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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!)

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:

1. sat relatively comfortably on my wall; and then
   
2. something would come along to challenge this comfort and I would fall off the wall and then try to “get my life back together again.”

Then the two stages of this cycle would start again.

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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!)

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.

• I’ve lost my job.
• My marriage has fallen apart.
• It’s raining.
• I’m in alot of physical pain.

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.

• “You don’t have a job. So you’re worthless and a loser.”
• “They have more than I do.”
• “I’m the best!”
• “I’m the worst!”

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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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