Good morning everybody. This morning I would like to
spend some time with the idea of karma, but maybe not karma in
the way that we usually think about it.
Often we hear the word karma, karma comma, Laura.
What comes to mind is the traditional understanding of
karma, the moral cause and effect system, the what I
typically think of as the you're going to get IT system.
For example, I do something that action has consequences, and
those consequences come back to me at some later point.
If I act good, good things happen.
If I act poorly, suffering follows.
In this way of thinking, karma is consequential.
It unfolds over time and it's affected.
It explains why I'm happy or unhappy, why things go well or
poorly for me. And to be to be clear, this way
of understanding karma isn't necessarily wrong, right?
It's intuitive and it kind of makes a lot of sense, and it's
often the first way people encounter the teaching of karma.
But this way of thinking about karma isn't actually, I think,
how the Buddha usually talked about it.
And it also comes with a few of its own problems.
One of them is that it assumes that we know what something
means in well, it's called the fullness of time, right?
That this happened, therefore it must be good or bad.
This suffering has occurred and therefore it must have been
deserved. This success came, therefore I
must have earned it. As many of you are well aware, I
am pretty fond of the story about the farmer whose horse
runs away. The neighbor says.
How unfortunate, The farmer replies, Nah, who knows?
The horse returns with wild horses, How fortunate, farmer
replies, who knows? The farmer's son breaks his
legs, breaks his leg. How unfortunate, Farmer replies.
Nah, who knows? The point of the story isn't
that, you know, what happens doesn't really matter, It's that
our view is always partial. We're always standing right in
the middle of the things that are happening and not outside
them. And yet karma can quickly tempt
us into believing that we see the whole picture.
Another difficulty with karma is how easily this understanding of
karma turns us inward and unskillful ways.
Case in point, if I'm suffering, it must be because of something
I did. If someone else is suffering, it
must be their karma. Sometimes this can lead to
resonation, such as saying things like wow this is just my
karma. And sometimes they could become
judgmental, like, well, they got what they deserved.
And finally karma can start to feel like a thing, which I wish
Curtis was on because that is a thing that would make him smile.
So what do I mean by a fake? It becomes something we carry,
something we accumulate, something that we are
perpetually waiting to arrive. We can feel like something like
a spiritual account balance that's always waiting to come
do, which is, I think, interesting because hoodism
tends to spend a lot of time warning us about turning
processes into things. So this morning I want to offer
a different way of understanding karma, one that I came across
with my students and that has changed how I understand
meditation as a practice. To do this, I want to start with
a question. What if karma isn't about what
happens to us? What if karma isn't about what
happens after an action, but all of the things that happened the
4th? What if karma is the set of
conditions already shaping how we see, feel and respond before
we start doing anything at all? So what if karma is our habits
and our histories and our belief, Beliefs about ourselves
in the world, our fears and our expectations?
What if all of that is karma? Karma isn't a moral judgement,
but the conditioning we accumulate over the course of
our lives. It's not the something that we
deserve, but the way our experiences have learned to
happen. And this is where the Buddhist
teachings on intention become important.
The Buddha. The Buddha often defined karma
in terms of intention as the movement of the mind toward or
away from experiences. Not intention is a plan or goal,
but the subtle leaning that happens before an action, before
we speak, and before our thoughts really fully form.
Intention kind of acts as the mind's inclination.
It's the quiet kind of tilts of what you mean to do before you
actually do it. It's the way our conditioning,
all the things that have happened to us before, nudges
toward grasping or resisting toward what we want to happen or
what we don't want to happen. In this way, karma isn't what we
do. Karma is the tendency,
tendencies we have behind what we do, the things before what we
do. You might say it like this.
Karma isn't what happens to us. Karma is how we enter into what
happens. From this perspective, karma
isn't primarily concerned with explaining why pleasant or
unpleasant events occur, why we suffer, or why we don't.
It's concerned only with suffering, with how suffering
continues, because even pleasant experiences can lead us to
suffering. If they reinforce attachment and
aversion, Even success can deepen our reactivity.
And reactivity is really what we are getting at here.
Reactivity is the way our perceptions immediately turn
into judgements. Reactivity is the way our
sensations turn into stories. Reactivity is the way our
experiences become about ourselves.
And I will say, for me, this shows up most clearly with my
irritation. I can feel it when a tiny spark
of irritation arises, and it's always something small,
something ordinary. And then before I even know it,
my mind has built a whole narrative about it.
I've built any conclusion about the situation, a conclusion
about the other person, sometimes even conclusions about
myself. And that's is what karma is.
It's not a dramatic manifestation of justice.
It's not a mystical process outside the self.
It's just the mind doing what it has learned to do.
And this is where meditation as a practice can become very
practical. Because when we sit on a
cushion, we get to watch karma happening in real time.
We get to see our thoughts arise, our sensations arise, all
of our memories, our judgements, our plans and anxieties.
And then almost immediately they turn into something we take to
be reality, such as, you know, this is bad or this is good or
this shouldn't be happening or this should be, this means
something about who I am or who they are.
All of these things arise in the moments and they turn into
stories. And so meditation really isn't
about stopping any of that necessarily from arising.
It's about seeing what arises clearly enough that we don't
have to make it into reality. Say that again, because it's
real important. Meditation is about seeing what
arises clearly enough that we don't have to take what arises
and make it reality. And this is where I think the
idea of a perception can be really helpful, even if the word
itself is a weird word. The word literally means without
perception added on. Not the absence of seeing, but
see before we Add all of the things that we like to add to
it. The meanings, the judgements,
the stories. A perception is a no perception.
It's perception before we turn it into reality.
It's perception without all of our baggage.
It's a perception without the stories we create and the
stories we tell ourselves. And on the cushion, this looks
pretty easy. A photo rises, we notice it, and
instead of following it or fighting it, we let it go.
Same thing with sensations. We feel it without immediately
turning it into a story or into a conclusion.
The Buddha responded to. The Buddha described the second
part as the second era, right? It's the suffering that we add
when we react to what we're already experiencing.
And each time we don't add that second area, something really
important happens. We interrupt the momentum of
karma, not by force and not by suppression, but by not feeding
our reactivity. And over time, this practice of
interrupting the momentum of Lord karma, this practice begins
to show up as space, kind of space between perception and our
reaction to it, a space between sensations and the stories we
create, a space between experience and the reality that
we wish that it was. And it's these things are not
indifference and they're not detachment, They're just space.
And in that space, something becomes possible and something I
think is really beautiful. We have the space to respond
rather than reacts. We can act without being
compelled by our previous karmas into actions dictated by those
karmas. We get to meet reality more as
it is, as interdependent, as independent, as changing and
unfinished. The kind of reality we then have
access to is difficult to describe, but I like the term
suchness, or maybe something like immediacy or something like
just this and that. Reality is not special, it's not
dramatic. It's just unrest unattached, and
from this perspective, awakening or liberation or enlightenment
or Nirvana isn't a state or bowl or some esoteric outside thing.
It's just the cessation of your karmic reactivity.
It's life continuing, its conditions continuing, but it
doesn't give suffering of attachment and aversion the same
footing that it had before. And then we can start then.
When we start to talk about eliminating karma, we're no
longer talking about stopping actions.
We're talking about ending the conditions that keep reactivity
running our stories, and stopping the conditions that
cause us to act in ways that cause us to suffer.
And then meditation is Hwy. to practice that, breaking the
cycle of our alert karmic reactivity as it arises.
Never really perfectly and never really permanently, but enough
to get a taste of what that freedom might look like.
I'm not. I think is what's karma is in
reactivity and a perception. So that's what I got for you
guys. Thank you.
Yeah, that was a long. Long, but I don't think it's
possible to talk about karma without.
Going along. Thanks, Joe, that that gives me
a lot to think about. Yeah, we may be discussing this
for a few weeks just between us, but.
Three things came up for me. First, your talk, your mention
that karma is not a thing that we carry because of Theravan
thought. It is Karma is what is reborn,
not our personality or anything else.
Our karma is reborn, we carry it through life and it becomes the
next rebirth. I don't think there's anything
wrong with it being a differing view, but I think you are
correct that in the Maya tradition it is much less they
think that we carry. It is somehow related to the
actions in your discussion of karma being the things that the
things that not fully cause but that set up our future actions
is that's very interesting to me because there's a even during
the Buddhist life, there was a philosophical debate over are
our actions completely set by our karma or are they not bashy?
The divide was are our actions completely set by our karma, or
are our actions completely free of our karma?
And the Buddha came down in the middle and said our actions are
influenced by our karma, but not necessarily set by them.
But I think that falls with what you're saying because our karma
sets the the ground from which we act.
We still have free will within that to act against that karmic
ground. So to be there, you're coming
down directly with the Buddha in that middle half between those
two philosophical arguments. And the third thing that came up
for me was your last point. All I could think of was Moses
addressing the burning Bush and say, Lord, what is your name?
And God responding, I am that. That's basically what you're
saying. It is not I do or anything else.
It is I am, I exist. I am within this reality and all
I could do was wow, what a cool confluence of God's sake.
What are you to an answer to what are you or who are you
saying I am? I exist as a wonderful
confluence today. Thank you.
That was a very thoughtful song. Thank you, I remember a couple
weeks ago, I don't remember exactly what happened but
realizing how quickly your brain can in infuse fear where there
wasn't any. And when I was just in Akron
this week with my mom, my sister was coming over and her husband
was going to drop her off on his way to work.
And they never said a time, but he was just on his way to work.
Well, in my mom's mind, he always worked 5:50.
So when she wasn't there by 10:00, my mom was worried.
And you know, the weather was bad and was there a car
accident, blah, blah, blah. And here his schedule that day
was 11 to 7. And you know, after some texts
and everything, she came and everything was fine and.
It was simply a miscommunication.
And again, you know, just a miscommunication can cause so
much. Something terrible happened.
And the other thing is I did not grow up, luckily, with anyone in
my immediate family who was addicted to alcohol, to drugs.
And obviously, if it were easy to stop those behaviors, people
would stop those behaviors. And sometimes I think we have to
remember some people what this is where judgment comes in.
We have to remember some people were not given the tools or need
help with the tools to fix their karma and and a lot of it is
beyond our understanding if you've never been through it.
No, I think officially addictions are a good way of
kind of entering into this, looking at karma differently,
right? Because the question with I had
with karma is I would do something.
I'd be like, why did I do or why did I feel that or what?
What was that? And for those of you that are
wondering, this presentation of karma is not mine.
It is by a gentleman named David Kalupahana who is required
reading for us. And if you would like to read
it, it is in a book called Buddhist Philosophy and it is
very technical, very difficult. And so if you thought my Dharma
talk was hard to follow, I will encourage you to read that.
But what the reason I brought up, I think your addiction thing
is apartment, is that we learn all of these habits and
predispositions and we are so usually unaware of them that
when we start to act, it comes from this pool of ways that we
have acted before. And then we start to act in ways
that cause us to feel ways that we sometimes want to, sometimes
don't want to, but in ways that we really do have more control
over than we think that we do. If we can realize that our
actions a lot of times are predicated on this, what we'll
call karma now, that we bring into every situation and then
apply to things that then 'cause us to react to things in ways
that we have been habituated into.
The Mia thought that comes into mind sometimes is my mother.
Like, I love my mother, she's a great woman, but when she comes
at me sometimes, or would, she just proposes something from the
vast history of our interactions together, our karma together.
I will then react to her in ways that aren't always appropriate,
that are based on what my perceptions are from things that
have all happened before. Not based on this interaction of
what is occurring in this moment in time, but based on this
history of actions. And then I will treat her in a
way that will cause her to to act in ways that I am used to,
in ways that I am comfortable with that reinforce all those
predispositions. And in that way, I am
perpetuating the cycle of karma, right?
I am then reacting to her in a way that will cause her to react
in a way that will feed into this cycle.
And before I know it, I will be irritated.
She will have done nothing. And I'll be like, well, there's
my mom acting like it's irritating and and most of the
time I am completely oblivious to this process.
And most of you probably are as well.
You have no idea why you're acting and reacting to certain
places, events and sensations until they are they have the
train is well left the station and you have arrived at whatever
feeling that you were predisposed to feel.
But the good news is that with meditation, we can see these
things happening as they are occurring and we can stop them.
And if we can stop them, then that karma doesn't have to be a
self perpetuating cycle. We can begin to whittle away at
it so that we can build karma that causes us to react in
better ways. Or the better thing is respond
as opposed to react. And this is, if you don't like
to think about it in Buddhist terms, you could think of this
in psychological terms, right? This is your mind's reactivity
based on all of the different neurons and synapses that you
created, that when a situation that is similar to something has
happened, all of these pathways light up because they're the
ones that light up the way they did before.
And all of a sudden you are at X synapse when you would prefer to
be at Y synapse. But if you can break down this
automatic conditioning, you can get to where you want, but it
takes a process and that processes meditation.
I, I just want to follow up with what you were just saying, Joe,
I, I struggle with anxiety. And one of the things that I've
learned is that that part of that part of your amygdala just,
you know, can override everything.
And there's a famous, you know, metaphor about your brain
thingy. It's a, you know, something that
snaps in the wood and you think that it's a bear, but actually
it's just your foot snapping a, a twig.
And what has helped me is specific anxiety exercises,
which are built on scientific principles, But those scientific
principles also vary very well with Buddhist principles, which
is, I think, why a lot of people find it to be effective.
But yeah, it's always like a, you know, cause and condition.
It's never one thing that leads to a, you know, reactivity.
That is something that I don't find being very pleasant and
causing myself suffering as well as the suffering of others.
And as we also, we often talk about this, driving is a great
opportunity to practice, to practice this regardless of
what's going on and whether you're driving and it's fine or
you're driving and you're stuck in traffic or the person in
front of you is really slow. But at any rate, I found it to
be particularly effective. Well, anyway, that's all I have
to share right now. So thank you.
Oh, thank you. Thank.
You for your contribution. I'm thinking about especially
one of the things when Glenn mentioned how the Buddha felt
like if I'm kind of in the middle of how much control you
have when it comes to karma, the physicality of it, and we could
just kind of started touching on that.
Then some of the comments, you just talked about neurons and
everything, but I'm thinking about both like nature and
nurture and how much control you have over it.
So we like to be in our heads about it, and it's very like the
way we were talking about it initially was very much mind
over matter in some ways. I don't think that's the way you
meant it, but I was thinking about like the physicality of an
extreme case like Phineas Gage. Who?
He used a key case in neurology and understanding the brain
where he was this wonderful foreman, like great with people,
his company loved him, all his workers loved him.
And then one day he was tamping down a rod for some explosives
and it accidentally went off and went through his brain and he
survived. But afterwards, he was a
completely different person, and it was literally because a
portion of his brain had been damaged and destroyed.
And that's not something that he could control, but it's somehow
still part of it. And just thinking about how the
physical world and our environment can put limits on
what or how much we can. Influence.
And I want to think about it some more, but it's just
recognizing that those habits, those things that set the
grounds, part of that is our physical conditions and some of
that we have control over and some of it.
We. Don't so how much it's about
influencing and recognizing that as part of this idea around
karma and putting more nuanced in it because I think as.
Oh, who was? That Mary earlier with the
addiction, which is both like physical and mental and
influenced by environment and society.
There's lots of big thoughts here.
And then also the level you've been talking about it at very
individual level, because that's where we have the opportunity to
impact it in a lot of ways and where we do a lot of our work.
But almost the idea of also societal level karma, societal
level habits that no one person necessarily creates, but the
conglomeration makes and it's hard to set away from.
So kind of thinking about both the physical, personal, physical
in your body, how karma is ingrained physically in your
body. And then also kind of ingrade in
culture and society as well. Yeah.
So those were the thoughts going through my head and I'll leave
it there. Yeah, I on a side note, the
Phineas Gage thing, I've always felt this kind of suspects
because the way the story is told in most by most
psychological journeys since he was this great guy with no
context before and then this thing happened and then he was
completely different story end. And that always it seems to it
seems to fit a narrative that's especially with that era of
psychology makes me worry. And so, but but the premise that
we'll say is true and that's it is possible that's the brain has
quite a bit of physical, but that that the brain is if as far
as environment goes, is wired to do certain things.
I think what the Buddha got at is that we have more control
that we think and it is even if it's not complete control.
Is that fair, you think? Oh, yeah, that that's the part
where Glenn's comment that the Buddha came down sort of in the
middle. You don't have full control, but
you also have more than you think because setting aside,
yeah, there's lots of things in psychiatry and that time and
age. Setting aside Phineas gauge,
even though it was probably a major change in personality,
whether he was a good person to begin with or not.
You could even just say lobotomies that a lot of women
were subjected to you in a certain period certainly change
how they were able to access the world.
But yes, it's fair to say. No go.
Ahead. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to
interrupt. Yeah.
No, it's just it's I have a tendency to be in my head and
one of the things I've been working on is recognizing that
physicality. And then also, as Beth said, a
lot of the anxiety exercises and things where you need to like
refer back to your body and functions that are actually
going in it on in it. And that helps.
So just thinking about how this isn't just thought processes,
but this is actual like physical things going on in the world, in
your in your body and how, yeah, how changes to those can impact
how, I guess karma unplays how much control you have.
Yeah. And just looking at it as a
larger process, I don't disagree with you.
That's what I'm saying. But it's just, it's the thing
that's coming up. Yeah.
And I don't, I don't, I'm not. This isn't, this is just a thing
that popped into my head and I can't go on without saying
something says pumpering works. Take care.
Buddha said that liberation was available to all of us, right?
And in this conception, the elimination of reactivity is
what Nirvana is, is what liberation is.
So that I think that the elimination of reactivity, the
mind over matter thing is a thing that is available to all
of us and is, yeah, I don't know how I feel about that.
So I don't want, I don't really want to discuss it right here.
I'm just thinking that like, yeah, I think, I think the
Buddha was saying that this is a thing that you can do no matter
what, no matter what your circumstances were.
If you had a lobotomy, you could still access it.
If you were born in XY or Z condition, you can still get to
the point of 0 reactivity. But I don't know that for sure.
I'm not. I was just thinking of it as a
thought experiment, so sorry. But then I said it.
No, I feel better. Yeah, go ahead.
Sounds. Good about the Phineas thing.
I think the same thing happens when people die, like especially
young people. It's a very sad thing.
And suddenly the people they went to high school with, even
if they bullied someone, they're just a St. and and it to me,
that's OK. You want to remember the good in
someone. But it could be a situation like
her. Has anybody not said something
that would like to say something I'll mention Beth.
Put into the chant, It's not survival of the fittest, it's
survival of the nurtured. Tara Brock said.
That and Jerry, whose left just says Thanks for the talk,
Gerald. Yes, that, that is.
Yeah, that's a quote by Tara Brock which I find to be very
illuminating and comforting. I OK, I will.
The one thing I wanted to say at the end is that's the version of
the Harsi trip that we tend to read the most, the second
version by day. The linchpin of his version is
the residing and receptive emptiness.
And then it gives the list of ways of what I think are
understanding our reactivity. And so for those of you that
wish to endeavour to understand this a little bit better, I
would say look at the second version of the Heart Sutra and
look at what that receptive emptiness versus reactivity
looks like and see how your mind does all of these things in
order to get to conclusions that we are, I think, karmically
reinforced. So with that, I want to thank
you all for this lovely talk and we will go ahead and close.