karma blues

Earl J. Hickey is a petty criminal, living in the fictional rural county of Camden, whose winning $100,000 lottery ticket is lost when he is hit by a car. Lying in a hospital bed, under the influence of morphine, he develops a belief in the concept of karmic retribution when he hears about karma during an episode of Last Call with Carson Daly.

To turn his life around, he makes a list of every bad thing he’s ever done in an attempt to correct them, as he believes that this is the only way he can gain positive karma. After doing his first good deed, he finds the $100,000 lottery ticket he had previously lost. He sees this as a sign of karma rewarding him and, with his new-found wealth, he begins doing good deeds according to his list.
As he continues to perform good deeds, Earl’s motives at first appear to be selfish – only doing good to improve his karma and by extension his own life; however, Earl begins to develop a genuine sense of morality and ethics, refusing to participate in illegal or morally wrong activities – though sometimes finding himself in very awkward situations…
Get the DVDs to watch the shows if you haven’t seen this.
My take away from all of this is that there has to be a better way to bust karma. And, there is…get it all here!

It’s not really a question of “mind over matter” because the mind IS matter!

As recent neuroscience has demonstrated, every habit lays down its own neural pathway i.e., it carves its own rut track in the brain – and the inertia around these pathways is considerable. The disruption of ANY happy pathway brings with it considerable discomfort and resistance. So you’re quite right in lumping together habits and addictions; the difference between them is more one of degree than of kind. One can be addicted to coffee, alcohol, porridge for breakfast, endorphins, heroin, meditation, exercise, sex or God! The difference is only that the classic “chemical dependency addictions” add to our already full plate of cognitive and emotional distress and at the interruption of a habit, physiological distress as well.

Most of the moral and spiritual training of Western minds over the past two millennia has been couched around instilling “good habits” – or at least replacing unhealthy behavior patterns with healthy behavior patterns. But there has been a school of spiritual training in all the great traditions that claims that real spiritual maturity is the ability to be habit-free: to be able to bushwhack through consciousness without laying down ANY of those familiar but deadly ruttracks.

My own teacher Rafe belonged to this school of thought. On his prayer desk, he kept a quotation from the British spiritual teacher Maurice Nicoll: “Faith is a continual inner effort, a continual altering of the mind, of the habitual ways of thought, of the habitual ways of taking everything, of habitual reactions.” Rafe took that saying deeply to heart. From time to time, he would spontaneously uproot his established patterns and preferences in order to keep his spiritual life (as well as his mind) supple, and to experience that pure rush of freedom that comes from being able to sit in the chaos of a disrupted habit – like an anthill that’s just been kicked in – and transform the pain into the razor’s edge of pure consciousness.

To do this, however, is an advanced spiritual skill. It requires an ability to sit in the presence of powerful emotional currents – pain, grief, yearning, fear – and experience them as pure sensation rather than as part of the story we keep telling ourselves about who we are. This is an acquired skill, whose foundations are in meditation and conscious breathing.

Both habits and addictions, in my experience, are a kind of shorthand we resort to for getting through our lives because we lack the spiritual/energetic force to stay present to the field of our own “pure awareness.” Our habits are primarily the SYMPTOMS of our low level of Being, not the CAUSE of it. So my own preference is to work a little each day on increasing my tolerance for Being (or presence or pure awareness – they’re simply different ways of speaking about the same vitalized energy field of consciousness). Once that force of Being is strong enough within us, then dealing with habits/addictions is like taking off a raincoat once the sun is shining.

Cynthia Bourgeault

Cynthia Bourgeault is an Episcopal priest, writer and retreat leader. She is founding director of the Aspen Wisdom School in Colorado and principal visiting teacher for the Contemplative Society in Victoria, BC, Canada.

Tuesday, May 03, 2011

If you change your space, you will change your karma. The mindset will change.

~ Dr. Pillai

The greater part of most people’s thinking is involuntary, automatic, and repetitive. It is no more than a kind of mental static and fulfills no real purpose.

Strictly speaking, you don’t choose to think; Thinking happens to you. The statement “I think” implies volition. It implies that you have willfully chosen to think what you think (or that you think in the first place). For most people, this is not yet the case. “I think” is just as false a statement as “I digest” or “I circulate my blood.” Digestion happens, circulation happens, thinking happens.

The voice in the head has a life of its own. Most people are at the mercy of that voice; they are possessed by their thinking and its repetitive, unconscious content. This circular, repetitive, incessant thinking is conditioned by the past, and it keeps you trapped in the past. It is as though you continue to relive the past over and over again. Do you ever wonder why the same problems challenge you throughout your life? Your unconscious mind is re-creating them, but you don’t even know it.

The Eastern term for this repetitive cycle is karma. You continually bring to your life experiences that correspond to your thinking. What you reap, you will sow. What you think, you will attract. If the contents of your thoughts are locked in past events, you are destined to repeat them. This is karma. And it goes both ways.

We have heard of good karma and bad karma. Bad karma is the experiences we have that are attracted to us by our mind’s obsession with all the bad things that have happened to us. Bad karma not only produces experiences that are undesirable, it is also a life lived in the past, not the present.

Good karma, on the other hand, comes from living in the present moment. When we liberate our mind from thoughts of the past and negative rumination, we are free to engage our mind in original, creative thought. We are free to be spontaneous and fun-loving. We are free to live our life now with a sense of curiosity, discovery and adventure. Far from being trapped in a cycle of negativity, we live a life of freshness, proactivity and healthy self-expression.

If you have been living life in the past, caught in the cycle of bad karma, you can get free of it.

Just in the way that thinking happens to you, bad karma happens to you. It is an involuntary predicament. It is a condition that you do not consciously choose.

The solution is to begin choosing what you want for yourself. Instead of being a victim of your own thinking, be an active, engaged choice maker.

* Choose to be more present.
* Choose to be more aware of what thoughts are circulating in your mind.
* Choose to engage your mind in original, creative thinking.
* Choose to make your mind an interesting, adventurous place.
* Choose to make good karma by using your mind for positive and productive thinking.