Search results for: past karma

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  2. Stay with the Knowing
     … Then there’s the question of what your karma’s going to be. There are so many battles fought in the world that are totally useless. What happens, of course, is that people end up creating a lot of karma. Then they carry the karma with them, while whatever victory they won is left behind. It’s totally meaningless. Learn how to draw on … 
  3. Staying on Track
     … But in either case, you can take his indications and work with them, realizing that if something unskillful comes into the mind, it’s a type of karma. It may come from past karma, but you’ve got the possibility of making better choices, better karma, in the present moment. This is the most important thing you’ve got to keep in mind. There … 
  4. Shoot Your Pains with Wisdom
     … This comes down to a fairly abstract principle that the Buddha mentions in another passage—that when you experience a feeling of any sort, pleasant or painful, part of it is just a potential for the feeling coming from your past karma; the rest is the way you actualize that potential with your present intentions, your present karma. You fabricate the potential into an … 
  5. Four Determinations
     … It’s not the case that you just sit here and wait for concentration to come, or hope that concentration will come— that somehow your past karma will do it for you. As the Buddha said, what you experience right now is the result of past karma together with present karma. And it’s the present karma that makes it possible for you to … 
  6. Disenchantment
     … Bhava means a state of being, becoming, the process of becoming, which is a combination of past karma plus our present karma. But then bhuta means things as they’ve come to be: the raw material that comes in from the past before we’ve added our hype, added our salt-and-pepper and mustard and ketchup to make it what we want. The … 
  7. Deep Time
     … You suffer sometimes from your past bad karma. You want to ask yourself how much longer you want to be open to the possibility that there’s more bad karma, or of coming back and forgetting about the Dhamma and doing stupid things all over again. We’ve done that who knows how many times. We learn some Dhamma and then we forget. Then … 
  8. The Power of Present Karma
     … It wouldn’t erase them—a moment of right view does not erase the bad things you’ve done in the past—but it can help you avoid some of the immediate consequences of bad things, and it opens the opportunity for you to practice so that you can be like Aṅgulimāla: You can gain an escape from your past bad kamma through your … 
  9. Immaterial Gifts
     … You benefit from the fact that you’re not going to be taking on the bad karma of having to get back at the other person. The other person benefits in seeing your good example. You can give the gift of virtue. As the Buddha said, if your observance of the precepts is total and all around, then you’re giving safety to the … 
  10. A Happiness Without Boundaries
     … So these are some of the beginning implications of karma, in the way the Buddha taught it. He was very careful to argue against two kinds of thought: One was that everything is totally determined from the past. You have no choices. And the other was that everything is really random: There’s no pattern at all that you can learn from; things just … 
  11. Generosity & Gratitude
     … When the Buddha taught the teaching on karma, he mentioned, “There is mother and father”—which, of course, sounds obvious, but it was a controversial topic back in those times. By saying there is or there isn’t mother and father, you were saying whether your parents were owed any specific debt of gratitude. When they said there isn’t mother and father, they … 
  12. A Thread Out of the Maze
    There’s a question the Buddha has you ask yourself every day: “Days and nights fly past, fly past. What am I doing right now?” The reason he wants to ask yourself this question is to keep reminding yourself that what you’re doing is really important. What you’re doing makes all the difference in the world. So what are you doing right … 
  13. Actor & Experiencer
     … When you’re thinking about karma and the past, that can get you tied up in knots. The whole point of the teaching on karma is that you want to focus on what you can do right now, the opportunities you have right now, and that you want to make the most of them, based on the level of skill and sensitivity that you … 
  14. Not-self, Not No Self
     … If you take a class in Buddhism, they’ll teach you about the four noble truths, about the teaching on not-self, and about karma and rebirth. And usually these concepts are explained beginning with, “There is no self. That’s the nature of reality.” But then the question is, “If there is no self, who’s doing the karma, who’s going to … 
  15. Wise About Pleasure
     … In the cases where things switch, the Buddha says that either you had karma of the other kind prior to that, or after that, or at the moment of death. If you develop good views, right views, at the moment of death, then despite what bad things you’ve done in the past, you can go to a good place. If you already have … 
  16. Page search result icon A Divine Seat
     … He would say, “Look at it in terms of your karma, the things that happen to you that you felt victimized by. Maybe you had that kind of karma from the past.” That thought changes the story. You realize that these issues go back and back and back, and there’s so much back and forth that we have no idea how things began … 
  17. A Legacy of Strengths
     … No matter how unskillfully you’ve been behaving in the past, you can change your ways. The way the Buddha teaches karma is not deterministic. He talks about tendencies that come in from the past, potentials that come in from the past. And these are actualized by your present karma, which is another reason why we focus in the present moment. Not only is … 
  18. Use Your Happiness Well
     … There’s that saying that if you want to see people’s past actions, you look at their present condition; if you want to see their future condition, you look at their present actions. That’s not really true. What you see now is the result of some past actions, but not all of them. It’s not the case that karma is a … 
  19. Endurance
     … But when you realize, “Okay their karma is their karma and it becomes your karma only if you pick it up,” then they can write as much as they want but they don’t leave a trace, because there’s nothing in your mind they can write on. If you have that perception in mind, that your mind is like space, it makes it … 
  20. Making the Most of the Present Moment
     … Some of the things that we experience come from our past karma or actions, from earlier in this lifetime or maybe from previous lifetimes. Other things come from our decisions right now, and those decisions have some freedom, have some range of choice—which means, on the one hand, that we have the opportunity to choose to do good, to do something skillful right … 
  21. Taking the Long View
    Several times in the past, when I visited Ajaan Uthai in Thailand, there have been other Westerners there, and he’s asked me to translate for him. He wants to give them the basic message of the Buddha’s teachings. And the point that he keeps returning to again and again is the teaching on rebirth. His feeling is that given the small amount … 
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