Search results for: past karma
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- It’s What You Give… So, if you’re facing difficulties in the practice, just remind yourself that you must have some bad karma someplace. You may have put some bad things into the system in the past, but here you have the opportunity to put nothing but good things in. That’s what the practice is all about: taking your input into the system and making it a …
- Mindfulness of Death & the Deathless… The worlds, of course—the options that are available—will be based on your past karma, but also on your clingings and cravings. So if you’ve got craving for sensuality, it might take you to a sensual place, where it looks like it’s going to be pleasurable. But look at the human realm. It’s one of the better sensual levels, yet …
- Against the Stream… the issue of what we want to identify with, what we don’t want to identify with, and seeing that desire for self-identification or self not-identification as a kind of karma. As with all kinds of karma, the question is, “When is it skillful, when is it not?” And the skillful question is: “What when I do it, will lead to long …
- A Pocket for Your Merit… In other words, may they create good karma, too. That’s a wish you can have for anybody, even people who’ve been behaving really horribly in the past. If they could change their ways, you’d be satisfied. Now, some people say, “I’d like to have a little bit of revenge first.” Or they might dress it up as “justice,” done first …
The Heightened Mind: Dhamma Talks by Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo
Intent
… In this way, the child harms itself in four ways: (1) There’s the bad karma of having deceived its parents; (2) it throws away the money the parents paid for its tuition; (3) it stays ignorant and doesn’t pick up any of the knowledge it would have gained at school; and (4) death keeps creeping closer day by day, the child itself …Show one additional result in this book- Guilt & Shame… So regardless of what you’ve done in the past, you can develop your mind so that you can mitigate the results of past bad karma. Which means that the proper response is not guilt. As the Buddha says, you can’t go back and erase what you did by feeling really guilty. And it’s not a question of preventing punishment by punishing …
- Straightening the Arrow… The Jains felt that you have to burn away all of your past bad karma through pain. When all your past bad karma was burned up, you would die, and that would be it. That was the only way out of the cycle. So from their point of view, the fact that the Buddhist monks stopped pushing themselves so hard was a sign that …
- Getting Out of Karmic Debt… to the people we’ve abused in the past. We don’t like to think about that. We like to think that we’ve gone through life—our many lifetimes—perfectly harmless. But the fact that we’re human beings means that we have some bad karma back there. If we had nothing but good karma, we wouldn’t be on this level. We …
- Instruct, Urge, Rouse, & Encourage Yourself… These are the different places you could go, but they’re all related to karma. Some of the levels of heaven, for example, are related to different stages of concentration, skills you can master. His design of the universe is not like what anybody else had designed at that time. Of course, he didn’t design it, he didn’t think it up, he …
- When Aging Closes In… Disease exists because you’ve got past karma. You’ve got a body that’s created out of fabrication. It’s going to go. But you can make sure that your mind doesn’t have to suffer from this. Part of that is accepting that this is the nature of bodies, this is the nature of karma. Still, there’s always that aspect of …
- The Buddha’s Program… This is why we try out different assumptions about the breathing and the breath energy in the body—and why, when the meditation isn’t going well, you don’t just chalk it up to past bad karma. You look at what you’re doing right now. Now, it may be that something happened a little while ago that has you all riled up …
- Smoothing It… We don’t believe that by enduring pain you’re going to burn off your old karma. The Buddha was quite snide—it may be hard to imagine the Buddha snide, but he was actually snide—about the idea that you could burn off your old karma. He asked the Jains—who endured self-torture, claiming that they’d burned off karma that way …
- Questioning Your Conviction… You can do things, but it’s not going to have an impact, or else what you do is the result of forces coming in from the past over which you have no control now. Those kinds of teachings the Buddha rejected. He had to explain his teaching on karma again and again: that there’s a pattern for good actions leading to good …
- The Power of Your Actions… He wanted to teach that to other people, because issues of karma and rebirth were widely misunderstood at that time. There’s a strange belief that everybody in India in the Buddha’s day believed in karma and rebirth, but that’s not the case. There were a lot of teachers who actually taught that human action was unreal, didn’t even exist. Others …
- Fixing the Present… Some of your present experience comes from the input of past karma, like raw materials, and then you shape it. If you didn’t shape it, you wouldn’t have an experience of the present moment at all. Our experience of the present comes because we’re shaping things with bodily fabrication, the way we breathe; with verbal fabrication, the way we talk to …
- Working Hypotheses… The situations we find ourselves in, to some extent, are shaped by past actions. The past actions provide the raw material from which we, with our present intentions, actually create what we experience right now. Even something as simple as deciding what to focus on, where to put your attention, what to ignore: There’s an intentional element there. Which means we’re always …
- Go in Light… What other people do to you is the result of past karma. But what you choose to do now is the important thing. Make sure each time you breathe in, each time you breathe out, that whatever you’re choosing to do, you stay grounded in the breath and you choose the right thing: You choose the path that heads toward the light.
- Full Attention… In the Buddha’s analysis, what we have here is a combination of past karma and present karma. It’s not the fact that just because a feeling is there it’s got to be there. It’s just an influence from the past. Then there are the skills or lack of skills that we have in the present moment that can turn the …
- Metta Is a Call to Action… Considered in the light of karma, it means several things. One is that you’re wishing for other people to know the causes for true happiness —in other words, skillful actions—and be willing and able to act on them. And you’re wishing the same thing for yourself. So it’s not just an idle thought, a pleasant pastime. It’s reminding you …
- Stay Principled… Often it’s unskillful karma. It happens in lots of areas where we really don’t understand the situation but we think we do. This is a really hard form of bias to guard against, because delusion and ignorance are, by definition, hard to see. Which means you have to be very careful in observing: When you’ve acted in the past in situations …
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