- Even if you don’t believe in reincarnation, it can be helpful to act as if you do! Then you will lead a more meaningful, successful life. Why? Because we can tune into spaciousness, a bigger perspective, larger view, beyond the tiny, self-centred me-in-the-present. You don’t have to believe in or know your past lives to get and exchange information from this site to rule your own life.
- Rather than berating ourselves because we have accumulated some “bad” karma, we can think of karma in its neutral sense, i.e. Because that happened, this is happening. We can learn from that rather than putting ourselves down.
- Not only do our habitual patterns reflect our particular karma. They also maintain that karma. Unless we practice continual awareness and cut through these patterns, they will bring us the same type of future life that we have now. “When you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.”
- What does it mean to “get out of our own way”? To me it means moving beyond ego, our manufactured, conceptual self and closing the gap between self and others.
- Two people can act in exactly the same way. One person accumulates negative karma. The other doesn’t. Why? Intention.
- A deep understanding of cause and effect creates compassion for others. Why? Because we see how our own actions have lead to certain outcomes and we begin to understand that everyone is operating on the same basis. So we soften and eventually drop our judgements about others.
- The good news is that when we talk about “I,” or “me” or “myself,” it is a conceptual self, comprised of habitual patterns etc. It is not who we actually are.
- What’s integrity? The Catholic Church threw Galileo in prison when he said that the earth moved around the sun, not the other way around. Galileo never recanted.
- Live in the Goldilocks zone. Not too hot. Not too cold. Just warm.
- We want something, something that’s really important to us. We seek it. We don’t get it. We seek again. And so on. Eventually, we might say “that’s my karma.” But actually, we may not get something we want because it’s not part of our path in this lifetime! In other words, it’s not necessarily because of “bad” karma that we didn’t get what we wanted. In my experience, the karma was in the frustration that arises from continuous seeking and not getting!
- If we want to ride our karma rather than be ridden by it, here’s a quick tip from DrumsofDharma: “Recognize the impulse & you can refuse it. Refuse the impulse & you can tame it. By taming the impulse, you lessen suffering.”
- In the ultimate sense, the good news is that there is no self as we usually think of it. The bad news is that we think there is.
- If you want to know what your past life/karmic formation was, look to your present conditions. If you want to know what your future life will be like, look to your present actions.
- We believe that what we perceive is inherently “real.” So we fail to realize that what we call “reality” is actually our own projections. In this sense, karma is simply our own projections coming back to us.
- “What we chose to contemplate, that’s what we’re going to sit in.” <Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, Ruling Your World>
- The same (conceptual) mind that created our karmic stream can free us from it.
-
The words of Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len:
For the ancient Hawaiians, all problems begin as thought. But having a thought is not the problem. So what’s the problem? The problem is that all our thoughts are imbued with painful memories, memories of persons, places, or things.
The intellect working alone can’t solve these problems, because the intellect only manages. Managing things is no way to solve problems. You want to let them go!
What makes it so hard to let them go?
This page is dedicated to Marigold, Oskar + Tessa and others who may find it particularly helpful.
