So Tuesday I introduced the topic for this week on the karmic stream and the dharmic stream and these are two major ways in which our lives could unfold.
Karma has the meaning of action.
That's the literal meaning for karma,
Action with the connotation that to make something happen.
And dharma in its roots means to support.
So karma implies that we're doing and dharma suggests that there's support.
The dharmic stream can provide a tremendous support for us and the karma stream,
The value of that has a lot to do with the nature of the actions that we do.
So one of the ways of understanding this karma stream is that when we act a certain way we're building,
We're constructing our response,
Our reaction,
Our character,
Our personality,
Our habits,
We're building these.
All these ways are being constructed.
We're making something happen and it takes work.
The karmic stream requires effort on our part.
We have to be engaged in creating it and sometimes we're weary and we're tired from all the constructing that we're doing,
Right?
Living this karmic stream of acting and reacting and acting and reacting.
So the dharma stream,
It comes with more support.
It doesn't require the same kind of action.
There might be things we do in a sense,
But it doesn't come from this forcefulness of making something.
It comes more from something is being expressed.
Rather than holding something up,
We're actually being held.
And so the karmic stream tends to be much more intentional,
Like we're disposed to do something to make something happen.
And we can see that in our thinking.
If you're thinking about anything that's not in the present moment,
Your mind is constructing.
It's constructing the memory,
The fantasy,
The future.
And in that construction,
There's an impetus,
There's a compulsion to have something happen to want something or to not want something.
And that impetus,
That creation,
It has force behind it sets into motion,
The nature of that action and that nature of action creates an impact in the future.
So if we act with greed,
And that's what's going on behind the thinking or wanting,
Then that creates a very different momentum in our lives than if we act with generosity.
If we chronically act out of aversion,
It creates a very different momentum in our lives than if we act out of love.
So the Buddhist emphasis on karma is on the act of constructing.
And so we see in the teachings of the Buddha that there is less interest in understanding why something happens,
Like something happens and sometimes we say that it must be the karma of the past,
Right?
That's not very interesting for practitioners of Dharma.
Rather what's interesting is given what's happening,
No matter what it is,
What is the reaction or the action from which we're meeting and responding to the force of what happened?
What are we doing in the present?
Not the reason why the present is happening.
That's valuable at times to look at the reason,
But to really get to the heart of the karma training is to learn how to act differently in the present moment,
Where the choice is to construct things differently.
And so what's useful if you're interested in the Dharma and the Dharma extreme,
If you're interested in freedom that comes with the Dharma stream is that you want to act and do things that support that possibility of leaving in the direction of freedom.
So generosity,
Ethics,
Kindness,
Compassion,
Equanimity,
Letting go.
These are all actions that are constructing a better self,
A better disposition,
A better stream of momentum in us that is supportive of the Dharma extreme.
And so to some degree if we're living in the karmic world where we're choosing the particular actions that we want to live by,
We have a sense of are they wholesome and beneficial and useful and we're learning to cultivate those wholesome beneficial actions and we're learning to let go of those which are not useful.
Turns out the unusable ones,
The ones that create a negative impact,
They come with a lot of tension and that tension has an ongoing momentum,
That compulsion has an ongoing momentum in our lives.
When we do beneficial karmic action it might have tension but it might not have that compulsion.
It's an important distinction to learn how to feel that in your body because when you start to see that your actions are for the benefit of others,
They're wholesome,
They're beneficial.
But if there's some tension the results are mixed.
If you do good things without compulsion,
Without tension,
The results tend to be better.
And the results we're talking about are not necessarily the results in our world but the results of the impact that they have inside,
The ongoing momentum of our disposition.
So the dharmic stream is mostly something that we allow and we don't construct.
It's sort of like mostly getting out of the way.
It's clearing the blockage in the stream and the karmic stream for basically learning to turn off the fire hose and the dharmic stream and learn to relax a little bit more deeply.
We're learning to let go.
We're not acting out of compulsion or tension.
Instead of acting out of negative karma,
We create goodness inside of us.
The love,
The generosity that's already there,
Just often covered over.
Inside of us are these good qualities including wisdom and kindness and compassion.
And yes,
There's tension and agitation.
So what's interesting is when we focus on the dharmic,
The dharmic stream,
Our actions kind of follow with the flow of that.
Our inner goodness starts to flow and support freedom.
And we can have some confidence in that.
So I wanted to really bring awareness to these distinctions between the dharmic stream and the karmic stream because it helps us to see that we don't have to always be constructing our world,
Constructing our responses,
Acting and doing and thinking.
We don't have to keep doing that.
It can be a tremendous burden.
We can kind of settle back.
Like there's,
You know,
Sort of like,
Ah,
I can just settle back.
There's this sense of relaxing.
Like there's a whole other half to this path when we understand that there's the actions,
The karmic stream and the dharmic stream.
So we'll continue with this kind of exploration next week.
And I hope that you'll get a better sense of this distinction and how to practice and work with it.
So thank you for your kind attention this morning.
