Get a Lifetime Dot Com

(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 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.

• Our spouse\significant other isn’t who we thought they were.
  
• We’ve lost our job.
  
• A child is diagnosed as “psychotic” and has dropped out of school.
• etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
  

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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(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!)

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.

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 »

(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!)

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.

Read the rest of this entry »