Search results for: past karma
- Page 25
- Practicing for Dispassion… When we sit down to meditate, sometimes we have narratives coming up from the day, or narratives from the more distant past. You can imagine what it would be like if we had eons of narratives: all different kinds of levels of being, all different kinds of identities. That was the Buddha’s knowledge of the first watch of the night. In the second …
- More Wisdom for Dummies… This is the basic principle of karma. Then comes goodwill. Once you realize that you can have the choice not to be foolish, not to cause harm, then the next step is to want to find out what you can do to become wiser. One of the basic principles the Buddha lays down is that you see which duties fall to you and which …
- The Dhamma Without Price… But we’ve seen in the past what happens. When the Mahayana was established, one of its aspects that people don’t like to talk about was the insistence in the early texts that the Dhamma the Mahayana teachers were giving was so valuable that you could never pay them enough. In other words, it wasn’t that the Dhamma was so priceless that …
- Large Perspective, Small Focus… There was the knowledge of past lives, the knowledge of beings dying and being reborn throughout the universe, and then the knowledge that put an end to his defilements, his asavas: fermentations, or effluents in the mind. One of the points that always struck me as interesting is that in the first knowledge—his knowledge of previous lives—even though he was able to …
- Purifying Gold… In fact, when the Buddha gave the list of causes leading to suffering, he said that your present intentions get experienced even before you experienced the senses, which are basically the result of past karma. So, given that your present intentions are the precondition for the present moment, you want to get them well trained, and have a strong sense that they really do …
With Each & Every Breath
Finding a Teacher
… The second warning sign is that they don’t hold to the principle of karma. They either deny that we have freedom of choice, or else teach that one person can clear away another person’s bad karma from the past. People of this sort are unlikely to put forth the effort to be genuinely skillful, and so are untrustworthy guides. Lack of integrity …Show 2 additional results in this book- On an Even Keel… The Buddha says that one of the ways of getting so that your past bad karma doesn’t get to you is to learn how to not be overcome by pleasure, not be overcome by pain. Concentration practice is how you do that. You don’t stop with simply being nonreactive; you’re nonreactive for a purpose, for developing a skill. And the skill …
- Appropriate Attention, Appropriate Intention… We can live the best life possible in this lifetime and still have some bad karma from a previous lifetime. Who knows what could sneak in from the past? We’re in a very precarious position. So it’s good to see the precariousness to develop a sense of samvega for any other type of attention or intention that doesn’t fall in line …
- Worthy of Trust… Sit down and try to trace through your train of thought, say, for the past five or ten minutes. Often you find it hard to do, because the mind was so thoroughly blacked out, even if it was just for a moment, when it went from one frame of reference to the next. Just as the people on the ship could do all kinds …
- Equanimity & ActionThe reflection on equanimity focuses on karma: All beings are the owners of their actions, heir of their actions, born of their actions, related through their actions, and have actions as their arbitrator. In other words, the actions that we’ve done and we’re doing are the things that lead to happiness, lead to sorrow, lead to ease, lead to difficulty. Why should …
- To Be an Adult… If we believe them and act on those beliefs, that becomes our karma—and that’s the danger. So we have to look into our own minds. Where are we susceptible to these kinds of messages? We’ve got to learn how to see through them. No matter who tells them, no matter how many people tell us, no matter how many times they …
- Your Inner Ally… Your past kamma is serving up all kinds of things. Your choice is where you’re going to focus your attention and what you’re going to do with what you notice there. That’s your present karma, and that’s where your freedom lies. You do have freedom of choice. And the more skill you bring to this freedom, the more the freedom …
-
Non-violence
Introduction
… To fully understand this section, it’s good to have some background on the Buddha’s teachings on kamma (karma). A good place to start would be the short booklet, Karma Q&A. Passage §6 in this section makes the important point that the desire for power creates a vicious circle, in which you have to treat others violently in order to gain and …Show one additional result in this book
- Grace & Dignity… This is how you carry on the goodness that got you here, both in terms of your own good karma and in terms of the generosity and goodwill of others. And one of the best ways of carrying that on is practicing—training the mind—because the goodness of the world comes from the mind. All the good things we want to do in …
- Facing Pain Straight On… But if you turn around and sit facing the back of the car, like you can do in those old station wagons, just seeing things going past, going past, there it goes, there it goes, what does that do to your relationship to the pain? There are lots of different ways you can question the pain. And again these are ways of setting up …
- Dealing with Confusion… They may be trying to influence you in a particular direction and it may have been the case that you’ve given in to them many times in the past, but you don’t have to give in to them now. You can just watch them for a while, even though it may be disconcerting to see that, yes, you’ve been nurturing all …
- In Training… That doesn’t erase their past actions. What it does, though, is that it gives you the right attitude so that you’re not going to create new bad karma yourself. That’s generosity. Virtue: How are your precepts? In particular, the precept against lying: The Buddha held that as having the most importance. As he said, if you have no shame at telling …
- Why It’s Good to Know Why… After all, we are responsible for shaping our experience, both through our past actions that send their influence into our present experience, in the form of the six senses, and then through our present intentions that actually shape that raw material coming in from the past in a good or bad way. So why should we keep on doing things in a bad way …
- Practicing in Solitude… the teachings on karma, the teachings on rebirth, the teachings on learning how to let go of the past. In other words, use the Dhamma to reframe the issues you’ve been carrying around. That’s what reading the Dhamma helps with. Other ways you get help from reading the Dhamma include the fact that it gives you ideas for meditation you may not …
On Majjhima Nikāya 61
… Karma Q&A; The Karma of Mindfulness; The Wings to Awakening; “The Road to Nirvāṇa is Paved with Skillful Intentions”; “The Karma of Now”; Selves & Not-self On virtue: “The Healing Power of the Precepts”; “Getting the Message” On appropriate attention: “Questions of Skill”; “Untangling the Present”; “Food for Awakening”; Skill in Questions; On the Path; Into the Stream On discernment: Merit; Discernment; “Ignorance …- Load next page...
