Glossary

causes and conditions:  the two factors that have to come together for karmic seeds to ripen.

  • causes = volitional action;
  • conditions = an aspect of consequences which are also the result of your past volitional actions

circumstances: One’s actions in response to circumstances produce further seeds. i.e. circumstances then act as the conditions for causes to ripen and for further causes (actions) to be generated. In the play An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde,
Mrs. Cheveley threatens to expose Lord Chiltern’s past indiscretions.

Lord Chiltern: My God! What brought you into my life?

Mrs. Chevely: Circumstances. At some point, we all have to pay for what we do. You have to pay now.

EXAMPLE OF CAUSES, CONDITIONS AND CIRCUMSTANCES

The fact that I inherit a business is a circumstance which is the result of the conditions, i.e., my father owning one and leaving it to me, etc., and also the result of a karmic cause (for this result) which was planted by an action in a past life. So, inheriting a business is the coming together of causes and conditions.  The fact that I now have a business is also a condition for further karmic seeds to ripen.  Because of the condition of having a business, I meet and hire various employees, I make a lot of money, etc.  Making a lot of money in the business is the result of the condition of having a business and a past action of generosity.  How I go about treating my employees, what I do with the money, etc. plants karmic seeds for future circumstances to ripen. Perhaps I go bankrupt.  This is due to poor management (a condition) and the ripening of another karmic seed coming from another past action in a past life.  If I lash out at people during the bankruptcy process, that plants further karmic seeds. (example provided courtesy of teacher Jay Lippman)

ego: what I call the manufactured self, made up of parts (just as a car is made up of parts), called skandhas. Ego is the entity we have manufactured to prevent ourselves from realizing that we do not exist in any permanent, ongoing, solid way.

From the point of view of lived experience, ego is what we are experiencing when we resist — resistance to change of any kind, resistance to challenges to our beliefs about the way things should be, resistance to “attacks” on the wall we have built to deceive ourselves.

So where emptiness is experienced as letting go, ego is experienced as  resistance, a lack of acceptance of the real nature of things.

empty\emptiness: (does not mean nihilism)

  1. from the point of view of lived experience, emptiness is what we experience when we let go.
  2. insubstantial (like a cloud or dream); not solid; empty of permanent, solid existence; we mistakenly think that we are separate from anything else in the world because we have individual bodies. We’ve all heard of the term “stand alone” computer. There’s no “stand alone” thing that exists on its own. Just as a car is made up of parts, so are we (see ego). The apparently solid car can be dismantled.  If you get a letter to ask you to visit a friend in another city or country, you might drive or buy a plane ticket. You bought the ticket based on the cause of being invited. Neither the letter, your visit, the ticket nor the airplane have an existence apart from other factors. They do not stand alone. In other words, things only exist in relationship to something else.  In short, when we dream we believe that the dream is “real,” that what is happening is “really happening.” We wake up and say “that was just a dream.” Certainly, the dream was vivid! But it wasn’t “real.” Neither are the things we experience in “real”\waking life.

karma:

karmic footprint: the imprint that our volitional actions have on the world around us

karmic package: the seeds (outcome of volitional actions) we are carrying from the past, some of which will ripen in this lifetime.

karmic stream: patterning; sometimes we find people who accurately predict something in the future. How? by reading someone’s karmic stream. A stream flows along. It has a particular path within which to flow. If I want to go from Point A to Point B, I look at a map and find the route\path. But I may decide that Point B, the destination, isn’t where I want to go. I now want to go to Point C.  So I have to get off the path that I’m on and chose another one. If I don’t, I’ll end up at Point B.

negative\bad karma: what we perceive as “obstacles” in our lives.

story line: (1) the thoughts and concepts that defend, protect, explain, and feed our emotions e.g. “Ths is what he said to me and this is why he was wrong. Next time I am going to…..”; (2) what we tell ourselves about why things happen the way they/why we experience life the way we do

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