Search results for: "Kamma"

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  2. Selves with Skills
     … We use these processes, what he calls fabrications, to put together the raw material that comes from our past kamma. We’re doing it all the time but, as the Buddha explains, we do it in ignorance, so we’re barely aware of it. That’s why we don’t get the best results out of it. One of the reasons why we meditate … 
  3. Anupassana
     … One is the results of kamma coming in from the past, and the other is both what you’re doing right now and the results of what you’re doing right now. In fact, what you’re doing right now is what enables you to experience the raw material coming in from the past to begin with. When the Buddha explains dependent co-arising … 
  4. Change Your Perceptions
     … The potentials for the present may come from past kamma, but because these potentials don’t get actualized until you contribute your present-moment karma—what you intend in the present moment, what you fabricate in the present moment—that gives you some freedom in how you’re choose to fashion things. Whether you’re going to choose to fashion a path or not … 
  5. How to Be Happy
     … If you can bring these qualities into the meditation, it makes all the difference, because one of the important principles of kamma is not so much what you did in the past, it’s what you’re doing right now that matters. There may be some limitations coming in from the past, but your choices about what to focus on, what to do with … 
  6. Beyond Inter-eating
     … And one of the major things he woke to was the principle of action, kamma: that our lives are shaped by our actions. Our happiness, our pains, are shaped by our actions, the intentions on which we act. Having conviction in that fact is a very strengthening thing. On the one hand, it empowers you. You see that you really can shape your life … 
  7. Laying the Infrastructure
     … They pointed him in the right direction, because the second knowledge pointed to the question of kamma, of views and intentions: the actions of beings, the views under which they acted. This is what inspired the Buddha to turn around and look at his actions and views in the present moment. He got very sensitive to what was going on in the present moment … 
  8. The Second Frame of Reference
     … You’ve got a disease in your body, you’ve got aches and pains in your body that come from old kamma. You can’t do much about that. But, as Ajaan Lee says, it’s not that your body is totally pained. And you do have the choice: Where do you want to focus your attention? What do you want to maximize? Do … 
  9. Always in Training
     … He said it’s something you give to everybody regardless, because if you have ill will for people, you’re going to act unskillfully around them, and that’s going to become your kamma. So to protect yourself from yourself, you need to develop goodwill to be universal. As the Buddha said, it’s a determination. It’s not something that comes innately to … 
  10. Toward Release
     … True, you’re not creating it out of whole cloth, but you are fabricating your sense of the present out of the raw material provided by your past kamma. This applies to all your present experiences, whether you’re meditating or not. The desire to fabricate your present experience well and the questions you ask as a result of the desire to do it … 
  11. Why We Practice the Way We Do
     … Can you take it with you when you die?” The king says, “No, I have to leave it behind and just go on in line with my kamma.” Death, not-self: another characteristic of the world. And finally the fourth one: “A slave to craving.” The king says, “What do you mean by that?” He doesn’t like being called a slave, so the … 
  12. Training the Committee
     … But you know the principle of kamma is such that the results of your past actions do not totally determine what’s going to happen in the future. It would actually be better for those people to learn in the meantime how not to suffer from bad situations, so that even if bad situations do come up, they can control themselves, they can keep … 
  13. The Dhamma Is in the Method
     … This is why the teaching on kamma is such a basic part of the teaching, i.e., the principle that your actions will give results based on your intentions in line with the principles of cause and effect. If your actions made no difference, or if you couldn’t choose your actions, then there would be no way that you could test any teaching … 
  14. Protecting Your Space
     … Belief in kamma is what grows into an understanding of the four noble truths: There is suffering, and it’s clinging. There is a cause, and the cause is there in the mind, something the mind is doing, and something you can do something about. There are factors in the mind that you can convert into the path; you want to develop those so … 
  15. Recollecting the Devas
     … The irony, of course, is that nowadays many people think that the Buddha’s teaching on kamma is deterministic. But he went to great pains to say No. He told the monks many times about his encounters with the Jains, his encounters with other deterministic teachers, and how, step by step by step, he refuted their teachings. It was rare for him to search … 
  16. Preparing to Die Well
     … As the Buddha said, this kind of pleasure is blameworthy, causes harm to yourself, harm to other people, and in addition to the bad kamma that often comes with getting involved in that kind of stuff, the mind gets dull, dull, dulled. Your vision gets restricted—because when you’re attracted to something of that sort, it’s usually to certain details. You focus … 
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