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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 Sunday, May 03, 2009 I watched a television programme on the world’s oldest living conjoined twins on The Learning Channel. On Mother’s Day, May 10, I want to pay tribute to their step-mother Mary. Their biological mother rejected them.

With their bodies fused at the lower chest, doctors didn’t think that conjoined twins Ronnie and Donnie would survive through the night. But the twins have confounded everyone by living to the ripe old age of 57. <source – The Learning Channel)

I was so moved by Ronnie and Donnie’s story. Besides feeling great appreciation for their step-mother Mary, I want to honour the twins for demonstrating in a physical way that we are all spiritually, emotionally and psychologically interdependent in this world. That we are not separate or independent from others.

They illustrate in such a heartfelt way the notion of skillful means and compassion.

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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 friend Marigold sent me a copy of actor Gwyneth Paltrow’s online newsletter Goop, edition April 16, 2009 in which Paltrow asks: Why are people delighted when bad things happen to other people?

Possible answer: we feel better about ourselves. Why? Because we can “shore up” what we mistakenly believe is our own independent, ongoing, permanent identity.

At the end of her article the actor asks:

I’m curious about the spiritual concept of “evil tongue” (speaking evil of others) and its pervasiveness in our culture. Why do people become energized when they say or read something negative about someone else? What does it say about where that person is? What are the consequences of perpetuating negativity or feeling schadenfreude?

While contemplating Paltrow’s question on her Goop website, I thought of the nursery rhyme about the Goops written by Gelett Burgess and published in 1900.

The Goops they lick their fingers,
And the Goops they lick their knives;
They spill their broth on the tablecloth —
Oh, they lead disgusting lives!
………
……..

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!)

© 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 »

(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 remember when my parents took me to the three-ringed circus when it came to Toronto.

The world of suffering and confusion seems to me to be like a three-ringed circus. But instead of the circus barker introducing the lions, elephants, and high-wire acts, he shouts:

Ladies and gentlemen, in this corner we have the rooster, representing the poison of passion. Over in that corner is the snake, representing the poison of aggression. And over in this corner is the pig, which represents the poison of ignorance.

The poisons are interrelated. That is why the tail of the rooster is grasped by the pig,  and the tail of the snake is grasped by the mouth of the rooster.

The role of the three poisons? To make us (our egos) feel solid, permanent, ongoing, unchangeable.

They work together. They each act to assist the others. They are partners. And for that reason I liken them to a three-ringed circus. There are three different acts going on in this ring, but at the same time they all mesh together to produce an integrated “show,” an effect.

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 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 understand intellectually, conceptually, that karma is carried from one lifetime to another and from one situation to another in this present lifetime, much like a torch is passed from team member to team member in a relay race. 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?

But what does karma actually look like “on the ground” in our daily lives?

Based on my weblog paged called Actual face of karma, what would the life of someone who is the present (fictional) incarnation of Queen Tiye (mother of Akhenaten), Helen of Troy, 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 these six historical figures in terms of money, career, sex, 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 29th day of the month of June in the year 1971 CE. May it benefit all beings who are trying to understand their karmic footprint. This diary entry deals specifically with the romantic relationships that arose out of the kind of past karma carried by the present incarnation of our portrait gallery described above.

Part One:

You needed to see me as
rough
but my kiss told you as
tender

You needed to see me as
critical
but my words told you as
helpful

You needed to see me as
formidable
But my eyes told you as
searching

You needed to see me as
having left you
But my presence told you as
here

You needed to see me as
You needed to see me
You needed to see
You needed to
You needed
You

But where does that leave us?

Part Two:

rough kiss tender
critical words helpful
formidable eyes searching
left presence 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!)

The story of Helen of Troy, with its combination of sex and violence, has endured for over 3,000 years since Homer wrote about it. There have been movies on the big screen. Movies on television. And scores of books.

Helen was the Greek version of Marilyn Monroe. Her story, as told by one of my favourite authors Margaret George, is a dramatic illustration of the laws of cause and effect, afflictive emotions, grasping and craving. In short, we watch with fascination as the karma unfolds. (For an historical account, based on The Illiad by Homer, you can read the first three chapters of Helen of Troy by Jack Lindsay.)

Helen was Queen of Sparta, married to King Menalaus. While Prince Paris of Troy is visiting Sparta, he meets Helen and the rest, as they say, is history.

Agememnon, King of Mycenae, and older brother to Menalaus, creates alliances with other Greek kings and they set sail — in the fabled 1,000 ships — to make war on Troy. While Agememnon is in Troy, his wife takes a lover. After ten years, Troy is sacked. Helen returns to Sparta with her husband King Menalaus.  When Agememnon reaches Mycenae to take up his throne again, his wife stabs him to death.

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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!)

To further demonstrate the 12 factors (links) that create and maintain our karmic stream,  I’m going to use a true situation as described by author Ann Rule in her book Too Late to Say Goodbye .

All lives, no matter how prosaic, have their secrets, and we never know what is actually going on in even our closest friends’ worlds. Jennifer Corbin was no different. Her involvement with someone outside her marriage began quite innocently.

In the spring of 2004, Christopher and Jenn meet on Sony PlayStation’s game called Everquest. Jenn plays a Wizard called “wizwiz148.” Her online partner signs on as “sirtank1223.”

A few weeks before Jenn Corbin is murdered, she discovers that her virtual lover “Christopher” is in fact another woman whose real name is Anita Hearn.  Anita is the last person to speak to Jenn Corbin in the early morning of December 04, 2004, the day she, Jenn, dies.

Her husband Dr. Bart Corbin, not realizing that Christopher is in fact a woman, has discovered steamy emails between his wife and “Christopher” and thinks his wife is involved in an affair. He murders her while their two young sons sleep in their beds.

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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.

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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!)

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.

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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!)

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 »