So today we're continuing on the theme I started last week on the karmic and the dharmic streams of our lives.
And for most people,
The one that plays the biggest role is the karmic stream.
And it's hard to recognize why this is.
It's kind of just business as usual with the karmic stream.
Yet we can experience our actions directly for ourselves.
It's not an abstract idea about what's happening over lifetimes.
So this inquiry is to start to become sensitive to how it works.
The karmic stream,
The dharmic stream,
Moment by moment.
How it unfolds in our lives.
And so to speak a little about the unconscious nature of the karmic stream.
We talked about this a little bit last week,
Sort of the diluted part of ourselves,
The ignorance of our actions.
It's kind of like the karmic stream is a self-generated perpetual motion machine.
It creates the conditions that prompt more of the same kind of crazy conditions in our karmic activities.
And what makes something karmic is that it is,
It conditions us.
It affects us in such a way that there's a continual motion of one thing after another.
Like there's no stopping.
And one of the best places to see this is in our thinking.
Because we see it operating moment by moment.
Especially when we're doing our practice.
It's like a monkey swinging from the trees,
You know,
From branch to branch.
As soon as it grabs onto one branch,
It's already moving to grab onto the next one.
And for us,
We have one thought and already there's a generation of the next one and the next one and the next one.
So a way of understanding karmic thinking is that it leaves traces.
It has an effect and generates,
Generates our disposition.
It creates kind of a mood for thinking in the future.
So often in daily life,
Our thoughts leave these traces and they influence us.
It's subtle,
But the accumulation of many thoughts over days,
Over months can have a huge impact.
And so it can almost create a disposition in a person,
A way of being,
A mood.
And it can be helpful to notice what influences the thoughts that you have by actually you can ask the question like,
What emotion is present for me?
What is the mood that I'm experiencing?
And then to see how that influences our thinking.
It's kind of cyclical.
So when,
When it first comes,
Like the emotion often gives birth to a thought.
And sometimes thoughts can give birth to emotions.
So when we start to see this cycle,
We see that thinking is not free thinking.
It has an impact.
It has an impact.
One of my teachers describes it this way.
It's like you take a tube of toothpaste and when you squeeze a tube of toothpaste,
The paste will come out.
And even if you want to stop it from coming out and you keep wiping off the opening,
Still it keeps on flowing out.
So what you have to do is you have to stop squeezing and then it might come out a little bit more,
But then it stops.
And so sometimes our thoughts are that way.
You know,
If we're squeezing,
If there's tension and tightness and there's pressure,
Then it just keeps coming out.
We keep building off of it.
So what creates that pressure?
You know,
It,
It might be a certain habitual way of thinking,
You know,
A way that where there's some fear that frightens us or there's a fear of letting go or there's some anxiety.
So then there's tension in the body and then that anxiety,
That tension,
What does it do?
It gives birth to more.
And this karmic stream can also be positive.
So,
You know,
If we have beautiful thoughts of love and generosity and appreciation and we're giving to our,
Our neighbors and we're giving to our community,
Those thoughts have a different kind of impact on our body and on our emotional life.
And sometimes you can feel that impact of what's left behind.
Like if we have a strong bout of resentment,
There might be like shoulders clenched,
Jaw clenched.
This is the influence that the thinking has on us.
Or if we have a deep appreciation for other people and love for them,
Then there's kind of a warmth that travels through us,
Maybe even an energy.
So one of the qualities of karma,
Both good karma and difficult karma is there's this momentum.
There's a momentum operating that sort of pushes us along.
So the key thing here is what propels it?
What's motivating that force?
What are the conditions?
And that's where we can look at our moods,
Our feelings.
Classically,
They say that what creates the momentum of karma is the intention behind what we do.
But I think it's not just intention.
It's what propels us.
It's deeper.
There's conditioning as well.
So in mindfulness practice,
One of the things we do with our thoughts,
When there's a lot of intense thoughts and we're caught in them,
Is to notice the emotion behind it,
The mood.
What's conditioning the thinking?
Are there attachments?
These habits are very much a part of our motivation.
And the real issues,
The real things that shape and influence are the karmic stream,
These deep conditionings.
The karmic stream is kind of like the myth of Sisyphus,
Pushing the boulder up the steep mountain and he pushes and he pushes and it goes up and up.
But what the boulder wants to do is roll to the bottom.
And so when he gets to the top,
It rolls down so he has to push it up again.
So the karmic stream is like pushing up the boulder.
We're pushing our desires,
Our wants,
Our concerns,
Our wishes,
Moving ahead,
Doing all these things with the mind,
The wanting mind,
The aversive mind.
It creates work in the mind.
It gets tiring.
The karmic mind is always working.
It's always constructing because it's action.
So when the karmic work,
The constructing mind stops and there's space,
Something else happens.
There's an unwinding.
The boulder rolls down and we're not chasing after it.
The tension of the mind,
The tension of the body begins to dissolve.
And when all these tensions dissolve,
It allows for something else to arise.
And one of the things that can arise is relaxation.
We have like breathing room again,
Space,
A deeper connection to ourselves,
Which is really hard to feel when karma is operating because karma is limiting.
It's just limiting.
So as we relax those limitations and feel the wholeness and ease of being,
Then the quality of our thinking changes.
The quality of our thinking starts to change.
And so next time when we come together,
We'll talk more about that change and being in the dharmic stream.
So thank you for your kind attention this morning.
