Your Karma Is Now

The Buddha's teachings on karma were far more optimistic - and useful! - than the common Western interpretation. In this talk and guided meditation recorded live at the Boston Mindfulness and Insight Meditation Meetup, we leave behind concepts of helpless reliance on cosmic retribution. Instead, we focus on skillfully using karma to create freedom from needing those concepts in the first place.

Transcript

Thank you for being here today.

Those of you who have heard this many times before may mindfully ignore me for the next 90 seconds or so,

But for those who have not met me yet,

Welcome.

My name is Ron Levine from Mindfulness and Blue Jeans,

And I stumbled ass-backwards into mindfulness and insight meditation in April of 1998,

During a time when I was dealing with clinical anxiety and depression and a raging panic disorder that had blown up into agoraphobia.

So I was trapped at home.

I was unable to work,

I was on disability,

I couldn't go past the front door without melting down.

And happened to get paired up with a psychologist who even back then was already several decades deep into practicing and teaching mindfulness and insight meditation.

And he offered me these techniques as a way of dealing with the issues that I was having.

I was not thrilled.

My sense was,

I can't be social,

I can't work,

I can't go to the market up the street.

My life has come to a stop,

And here's this guy saying,

Well,

Why don't we sit and watch the breathing for a while and see what happens.

Great,

Thanks buddy.

Though he didn't give me anything else at first,

And I was sitting at home all day panicking anyway.

And I figured,

Alright,

I'm going to do this just long enough so I can go back to him and honestly say,

Look,

Dude,

This didn't work.

Can I have the real treatment now?

That was 24 years ago now?

I have not had that conversation with him yet.

And here I am doing things like this.

So it seems to have worked out pretty well so far.

I'm going to keep doing it a little longer.

And here we are.

So thank you for joining me.

I always start the year with my Mindfulness 101 Am I Doing This Right session,

Which we had a couple of weeks ago,

And I like to follow it up with New Year,

New Karma.

There's a lot of misconception about karma,

Particularly in Western society and what we mean by it.

We have these notions of revenge,

Justice,

He's going to get his,

What goes around comes around this sort of stuff.

I'd like to talk about what karma actually is in the Buddhist sense when it was originally being taught and how we can use that in order to achieve the one thing that the Buddha taught,

The only thing the Buddha concerned himself with in his 45 years of teaching,

Which was how do we alleviate our suffering?

Now last time I delineated the difference between pain and suffering,

Right?

We're not going to eliminate our pain.

We're going to experience pain in this life.

Suffering arises when we do not deal with our pain skillfully.

So when we talk about the word skillful in this context,

Skillful means,

Am I increasing or decreasing my suffering?

When I am relating to something painful,

Am I doing it in such a way that is going to make things worse?

Or am I dealing with it in such a way that I am not adding more shit on top of the pain that I already have,

The stuff that I don't have a choice about?

There's a collection of classic Buddhist teachings called the Dhammapada,

And I'm going to read the first couple of lines from it.

And it's important to note that these are the first couple of lines right here at the very beginning.

The first thing,

Obviously this is stuff from,

This is 2,

500 years ago,

Been translated across Lord knows how many languages,

So anytime you're reading something that comes from the Buddha as best we know it,

You're going to have multiple translations.

And I always choose this particular one because there's a funny pun in it when translated into English using this particular translation.

You're going to hear me say the term mind rot.

And I want to make clear that in this context it's actually,

It's not rot,

R O T,

Okay,

It's W R O U G H T.

So mind derived,

Mind generated.

I'm not actually saying mind rot,

Like that's crap,

But it is a nice little pun to have in there.

And so I choose this one.

So these are the lines.

Mind precedes all mental states.

Mind is their chief.

They are all mind rot.

If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts,

Suffering follows like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox.

Mind precedes all mental states.

Mind is their chief.

They are all mind rot.

If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts,

Happiness follows like a never departing shadow.

We'll come back to that in a couple of minutes.

I'd like to describe a phenomenon that I noticed early in my practice.

Something that I call the inner and outer cycles of dread.

A pair of cycles that we use inadvertently to generate a pretty miserable inner experience for ourselves.

Okay,

And you see if maybe this resonates for a couple of people.

When we have something looming over us,

Something coming up in the near or far future that we are dreading,

Something that is causing us perhaps some fear,

Anxiety,

The central question that we are always concerned with is,

Am I going to be okay?

Am I going to be okay?

And how do we try to be okay?

Well,

We have this thing coming up in the future,

So we start trying to be prepared for it.

Well,

How do we be prepared for something that's not here yet?

Well,

We start anticipating it.

And if we're really going to be prepared,

Well,

What's the best way to be prepared?

Well,

We have to be prepared for the worst case scenario.

So that's the one we imagine.

Whether it's realistic or whatever,

We got to be prepared.

We've got to be ready.

So what's the worst case scenario?

Let me play through that in my mind so I can work out all my contingencies and my backup plans and well,

What does this do?

This sends signals to our subconscious mind,

Which doesn't know the difference between something that's actually happening and something that we are imagining is happening,

Right?

It gets the same signals either way.

Something says,

Oh,

There's an emergency here.

Okay,

Get shit ready.

All right.

And what does it do?

It sends signals to the body.

And the body starts going into fight or flight mode thinking there's a real emergency here,

Which then serves to confirm for our mind that there is an emergency because if there wasn't an emergency,

Why is the body doing this,

Right?

So now we've generated this feedback loop between our mind and our body in an attempt to calm ourselves down,

Except we're getting the opposite results.

And what happens when we get the opposite results?

Well,

This is not acceptable.

Better try again.

Great,

Right?

That's the inner cycle of dread.

Okay.

Then a funny thing happens.

The event we were so worried about comes and goes,

Usually not with the worst case scenario.

And even in those cases when the worst case scenario happens,

Usually not quite as bad as we pictured it.

So we come out okay.

And our minds,

Our minds and their infinite wisdom make an association between the misery we caused ourselves and the okayness that we are now experiencing and say,

Ah,

That worked.

Keep doing that.

It's like this sick sort of superstition.

I got through it okay,

So let's keep doing what we were doing so when it comes up again,

We'll be okay again.

It always makes me think of scientists or when you're thinking of statistics when they say correlation is not causation,

Right?

That's this,

Because obviously all of this misery we are causing ourselves is not the cause of things ultimately being okay,

Right?

But we develop this association.

So this is the outer cycle.

We start to see,

Oh,

Okay,

I did this and then I got this and so that seems to work so let's keep doing that.

So we have that inner cycle where we're causing ourselves all this misery and this outer cycle where we're saying,

Okay,

Let's keep that going.

And we end up rewarding our own dread and perpetuating it.

When I was making my notes,

I came across a passage that I wrote some time ago based on this and this is what I wrote.

I wrote,

We plant the seeds of our own suffering and nurture their growth.

Such seeds can only bear bitter fruit whose own seeds start the cycle anew.

In our attempt to be okay,

We ironically cultivate a garden of misery.

This is karma.

This is karma.

How so?

I don't usually read a lot of passages during these,

But I'm reading a lot today.

This comes from an American monk that I quote quite often,

Tanisaro Biku.

This is what the Buddha discovered as he was working all this stuff out.

The Buddha discovered that skillfulness,

Remember,

Not causing ourselves more suffering,

Decreasing our suffering,

Skillfulness depended not so much on the physical performance of an act as on the mental qualities of perception,

Attention,

And intention,

Perception,

Attention,

And intention that played a part in it.

Of these three qualities,

The intention formed the essence of the act as it constituted the decision to act while attention and perception informed it.

So let's apply that to our example here.

We talk a lot about thought,

Speech,

And action.

Thought and speech in themselves are action.

They are forms of action.

Thinking is something that we are doing.

It's a process we are engaging in.

So in the case of this example,

We are experiencing pain,

The thing we don't have a choice about,

Right?

We are experiencing pain in the form of uncertainty and fear of that uncertainty.

We're experiencing a pain in the form of fear of uncertainty and we are basing our action,

In this case,

Our thought pattern,

On an intention,

An intention to shut off from that pain.

And when we do not clearly perceive,

Is the perception,

When we do not clearly perceive that action as a source of suffering and we're not paying attention to the cause and effect relationship of how what we're doing is giving us these results,

We continue to act and think out of what the Buddha would call ignorance and delusion,

Literally not seeing what it is we're doing,

Why we're doing it,

And how it's working out for us.

And if we're not seeing that,

Well,

How the hell are we going to improve that?

Right?

I want to point out several key aspects about karma that we can take from this,

Along with the central roles of intention,

Perception,

And attention.

And these are the ones that I really like to stress so that we can get out of that,

Like I was saying before,

What I call the bastardized Western mentality of karma as some sort of justice,

Revenge-based thing.

I really want to point out that karma is now.

There's an immediacy.

It's not this off in the future thing.

How we are experiencing our lives right now is a result of what we are doing right now.

I think of intention.

I get this mental image of it imprinting my thought,

Speech,

And action in such a way that even before there's been any outward external,

If I've said something or acted physically in an external way,

Before there's anything actually put out into the world,

There's already an imprinting upon whatever that action would be based on the intention behind it.

I'm already experiencing.

For example,

If I want to do something nasty to another person,

I'm already now in an unskillful state.

There's an inner misery there that is being perpetuated by that thought pattern.

Now,

I don't have a choice if a particular thought just comes up.

So if I have a particular thought that I want to go swat that person because they did something,

I can't really help that.

That just happens.

What I do with that,

That has an effect on my immediate experience,

An effect on my immediate experience.

Any time you hear the word cause or effect,

That's karma.

That's part of our real-time experience.

It's not some sort of cosmic justice.

It's basic cause and effect.

So it's less what goes around comes around and more if we do what we've always done,

We're going to get what we've always gotten.

Intention is the main pillar of the three.

But we need clear seeing for the perception and attention to inform that intention.

That's why we're here.

That's why we practice.

We don't practice mindfulness and insight meditation for its own sake.

We do it in itself as a cause for an effect,

A skillful cause for a skillful effect.

We're setting conditions,

Planting seeds for the effect of decreasing our suffering.

So this practice in itself is our karma right now.

It's playing out right now.

So to me,

This is a far more optimistic view of karma than the way we tend to think of it.

Like I say,

In this justice or revenge based context.

Why?

Well,

Our karmic experience is not deterministic,

Meaning we're not stuck with it.

Our experience is shaped by the results of our previous intentions,

But also our current intentions.

We are experiencing the effects of our previous karma,

If you will,

But with the ability to shape how we experience it,

Which in turn creates the conditions for what's going to come next.

The mental image that I always get when I'm talking about this is one of those old school video games.

Think of those old school where you're like this poorly rendered little character on the screen that doesn't even look like a person,

Right?

And you're going down.

It's one of those up and down moving games.

Can't really go side to side much.

You can go up and down.

And it's like you're going on this path.

But on the sides,

There are these mountains.

And of course,

They don't even look like mountains either.

It's just like these squiggles.

But you're supposed to know they're mountains,

Right?

The little book that comes with this is,

Yeah,

Those are mountains.

Those are mountains.

And if you try to walk up against the mountains to cross them,

You'll hear this little boomf,

Like one of those old school,

Just to let you know,

Yeah,

You can't do that.

Can't go there.

And why is that whole section blocked off by these supposed mountains?

Well,

For the same reason that your poorly rendered character is so poorly rendered.

Because back in those days,

The programmers of the game were limited by these memory constraints,

Right?

The computer memory was so tiny.

So they're limited,

Right?

That's the way I think of this is we're walking down this path.

And there's these mountains.

And they're kind of a constraint,

If you will.

They're kind of the potential area that we're able to explore.

And that limitation is coming from our karma,

Okay?

Coming from how we've handled things in the past.

But who's the programmer in this case?

Well,

That'd be us,

Huh?

And we are not limited by the constraints that the video game programmers are.

In fact,

Our only constraint pretty much is probably the law of physics,

Right?

So we get to say how we're going to handle these potentials that we find ourselves with based on how we've handled things before.

And know that,

Hey,

How I handle this now shapes my experience right now and going forward.

That's pretty optimistic,

I think.

It puts the responsibility on us,

Which we don't always like,

Right?

But would you really rather it be in someone else's hands?

Through attention and perception,

We inform our intention and we can short circuit unskillful cycles like the ones I described before.

And as I say,

This is our responsibility.

Other people's karma is their responsibility.

How people handle their business is their business.

How we handle how other people handle their business is our business.

This is an individual experience,

Which is why I chose the example that I did of this one of our own thought patterns.

I could easily have chosen any number of external kinds of examples.

For example,

Oh,

I don't know,

Let me pick at random political upheaval,

Right?

Because we can do the same thing with that.

It's all the same causes and effects over time.

But that same paradigm happens just within us and within very short periods of time,

A minute,

10 seconds,

Right?

So,

We have a tremendous amount of say.

In fact,

We're the only ones who really have say how our karma plays out.

I want to say one more thing before we sit.

This is really key.

The Buddha chose his words very carefully.

Buddha was fascinating.

I mean,

He was part scientist,

Part poet,

Part psychologist.

He chose his words very carefully.

And I want to read the passage once more that I started with,

Because there's something really interesting here if you read between the lines,

Okay?

Mind precedes all mental states.

Mind is their chief.

They are all mind wrought.

If with an impure mind,

A person speaks or acts,

Suffering follows like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox.

If with a pure mind,

A person speaks or acts,

Happiness follows like a never departing shadow.

I love this.

You can tell over the course of my talk,

I'm very visual.

I get lots of images in my mind in the course of this practice.

And the imagery here is amazing.

An impure mind suffering follows like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox.

The mental picture of that,

This exhausted animal dragging through the mud with this heavy load behind him.

Oh,

Sounds terrible.

But then the pure mind,

Happiness follows like a never departing shadow.

In contrast to the poor ox,

This is weightless,

Effortless.

But even more importantly,

What do you need to cast a shadow?

Light.

Light.

It's amazing.

I love it.

Love it.

Let's sit for a bit.

If you are seated,

If your hips elevated higher than your knees,

If possible,

This is good for your breathing as well as your posture.

That's not possible at the moment,

Not a federal offense.

Something to keep in mind for the future perhaps.

And let's begin as we always do by imagining that we are suspended from the ceiling by a string attached to the top of our heads as a cue to sit up straight without adding any extra tension to do so.

If there is some tension right now,

Mental tension,

Emotional tension,

Physical tension,

That's fine.

That is allowed.

We do not need to interfere with it or try to force it away.

That really just adds more tension to the tension and is a prime example of what I was talking about before where the initial tension would be considered perhaps a form of pain or discomfort.

And the extra tension we might add in order to try to get rid of the initial tension,

Well,

That would be suffering.

Because you can't really get rid of tension by adding more tension.

So we simply allow any part of our body that is not actively holding us up to release in its own time.

And that may be today and it may not.

And that's fine.

I also like to notice what is in contact with the floor,

The chair,

So there's this sense of grounding.

Even if we don't feel particularly grounded at the moment,

There is something supporting us and it can handle that job.

We can let it do that.

So notice that sense of support at the bottom and perhaps a gentle lift at the top.

And whatever else happens to be in between for you right now.

Okay.

And if And notice,

As soon as we do that,

We have what?

A perception of what the breathing is like.

And we may very quickly form an intention for how our breathing should be.

Now there are practices where we do control our breathing,

We have intentions for how our breathing will be.

This is not one of them.

There's no meditative breath per se required here.

Our meditative breath is simply the one we are observing as we are meditating.

It can be long,

It can be short,

It can be deep,

It could be shallow,

It could be pleasant,

It could be unpleasant.

It's not about the quality of it,

It's about simply seeing the quality of it.

And what arises in us as a reaction to that.

Can we form an intention to simply observe the breathing as it is?

Which by the way is very difficult.

It is very difficult,

If you're noticing difficulty,

It's not you.

In fact if you're noticing difficulty,

You're doing this right.

It's very difficult to observe the breathing and not try to control or shape it in some way.

So for me it's never been a skillful intention in this practice to try to control the breathing.

I'm not saying it's never a skillful intention,

I'm saying for me it's never really worked out and this is what the Buddha said was,

You know,

Don't take my word for how any of this works,

You got to try it out for yourself and experiment and see what works for you.

Only each of us know what's going to increase or decrease our own suffering.

So I invite you to try out the intention of simply observing the breathing as it is.

And if there's an element of control or shaping happening there and it's going to cause more suffering by trying to control the controlling,

And you don't have to do that.

Notice that there's breathing,

Oh and there's also controlling of it.

See what's a skillful intention for you.

Try a few different things.

A skillful intention for the breathing and pay attention to it.

What is the perception about it?

What is the effect generated by the cause of putting our intention into action?

Let's take a few minutes with that.

Now let's suggest some daily devotional practice to break up the emotionaly and mental telehedra.

Now one thing that we often notice in this process of making space,

Which is what we're doing,

Practicing observation without interference,

So things have a chance to express unimpeded.

What happens when we do that?

Well,

Things express unimpeded,

Don't they?

And that's usually in the form of thinking.

It's very common for people to come to a mindfulness practice,

Meditation practice,

With an intention of stopping all thinking,

Clearing the mind.

Is that a skillful intention?

I've never found that to be the case.

I've found that that causes a hell of a lot of suffering.

Now having the intention of coming back to the breathing when we realize we have fallen into a storyline,

A daydream,

Having the intention of simply coming back,

That's sustainable.

That doesn't seem to cause suffering.

That's been my experience.

And that right there is karma,

Cause and effect,

With intention at its core,

Right?

One of the analogies I use a lot is you can plant seeds,

You can put them under the sunlight,

You can water them,

But at some point you got to step back because you can't make the damn thing grow.

That's going to happen on its own.

That's the same thing here.

If we cultivate skillful intentions,

When we address the causes and conditions,

We don't really have to do anything about the effects.

The effects,

That happens on their own.

We don't have a choice about that.

We don't have to do the effects.

That's not up to us.

That's just another form of suffering is when we feel like we're responsible for the effects,

Trying to make situations comply with our desires.

Cause how does that work out for us?

Eh,

I'll take a look at the world,

See how that's working out for us.

Focus on the intent and the clear scene so we have the attention and perception to inform the intention.

Ada,

Do you want words?

If thinking has taken over,

Simply come back.

The intention of focusing on the breathing.

And if there was a little voice of condemnation saying,

Ah,

You fell off again,

You're terrible,

You don't know.

That is just another thought process that can be observed and noted.

And we come back to the breathing.

The problem isn't that little voice.

The problems arise when we don't handle that little voice skillfully.

We come back to the breathing.

We come back to the breathing.

We come back to the breathing.

You might notice when things arise,

Whether it's a thought,

Feeling,

Physical sensation,

You might notice how there's an initial perception or attention and how quickly we might form an intention around that automatically because it's become habitual over our lives.

You might feel a particular sensation and immediately shift our bodies without even thinking.

Oh,

What's this feel like if I don't shift?

Don't interfere.

Now,

If it's a real pain,

A real issue,

Then of course it's not skillful to simply sit there and observe it because we want to be a good meditator.

That's horseshit.

But if there's an itch,

A mild discomfort,

Notice how that autopilot might kick in and realize,

Well,

Geez,

If my intentions are being,

If you will,

Outsourced like that to the point where we're not consciously even doing anything anymore,

Right,

Out of pure habit for all these things that come up,

Something as small as an itch or as large as,

I don't know,

Pick your own example.

Well,

Geez,

I mean,

Who's running the show here?

Who's running the show?

Who's in charge?

How's that working out for our day-to-day experience?

I'm not here because I'm worried about getting enlightened.

I'm here to improve my day-to-day experience,

Not cause my own suffering here now.

If I'm going to do that,

I damn well better pay some attention,

Right?

How do I develop the clear seeing to make sure that my intentions are skillful?

And I've been doing it for almost 25 years because it works.

Works for me.

Take another couple of minutes and then I'll have a short reading to close the sitting.

It'll be lovely to be able to hear you speaking.

We get a few words from,

Again,

Thanasarabhiko.

By paying attention to the moments when you catch yourself being unskillful,

You work with that particular intention.

You don't have to deal with your entire character all at once.

Just see what's happening right here,

Right now,

With that particular lack of skillfulness,

Because you can deal with individual events.

They're not too much.

They're not overwhelming.

As you develop this quality of being meticulous,

You actually accomplish the training.

You're developing the qualities needed for the path.

Reviews

A lot of wisdom in this session . A lot to think about and to practice . Much love and gratitude ❤️🙏🕊️

Awesome thank you and lovely voice