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!)

If I make certain decisions, I will get certain outcomes. That is the law of karma — the basic flow of nature. <source: Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche – The Four Sessions of Basic Goodness and here.>

In the post of March 28, 2010 we heard the story of Sariputra, the monk, who roared with laughter. We saw that once the consequences from our past volitional actions ripen,
we cannot change them. So it would be a good idea to get familiar with the
10 non virtuous actions and the karma accumulated from having engaged in them — especially as one of those non virtuous actions is not understanding how karma works! Yikes!

As Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche puts it, karma is tit for tat. <source: description of One of the Four Reminders: Karma, its cause and effect. For full quote, please click
here.>

Here is the chart of the 10 negative consequences that arise from ten past volitional actions. The one thing they all have in common is that they spring from self-absorption <source: teacher Jay Lippman, Talk 5 of weekend seminar in Toronto, Canada on Karma, March 13-14, 2010, Toronto, Canada>:

In a future post, I will demonstrate the information in the chart by using real examples from real lives.

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Thinking I have problems.
Thinking I have.
Thinking I.
Thinking.

There can be many meanings for this verse.

Here’s one:

If we follow thoughts back, we can see that they stem from an embedded karmic situation that has gone on for a very long time. <source: Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche)

The point of the practice is to stop being the person who has problems, and instead to abide fully in the nature where there are neither problems nor a separate individual to struggle with them.  <source: Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche>

It is often thought that the buddha’s doctrine teaches us that suffering will disappear if one has meditated long enough, or if one sees everything differently. It is not that at all. Suffering isn’t going to go away; the one who suffers is going to go away.” < source: Ayya Khema: When the Iron Eagle Flies>

Leave the mind in its natural, undisturbed state. Don’t follow thoughts of “This is a problem, that is a problem!” Without labeling difficulties as problems,  leave your mind in its natural state. In this way, you will stop seeing miserable conditions as problems.” <source: Lama Zopa Rinpoche: Transforming Problems into Happiness.>

(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!)

Doesn’t every good story start with “Once upon a time……..”

Well then, once upon a time, Sariputra, a highly-realized student of Sakyamuni Buddha’s, is travelling with some of his (Sariputra’s) students when they come across a family who has just sat down to supper on the lawn. The supper table sits between a pond and the house.

The fish that had been swimming in the pond has just been caught by the father and is now being eaten by the family for supper. The father, sitting at the head of the table, has his baby son on his knee. As soon as the father finishes eating the fish, the family dog runs up to the table, grabs the fish bones and begins to eat them.

The father is very angry. He beats the dog.

Sariputra laughs. His students ask him “What’s so funny? What do you see that we don’t see?”

Sariputra explains.

In a past life the father thought that is wife was cheating with on him with the neighbour. So he killed the neighbour.

The father’s parents — the grandparents of the father’s children — are deceased. But while alive, the grandmother was a real homebody, very attached to her home, her children, and everything connected with her home. The grandfather loved fishing.

In this present lifetime, the grandfather is now the fish who has just
been caught and eaten by his son.

The grandmother has now been reborn as the family dog!

So the grandmother (now a dog) is now eating the grandfather (the fish) and she is also being beaten by her son in this lifetime.

This story expresses the reality of suffering. It demonstrates how the attachments of a previous life are now expressed in the circumstances of the present lifetime.

Source: material based on weekend seminar on karma by teacher Jay Lippman.

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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’m on my way to meet a friend at a restaurant. It’s raining. So I take my umbrella along with me in the car. We meet. Eat. And leave. I then discover that I do not have my umbrella. Return to restaurant. Return to the table at which I was sitting. No umbrella there. Ask the hostess whether anyone turned in a black umbrella. She checks. No.

I demand to speak to the manager. In harsh language, I tell the manager that the restaurant is bad news. In fact, maybe one of the staff stole my umbrella.

When I get home, I’m still fuming.

(source: modified version of original by teacher Jay Lippman)

What just happened?

• umbrella was stolen as a consequence of past negative actions that have now ripened;
• harsh speech and indulging in “the blame game” create future negative karmic consequences;  and
• hanging onto anger by indulging in it, even when the situation has ended, strengthens my habitual tendency to be angry. This ensures that when I am in a similar situation in the future I will most likely behave in a similar negative manner.

In the next scenario, the situation is the same — someone has stolen my umbrealla — but I respond differently:

• recognize that the karma of previous negative actions is being burnt up;
• Although anger is arising in me about the loss of the umbrella,  I refrain from harsh languzge when speaking to the manager;
• when the situation ends, I try to let go of anger every time it arises. This weakens the  negative habitual pattern. The next time I am in a similar situation, I will have a better chance to recognize that this is yet another opportunity to weaken my negative tendency to anger.
  

What’s the difference between these two sets of responses? 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 effects in the future. What we call our past history was once the future that was caused by previous “present” volitional 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 (past volitional actions) 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 into my private diary on the 05 th day of the month of December in the year 1970 CE. May it benefit all those who are trying to understand their own karmic package.

Over the last few years, there have been reports about the possible reasons that King Tutankhamun died at the age of 19. The latest was this past Tuedsay, February 16’10, one of which is entitled King Tut Mysteries Solved: Was Disabled, Malarial, and Inbred. It says that the young pharoah died of malaria and mentions that his father and mother were brother and sister. The diary entry below tells the real story…..

I am a slave in the court of Tutankhamun. Tumult in Egypt. Akenaten has disappeared. Tutankhaten (later changed to Tutankhamun to appease the priests of the old school), a physically disabled lad of nine or ten, came to the throne in 1333 B.C. His uncle, the High Priest Ay, is the power behind the throne and is plotting to have his nephew Tutankhamun murdered so he, Ay, could ascend the throne.

It happened this way: 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!)

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!”

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!)

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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(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.

If you found this post helpful, please share it with your friends! Then consider subscribing to the weblog. Just click on the Subscribe button in the navigation bar. Then follow one of the 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 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 »