I've committed one bad action in my life, I was 7 years old and I pushed my younger brother off an indoor trampoline because it was "my turn" - he hit his head on the edge of a door and had to get stitches for his lip, couldn't eat well for a few days due to pain.

Recently, after moving to my current place, I've been suffering from unexplainable debilitating depression, something to do with the place I live, it wouldn't go away no matter what I did, I begged to move back in with my parents because the depression wasn't there when I lived with them, but no luck. I figured out that maybe it was karma, and I remembered back to the only bad action in my life that I had done, then I figured out that I could go with a My Name Is Earl -attitude and try to amend my wrong deed. For the first time in my life I offered some help for my little brother, and the depression immediately went away and hasn't returned. (Unfortunately) he doesn't need that much help, but I've found I can eliminate some past bad karma just by praying for him.

Following the karma theory I figured that everything I suffer from stems from past wrong acts, so then I applied this thought to tension headaches that I had, and it took me a while but I somehow traced them to my younger brother being in operation to get the stitches (I used some meditation help to perceive something to do with a bunch of metal instruments and figured it might be the operation). So I prayed a bunch of things, imagining what might be a good act to make up for the operation, and my tension headaches vanished.

Anyway, I've been cooking up an (old) theory that all your suffering stems from past wrong acts, karma, and found karma to be pretty much true in my own life beyond this example too. 

Who is that continuous and separate entity that supposedly is being punished? 

(Just to be clear, this is NOT what I meant when I said that it might be a good idea to consider connections between posture-related pain and the five hindrances that you aim at letting go of.)

You could extend this idea to the Buddhist path -- if the reason we suffer might be due to past wrong actions, then wrong actions happen due to craving, and ceasing to crave would eliminate all suffering.

Correlation and causality are only one dimension to the word. The suffering you experienced is not something so severe though... it is guilt and the unequivocal aversion to it sounds like a classic matter of running away from something and unknowingly running towards it.

The Psychosomatic case; your attitude shapes the way your body reacts:
The mind controls the nervous system, and the nervous system controls x, therefore the mind greatly influences x

Innovation in functional MRI's and CAT scans allow us to observe living brains, and you can show that placebo & nocebo responses are associated with particular activity in certain brain centers.
(That helped make "the mind" real to the scientific community)  

"Bad Karma": A lot of people who get injuries in their backs aren't actually suffering the injury itself, but the muscle spasms being generated by the brain in expectation of pain, this is even after the injury has recovered. It's not all in your head, it's in your head & your muscles. The Mind associates particular events, or in this case movements, with danger in order to avoid them. Muscle spasms are created by the mind and the problem with them is they cut off the blood supply. With the mind out of the way, the blood can flow naturally.
Moving out must have been your trigger because memory is always there, lingering.

"Good Karma": We are like super atoms. Our actions and energy reverberate out and impact us all the time. An audacious sense of unwavering positivity, unfounded optimism, and undue confidence can have beneficial and tangible effects in the real world because how you act with other people influences that person's reaction, therefore things go smoother for you. 


The roots of Karma go beyond good and bad, action & result as mentioned are only the surface depth. What karma really means is information & memory. The memory in your mind has been gifted with too much significance. There is memory written in the DNA. So even patterns of behavior developed over the course of one's life are passed on in the form of genetic expressions. 

More on that if you're interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zO8QzMWZbN4

Yep! But there is nothing wrong emotion, or enjoyment. In fact suppressing emotion and enjoyment is a mistake - a dead end.  But the clinging and the craving, the burning of needy desire for 'other' things.  Those are the problems.  So calm down current craving, purify the karma/formations that give rise to that craving, learn to understand the craving process, and then pull up the craving process by the roots.

Ah, so that's what happens when I move energies to take away the pain. Makes sense.

Yes, you're beating the right drum here. The rhythm might be a little off but it's still funky!

Thoughts, speech and actions leave impressions in the mind/body and resurface from time to time based on some later corresponding conditions. (I could delve with some depth into that but I don't want to). The critical theme I want to follow here is 'time'. Consciousness creates time in this way through our experiences and the energy that keeps this rolling on is of the order of mental, vocal and physical. Time itself is the very substrate from which the movements of karma operate and the movements of karma are the very substrate from which time revolves; they are both interdependent and thus instrumental within the grand creation of samsara. No time, no samsara and no karma.

Furthermore, through practising mindfulness or awareness karma should cease becoming a theory. It should become a standard view of phenomena and when one experiences the workings of karma in this experiential way it massively informs your own practice. You become very conscious of your own actions for fear of falling back into lower levels of stupefied simplicity and automation. Mindfulness in this respect has a threefold effect leading to a manifold understanding of the universe of karma: 1) morality 2) sustained attention 3) wisdom.

Hello Linda. We haven't crossed paths for some time but I've been trawling through your practice logs (not in a sensual way!) and found them quite intriguing.

I'm guessing that your question here is pointing rhetorically to something with which cannot be located although it appears that we experience the effects of its phantom-like existence - usually of the nature of suffering and other regular unsatisfactory whatnots. 

Personally I prefer to think of it as dependent origination rather than karma, because the latter is so commonly viewed as some sort of punishment. Everything that occurs has consequences because nothing exists independently, but it isn't about some cosmologic justice. It's more about sawing seeds and building infrastructures and probabilities. 

I see that we were writing simultaneously. Does my post above answer your question? 

Precisely, dependent co-arising gives phenomenal detail to the workings of cause and effect. Dependent co-arising is astonishingly deep! Cause and effect is neither one thing nor the other or, as you say "good or bad". It is, in its basic form, part of a limited consciousness bound-up in the human mind (there are different types of cause and effect circumstances). In order to gather a purchase into different areas of mindfulness we are forced to face our past, present and potential actions.

Additionally, I wholeheartedly agree. There is no justice but the illusory one you apply to yourself. When you draw in your last breath the energy from your actions concertinas into a moment of consciousnesses and this is where you become your harshest judge. It determines your next landing so you place yourself squarely in this universe. In the physical form you were always your own worse judge, why would that change after your body has perished? You are the creator of it all. You are the decider and you can be the finalizer.

Then we are on the same page.

That's kind of the unique idea I'm presenting, karma as full cosmological justice, but I guess not everyone believes in it -- it would've been hard for me in the past to believe it, but I've also seen magical bad consequences happen to people who've wronged me. Have a good day though 

If you accept the cosmological view of karma, the Buddhist path can be seen as maximizing good karma -- one sets off into homelessness, losing everything but the essential possessions, which is the good act of giving away everything. Meditation might be a way to not crave for those possessions, being satisfied with nothing. The rest of the path might be losing the bases of clinging so one can never really "own" anything, so that one develops no negative karma by not craving for things of others -- one essentially loses the self that owns things, losing the base for karma altogether.

Not having a self that owns things, one perceives that any possession, say food, is thus come and thus gone -- it doesn't last in one's own mouth but moves away, impermanent, as it is gone to somewhere else. Perceiving it as impermanent, one does maximum effort to give away pleasing sensory experiences off to somewhere else, and in this way due to never having pleasing sensory impressions one develops no positive karma. Due to not craving for impermanent sensory pleasures, one does not perform wrong acts, but say due to injustice, would rather give away the pleasing sensory experiences to the wrong-doers. 

Not having a self that owns things, all pain is suffered by the same human continuum, so one naturally develops good acts, and thus experiences no negative karma. 

It gets a bit weird here -- the released sensory impressions develop another body that gives great fortune for one. Due to releasing sensory impressions one becomes destined for another world, one with ease and comfort, because one finds a way to suck in new pleasing sensory impressions, because it just happens accidentally in this world, not via a being's own actions -- one automatically guns for all of the pleasing sensory experiences the world has to offer. So one experiences fortune without any foundation for karma, due to no action.

The only way to relinquish suffering, bad past karma, is to suffer deeply. One can suffer deeply by relinquishing control, accomplished by not knowing, accomplished by being ridiculous -- repenting. If one murdered someone, one needs to be ridiculous and make it up to the person's family, by being ultra-ridiculous and dearly praying for the one who was murdered, by being ridiculous and crying for the person who was murdered.

I don't need the idea of cosmologic justice (which is not that unique, by the way) to want to do the right thing and to let go of craving. The risk of punishment is not what motivates me. I just want for the world to be loving and compassionate and peaceful. If you need to punish yourself, sure, go ahead, but self-compassion is usually more effective if you want to let go of hindrances. 

Why would relinquishing control mean suffering? You do know that the Buddha was all about the end of suffering, right? 

The primary idea is that one just needs to suffer deeply, and by the theory, relinquishing control might be just one way to suffer deeply -- first way that popped to my head. You can also suffer deeply by giving away everything, so perhaps letting go of all possessions and becoming homeless can be a way to repent. By the theory, repenting is a way to end suffering -- the whole thing is based on buying into the idea of cosmological justice in the first place.

Thanks for replying 

Well, the point of the path is to let go of control in order to end suffering. 

Is it? (I'm not amazingly well-versed in the path yet, having only read half of the Pali Canon, not knowing much). In that case, reading Buddhism from the point of view of cosmological karma might have fascinating results.

I also just had another idea -- the teachings of Jesus from the point of view of the time. If Buddhism is space and the end of suffering, the teachings of Jesus might be the time and happiness. 

A sin might be the enjoyment of a poor time, say mocking someone, hating. As a consequence one might enjoy a poor time in the future, of no enjoyment. A good time of loving might be met with also a good time. 

Time will come when justice will be done, so it's good to have faith that evildoers will be punished and righteous ones saved -- to not let go of goodness, of innocence. 

Yes, minus the paper but abundant in the luminescence of hypertext markup language. 

(Or something)

Justice is a figure of speech that describes the fruit of your own actions. Faith is a figure of speech to describe your grasping at future outcomes. Punishment and righteousness are figures of speech that describe the fickle imposter that governs your every perception - separating, dividing and fragmenting.

Loving-kindness meditation is a good remedy for such mind ailments. :-)

Yeah, I actually also perceived that the evildoers might wind up in heaven with one, if one keeps faith. 

My dharma faculties are dwindling as I contemplate what karmas are over there in heaven. 

I'm thinking there's karmic heaven and maybe something Jesus spoke of, distinct from it.

I like to delve into some zen from time to time. You reminded me of this beautiful zen story. Enjoy...

A university student while visiting Gasan asked him: “Have you ever read the Christian Bible?”

“No, read it to me,” said Gasan.

The student opened the Bible and read from St. Matthew: “And why take ye thought for rainment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They toil not, neither do they spin, and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these… Take therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.”

Gasan said: “Whoever uttered those words I consider an enlightened man.”

The student continued reading: “Ask and it shall be given you, seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you. For everyone that asketh receiveth, and he that seeketh findeth, and to him that knocketh, it shall be opened.”

Gasan remarked: “That is excellent. Whoever said that is not far from Buddhahood.”

It's a nice koan.

Karma is bad feelings -- you can fix your own suffering, regarding a person one wronged, by giving good feelings to every suffering they went through, or by giving good feelings to them now, say being on their side.   

Karma is basically being mothered -- if you think this thing, then you'll suffer this. If you feel this way about something, then you'll feel terrible. If you want to cause something, then you'll feel this. 

Regarding a wrong act, one can think that I don't think it was fine, because the person I hurt actually did a kindness to me -- one can reverse the motives around a bad action, and subsequently develop highly good motivation toward the other person, wishing to give them more. This might ease karmic suffering. 

Maybe if you wished that the self was good. One can do practices, say regret, to make the self good.

Karma, goodness of self, is hidden. The self exists as a pure individual in the world. The goodness of the self arises from marks left on the world. Leave bad marks on someone, the marks direct the self on a far worse path. The world is a seed-ground, and leaving bad marks on it leads to bad fruit, so the entire world along with its beings is one. Marks are based on intentions, they cause us to register things poorly and sadly due to hatred of ourselves displayed by makers of bad marks, and hatred is a sense that things are unlasting. What one makes last produces good fruit, because a good mark (intention) is seen and felt with one's heart, they immediately lead to fruit due to seeing the better way of lasting things, and the marks one makes is the path one travels, downward or heavenward. Heaven is ultimately seeing that things do last.

The Buddha might exist in a perennial heaven, disconnected from Earth, something ever-lasting. To take only what one needs is to produce ultimate lastingness of the self, to conquer craving. 

The mark-maker gains new ways to involve energy with good marks, and the lasting structures naturally lead to prosperity. Giving to the poor, one finds new ways to employ the power of the poor, and one yields great fruit as a consequence. Bad marks lead to ways to lose energy, thus, hurting another, one loses the energy of gaining, so one is forced to sideline into other activities, bringing great misfortune on one.

Maybe one can, in this case, purify bad marks by rejoicing for the hurt person's gains, thus gaining access into this form of energy, no longer sidelineing activity and experiencing illness from lack of energy. It's essentially hoping for the speeding-up of the one who one hurt, opposite from hoping for their deterioration, which was the original impulse. 

I have more on Christianity:

The world is where one lives. God bestows new dreams at the edge of it. The world is good when things go according to plan. The world is bad when things don't go according to plan. One produces a good world by causing nothing, this lets the world to come, unhindered, perfect. If one never causes anything one just might exponentially face an eternity of things coming to one. So one needs to have faith that things will reach one, not go and lose it in face of disasters but keep hoping for the best. Prayer is to put full faith in the Lord to produce the best, and this faith is the way to lose sorrow over what one has created by causing something in the world, mainly to not wish for the best.

all human beings are conscientious, they have this tiny conscience that have 3 signs called Anatta, Anicca and Dukha

Dukha means suffering and your suffering because you hurt your brother. Just like me, I almost killed my brother when I was young and naughty and since then he suffer a strong fear inside him due to almost being dead

since then I have suffered from mental illness and I cant forgive myself and nothing seem to be enough to be done by me to liven up his life. He subconsciously is wishing me to be alive for longer than him because that is human nature when they have given up hope for themselves.

I am sadden because of this and my mental illness is worsen and I wish I could die for him so that he can get back his childhood with a better older brother unlike me, but nothing can be changed by my death and it is just a wishful hope. My death wont exchange him anything but a longer suffering for him because he is expecting me to take care of our parents when he is dead because he suffered stroke recently

It is not easy for me to realise this and my family has been suffering deeply due to abusive father and my mother suffer from depression because of how I cant fit myself into her heart and blame her over her greed and fear of death because she almost get killed by my grandfather after pushing her down to a pit where she almost fall down

My family is problematic and sad, and I realise nothing is really going to change other than changing myself to refrain from negative or impulsive reactions and endure my problems and try hard to show them care and compassion

Only by changing how myself perceive the suffering of others by letting the feeling to flow that all suffering will eventually cease to exist when people is awaken or enlighten, only then I realise that the true way of life is to awaken others from their ignorance into Buddhahood in order to severe the cycle of suffering (samsara).

To undo a bad deed, one's heart needs to change, to mind the wronged one. 

aloha lasse,

   In chinese philosophy, the confucian view holds that the human being is essentially benign, and is motivated by love. The cradle of this love, as it were, is the family.

   Confucians speak of "the five relations." The original three primary relations are the mutual love of  husband and wife;  the mutual love of elder and younger siblings; and the mutual love of parents and children. The two extended relations are the mutual love of the citizen/subject for the political leader/monarch, reflecting love of parents and children; and the mutual love of one's neighbor, reflecting love of siblings.

   Your life is a dream, and in this dream your brother symbolizes all of humanity. Depression, in your case, may be due to your soul (as opposed to your self-interested ego) recognizing at some level that having compassion for the "other" relieves your unhappiness.

   The sense of separation caused by identifying with the ego is the root of depression in otherwise organically healthy people. The feeling that we are all in this together is a relief. 


terry



He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother
(The Hollies)

The road is long
With many a winding turn
That leads us to who knows where
Who knows where
But I'm strong
Strong enough to carry him
He ain't heavy, he's my brother
So on we go
His welfare is of my concern
No burden is he to bear
We'll get there
For I know
He would not encumber me
He ain't heavy, he's my brother
If I'm laden at all
I'm laden with sadness
That everyone's heart
Isn't filled with the gladness
Of love for one another
It's a long, long road
From which there is no return
While we're on the way to there
Why not share
And the load
Doesn't weigh me down at all
He ain't heavy he's my brother
He's my brother
He ain't heavy, he's my brother, he ain't heavy

Songwriters: Bob Russell / Bobby Scott

   The idea that you have only committed one sin in your whole life is also symbolic. Thus made a unity, you can atone for the whole business in one go. As long as you recognize that "the wronged one" is a symbol for the collective other, and ultimately all being(s), including you.

   Compassion goes both ways.

t 

Ahh... what an enlightened wordings,
When time and space is not relevant anymore.
Punishment is for beings, not the non-entity.
Switching from existence to activity is the key.
You are the world and the world is you afterall.

[quote=Mista Tibbs


So even patterns of behavior developed over the course of one's life are passed on in the form of genetic expressions. ]






    This notion, aka lamarckism, is not widely accepted in biology. At least, not since darwin.

t

Epigenetics is a rising new field putting forth a lot of concerns that are currently not accepted. It deals mainly in gene expressions apart from DNA alteration. Animals unfortunate enough to participate in lab experiments have shown traits and behaviors linked to genetic expressions directly influenced through the germline.
A lot of progress and re-writing of literature has happened and is going to keep happening since Darwin's time. We cant hold on to the cemented understanding just as we shouldn't be attached to contemporary knowledge. New insights will continue to be made

[quote=Bardo Cruiser




]
Yes, you're beating the right drum here. The rhythm might be a little off but it's still funky!

Thoughts, speech and actions leave impressions in the mind/body and resurface from time to time based on some later corresponding conditions. (I could delve with some depth into that but I don't want to). The critical theme I want to follow here is 'time'. Consciousness creates time in this way through our experiences and the energy that keeps this rolling on is of the order of mental, vocal and physical. Time itself is the very substrate from which the movements of karma operate and the movements of karma are the very substrate from which time revolves; they are both interdependent and thus instrumental within the grand creation of samsara. No time, no samsara and no karma.

Furthermore, through practising mindfulness or awareness karma should cease becoming a theory. It should become a standard view of phenomena and when one experiences the workings of karma in this experiential way it massively informs your own practice. You become very conscious of your own actions for fear of falling back into lower levels of stupefied simplicity and automation. Mindfulness in this respect has a threefold effect leading to a manifold understanding of the universe of karma: 1) morality 2) sustained attention 3) wisdom.










aloha bc,

    I wonder if time is truly primordial. 

   Identifying as subjects, we project objects, and find them nearer or further from our point of view. From this, upon reflection we create space and time as abstractions, and further attenuate them through measurement.

   Samsara, the cycle of existence, and karma, the law of cause and effect, are likewise not primordial. More like theories; metaphysics. Notions. Useful notions, but thereby blinding, concealing.

   Samsara is a whirlpool. In the taoist metaphor, one may learn to use the energy of the whirlpool and swim at one's ease. Karma relates to objects: the objects, always, of desire. Aristotle said that all objects have their causes: this involves the ancient paradox, if god created everything, who created god? As with the similarly paradoxical big bang, every thing, even the universe, must have a beginning and an end. Yet, to ask after the original cause is perhaps the same as asking, what is north of the north pole?

   Even in the context of buddhism, with karma we are dealing with different levels of perception of phenomena. The notion that all things have causes and effects is superseded by the notion that all things are subject to dependent origination.

   Leibnitz asked, "why is there something rather than nothing?" Short answer: there isn't.

   Anyhows, I have a question for you:


     Is the enlightened person subject to the law of cause and efffect?    


    (wink)


terry



Blending with the wind, 
Snow falls; 
Blending with the snow, 
The wind blows. 
By the hearth 
I stretch out my legs, 
Idling my time away 
Confined in this hut. 
Counting the days, 
I find that February, too, 
Has come and gone 
Like a dream.

~ryokan

    You want to end suffering, bra, not prolong it. Don't be ridiculous. (wink)



t

 (sound of pot cracking)

Hey terry, great to see you back!

(bows)