Search results for: "Kamma"

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  2. For the Survival of True Happiness
     … You’re not creating bad kamma with other people. In fact, your inner victory is going to be good for other people outside as well.
  3. Good for What Purpose?
     … Even though a lot of the things you experience are based on past kamma, past actions, not everything is. How you put it all together is determined by your fabrications right now, your intentions right now, your desires right now. And you’re free to choose those. So this is what we’re trying to train: What kind of desires are really useful for … 
  4. Exploring Fabrication
     … Basically, you take the potential for, say, a form or a feeling or a perception, fabrications, or consciousness—these potentials come from your past kamma—and then you fabricate them into an actual experience of the aggregates. There’s an intentional element in all of these things. As the Buddha said, the essence of insight is learning how to investigate the process of fabrication … 
  5. The Allure of Sensuality
     … Try to see where you’re lying to yourself, the way you have of dressing things up in order to make them appealing, and then look at this pleasure that the Buddha offers that doesn’t require dressing up, doesn’t involve any bad kamma at all. No bad consequences, now or into the future. That’s when you see that you’ve been … 
  6. Momentum Through Restraint
     … As the Buddha said, it’s through our intentions that we shape our present experience out of the raw material coming from our past kamma, and all too often we’re in the dark about our present-moment intentions. That’s what ignorance means—we’re not really clear about why we’re doing things. So you take the precepts to help clear up … 
  7. Boring
     … That’s the kamma in the meditation. All of the other factors that you need to understand: They’re right here for you to observe again and again and again. If you let yourself get bored with them, you’re never going to see their subtleties. You just tell yourself, “Okay, I’ve seen this before. I know this.” Remind yourself, if you really … 
  8. Levels of Truth
     … After all, meditation is a kind of kamma, a kind of action, so you want to do it skillfully. It’s on this level that the Buddha talks about beings, worlds, and most of our common everyday concepts. It’s a very useful level to have on hand. But he also has other levels of right view. There’s the level of the four … 
  9. Strength from Within
     … If you really are convinced in the principle of kamma, you won’t break any of the precepts, particularly not the five big ones. As you realize that what you do—the decisions you make about what’s okay and what’s not okay—will have a huge impact on the course of your meditation, the course of your life, and the state of … 
  10. Training Your Intentions
     … But the basic message is that we have raw materials coming from our past kamma for certain forms, feelings, perceptions, etc. We choose the ones we want to focus on and pay attention to, and we turn them into the actual experience of an aggregate. So we’re playing a very intentional and purposeful role in our engagement with these things—in fact, with … 
  11. Breath Meditation, Step by Step
     … Thoughts will present themselves, and it’s the habitual nature of the mind to go with them, because you’ve got past kamma that keeps having this effect on the mind—your old habit of trying to find happiness by getting into these thoughts. Now you’re going to change that habit. As soon as you realize you’re off the breath, you bring … 
  12. Learning Through Healing
     … We have things coming in through the senses that are essentially the result of past kamma. But we’re already primed to manipulate those experiences: We focus on some things and ignore other things. We direct our thoughts and evaluate things in a particular way. And when we do this out of ignorance, there’s going to be suffering. We hold certain images in … 
  13. The Power of Perception
     … These things exist in a potential form, coming in from your past kamma, which places some limitations on the range of your choices. But to actually have a feeling, actually have a perception, requires an intention, a sankhara, a fabrication that occurs in the present moment. These aggregates the Buddha talks about are activities. There’s an intentional element in them. Really to accept … 
  14. Angry
     … Someday we’re all going to be in our graves and today’s issues won’t matter, yet here we are creating kamma with one another and it just drags us down. Think of the Buddha’s image of human beings as fish in a dwindling pond. The water’s drying up, and the fish are struggling over that last little patch of water … 
  15. The Karma of Self & Not-Self
    The Buddha called himself a kamma-vadi, which means someone who teaches action. One of the central points of his teaching is that we choose our actions, our actions are real, they give consequences, and those consequences depend on the state of mind with which we do the action. So the Buddha had a tendency to look at everything in terms of an action … 
  16. Refuge
     … You’ve actually helped your friends in a really deep way, because now they have good kamma. This is how you show compassion. So these are the three qualities we’re trying to work on—wisdom, purity, compassion—as we practice. With practice, these become our refuge. As you develop these qualities within yourself, you’ve got the qualities of the Buddha inside. Notice … 
  17. A Good Independent Self
     … If your mind is expansive, then whatever painful results you’re experiencing from past kamma will be greatly reduced. Just as when you throw a salt crystal into a large river of water: Even though you’ve put some salt in the water, there’s so much more water than there is salt that you can still drink the water and it won’t … 
  18. Compunction
     … Belief in the principle of kamma, fear of retaliation, and empathy can inform your compunction. When you realize it really is in your own self-interest to take care, you also realize that it requires energy. This is why we practice meditation, because there are some forms of putting yourself out where you feel depleted and other forms of putting in energy where you … 
  19. On Denying Defilement
     … There are some aspects of the traditional teachings that modern Western teachers like to brag about, saying that they’re going to drop this or drop that teaching from the tradition— they’re going to drop kamma, they’re going to drop rebirth—but they don’t even mention the word defilement. You would never know that it was ever a part of the … 
  20. Separate
     … Now, remember, goodwill is not saying, “May everybody be happy just doing whatever they’re doing.” You look at happiness in terms of the teachings on kamma: People are going to be genuinely happy when they’re doing skillful things. So you’re actually wishing, “May all beings be skillful.” Of course, that’s something you can’t bring about through your own efforts … 
  21. The Six Properties
     … You’ve got potentials coming in from past kamma, but you’ve also got the element of present choice, which becomes extremely clear when you analyze things in this way. When I first went to stay with Ajaan Fuang, he had me memorize Ajaan Lee’s Divine Mantra: six passages dealing with the different properties. For a long time it seemed very foreign to … 
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