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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!)

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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(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!)

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

If you found this post helpful, please share it with a friend. Then consider subscribing to the weblog by clicking on the Subscribe button in the navigation bar and following one of three sets of simple instructions. Thank you.

(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!)

Ten seems to be a power number.

• the Ten Commandments;
  
• Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche’s The Ten Percent Advantage;
• the nursery rhyme Over in the Meadow; and
• the movie Ten
  

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 »

(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 »

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 »