Search results for: past karma
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- Things as They’ve Come to Be… There are other parts of the Canon where the Buddha talks about bodily fabrication, verbal fabrication, and mental fabrication simply in terms of any bodily karma, any verbal karma, any mental karma that will have an impact later in this life and on into future lifetimes. Which means that when we’re focusing on these immediate forms of bodily, verbal, and mental fabrication right …
- De-personalizing the World… Let that just be their karma. Remember that’s their karma, not yours. You just watch it go past, go past, go past. The same thing with physical sensations: We’re going to have a heatwave this week. It’s going to be hotter than normal. If you personalize the heat, it’s going to become oppressive. You have to find a cool place …
- Dedicating Merit… But who knows what we have hidden away in our past? When you look at a person in the present moment, it’s not the case that you see the running balance in his or her karma account. All you see are the past actions that are sprouting right now, that are giving fruit right now. As for other actions, they’re still in …
- Remembering Ajaan Suwat… your karma. It becomes yours. So be very careful about what you choose to take as yours or not yours. You have the choice. If you didn’t have the choice, there’d be no point in even having a place like this. Everybody would just have to do what they had to do, what they were forced to do, by past conditions or …
- Death is the Context… In other words, even though you may have some good karma, you’ve also got some bad karma somewhere in the past, so you never know what’s going to come up and be really strong right there at the moment of trying to find a new place to take birth. The only security is if you’ve found something deathless inside. That gives …
- Going in Light… How we come is the result of past karma. But our present karma can make the difference in how we go. So focus there. And where is the present karma being made? Right here in the present moment. So try to get the mind so that it’s happy to be here in the present moment, so that it can see itself clearly. In …
- No Arrows, Nothing… that even though our past karma may be such that we have a body that has all these disease—some of us have more diseases than others—we don’t have to suffer from them. That’s the difference between past karma and present karma. The present karma is what makes all the difference. If your present karma is unskillful, you can suffer from …
- Work on Your Mind… It just means that you have that karma in the past. But you also have the potential for good karma in the past. And you have the potential to create good karma now. Focus on those potentials. That’s the work you have to do. So, as we go through life, we have to learn how to work with our minds so that we …
- Be Still… The fact that they come into the mind is just an instance of past karma showing itself. But what you do with it right now, your present karma: That’s what makes a difference. So you want to be in a position so you can see clearly what are the skillful things to do with what comes up in your mind. For that, you …
- A Fish-Eat-Fish World… Just the fact that your past karma has generated that thought doesn’t mean you have to make new karma with it, aside from letting it go. Then try to figure out where it comes from. We’re here not just to watch things arise. We’re here to figure out, when they arise, why did they arise? What sparked them in the present …
- Protective Meditations… After all, karma is complex, and who knows what we have in our past karma? But, when you follow these meditations, they prevent you from creating any bad new karma. And that’s important, because that’s where you actually can make a big difference. As we know, if we develop the right attitude toward the present moment, sometimes it can help us to …
- The Challenge of Right View… This understanding of karma—that what we’re experiencing right now in terms of pleasure and pain is a combination of past actions and present actions, or past intentions and present intentions—is crucial for understanding why we’re meditating the way we do. We use the processes of fabrication—directed thought, evaluation, perception—to dig out the causes of stress, and to learn …
- An Auspicious Birth… You’re going to hold on to that regardless, because what’s going to come up in the present moment is not just past moments. All kinds of karma—past karma, present karma—get all mixed together. You want to be clear on the fact that you want to keep your focus on what you’re doing right now—that’s what your present …
- You Can Make a Difference… Sometimes they say, “Well, it’s because of karma,” or the teaching on karma, that’s the implication. But the way the Buddha explained karma, there are influences coming in from the past, but the way you experience those influences is going to depend on your mental actions and mind state right now. So, even though you may have bad influences coming from the …
- Good Before, During, & After… There is, of course, happiness that comes from your past karma. But you don’t want to just be eating up your good past karma. You want to be producing good new karma. So you think about the different ways you can find happiness. The Buddha sets out three: generosity, virtue, meditation. We have to reflect on the fact that these are all skills …
- Making Progress… You have good karma from the past and you’re living in a civilized country. Those are two things that are really important to have. They’re something you can fall back on. But you can’t fall back just on those because we know a lot of people who’ve done good in the past and lived in a civilized country and yet …
- A Pleasure Without Stories… You start putting things into perspective, seeing things from the point of view of karma. A relationship ends. Okay, you had some karma that was enabling you to stay together for a certain amount of time and then it stops. Relationships don’t work out. Okay, the karma to stay together was not there. We’re talking both about past and present karma. Thinking …
- Accepting the Way Out… We’re not talking about karma from the past so much as your present karma around the mood. What is the present fabrication going on? Can you see it as a result of action? And some parts of it, you find, will be determined by past actions. We’re not necessarily talking about past lifetimes here, but more the thoughts that went through your …
Karma Q & A
Kamma and rebirth are often understood to be teachings of fate and helplessness in the face of unknowable influences from the past. For this reason, they’re often rejected. However, the real problem with kamma and rebirth is that we tend to misunderstand what these teachings have to say. This is because Buddhism came to the West at the same time as other Indian …- Refuge for All Beings… Past karma comes—we have all kinds of things in our past that will sprout at some point, and if you learn how to deal with them skillfully, you don’t have to suffer. That’s what we’re learning as we meditate—the skills that can enable us to deal with painful sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and ideas without suffering from …
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