Get a Lifetime!

(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!)

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.

• Roy Orbison: You Got it
• Bonny Raitt: Something to Talk About
  Huey Lewis and the News: Power Of Love
• Elton John: I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues
• Climax: Prescious (sic) and Few
• Melissa Manchester: You Should Hear How She Talks About You
• G. Rafferty: Right Down the Line
• Glass Tiger: Don’t Forget Me
• Sister Sledge: We Are Family
• Barry Manilow: Read ‘Em and Weep

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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!)

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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(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!)

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:

• Today is the anniversary of the death of the Spanish St. Teresa of Avila, one of the historical figures in our Portrait Gallery — as described in the Prologue above — who died at the age of 67 in 1582.
• Karma from my past actions has now ripened because my desires in the past were ego-based. The antidote to this habitual pattern is to put others’ first rather than wallowing in self-absorption.
  

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