Many do not realise that one day everyone will die.
For those who fully understand this truth, all fighting is ended.
Dhammapada verse 6.
Happy New Year!
Understanding Kamma.
Forget the drama, release your Kamma.
If you hold the erroneous view that Kamma is something external, something in the world that happens to you or others, and based on only physical and verbal actions in the past, you will have missed the subtlety and profound truth of this most important aspect of life.
Without a firm and committed investigation into the reality of this fundamental teaching we will fall into the trap of mistaking it as just another system of reward and punishment. In this place your life will simply revolve around a commitment to a delusional perspective and so peace will never establish itself in your heart.
Kamma and its corresponding Vipaka needs to be understood at the intuitive level and so become an integral part of our life.
Simply put, each one of us meets without fail the consequence of every mind state we empower. This consequence is inevitable and inescapable as the seed of it lies in the very moment of that empowerment.
This seed lies dormant until the appropriate moment for it to appear and manifest into consciousness.
Kamma / Vipaka (mental action and its impersonal consequence) therefore begins and ends within the mind and so the simple Dhamma teaching as the complete path to freedom is, live with love for yourself and all beings and cultivate awareness in your life to realize the liberation of no longer simply following the mind and the fantasies it presents.
And why make this effort to be free?
Because it is better for you and the universe you are part of.
Therefore we do not practice meditation to escape the world. We practice meditation to embrace the world, our world, with its fears, anxieties and endless difficulties. By embracing and understanding them for what they really are, we see that they are no longer disturbing ghosts from the past, but only old friends coming to visit us.
Our freedom comes in the realisation that in every instance these thoughts, moods, feelings and emotions (Kammic influences), only ever have the power that we give them, and if we don’t invite them to stay or don’t attempt to push them away, they will leave by themselves, never to return. Allowing things to fall away by themselves in their own time is how to understand the depth of ‘letting go’.
In Buddhist teaching this beautiful process is called the Visudhimagga, the Path of Purification. To gently, lovingly and graciously let go of the conditions and causes of our unhappiness.
Open your heart and accept the different aspects of mind. Once you don’t mind what the mind presents you are free.
The world is not the problem it’s only your relationship to it that creates the suffering.
May all beings be happy.
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Koan:
If a tree falls down in the forest and there’s no-one there to hear it, does it make a sound?
Dhamma Quotation:
When we know where to look for the truth our problems and judgements fall away.
From Higher than Happiness, by Michael Kewley.