Search results for: past karma

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  2. What Are You Doing Right Now?
     … One is the past karma, the results of your past actions. This body that you’re sitting with here right now, the mind, the habits you’ve got: These are all the results of past actions. That, he says, is the soil. Then consciousness is the seed. For the time being, your consciousness is focused on the breath. You want to be focused on … 
  3. Potentials
     … If we think in terms of karma, your past karma is serving up a buffet of potential dishes that you could choose from. And you can explore, “What does this dish taste like? What does that dish taste like?” You begin to get a sense of which dishes have no good potentials at all. You leave those alone, and you pay attention to the … 
  4. Understanding Pain
     … That’s how we can get past the pain. The first thing is to understand is that the pains we experience come from two kinds of actions or two kinds of karma. There are actions in the past—they gave us this body that we have, they gave the body the shape that it’s in right now. Then there are all the things … 
  5. Ripples Go Far
     … After all, that’s how the Buddha gained his insight into karma. He had that first knowledge on the night of his awakening, knowledge of his past lives many, many eons back. As long as he was just focused on himself, he couldn’t see the larger pattern, didn’t understand what was going on. As he said, sometimes you look at one life … 
  6. Free to Do the Right Thing
     … The important ones do to have to do with karma, your actions. And the Buddha is very clear in his teachings on action. What you’re experiencing right now is the results of past actions combined with your present actions and their results. You can’t do anything about past actions, but this explanation really focuses you on what you’re doing right now … 
  7. The Sublime Attitudes in Context
     … We don’t go around with a single karma account with one running balance. Each action is like a seed. You’ve got many seeds in your past; other people have many seeds in their past as well. Just because the bad seeds are sprouting right now doesn’t mean that there aren’t any good seeds there, and conversely, the fact that good … 
  8. Off the Grid
     … the past—we can still have our happiness inside. So although there are a lot of teachings about interconnectedness and interdependence, there does have to be this independent source of well-being, this independent source of goodness inside for you to find true happiness. As for the connections we make with other people, we want to make them good connections through good karma. And … 
  9. True Protection for the World
     … When you realize that certain things are beyond your control, either because of that person’s past karma or your past karma—people for whom you wish well but they keep on doing unskillful things or they are suffering in ways that you can’t stop—you have to have equanimity there so that you don’t waste your time trying to change things … 
  10. Alert
     … So, given that we do have this principle that some of the causes of what you’re experiencing right now are actually happening right now, it’s not all a fabrication of past karma. There’s also present karma. So be alert to your present karma. Get the mind in a state where it really can see clearly what it’s doing. That’s … 
  11. Investing Your Intention
     … The other things you’re aware of come into your senses because of your past karma. And where was your past karma made? Well, it was made right here in a past version of the present moment. And that’s gone. There’s nothing you can do to bring it back. What’s really important is what you’re doing right now. So you … 
  12. Conviction in the End of Suffering
     … Buddha has you believe in is karma.” But when you get into karma, you realize it has to include rebirth as well, because if your experiences are shaped by your actions, not everything you’re doing in the present moment can explain why you’re experiencing certain things: There have to be some things coming from the past. Not everything in your experience in … 
  13. Shoulds & Should Nots
     … Now there may be some past bad karma coming in, but at the very least you know how to handle that in the present moment so that it doesn’t turn into more bad karma. Now to protect yourself in this way, the mind needs to be really solid. This is why we keep coming back to the breath, back to the breath. You … 
  14. Being a Buddhist
     … The third is that you do believe in the principle of karma. The sutta expands on that in the fourth characteristic, which is that you don’t look for protective charms, you don’t look for magical formulae that will somehow undo your karma. Which means that, by the Theravada definition of a Buddhist, Vajrayanists are not Buddhist because they do believe in these … 
  15. The Buddha’s Basic Therapy
     … The actual pleasure or pain, happiness or suffering, that we feel right now depends, to a large extent, on our present karma: how we deal with the raw materials from the past. When you think in those terms, it gives a real focus to the meditation: that we’re here to learn about present karma, to see, “What are we doing right now that … 
  16. A Self Rightly Directed
     … One is having made merit in the past, and the other is directing yourself rightly. The first one, of course, is one over which you have no control right now. The merit in the past is showing itself in the opportunities you have right now, and that’s the connection. You’ve got opportunities. You’ve got opportunities to practice, and you want to … 
  17. No Dharma Without Karma
     … And, two, there’s no Dharma without karma. I keep running into this again and again: people who want to be told that the reason they’re suffering has nothing to do with them. It’s somebody else’s fault. They’re miserable because someone taught them to fear the world or fear their desires, whereas all you have to do is realize that … 
  18. Factors for Stream Entry
     … One of the big misunderstandings about karma is the idea that everything you experience in the present moment can be traced back to past actions, but then you can take this present moment and make choices about it whose results move on to the future. There’s a problem with that right there. If everything you’re experiencing right now is a result of … 
  19. Owning Your Actions
     … But then the passage on karma: We’re the owners of our actions. That’s something we’re responsible for: what we choose to do. And it’s good to make a distinction. A lot of things happen to us, and we have to write that off as past karma. But we don’t want to focus on that. We want to focus on … 
  20. The Wisdom of Ardency
     … So not everything is shaped by past karma. Present karma plays a role as well. In fact, it plays a very powerful and important role. So that’s where he looked next: What intentions was he focusing on in his own mind? What were they doing? That’s how he saw that the present moment is put together through your fabrications. What happens if … 
  21. Karma-ism
    There’s a saying in Thailand that Buddhism is “karma-ism,” that that’s the essential teaching: the nature of action. And it’s wise to reflect for a while on what the implications of that are, and why that is the central teaching. The Buddha once said that the basic questions we face coming from suffering are two: One, there’s a sense … 
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