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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!)

© The New Yorker Collection 2000 David Sipress from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.

Meditation is no longer a strange word. Scientists have done many studies to show the benefits of meditation on our health, both physical and mental.

This post is, however, not directly about the health benefits. It is about the misconceptions around meditation. It is necessary to deal with this because meditation is one of the tools that can help us to change the course of our lives, our karma. And if we are operating on misconceptions, then we cannot make proper use of this valuable tool.

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche provides the context for this post

“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.”

“The point of buddhism is that we are creating future actions. We can change the course. We are not stuck in our karma.” (Classes 4 and 5)

By meditating, we see how the mind that created our karma is the same mind that can cut the creation and maintenance of that karma.

Before we get into details about how meditation can cut karma and allow us to control our lives, I want to first dispel some common misconceptions: Read the rest of this entry »

It’s 06h15. I’m listening, as I do everyday, to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio One, and hear about the website that encourages people to sit at their computers and do nothing for two minutes. You cannot touch your mouse or keyboard. You get a Pass or Fail grade.

It is almost impossible to meet the challenge. We tend to go AWOL. Even for two minutes!

We’ve neglected mental fitness. We’ve been brought up on a diet of action, doing, going. We’ll get physically fit. But we don’t make time to practice fitness for the mind where we could actually meet our own minds directly and reclaim them.

Try the challenge! When you get a Pass grade, I’ll meet you 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 of benefit!)

My son lives in the north part of the city. But he likes the downtown. He just doesn’t like to pay the new, increased fare to get there. I suggest to him the he not begrudge spending money on a transit ticket.  It’s literally and figuratively his “ticket to ride,” as the Beatles’ song put it.

It’s his ticket to having multiple choices of where he wants to go and what he wants to do. In other words, it’s his ticket to relative (conventional) freedom.

How about the ticket that takes us beyond the myth of  freedom? For me, real freedom is to go beyond the karma we have created and constantly and unwittingly maintain by our actions.

How do we go beyond? Cut through? Change?

In short, we need to change our attitude, our perspective.

How?

Read the rest of this entry »