Search results for: past karma
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- Birth Is Suffering… As they say, the opportunities open to then you are based on your past karma. But look at your karma. You don’t even have to look at past lifetimes. Look at your karma in this lifetime, and you realize you’ve got a mixed bag. You’ve done skillful things and unskillful things. And only a very well-trained mind can be sure …
- Gaining the Dhamma Eye… As for the past karma with which you may have killed people, animals, or whatever in the past, you deal with that in terms of developing good qualities of mind right now. As the Buddha said, if you develop immeasurable goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity, the results of past bad karma will be minimized, because of the large and abundant quality of your …
- A Good Path to Be On… The way the Buddha taught karma is that we have choices in the present moment. There are influences coming in from our past actions, but that’s not all. There are also our present intentions. In fact, without our present intentions, we wouldn’t even be aware of things coming in from the past. Our present intentions are what can shape them for good …
- Choosing to Believe in Your Choices… So your new karma in the present moment is something that you experience prior to your experience of the results of old karma, which means that you’re not totally shaped by what was done in the past. This was a point that the Buddha was so particular about and that he saw as so important that there were times he’d actually go …
- Thinking About Rebirth… Because karma doesn’t teach you that you deserve to suffer. It simply points out that there are these actions in the past. When the Buddha was asked, “Are you the same person now as the person who did those actions?” He didn’t answer the question. Are you a different person? Well, you’re not a different person. You’ve been all kinds …
- Cleansing the Mind… Now, karma’s not tit-for-tat. You’re not going to have to go through and pay all your old karmic debts before you can gain awakening. But a certain type of action will lead to that type of result. If you know that you’ve got some bad karma in the past, this is when the Buddha has you develop two things …
The Need for Agency
… But you do that first through using that sense of self as agent so that you can really get to know the principle of karma. As you’re sitting here right now, there are some things appearing in the mind caused by what you’re doing right now; other things appearing in the mind are a result of past actions. So, there are some …- The Rivers of Karma… This is why when the Buddha explains issues of karma, he doesn’t use mechanical images. His images are all fluid. We all have unskillful decisions, unskillful intentions that we’ve acted on in the past, but it doesn’t mean we have to suffer from them. They will have their effects but their effects are going to be mitigated or amplified by your …
- In Accordance with the Dhamma… So he used that principle both in the karma of his path until he realized that ultimately he was going to have to get past karma entirely, because the goodness of karma can go only so far, except for one kind of karma: the karma of the noble eightfold path. That’s the karma that gets you out, starting with right view going on …
- What’s Relative, What’s Constant… As I said, karma is the constant. Your identity is not. People can do things to you which you think are horrible, and you can tell yourself, “I never would have done that. Why is this happening to me?” Well, how do you know? If you hadn’t done something like that sometime in the past, it wouldn’t be happening to you now …
- Look after the Source… As for the effects outside, everything runs on karma—your karma and the karma of the people around you. We have a big mix. We have old karma; we have new karma. We have bad things we’ve done in the past and good things we’ve done in the past. We have our skill and lack of skill at the moment in how …
- Unscarred… You can’t say that you’ve never done evil yourself, because you don’t know in the long past that you’ve been coming and going, coming and going, what you’ve been doing. But in spite of whatever bad things you’ve done in the past, you’ve been able to lift the level of your mind. So in the same way …
- Encourage Yourself… For example, when the Buddha talks about past lives, future lives, the principle of karma: It’s to focus our attention on what’s really important right now, which is the intentions we’re thinking right now, the intentions we’re following through with right now. He has many stories about the cycles of the universe, past lives, future results of present actions. They …
- The Joy of Curiosity… It’s the insight part of your concentration practice, because you begin to realize that how you put things together right now depends both on the raw materials you have to work with coming in from your past karma—and past karma here can be anything from earlier in this lifetime or habits you picked up from previous lifetimes, all the way up to …
- Heedfulness… We can reflect on the mistakes we made in the past and learn from them. When the Buddha introduced karma to his son Rahula, he didn’t start out by saying, “You bad boy. You’ve done all these bad things in the past and you’re going to have to burn in hell for them.” That’s not what he said. In fact …
- A Resting Place for the Mind… We’re subject to aging, illness, and death, separation from all the things that we love, and all we have is our karma. Our karma here is the karma of the mind. This is the karma that you can really depend on. This is the only thing that’s left for you when the body goes, when everything else goes. You’ve got this …
- Withstanding Pleasure & Pain… For one thing, this is useful in dealing with your own karma from the past. As the Buddha says, if you’re developed in body, developed in mind, developed in virtue and discernment, and you make your mind unlimited—in other words, with the brahmavihāras—the results of past karma can come, but they don’t have to have an impact on the mind …
- Strength of Conviction… And even though the results of good actions may not show up immediately in your life, you can just chalk that up to past karma because your past actions have results, too. It wouldn’t be fair to insist that “I want my nice, good actions in the present moment to have the power to shape my life, but I don’t want past …
- Heedfulness… That requires that you stay with good things in your mind, in your thoughts, in your words, in your deeds, realizing that the time you have is a gift from your own past karma that allowed you to become a human being. So you want to reinvest it well.
- The Karma of Perception… They’re a kind of karma. So what we’re learning how to do is to take this karma of perception, which so often we use in unskillful ways, and turn it into what the Buddha called the fourth kind of karma, the karma that leads to the end of karma, making it part of the path, to unravel the ways in which we …
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