The Power of Karma (Part two)

There are many “baby Buddhism” explanations of deep principles of Tibetan Buddhism available. The “accessible” information stream is very easy and smooth with practically no effort needed on the part of the curious. “Do good things, and do not do bad things.” However, I do have confidence in your intelligence. The explanations of karma commensurate with the shift to inner quantum physics realities logically would be more complex than perhaps a small sign on a store shelf telling us, “stealing is bad karma.” You might even think, ‘Why am I being fed simplistic beginner concepts when I am completely capable of understanding more complex strategies?'

However, in the real world, a relationship with a teacher or mentor evolves on both sides. The more you interact with the teacher, and the lama begins to trust and appreciate your ability to understand, the more he or she will, with a professional ease, touch points of perceptual errors that need to change. In that way, we go from the very simple explanations to very complex explanations, and then we reverse the intricacy to another very easy form after you have visited and accomplished the complexities. This means that you are then capable of simplifying in a new way. That is not baby Buddhism, all right? To practice at a higher level, one must return to simplicity and not just use aphorisms that we hear come from a high level practitioner as the very method of our practice.

Returning to our discussion of karma, we might be currently experiencing either happiness or sadness. It is important to know that whether we are perceiving events as good luck or bad luck, or neutral events, what is actually happening is the arrival of the results of previous actions by experiencing them, followed by the dissolving of previously gathered karma. We then forge new karma by the energy of the expended actions assembled along with any applied perceptions that will stimulate more karma. There is an energetic push or arisal from subtle mind, causing the experiencing, and dissolving the energetic pent up karma in a special kind of energetic closure. We are exhausting the karma that created the event, as well as producing a fresh karma to bring about the identical or very similar result in the future.

Neutral karma, however, is like filler activities. For example, events such as walking or eating soup, without special likes or dislikes toward the actions are neutral. Those actions arise more in response to conditions than inner causes. For example, simply by being born into the human realm, with a human body and mind, we are necessarily interacting with our world in a kind of mechanical way, not thinking or judging or planning. We do not have virtuous thoughts or particularly negative thoughts, although we could be in a bad mood generally and find that everyday non- important activities become a source of boredom or actual suffering.

In Buddhist practice, a vast untapped resource of virtuous karma that we will need to for gaining suitable causes and conditions in the future is by transforming how we participate in neutral karma functioning. We can change our perceptions from mindless existing to a more skillful gathering of positive virtue by binding our futile concerns for our self to benefiting the more valid needs of others in compassionate concern. To be continued….