Search results for: past karma
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- Proactive Mindfulness… The fact that things come popping into the mind, that’s past karma. You can’t do much about that, but you can choose what you’re going to do with those thoughts. That’s why you want to remember. “Remembering,” here, means recognizing skillful and unskillful qualities, and then remembering what you do with them—what techniques you’ve learned in the past …
- Purity… back into the past about how this particular universe began, or going on in the future how human society is going to degenerate to the point where they have what they call a sword interval, and then civilization begins to regenerate to the time of the next Buddha, each of these accounts ends with a reminder of the principle of karma that all of …
- Equanimity & More… The arahants are free from creating new karma, but even they have to experience the results of some of their past actions, for what they did before their awakening. But everybody else, no matter where you go, even the highest levels of heaven: All beings are subject to these things. That thought should give rise to a feeling of samvega. Where are you going …
- Commit & Reflect… In other words, it wasn’t just past karma but also present karma acting together that had a huge influence on where you were going to go. So he took that principle and applied it to his mind in the present moment even before death. And he realized, by looking at the present moment in terms of the four noble truths, he could go …
- Balanced Concentration… As for things that other people did or said to you, remind yourself that that’s their karma. The fact that incident happened means that maybe you had done something like that far in the past that you’ve now forgotten. This is just your old karma coming back. Well, that particular bit of karma is now done and gone, unless you dig it …
- The Path Is in the Details… Your past habits, your past tendencies, color the present moment to some extent. But they don’t have to totally overwhelming. They don’t have to determine everything that’s going to happen right now. You do have the freedom with each and every moment to choose to do the skillful thing, to choose to be honest about your intentions, so that you can …
- Generating Good Energy… This will have to do with either your past karma or other people’s past karma. So you put the matter aside for the time being and focus on areas where you can be of help. And keep an eye out for the time when the conditions may change and you can be of help in another situation. Now, these attitudes can be developed …
- Don’t Limit Yourself… And to what extent things coming up in the mind are intended right now, which things were intended from the past, and which things are things you can’t remember the intention at all. You start sorting out present karma from recent karma, and both from long-time-ago karma. The word karma means action. Even the word Dhamma has, as one of its …
- Something to Hold On To… Some of the thoughts we think are of things that we intend to think, and others are just random stuff that comes out from our past karma, and you have no idea what that’s going to include. So you have to have a safe place where you’re not pulled away by these things, or they don’t pull bad things into you …
- An End to Suffering… The first one was knowledge of narratives—all the narratives of all his past lives, countless past lives. Think of all the different narratives that were there: “Such was my birth, such was my name, such the food that I ate”—imagine that, that was one of his main memories of his past lives—the food he ate. His experience of pleasure and pain …
- Prevention… Mindfulness is actually a quality of your memory, applying useful things from your memory of the past to the present moment with the knowledge that your mind is always creating karma. The mind is not just passively receiving input. It’s out there actively creating the world that it knows. Some of that creation involves input from outside but then even before the input …
- Doing Your Duty… Now, in some cases your past karma may be such that no matter what you do, you’re going to get sick. But do you know your past karma? Do you know that it’s inevitable? As the Buddha said, there are some cases where a person is going to get sick and will recover regardless of whether he or she gets medicine; other …
- Friends with The Breath… The Buddha talks about how we fabricate our present experience out of a combination of past karma and present intentions. Among those present intentions are your perceptions, the images you hold in mind. These have a huge impact on how you relate to pain. So ask yourself, do you see the pain as a solid block? Has it become the same thing as the …
- Mindworms… Look at that mindworm as a result of karma. You’ve got some old habits that have given rise to this circular pattern. But you have every right in the present moment not to go along with it. This is the basic principle of meditation: that your present choices are much more important than things coming in from the past. So, you don’t …
- Reflect… For the time being, as you’re meditating, ask yourself, “What do they do? How do they perform?” Remember, this is a teaching on karma. Remember the Buddha’s awakening, those first two knowledges he attained: One was knowledge of past lifetimes, the other was knowledge of all beings in the universe dying and being reborn in line with their karma. Those were not …
- Delight… It’s not as if our fate has been written in the past, putting us under some compulsion to act out something that was decided a long time ago. Some conditions in life can be traced back to past actions, but the Buddha’s image of our past karma is like a big field. There are lots of different seeds in that field. It …
- A Network of Goodness… After all, that’s why the Buddha brings up these topics in the context of karma. He’s making the point that we have choices. Our actions are not determined by the stars, and not everything is determined even by past karma. We have fresh choices every moment. It’s because we have those fresh choices that generosity has meaning, that gratitude has meaning …
- Things Aren’t as They Should BeThe common understanding of the Buddha’s teachings on karma is that all the pleasures and pains you experience right now come from your past actions; there’s no way you can avoid them. But there are actually two places in the Canon where the Buddha refutes that idea as being totally antithetical to what he taught. There’s one case where he hears …
Beyond Coping
Introduction
… Given the fact that the experience of the present moment is shaped both by past and by present intentions, it is possible that—if an illness is the result of present intentions—a change of mind can effect a cure in the illness; but if the illness is the result of past intentions, a change of mind may have no effect on the illness …- Everything’s Right There… As the Buddha said, it’s the karma that puts an end to karma—not by burning karma away but by taking you to a place that lies beyond karma. But that requires that you get really sensitive to what you’re doing right now. Again, this is why we’re with the breath. If the mind wobbles away from the breath, you know …
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