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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!)

source:  Elephant Journal March 16, 2009 edition

In previous posts, we came across terms like the

• 12 links
• 12 nidanas,
• wheel of life, and
  
• laws of dependent origination.

Here’s a Plain English way to understand these terms: if you have a project to do, you first break it down into small tasks. Let’s say there are 12 of these tasks. They are all linked, interlinked, with task one leading to task two leading to task three and so on until finally we have completed the entire project.

It’s the same with the 12 links etc. And the project described by these terms is nothing less than the creation of a “self” and its karma.

I like to use the word “factors.” But no matter what term you use, all these terms explain the dependent relationship — the INTERlinking —between the factors that create our karma :

…[In short] how we are born, how we create karma, how we die, and how that all revolves. <Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche>

and why we experience the world the way we do:

…the ego-self is ungrounded, and as a result we experience an uncomfortable emptiness or hole at the very core of our being. We feel this problem as a sense of lack, of inadequacy, or unreality, and in compensation we usually spend our lives trying to accomplish things that we think will make us more real. <author: David Loy>

If we want to understand why we suffer, then we have to understandthe process of causes and conditions that underlies the suffering. Only then can we begin to undo these causes and conditions.

Up until now, I haven’t listed the 12 links. Over the past 30 years, whenever I tried to study them in depth, I got dizzy. I felt badly about that.

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!)

In the March 01, 2009 post entitled Life is [Like] a Dream – am I missing something?, I offered this description of our ignorance of our true nature:

We’ve been caught up in some major mistake. But not the kind of mistake where we show up at somebody’s house for a party on the wrong day…..

Actually, I realized as I was walking south this past Friday on Yonge Street in Toronto that our mistake is in “showing up” at all!

“Showing up” in the sense that that we confuse what is a manufactured ego — created out various causes and specific conditions that themselves can change at any moment — with who we actually are, a collection of moments that are fleeting and impermanent. The image that I find helpful is fireworks. They arise, flash in space, and then die.

The unchanging space that underlies all changing phenomena is vast like the sky. Ego tries ad nauseum to carve out a little piece of the sky for itself. Then it has to defend this little piece of the sky. This leads to all sorts of  confusion. And wars. Wars on both the personal and national level. Wars for more territory.

We can see this very clearly in what we call The Terrible Two’s. A two-year old will scream “Mine! Mine!” if another child tries to play with his toy.

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!)

In the post of March 01’09 below, I noted that, while I found Row Row Row Your Boat, a child’s nursery rhyme, helpful in understanding the nature of reality, it still didn’t answer the question of why life is like a dream. I also asked the reader to note that

“We must be very clear that only the self that is being grasped as intrinsically real needs to be negated. The self as a conventional phenomenon is not rejected.” (source: From book by HH Dalai Lama XIV)

I quoted a story the Buddha told about why we are so confused about who we are. Please see previous post for the quote.

He talks about the “false views”: believing that we have a separate, permanent, intrinsically-existing self  ( oneness”), that is different from the other separate, permanent, intrinsically-existing selves (otherness”) around us.

When you ask someone, “what is the self?” the answer will usually be a list of parts or items — the self is the body-mind, my history, my memory, my thoughts. Our most basic assumption is that everything inside this bag of skin is me and everything outside of it is the rest of the universe. (source: In the Face of Fear; article by John Daido Loori: “Getting to the Bottom of Stress”)

and:

Karma is created by two situations [false views]: the sense of me-ness or I-ness and the sense of other. “I am what I am, therefore things are as they are.” <Karma Seminar>

So, in a very real sense, the line from a Beatles’ song “I am he as you are he as you are me as we are all together,” rings true.

We may know intellectually that we are not permanent or solid. After all, this “self” — that has no existence apart from relative causes and conditions — dies. But we act as if we are a continuous, separate self….”Hi, my name is ___. I have two children, two cars, work at ___job, take holidays at _______, have four credit cards, play tennis,” etc. etc. etc. You get the idea. But just in case I didn’t explain it well enough, this quote might help: 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!)

—

Ultimately, the good news is that we don’t exist in a permanent, solid, important way. The bad news is we act as if we do. This misunderstanding creates harm to ourselves and others.

[We must be very clear that only the self that is being grasped as intrinsically real needs to be negated. The self as a conventional phenomenon is not rejected. from book by HH Dalai Lama XIV]

When we look at a television that has been turned on, we see pictures. But the pictures aren’t solid or real, as they appear. They are made up of dots. So is ego, the “I,” “me.” It is made up of tendencies, habitual patterns, imprints, emotions etc. that, when we link them together, appear solid. We mistakenly think that this is who we are.

The self is not made of any substance at all: it is just a kaleidoscopid display of empty imagery, intangible, like a self in a dream……This sense of self is actually a transitory, discontinuous event, which in our confusion seems to be quite solid and continuous. (Contemplating Reality)

This post is about the first link (factor) out of the traditional twelve nidanas or 12links of interdependent origination (chapter 3),namely our ignorance of the nature of reality.

Ignorance does not mean stupidity here. It is vital to understand this first link because this is where ego is born. And our suffering and confusion with it. I use the word “ego” to describe a manufactured, constructed“self” vis-a-vis who we are in an unfabricated, primordial way.

This point is important. So I don’t hesitate to repeat it. We have manufactured cars, boats, houses, airplanes etc. etc. etc. We have also manufactured a “self.”

By the time I was 22, I could sum up how I felt by a line from a song by The Rolling Stones — “I think I’m on a losing streak.” I was walking along St. Clair Avenue West in Toronto when I realized that all the intellectual explanations I had created to explain why I was suffering so much were not helping. Then I came across the idea that we suffer because of how we, in our ignorance, have created a self that we think is real in a permanent, ongoing, solid way. It is important to say that this is not a nihilistic view. Read the rest of this entry »