Search results for: past karma
- Page 28
Metta Math
… And that becomes our karma. It’s a drain on our resources. The Buddha talks about goodwill and the other sublime attitudes as being the practitioner’s wealth. And it’s an interesting kind of wealth. It’s not the kind where you have to go out and do something to get it from somebody else. It’s something you can produce from within …- Choosing Freedom… All of that is past karma. But you do have several choices. There’s the choice of where you’re going to focus your attention and what you’re going to do with where your attention is focused. And that can make all the difference. It may seem like a big responsibility, but it’s also good news. What this means is that as …
- A Complete Training… So you have to talk to yourself in terms of the principle of karma, say. If you have ill will for people like that—and it’s so easy to have ill will for them—you can’t trust yourself around them. And if you want to have some influence over them, but if you have ill will for them, they’re going to …
- To Sustain Your Practice… Why devote your life to pursuing these things? Another good perception to hold in mind—here we’re talking about mental fabrication—is simply the fact that where there’s karma, there’s also rebirth. Wherever there’s craving, there’s going to be rebirth. Where do you want to go? Think of the image of the king. The story goes that a king …
- Inner Refuge… This is how happiness is found, this is how people have found it in the past and other people are finding it in the present moment. But for genuine refuge, we have to take the qualities that they develop—mindfulness, alertness, concentration, discernment—and build them up inside. That’s when the refuge becomes an inner refuge, something we can really depend on. And …
- A Rite of Passage… What’s skillful and what’s not? When the Buddha talks about the various qualities you can develop through good or bad karma, he talks about how you can become a good-looking person, how you can become a wealthy person, how you can become a respected person, how you can gain discernment. Discernment is the only quality that starts with a question: What …
- Values… This may be one of the reasons why, on the night of his awakening, the Buddha started out with that knowledge of his past lives. But then from there, he didn’t go straight into the present moment. He inclined his mind to that second knowledge as well, seeing all beings throughout the universe die and then be reborn in line with their karma …
- Change Your Habits… This is where you’re going to learn about karma. You intend to breathe in a certain way, and then you see what happens with that intention. If it’s not skillful and it’s not getting the results you want, then you change. This is how we learn, by experimenting. This is an experiment we’re working with right now, to see what …
- Look at Yourself… There’s the input from your past intentions and then your present intentions and the results of the input from your present intentions. Those three things are what you really want to focus on. As for the results of your past intentions, they’re there for you to learn from. If you did something skillfully, remember it. If you did something unskillful, remember. That …
- Not Swept Away… It’s the same impulse that makes people run after rituals, like a ritual that’ll take away your karma. The idea of someone who’s going to come down and forgive you and erase all your mistakes in the past, so that you don’t have to think about the results of your actions, is very appealing. But it shows an unwillingness to …
- Potentials for Awakening… past. But then there’s your contribution in the present moment, and that’s what you’re working on, that’s what you’re going to be studying, and that’s where the discernment comes. As I said earlier, discernment is not a matter of seeing our interconnectedness or any other metaphysical issue. The only metaphysical issue the Buddha dealt with is karma, the …
- Duties… That’s what we’re now trying to get past. The Buddha talks about suffering or stress on different levels. The word dukkha can mean either one. There’s the stress of what they call the three characteristics or the three perceptions of inconstancy, stress, not-self. The fact that things are inconstant means they’re stressful. And if they’re stressful, why call …
- Alone & Together… You read about other people’s approaches to getting past their defilements, and some of them may work for you and some of them may not, but the basic battle lines are the same. We all have to deal with sensuality, we all have to deal with ill will, all the hindrances: sloth and torpor, restlessness and anxiety, doubt about what we’re doing …
- A Refuge from Death… It’s important to remember that when the Buddha talked about precepts, when he talked about karma, he said that thinking back on the bad things you did in the past is useful only when you take it as an incentive not to do those things again. If you start getting tied up in remorse and guilt, he says, that’s not helpful at …
- The Need for a Purpose… We have a purpose, which means, of course, that we have some expectations, that by fashioning a sense of form, feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, and consciousness out of the raw material given to us by our past karma, we’re looking for something. We have a purpose in mind. This is the nature of our mind. It’s purposeful. When it has no purpose …
- A Meritorious Heart… The reason I bring this up is that over the past century, Western scholars have gone to Thailand and other Asian Buddhist countries to study Buddhism over there, especially Buddhism, as you might say, on the ground. They’d usually start out by reading up on the teachings and would see in the Canon a lot of passages on suffering. Yet they got over …
- Action & the End of Action… When the issue of rebirth came up—which was a hot issue in his day; it wasn’t the case that everybody believed in rebirth; even those who believed in rebirth didn’t all believe that your karma or actions had anything to do with it—everybody else would talk about what you are, and what it is that gets reborn. And then, based …
- Victory… At some point, if you keep fighting, you’ll finally figure out some way to get past them. That’s the kind of victory you can really be proud of. Whether other people know about it doesn’t matter. They don’t have to know. It’s really none of their business. You know that you’ve won. And this is a victory with …
- Goodness Comes from Heedfulness… You make up the mind you’re going to stay with the breath, and five minutes later you find yourself someplace else, thinking about the past, thinking about the future, anything but the breath. If you try to trace it back, it’s hard to remember the point where the mind left the breath and got involved in something else. The mind does have …
- Make the Most of What You’ve Got… This is something that has become out of our past karma. There are also states of becoming in the mind—in other words, thought worlds. You can visualize San Francisco; you can visualize New York; you can visualize the middle of Canada. Then you can put yourself in that visualization. That’s taking birth in a state of becoming. You can think about having …
- Load next page...
