Tag: karma

Luck of the Draw

Last week we discussed victim mindset and how we should avoid blaming others for things that may be happening in our lives. Today, I want to take this one step further and examine, why things happen in our lives the way they do. We all have certain tendencies that keep us in this loop of a specific pattern. Two people trying the same thing and coming out with a different result. I call this Luck of the Draw. Let’s dig deeper.

Although our tendencies are what keeps us in a pattern, have you ever thought about what creates those tendencies within us? We are all predisposed to certain thought patterns, actions, and behavior. It all comes down to our Karma. Our karma influences our thoughts and creates tendencies that put us in these patterns whether positive or negative.

Let me give you an example. There was this famous Indian Buddhist monk named Atisha. He was one of the most recognized scholars of his time. The king of Tibet at the time decided to invite him to teach his people. Atisha happily accepted and went to Tibet. He brought a cook with him. Now Atisha’s cook was known for his bad temper. He was impolite and otherwise rude to Atisha. He would cook the food and then would ask Atisha to eat if he wanted to and would not care if the food was tasty or not. The Tibetan people were watching this drama for a few weeks. Finally, one of them could not resist. He went to Atisha and said, you know, we have good cooks here in Tibet and we are happy to lend you a couple of cooks. Why are putting up with this nonsense from your cook? Atisha had a brilliant answer. He told them he create certain karma that put him in this position and that reminds him that he needed to learn patience. His cook was both allowing him to work out his karma and teaching him how to be tolerant!

You see, all of us are put in certain situations based on our karma and we must accept that and make the best out of our situations. Warren Buffet calls this the Ovarian Lottery. Your fate in this world is decided by where you are born. If you happen to be born in a first-world country, your life will turn out one way versus if you are born in a poor country. This is karma.

So how do we get out of the karmic tendencies we have? The answer is really simple. By being mindful of every decision and every thought, you are breaking that cycle of tendency. So how do we become mindful? The first thing to do is to recognize what type of tendencies we have developed over the years. For example, some of us may tend to get into a negative thought process about someone or something, someone else may tend to make nonbeneficial decisions such as gambling, etc. Once we recognize the type of negative tendency that always ends up hurting us in the end, we can then begin to address this. One thing to be careful of here is not to take on all of our negative tendencies at once. That can get overwhelming. So let’s just focus on one tendency that we can begin to break.

Once we have identified this tendency, mindfulness will help us break the trend. We need to be mindful about when the thought or action related to that tendency begins to creep in. If we are mindfully watching when it does, we will begin to remind ourselves why we want to break that tendency. Initially, it may be difficult to break the habit and you may snap right back into it. That is perfectly OK. In my experience every three or five times you are successful at breaking that tendency, you will fall right back in once. So we start again. After a few cycles, the gap between relapse increases. Now you are not snapping back into your tendency for longer and before you know it, you have overcome this tendency.

So you see, we all have these karmic tendencies or habits. I call it luck of the draw. Our challenge is to not accept those as they are or to blame others for it but to learn to snap out of those karmic cycles. I encourage you to dig deep and identify one tendency you would like to break. It is not easy to identify but with enough introspection, you will be able to do it.

Hatred

If you look at all the problems we are having as well as all the problems in the world, there are typically three causes. Greed, Hatred, and Ignorance. Today we will discuss hatred and how it can destroy our lives as well as civilization.

Before we talk about hatred from a personal perspective, I want to talk about hatred in society. If you look at every war in the history of mankind, it has its root in hatred. Every terrorist attack is a result of hatred. That hatred that was towards other people or the people we did not understand has now become against each other. A lot of civil societies are on the verge of being torn apart. Politicians are pitting people against each other creating divisions. Look at Great Britain or Brazil or Argentina or India or right here at home, good old US of A. We are fighting amongst ourselves because the politicians are creating a divide that works for their short-term benefits. We have broken down society in so many little slices that no one thinks about the big picture anymore. It used to be that what’s good for the goose was good for the gander. Now every goose, every gander, every duckling needs their own island and no one wants to share.  

Media is largely to blame because without media being complicit, the politicians would not have a way to distribute this hatred. I especially, remember during Tump’s presidency here in the US—no matter your politics, there was this daily hatred spilled out by major cable networks. If he sneezed, he was spreading germs and if he did not, he was holding something up! It was insanity. But that is what gave fuel to the fire. The same story is playing out everywhere it seems.

Now that we understand societal hatred hopefully we can all think rationally without regard to what the media is spouting out. Hopefully, you recall from our Karma series that there is such as thing as collective karma. You might revisit our Karma videos as a refresher.

Now let’s look at hatred at an individual level. Where does the hatred come from? The root cause of hatred tends to be our belief that our I is inherently existent. We grasp on that I that self so more important than everything else around us. Hatred is also aversion meaning a strong dislike. We tend to dislike things that we consider different from us. We don’t think that is part of us or that we are all interconnected. So we develop aversion towards those beings. Once we separate ourselves from others, judgment comes. This is what breeds hatred. Without judgment, there is no hatred.

So how do we get rid of hatred? Just wishing or determination would not help. The antidote to hatred is loving-kindness. We covered this at length as well in one of our previous episodes. I recommend you might want to check that out. But the gist of this is that we need to develop a loving relationship with all living beings. A wish that says “I want everything for you and nothing from you.” It is that simple. If we begin to develop that wish slowly but surely hatred will disappear from our lives. Now that may not be completely possible. If that is the case, try practicing loving-kindness towards the feeling of hatred you are experiencing. In other words, accept the feeling, be comfortable with it and the hatred will disappear.

There is one other type of hatred that we all have experienced and that is self-hatred. This is one of the worst kinds of hatred if you will. It will destroy you internally. It smashes our self-confidence, brings self-doubt, frustration and we become hopeless. All we are doing is telling ourselves that we are not worthy and that we are not qualified and so on. We are exaggerating our bad qualities. But in reality, it is just a mental image or perception we have of our specific quality. There is nothing behind that mental image to support it. It is something our mind made it up. It is just a hallucination or mental projection.

So how do we solve self-hatred? The first thing we need to do is acknowledge it and realize how harmful that is to us. The next thing to realize is the fact that we are not our thoughts. Our thoughts are just passing clouds in a big blue sky. If we start examining our mind during meditation, the peacefulness that brings will tremendously help in eliminating a lot of negative thoughts. This is not a one-day exercise. It happens over time and requires consistent meditation practice to get in touch with our inner peace. Once we turn our attention inwards, we will see how wonderful it can be. This also allows us to identify with our shortcomings without identifying with ourselves. In other words, realizing that we are not our faults and our faults or shortcomings are passing and we can change those habits that we may have developed.

Hopefully, this is helpful and you can put this into practice in your daily lives.

Renunciation

When someone says renunciation, people have all kinds of ideas. They think it is about leaving your family or getting away from it all and going to some cave to meditate. That cannot be further from the truth. So let’s demystify renunciation today.

Renunciation means a spontaneous wish to attain liberation (Mukti, Mox) from Samsara. This requires a careful look at the definition of Samsara. For a lot of people who are of Indian origin, Samsara typically means day-to-day life. That is not Samsara at all. Samsara is this endless cycle of birth and death. If you think about it, we have been going through this cyclical process of birth, death, birth for eons. Idea is to get out of that wheel.

Why would we want to get out of this circle you may ask? If you look at it, Samsara is full of suffering. We go through the suffering of birth, aging, sickness, delusions, death, and then rinse and repeat! Let’s look at each of these individually.

Any woman who has given birth will tell you it is no joke. If the full-grown adult is having so much pain, can you imagine what a baby goes through during the birthing process? Even before the birth, in the mother’s womb, the baby goes through suffering. When a mom drinks something cold, the baby feels like she is taking a cold shower, and exactly the opposite when mom drinks something hot.

Once we are born, for initial weeks and months, we don’t know how to convey our wants and needs. The only thing we know is to cry and to move our limbs around to get attention. That has to be a frustrating experience. Not being able to communicate you are hungry or you are in pain.

As we grow, the suffering of sickness is one of those things that can sneak up on you at any time.  When sickness strikes even the most healthy amongst us can get knocked out. It can take away our daily joys and make us feel unpleasant. When we feel ill, it is like a soaring bird that gets shot and comes straight down to the earth. We have no strength. We get frustrated and sometimes are dependent on others for our day-to-day activities. Our medical team may or may not be able to help us. If our sickness is incurable and if we are not exposed to spirituality, we may feel anxious, fear and regret.

No one can escape from this next suffering called aging. All of us age and with age comes age-related issues. The simple task of getting up and down becomes a chore and is painful. When we are young, we can travel around the world, however in old age, just getting out of the house is very difficult sometimes. We lose our eyesight and ability to hear as we age. Our memory fades and we tend to repeat ourselves – I feel like I am already experiencing this one😊Things we used to enjoy when we were young, no longer appeals to us and we are not able to enjoy those same things anymore.

At the time of our death, we don’t want to let go of the possessions we have accumulated throughout this lifetime We feel sorry about leaving our loved ones behind. We have to leave everything and everyone we are attached to and that creates sadness for many people.

There are other sufferings beyond the four basic sufferings of birth, sickness, aging, and death that we discussed here. We all suffer from our delusions. These delusions bring us anger, attachment, hatred, confusion, jealousy, and so on. When we get angry for example, sometimes, we can feel physical pain. It also creates tremendous mental suffering. It affects our health. These sufferings prevent us from enjoying life. We suffer from environmental factors such as recent weather extremities in Texas. That causes people to lose their shelter, temporary displacements, and so on. We suffer from not having our desires fulfilled. Even when our desires are fulfilled, they may not get fulfilled in the way we want them to be fulfilled. With wealth comes its issues and that could be temporary as well.

So as you can see the cycle of birth and death tends to bring suffering. The only way out of this is to strive for liberation. We should make a spontaneous wish to get out of this endless cycle and make a determination to attain supreme inner peace of liberation.

Does Inherent Existence mean everything is a mind game?

We are not saying nothing exists. What you see does exist but not an inherent existence. The existence of phenomena is a dependent existence as opposed to inherent existence. For example, if you look at a car that is coming at you, you are able to see it and hear the noise. So it is in your experience. But if someone is deaf and blind who is seating next to you, does that have that car in their experience as they cannot see or hear the noise the car is making. So the existence of the car is a dependent existence since one of you can experience it and another cannot. The idea about all this is to reduce our attachment to things. Once we know things do not exist inherently, hopefully, we will reduce our attachment to things. For example, if you lose some money, if we don’t have attachment towards our money, hopefully, it will not bother us and we will be able to carry on without much suffering.

Inherent Existence Continued

We have been discussing inherent existence for the past two weeks. Let’s continue on that topic one more session to make sure we have a good understanding of this topic before we move on to the next subject. Inherent existence means existence as the object’s basis of imputation. Inherent existence refers to the false idea that any entity can exist independently. Every characteristic defining an entity arises dependently from things that are not the thing being identified. You cannot have an object that is independent of its parts, causes, and conditions or mind that perceives it.

Things do exist just not in the way they appear to be existing. Things lack inherent existence means that things are existing by themselves. They are existing dependent on other factors. Let’s look at an example of a tree. All of us love to go watch fall foliage. A tree changes during the different seasons. Why does it change? It changes due to being set up dependent on other factors such as weather. That means that objects are constantly changing. If a tree were inherently existent it would never change. It would stay the same color with fruits and flowers all the time. It would stay the same not affected by weather all any other phenomena. But we know that is not the case.

Let’s look at a couple of more examples. A friend of mine used to have anxiety issues. He would be in the car in a rush hour and would get upset about the traffic. We had an interesting discussion maybe 10 years ago. I asked him if he would consider just ignoring the traffic around him and focus on music or something during his drive. He said, well, that’s not me. That is not personality. I said maybe you should consider changing. He took a big offense he said that is my identity how can I change who I am. I let the subject go. Fast forward 10 years and he has calmed down considerably. Things don’t bother him as much in traffic. He adopted. What he thought was his identity changed. 10 years ago, he thought that was inherent existence. Today it is clear that it was not since he has changed.

Let’s look at another example. Have you ever been absorbed in a movie? I know I certainly have. If it is a well made gripping movies and you are fully captivated by the plot; you can feel everything being real. You even get a physical reaction if there is an unexpected gunshot or something as if it just happened in front of our eyes. Even though we know we are watching a movie, at that moment we think it is inherently existent. We feel everything that is happening is real. We know it is just fiction.

We will do a longer Q&A session today than usual so we can clear up any questions on the subject. This is a profound subject, and I would like all of you to contemplate the subject and try to come up with your own examples to make sense for you in your experience. Once this clicks, the rest of the wisdom teachings become a lot easier to grasp.