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Confined in the dark, narrow cage of our own making that we take for the whole universe, very few of us can even begin to imagine another dimension of mind. Patrul Rinpoche tells the story of an old frog who had lived all his life in a dank well. One day a frog from the sea paid him a visit.

“Where do you come from?” asked the frog in the well.
“From the great ocean,” he replied.
“How big is your ocean?”
“It’s gigantic.”
“You mean about a quarter of the size of my well here?”
“Bigger.”
“Bigger? You mean half as big?”
“No, even bigger.”
“Is it . . . as big as this well?”
“There’s no comparison.”
“That’s impossible! I’ve got to see this for myself.”

Read the rest of this entry »

It is now January 01, 2011. Many of us will have made or will be in the process of making New Year’s resolutions!

• to listen to others rather than trying to dominate the conversation
• to be kinder, less aggressive
• to get fit
• to spend more time with family
• etc. etc. etc.

My New Year’s resolution is to NOT make any effort around “self-improvement.”

Why?

As long as you’re wanting to be thinner, smarter, more enlightened, less uptight, or whatever it might be , somehow you’re always going to be approaching your problem with the very same logic that created it to begin with: you’re not good enough. That’s why the habitual pattern never unwinds itself when you’re trying to improve, because you go about it in exactly the same habitual style that caused all the pain to start. (source: Pema Chodron: Start Where You Are)

I want to unwind my habitual “self,” not improve it!

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!)

Many of us have found the concept of “emptiness” difficult to understand, to “get a handle on,” to “come to grips with.” Not surprising, as even the concept of emptiness is empty!

Why would I want to write about it? Because it describes the true nature of our minds, of reality, of the universe. Put another way, what we think exists in a permanent, solid way is just an appearance.

Phenomena are  like firecrackers. They flash (appear) in the sky, stay for a second, and then pass away. They have no inherent existence apart from the causes and conditions that produced them. You may have heard the phrase “the world of appearances.” That is what I am referring to here.  So everything that arises in our lives is actually an “appearance,” not some solid,  permanent reality.

I have come to believe that without an understanding of this true nature, we cannot really live the best of lives. Why? Because we are fooled, deluded, duped. That’s what is meant by the phrase “we are fooled by our own projections.”  The problem isn’t so much that we project, but that we don’t acknowledge it. Personally, I do not want to live in this state.

We experience this “emptiness” everyday: things change all the time, manufactured items like cars, a supper plate, etc. etc. fall apart. But while we understand the concept intellectually, it is emotionally difficult to accept. Why? Because our ego resists this truth.

So what? Who cares?

What possible usefulness is it to understand ideas like emptiness, appearances, the 12 factors of dependent origination, cause and effect. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s Spring, 1976. I am the sole support mother of a beautiful four-year-old son.

The doctor says my son has to have his tonsils out.

Every night for one month I read a book to him that takes a child step-by-step through the process of what happens when the child enters the hospital for the operation. I hope that this information will calm his fears.

When my son is rolled through the hall on a gurney towards the operating room, he says to me “I not only love you. I like you.”

Even 36 years later, I am struck by the wisdom in this remark.

But what does it mean?

We talk about love a lot. But this remark suggests that somehow you might love someone, but not necessarily like them!

In order to gain some clarity, I did a contemplation exercise on loving and liking.  (Instructions for how to contemplate are provided in Appendix C,  Turning the Mind Into An Ally by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche)>

Here’s what arose for me: 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 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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(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!)

Even if you do not believe in reincarnation, live as if you do!

Why?

Your perspective gets much larger. More spacious. Less crowded. It’s easier to sort out what is important and what can wait.

On a light note, there’s also what I call the “just-in-case” principle: live as if you believe, just in case you find out that it is true when you die…..

My son pointed out some specifics of the benefits of acting as if we believe in reincarnation:

1. We have a larger perspective. We realize we don’t need to dwell so much on things have are happening or have happened in our lives. We’re working on a much larger scale.
2. There’s a long-term meaning to our lives, rather than the “It-doesn’t-matter-what-I-do-in-my-life-because-nothing-matters-anyway” attitude.
   
3. If we’re very materialistic, acting as if we believe in reincarnation helps us to shift our focus to the spiritual dimension of life.
4. The belief in past lives helps us to make sense of what happens in this lifetime in a much deeper way.

Post Script: you might find a transcript of Suzuki Roshi’s comments interesting – please click here and scroll about half-way down the page.

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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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We live in the mundane world, the relative world, the world of phenomena.
We do not live on the ultimate plane.

Nonetheless, we can make use of the ultimate plane in problem-solving.

How? Read the rest of this entry »