Search results for: past karma

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  2. Fear of Death
     … In the course of seeing the deathless, you step out of time, and in stepping out of time, you may not see the details of your previous lifetimes, but you do see that you’ve spent a long, long time, going through the many, many lifetimes of the past. That’s how you get past those four fears: by a full training in the … 
  3. Goodwill, Gratitude, No Guilt
     … You need something to connect you with the present moment, because the mind has so many stories and other issues that pull it off to the past, to the future, to other people. They always seem to say, “This is more important. This is more important. Think over there, what I’ve got over there.” You’ve got to remind yourself, “No, this is … 
  4. Dissolving Distress
     … things we want out of it, things that have happened in the past, memories that are hurtful, memories that are happy. The mind likes to go over those in the same way you might pick at a scab on a wound. You have to learn how to make those stories uninteresting. This is especially difficult with stories where you were a victim and you … 
  5. The Skill of Happiness
     … We sometimes hear the teaching on karma that what you’re experiencing right now is determined by what happened in the past, but that’s not totally true. There are influences from the past but you also have freedom of choice in the present moment. If you didn’t have that freedom, there would be no way you could develop a skill. It’s … 
  6. Inner Wealth
     … They start with conviction, conviction in the Buddha’s awakening, which translates into conviction in the principle of karma: that what you do leads to results. Skillful intentions acted on lead to good results. Unskillful intentions, when acted on, lead to bad results. So the source of all good and bad actually comes from your own actions, your own intentions. And this is a … 
  7. Use Your Defilements
     … This is probably the big lesson of karma in the meditation. There are potentials coming from the past. The Buddha’s image is that we have a field full of seeds and we have our choice as to which seeds we’re going to water. So right now you can sit here, focus on the pains, and make yourself really miserable about the pains … 
  8. Fabricating against Defilement
     … There’s some confusion around the phrase “knowledge and vision of things as they are.” Actually the phrase is “knowledge and vision of things as they’ve come to be.” It’s a special kind of knowledge in which the results of past karma arise, but you don’t create any new states of becoming out of them, and you don’t try to … 
  9. Reading Your Meditation
     … It’s interesting that when the Buddha introduces the doctrine of karma, he doesn’t focus on past bad actions, the punishment that’s going to come from the mistakes you made in the past. He starts instead with the topics of generosity and gratitude. The fact that we’re responsible for our actions means that generosity and gratitude are valid emotions, valid activities … 
  10. Breathing Skillfully
     … What comes to us through sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations is the result of old karma. What we do with these things is new karma. You can’t change your old karma, but you can change your new. Again, it’s like being a cook. You open the refrigerator today and there may not be all that much in the fridge. But if … 
  11. A Heart Wider than the World
     … After all, we all have our past karma, which is going to place some limitations on us in terms of the situations that are available to us, but we also have our present karma—the decisions we’re making right now—and those offer us an element of freedom. Which is why no matter what the circumstances are around you, you can still develop … 
  12. The Desire for Things to Be Different
     … But there are times you find yourself presented with raw materials from your past karma—and this can be anything from sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, to other people, situations outside that are beyond your control—and if you go butting your head against those things, it’s a lot of wasted energy and a lot of unnecessary pain. A large part of … 
  13. Patience Is a Skill
     … Patience is a skill in learning how to talk to yourself, learning how to give yourself encouragement, to remind yourself that what you’re experiencing right now is a combination of past habits and present habits, present actions. The past habits may be very strong, but they’re not consistently strong. And because it’s past karma, it’s going to wear out someday … 
  14. Training for Happiness
     … This is why the Buddha spent so much time teaching about karma, the principle of action. Every moment, he says, we experience not only the results of our past actions, but also the results of our intentions in the present moment. You can’t change your past actions, but you can change your present intentions. The thing is that they’re there so much … 
  15. Goodwill & Kamma
     … Something is fabricated out of a potential, coming from past kamma, and turns into an actuality. Just like the issue of past kamma in general: What you focus on is going to become the actual kammic result you experience. And so it’s the intention there that’s important, the intention to pay attention to the breath continuously, that keeps that feeling going. Two … 
  16. Goodwill
     … There’s another passage where the Buddha says that when you realize you’ve acted in unskillful ways in the past, the proper attitude to have toward your past bad actions is to realize first that remorse doesn’t help. No matter how much you regret the past action, that doesn’t go back and erase the action. And you don’t get Brownie … 
  17. We’re All Learning the Ropes
     … After all, the world you’re experiencing, everything you experience through the senses–sights, sounds, smells, tactile sensations—all these things come from your past karma. The world you’re living in is the result of your past actions. Now, you can’t see all of your past actions right now. You may have some really good things in the past and some really … 
  18. Practice in Dying Skillfully
     … It’s because their minds have been trained in the meantime and they have other good karma. So you can counteract your past bad karma. This is one of the reasons why, as death approaches, it’s a general Buddhist custom to have people think of the good things they’ve done—not the good times they’ve had, the good things they’ve … 
  19. Rebirth & Not-Self
     … As he said, he saw that people with good karma would go to a good destination. People with bad karma would go to a bad destination. That’s his short version. His more extended version of what he saw was that there were cases where people were doing good karma in one life, but then as they were dying, either right before death or … 
  20. When This Is, That Is
     … Either you weren’t aware of the change, or else it’s something that’s based on past karma. Or if you’ve got a particular problem in the present moment and one approach doesn’t work, you can try another approach. This is how scientists experiment. After changing various approaches or holding to one approach in different circumstances, you begin to get an … 
  21. Large-hearted Equanimity
     … Think of that phrase we have, purisa-damma-sārathi, “the trainer of people fit to be trained.” There are a lot of people who are not fit to be trained, either because of their past karma or their present karma. The Buddha himself found that the reasons why some people would find awakening listening to his Dhamma talks, and a lot of people would … 
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