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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!)

I replied:

I don’t know where this comes from.

But I began to contemplate its meaning.

This is the best I can come up with:

Nature’s actions — wind, rain, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, sunshine etc. etc. etc. — while the result of cause and effect, aren’t “volitional” (not by choice). They are not underpinned by the kleshas (poisons).

In other words, Nature’s very power lies in the fact that it is free of
volition and the kleshas that underlie volitional action.

(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!)

Two young Canadian women were brutally murdered on or about November 24-25, 2009, and January 28, 2010 respectively.  On February 07, 2010 Canadian Col. Russell Williams was arrested for the torture, rape and murder of the women.

The colonel pleaded guilty and avoided a trial. But that wasn’t the end of the drama. In October, 2010, the colonel went to court to hear the prosecution’s evidence against him. It was chilling.

We follow the timeline of events that starts in 2007 and ends in 2010 – two young women murdered, and 82 houses broken into and lingerie stolen and meticulously stored in the colone’s home in military duffel bags.

Among all the events, I couldn’t help noticing the shattering juxtaposition of two
of them:

We wonder “what kind of person could murder a woman under his command on a military base on Nov 24-25, 2009 and then write a letter of condolence to her parents on December 01, 2009?”

We wonder “what kind of person would rape, kill  and even take pictures of the entire sadistic event, including pictures of himself in the murdered women’s lingerie? How do people come to this point?”

This is where the 12 factors that create and maintain our karma may help us gain some insight.

In previous posts we have looked at the 12 factors in terms of past lives and how they influence our present one.

In this post, we’ll look at the factors in terms of one particular action.  Killing. 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 beneficial!)

Teachers tell us that how we perceive things is an indication of the karma we brought from our past.

Even within the human realm, all of us have our own individual karma. Human beings look much the same, but we perceive things utterly differently, and we each live in our own unique, separate, individual world. As Kalu Rinpoche says:

“If a hundred people sleep and dream, each of them will experience a different world in his dream. Everyone’s dream might be said to be true, but it would be meaningless to ascertain that only one person’s dream was the true world and all others were fallacies. There is truth for each perceiver according to the karmic patterns conditioning his perceptions.” (italics mine) (source: Rigpa Glimpse of the Day, April 16, 2011)

I’d like to tweek this slightly to express an insight I’ve had over the years that keeps returning to me: perception is karma! The fact that I perceive something in the way I perceive it is my karma.

The universe that we inhabit and our shared perception of it are the results of a common karma. ~ HH XIV Dalai Lama

Example: If I perceive some situation to be an obstacle to what I want, that perception is my karma.

“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” – Shakespeare

Another way to put this? We are fooled by our own projections into thinking that what we perceive is solidly “real.”

Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche – re dreaming together = reality: perhaps dreaming together is what we all agree to call reality! (Twitter msg. Aug 15’10)

And:

“It was a shared dream we agreed to call Reality.” <source: from the preface of the play called “Doubt” by John Patrick Shanley; now, a movie starring Meryl Street and Philip Seymour Hoffman>

The mantra of some politicians is “Perception is reality.” In other words, if they can get us to perceive an issue in a certain way, that becomes our reality. And if we take the next step and cling\get attached to this perception, it then becomes our karma.

That’s why it is said “change your mind and you change your karma.”

What has been described above is what we might call the profound level of the understanding of karma. If we can attain this profound understanding, then we can cut through our karma and be liberated from it.

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A woman dreams every night that she is being chased through an old haunted house by a huge, hideous monster. Night after night, it endlessly chases her, coming so close that she feels its icy breath on the nape of her neck.

Then one night, though she runs madly, the monster corners the terrified woman. Just as it reaches out to tear her apart, she turns around, finds her voice and screams, “What are you? Why do you chase me? What will you do to me?”

At that, the monster stops, straightens up, and with a puzzled expression, shrugs and says, “How should I know? It’s your dream.”  <source: click here>

Apparently, our waking life is the same as a dream……

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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!)

The karmic system, comprised of causes, conditions, circumstances and effects, is, for me, the most definitive proof of the teaching that we are fooled by our own projections.

In other words, we create our own reality. And from that flows what we call our karma.

How?

By concretizing our thoughts, emotions, values, and beliefs. We make them solid — and call it reality!

And when something happens — pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral — to us in our lives, we again call it reality! “That’s life,” we’ll say.

But it is just our own projections, our own storyline, coming back to us. These projections are in fact the karma produced by our creating, and then believing in, those projections.

In short, the whole karmic system of causes, conditions, circumstances and effects is manufactured.

The way to liberate ourselves from the “reality” we have created for ourselves? Meditation practice. Only this practice allows us to work with our own minds to let go of the fixation on our thoughts, emotions, values and beliefs and experience freshness.

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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!)

How often have we heard “It’s the thought that counts”?

For example, if we couldn’t get someone the expensive gift that we would like to have given them, we can comfort ourselves with the belief that “it’s the thought that counts!”

That’s the use of the word “thought “as in “intention.”

But believing this phrase It’s the thought that counts is also how we can get ourselves into trouble.

If you have no interest in a thought, it has no power.
You oxygenate them with your beliefs and interests – Mooji

How? 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 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

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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!)

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 »

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 »