si dawson

I was talk­ing to a friend the other day about karma, and I got to won­der­ing — what the hell IS it, exactly? I mean, every­one thinks they what it is, right?

You do some­thing bad — in this life or past — and it'll come back & bite you on the arse.

Ok, well that's simple.

But hang on, the wikipedia page on karma is almost 4000 words. What the hell?

Ok, so maybe there's more to it.

The basic gist of that enor­mous page is that the effects of all deeds actively cre­ate your past, present & future expe­ri­ences. Ie, you're entirely respon­si­ble for your own life.

There is a sub­tlety though — and that is, it's not any old deeds, but only deeds that have thought behind them. Only voli­tional, or con­sciously cho­sen deeds, cre­ate karma.

So, ok, if I choose to do some­thing, that will cre­ate karma, and I'll then have the fruits of that, good or bad, echo­ing through my life.

Over time — and par­tic­u­larly if you believe in rein­car­na­tion — that's got to add up to one HUGE amount of karma, all bang­ing around, recre­at­ing the same bad (or good) stuff, over and over.

(pic by con­sumer­friendly )

Wow. Nutty.

Now, there's a pro­foundly thought­ful guy called Ram Dass, who has spent most of a life­time think­ing about this stuff (after he fin­ished hang­ing out with Tim­o­thy Leary & doing a ton of acid). He's inter­viewed in a thor­oughly excel­lent doc­u­men­tary called Ecsta­tic States, and he has this to say on the subject:

Inter­viewer: Could you tell us exactly what karma is?

No. *laughs* That take care of that question?

You could say it's.. uhh.. It's a very com­plex con­cept of cause-and-effect. What it says is, if you drop a peb­ble into a clear pond. There'll be all these lit­tle waves going out and out and out. And even though you could almost see them stop, with your naked eye, if you looked at it with tech­ni­cal equip­ment, you'd see that the thing keeps going and going and going.

So what it's say­ing is that every action starts a sequence of events. And then who we are at any moment is deter­mined by all the events we've started in the past that are rever­ber­at­ing into us now, over time. Over lots of time.

It's like, you know, for exam­ple, that your child­hood expe­ri­ences affect your adult per­son­al­ity. That's sort of an exam­ple of karma.

It's your karma, mean­ing it's the pre­vi­ous causal forces that are cre­at­ing this par­tic­u­lar effect. So if you look at your life, and if you have a larger sense of who you are than your phys­i­cal body. I'm talk­ing about rein­car­na­tion, or the whole idea that an individual's soul goes through birth after birth after birth. Each birth is deter­mined by the karmic residue of all the pre­vi­ous births. Then in a birth, you are liv­ing out the karma cre­ated by the pre­vi­ous births. Now, as you awaken more, most peo­ple are not only liv­ing out the old karma, but they keep cre­at­ing new karma all the time, which keeps pro­pelling them into the future, more and more.

To be free means to be free of this kind of karmic law that you're just being a mechan­i­cal run-off of. So, the begin­ning of awak­en­ing means that you no longer cre­ate new karma, because you see how karma's cre­ated (which is another lit­tle dis­cus­sion). And then you're just run­ning off old karma. So a lot of the beings you see are peo­ple that have awak­ened suf­fi­ciently so that they don't cre­ate any new karma, and then they're in a body, or they con­tinue their work, like the iner­tia from the past, until it runs out.

Inter­viewer: How do you not cre­ate new karma?

By the aware­ness no longer being iden­ti­fied with the moti­va­tion. It is the desire that cre­ates karma. It doesn't mean you don't have the desires, it means your aware­ness is not iden­ti­fied with the desires. You still do what you do, but you're not caught in being attached to the doing of it. Which is kind of sneaky, because when you're not attached, it changes what happens.

Clear as mud? Thought so!

(pic by vidu­lar )

What to do, what to do?
There are a cou­ple of issues here:

1. How do we stop old karma from con­tin­u­ing to screw up our lives?
2. How do we, prac­ti­cally, stop cre­at­ing new karma?

Here's where every­thing gets a lit­tle speculative.

From what I've seen in my own life, I'm pretty sure that by heal­ing (eg, using EFT) any­thing bad that hap­pens to us (includ­ing neg­a­tive thoughts, emo­tions, feel­ings), we short cir­cuit our karmic loop­ing of old prob­lems. This seems a proac­tive way of doing what Ram Dass describes as "run­ning off old karma".

EFT isn't the only way of doing this, of course. I know peo­ple that use falling still, yoga, chant­ing, eat­ing raw food, med­i­ta­tion, and so on, to achieve the same end (or, hell, all of the above!). As Bud­dha says, "There are many fin­gers point­ing at the moon, but only one moon."

So, if this helps to speed up get­ting rid of old karma, how do we also stop cre­at­ing new karma? (oth­er­wise we're going to be chas­ing our own tail a bit here)

"Not being iden­ti­fied with the desires" or "not being attached to the doing" is fair enough, but how do you actu­ally do that, with­out spend­ing 30 years sit­ting on a moun­tain top somewhere?

Well, let's look at it a sub­tly dif­fer­ent way. Any­time we react angrily, that's got to increase our karma, right? Sim­i­larly then, if we act from any other emo­tions. The only excep­tion would be com­ing from a place of pure peace. If we have a still mind, and an open heart, that would have to be a place from which no new karma would be gen­er­ated. It meets both Ram Dass' & wikipedia's cri­te­ria. Action with­out attachment.

How to reach that place of still mind & open heart? Is it per­haps unsur­pris­ing that the heal­ing tools listed above seem to coin­ci­den­tally result in exactly these outcomes?

Does that mean these tools will take you to a place of nir­vana? Reduce all your karma to zero & have you strum­ming a harp on a cloud? I couldn't pos­si­bly say. It's a com­pli­cated thing that peo­ple have been think­ing & argu­ing about for thou­sands of years. All I can say is from where I stand now, these seem like good steps to be tak­ing in more or less the right direction.

Less attach­ment & suf­fer­ing in this life, fewer karmic echoes in the next.