What’s karma got to do with it?

This morning I felt mildly irritated at an “official” person because they have a different idea about something than I do, and naturally that means their idea is daft, but they are the ones in charge. Sound familiar? (I know it’s not just me).

Angry Birds

People play Angry Birds, so they tell me, because of the fun they have in beating each level. When two fantastically bright Millenials admitted to playing Angry Birds for two whole hours in one sitting — catapulting the poor birds at the long-suffering pigs or monkeys with a swipe of their finger — this was the only reason they could give me, even though I tried for at least half an hour to squeeze more psychology out of them. I have unhelpful habits of my own, but I confess I don’t really get the attraction (should I say mass addiction) of video games like Angry Birds. It was so clearly pre-programmed by nerds in an office who are having a laugh at your behalf and rubbing their hands in glee at the money 200 million people have purportedly parted with to “beat” a machine.

But this morning I actually got a glimpse of what my friends were saying. I’m not a fan of negative minds or so-called delusions, but I do find small ones quite helpful, as you can immediately look at your mind and see what you’re doing, where you’re focusing, and how it feels. And I have grown to enjoy the challenge of overcoming my negative minds with their opponents, beating them at each level, starting from the big and working your way up/down to the most subtle.

A couple of people recently asked me to do an article on karma. It is a vast subject and covered beautifully in my teacher’s books, but I’ll say how I smashed this morning’s particular monkey/pig by remembering the teachings on karma.

When irritation arose, I blamed it on its source… that b****y annoying person. I externalized it and as a result I felt powerless. If we hold the source of our aversion to be something out there, independent of the mind, there is precious little we can do other than get more defensive and angry as we try to push that seemingly harmful object away from us. (Alternatively, I could work for years to get into a position of power and then fire them, but that doesn’t seem quite practical either.)

It is always more enjoyable and peaceful to be centered in the heart-mind, feeling connected to everyone and everything, than to be adrift and cut off, relating to an apparently inherently existent world outside our mind. But delusions force us to live dualistically, sensing an unsettling gulf between us and the world about us – e.g. I am here and you, annoying person, are over there. This gulf is a figment of our ignorance and yawns wider when our delusions are strong.

Where does the world come from?

Luckily, the actual source of the irritation is nothing outside our mind. We can see from Buddha’s teachings that the world we experience depends on the world we are paying attention to or focusing on. There is no world other than the world we experience. No need to take Buddha’s word for it — try to inhabit, or even point to, a world outside of your experience of it!

The world we create for ourselves also depends entirely on our mind. If the only world we inhabit is the world we experience, and experience is mind, the causes of our world must also lie within our mind.

Specifically the world we live in depends on our intentions, or mental actions. “Karma” is the Sanskrit word for “action”, referring to mental actions. Karma generally speaking is the mental, internal law of cause and effect, which is as infallible as the physical, external law of cause and effect, such as oak trees arising from acorns and chickens arising from eggs — or is it the other way round?! Either way, everything must arise from something in the same continuum as itself, so an apple tree cannot arise from an unrelated peach seed, for example, as Master Oogway pointed out to Master Shifu, nor mental experience arise from a physical cause.

Every time we intentionally do something, we create the cause for something to ripen for us in the future, sowing a karmic “seed” in the soil of our mind. Mental intentions are those seeds, experience is their effect. Positive actions sow the seeds for positive experiences; negative actions sow the seeds for suffering experiences. Seeds take time to ripen, but what we put into the world is what, sooner or later, we get out of it.

Mladic would never have escaped

We cannot escape our negative karma unless we purify it. I read a story in the press today about the fugitive Gen. Ratko Mladic who has now finally been delivered to the Hague. Even without being tried for the Srebrenica massacre and other crimes against humanity, he will reap their ghastly results sooner or later in this or future lives. It seems to me that his bad karma already began to ripen when his beloved daughter Ana allegedly shot herself with his favorite gun because she was so distressed by his atrocities. He was granted permission to visit her grave before he was exiled. He has had strokes, heart attacks and cancer, but that loss must hurt him more than anything else.

How to gain more conviction in karma

There is no world independent of our mind. The world we experience depends on our current states of mind — if our mind is peaceful, the world seems like a pleasant place; if dark, we live in a dark world. As mentioned, the world we experience also depends on our previous thoughts and actions.

My teacher Geshe Kelsang advises that to gain more conviction in how we create our world with our intentions or karma, it is most helpful to consider how things do not exist from their own side but are projections of our mind. They are rather like a movie. We know a movie on a cinema screen is not out there coming at me, as it appears to be, but is projected by a projector. Similarly, the world appears to be out there coming at me, but it is in fact projected by my mind.

If my world is merely a projection of my mind, with no existence “out there” from its own side, then why does it appear in one way and not another? How do we become involved in one movie and not another?

How the world appears depends on which of my karmic potentials are ripening; these are rather like the movie reel being run through the projector. For this reason, everything is said to be mere karmic appearance of mind.

When we dream, where do all those appearances come from? They come from karmic seeds planted in our mind; where else could they come from? We experience a dream world that is projected by our own karma. Our waking world is also projected by our karma.

Looking in the mirror

So, going back to this morning… I thought about these things and how the only reason I was irritated was because I had irritated someone else in the past. If you look in a mirror and don’t like what you see, what do you do? Do you get out a paper towel and some Windex and try and rub that dirt away? Or do you realize it is just a reflection and use the mirror to clean your face instead? In the same way, if I don’t like what is appearing to my mind do I tire myself out by fixing the person out there with frustrating results? Or do I purify the causes for unpleasant appearances and make sure not to create more karmic causes for the things I don’t like?

If you don’t like a movie, change the movie reel.

Believing in karma is said to be like looking in a mirror that shows us what to abandon and what to practice. If you’re a Buddhist, you may think you believe in karma, yet the proof is in the pudding – if we do believe it we will want to engage in positive actions and abandon negative ones. We also won’t keep blaming the wrong things for our suffering or chasing the wrong things for our happiness — fiddling with the projected rather than the projector. As Geshe Kelsang says in Modern Buddhism (now available as a free eBook!).

“We should judge whether or not we believe that the main cause of suffering is our non-virtuous actions and the main cause of happiness is our virtuous actions. If we do not believe this, we will never apply effort to accumulating virtuous actions, or merit, and we will never purify our non-virtuous actions, and because of this we will experience suffering and difficulties continually, in life after life without end.”

The driver’s seat

Observing the natural law of karma puts us in the driver’s seat of our own destiny. If we don’t know about karma, we can’t do much about our future. Even if we try day in and day out to shape our world, we will rarely receive the results we wish for, because we are putting all our energy into creating external causes whilst ignoring the internal and actual causes of our experiences.

Buddha said that until we have gained a realization of ultimate truth, emptiness, observing karma is the most important thing for us to do in the pursuit of happiness and freedom. Why? Because karma entirely shapes what happens to us and how we experience life. If we want to be a conscious architect of our reality, choosing our own experiences, we need to fall in with this natural law. If we do not, we remain stuck and powerless; and, however hard we try to change our future, it never goes the way we want it to. With the wisdom understanding karma, we seize control and change our karma as we like. Without it, we are to all intents and purposes pre-determined by our karma. Buddhists don’t believe in fate, but if we blindly ignore the law of internal cause and effect, it looks like we are dooming ourselves to a future beyond our control!

I look forward to your comments, and please share this article if it’s helpful.