrible Two’s. A two-year old will scream “Mine! Mine!” if another child tries to play with his toy.
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In the post of March 01’09 below, I noted that, while I found Row Row Row Your Boat, a child’s nursery rhyme, helpful in understanding the nature of reality, it still didn’t answer the question of why life is like a dream. I also asked the reader to note that
“We must be very clear that only the self that is being grasped as intrinsically real needs to be negated. The self as a conventional phenomenon is not rejected.” (source: From book by HH Dalai Lama XIV)
I quoted a story the Buddha told about why we are so confused about who we are. Please see previous post for the quote.
He talks about the “false views”: believing that we have a separate, permanent, intrinsically-existing self ( oneness”), that is different from the other separate, permanent, intrinsically-existing selves (otherness”) around us.
When you ask someone, “what is the self?” the answer will usually be a list of parts or items — the self is the body-mind, my history, my memory, my thoughts. Our most basic assumption is that everything inside this bag of skin is me and everything outside of it is the rest of the universe. (source: In the Face of Fear; article by John Daido Loori: “Getting to the Bottom of Stress”)
and:
Karma is created by two situations [false views]: the sense of me-ness or I-ness and the sense of other. “I am what I am, therefore things are as they are.” <Karma Seminar>
So, in a very real sense, the line from a Beatles’ song “I am he as you are he as you are me as we are all together,” rings true.
We may know intellectually that we are not permanent or solid. After all, this “self” — that has no existence apart from relative causes and conditions — dies. But we act as if we are a continuous, separate self….”Hi, my name is ___. I have two children, two cars, work at ___job, take holidays at _______, have four credit cards, play tennis,” etc. etc. etc. You get the idea. But just in case I didn’t explain it well enough, this quote might help: Read the rest of this entry »
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(Prologue: I’ve got first-hand experience that a real understanding of the laws of karma can substantially change our lives for the better. I created this weblog to share information and personal experience with others. May it be of benefit!)
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Ultimately, the good news is that we don’t exist in a permanent, solid, important way. The bad news is we act as if we do. This misunderstanding creates harm to ourselves and others.
[We must be very clear that only the self that is being grasped as intrinsically real needs to be negated. The self as a conventional phenomenon is not rejected. from book by HH Dalai Lama XIV]
When we look at a television that has been turned on, we see pictures. But the pictures aren’t solid or real, as they appear. They are made up of dots. So is ego, the “I,” “me.” It is made up of tendencies, habitual patterns, imprints, emotions etc. that, when we link them together, appear solid. We mistakenly think that this is who we are.
The self is not made of any substance at all: it is just a kaleidoscopid display of empty imagery, intangible, like a self in a dream……This sense of self is actually a transitory, discontinuous event, which in our confusion seems to be quite solid and continuous. (Contemplating Reality)
This post is about the first link (factor) out of the traditional twelve nidanas or 12links of interdependent origination (chapter 3),namely our ignorance of the nature of reality.
Ingorance does not mean stupidity here. It is vital to understand this first link because this is where ego is born. And our suffering and confusion with it. I use the word “ego” to describe a manufactured, constructed“self” vis-a-vis who we are in an unfabricated, primordial way.
This point is important. So I don’t hesitate to repeat it. We have manufactured cars, boats, houses, airplanes etc. etc. etc. We have also manufactured a “self.”
By the time I was 22, I could sum up how I felt by a line from a song by The Rolling Stones — “I think I’m on a losing streak.” I was walking along St. Clair Avenue West in Toronto when I realized that all the intellectual explanations I had created to explain why I was suffering so much were not helping. Then I came across the idea that we suffer because of how we, in our ignorance, have created a self that we think is real in a permanent, ongoing, solid way. It is important to say that this is not a nihilistic view. Read the rest of this entry »
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(Prologue: I’ve got first-hand experience that a real understanding of the laws of karma can substantially change our lives for the better. I created this weblog to share information and personal experience with others. May it be of benefit!)
I’m not wise enough to know what karma of hers contributed to her present situation. But we all have our own karma. Out of that we create our own lives. We are responsible for what we create.
When I became pregnant as a single woman, people may have thought that I had brought this situation upon myself. Quite right! Fortunately, however, people stepped outside themselves to help me. Their compassion was inspiring.
I’d like to offer a quote that presents another view than the predominant one in the media.
As our technology becomes more sophisticated, we perhaps think that our emotional responses need to be more sophisticated as well. But what seems best is simple, direct feeling that is not padded with logic or twisted concepts, such as, “Maybe they deserved it,” or, “I’m glad it’s not me,” or, “They should have known better,” or even, “That’s their karma.” These contorted responses reflect poorly on our own state of mind. If compassion feels unnatural, it’s probably because we’re still thinking of ourselves. We want the suffering to go away because it scares us or it causes us personal pain. (Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche)
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