Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 47-minute teaching, Ven Robina Courtin gives a frank, contemporary look at how karma actually operates in human life. She starts by reframing experience as ‘made by mind’ — clarifying how our karmic tendencies shape what we perceive and encounter. She walks through the four ways karma ripens: throwing karma (determining rebirth), actions similar to the cause (our habits), experiences similar to the cause (what happens to us), and environmental karma. Using vivid examples — Jeffrey Dahmer’s lifelong pull toward harm, a compulsive fisherman, gang violence, her own youthful shoplifting — she exposes how deep karmic habit works. The teaching challenges the Western notion of ‘free will,’ showing that the stronger your karmic groove, the less actual choice you have. Pitched at practitioners already familiar with Buddhist foundational concepts.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 11 DAR 2003 06 21.mp3
UUID: 9051fe86-1cf4-471c-9db3-55204a1bdee4
Teacher: Ven Robina Courtin
Collection: y Death and Rebirth (Ven Robina Courtin)
Date: 2003-06-21
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 46.6 minutes
Words: ~9,586
Well it’s just not meant to be taped that’s all. Just relax and let it go. What to do? So it’s interesting, these things, I mean we can talk a lot about this just to even how does it happen all these experiences and this is where we really understand how to look at karma which I’ll talk about later. But it’s it’s curiously interesting that Buddha is saying, the Buddha’s view is saying that whatever we experience, including our human experiences, are all, as they say, made up by our mind, including our experiences, which doesn’t mean there’s no reality.
This is where it gets touchy. It gets tricky. Earrings, as long as it ever says, is our karmic appearance. The fact that we have a human experience, this is karma which is coming from. The fact that we have a human experience is due because things, in other words, for our life in general right now, where we’re reasonably sane and reasonably healthy and have sanity and everything works and we make things make sense and we drive a mile, it feels like a mile.
You understand there’s no kind of bizarre experience we can have sometimes. That is the result of unbelievable morality karma because it’s morality and virtue that culminates in things working, in harmony and things being comfortable, and the environment not destroying us, and people not, you you understand my point? Not being invaded by spirits, that things seem reasonable and coherent. At the level of our ordinary life, that’s the fruit of morality. So then you can have a nightmare.
I mean, these guys, it was more than just a bad dream. They were actually, they did leave their bodies and had this actual experience. Now we all know they’re not gonna find the person, that you won’t find those people who drove you along the corridor probably. They were his own karmic appearance. But you could also say they were spirits, manipulative, harmful spirits embodied as humans who had this and he had this vision of all this thing happening.
So this is why we say in Western psychiatry that it didn’t really happen, it was just your mind, you know. But the Buddha would say that, excuse me, so is this, which sounds peculiar, so we have to do masses of thinking and meditating to get this, you know. But everything is our karmic appearance, and it’s just extremely interesting, And those experiences are extremely interesting, you know, when you that everything’s real insofar as you have it. You have a nightmare and a dream, you can’t say it isn’t real insofar as you did have those experiences. You physically didn’t you know, the person didn’t come and knife you because you wake up and here you are still alive, but that mental experience is really what the suffering was, you know.
And so the same with those beings who had the hell experience, these guys who had that hell experience. So it’s extremely interesting actually. Anyway, basically the point here is the Buddha is saying there are all these different realms of existence and all these sentient beings just experiencing the fruit of karma. Fruit of their own minds. That’s all.
You know? Those experiences. We’re experiencing the fruit of virtue predominantly, we can say. So, okay, so the point here, the contemplation at this point after this long discussion is to contemplate the suffering of these realms. So we we maybe find it a leap of the imagination to think about hells and spirits if we haven’t had direct experience.
But, you know, we can all see animals. So this is my business about the lion. The way to get our head around this is just to look freshly at animals, look freshly. I mean, using the Buddhist perspective here, you know. I mean, we say in the west that these beings are born, they’re created by God, or they just exist, and they’re just the way they are.
We don’t think of it as suffering. We don’t think of it as suffering, you know. We don’t when we see wild animals doing their thing and ripping each other’s guts out and having sex in weird ways and torturing each other and doing them as dreadful things to each other, we think, oh, isn’t it fascinating? This is nature. I mean, excuse me, you see your cat and your dog do that, you don’t call it nature, you get completely upset.
Why? Because you’re attached to them. If you’re attached to that that scorpion, if you’re attached to that little creature, you know, that the scorpion’s harming, you wouldn’t say, oh, how fascinating this is nature. You’d be hysterical, you know, because it’s your creature. So we’re really so emotional.
I mean, or we think, well, they’re separate from us. It’s, you know, oh, you know. But actually, if you look at humans, we can all see it’s not for another it’s not a joke to say that Buddhist, you know, that psychology refers to all living beings. If you use it’s certainly Buddhist psychology of attachment and the delusions and the positive qualities and you refer those to animals and mosquitoes and scorpions, it’s a very useful working model. It would describe very comfortably what you’re seeing.
You’re seeing aggression, you’re seeing jealousy, you’re seeing violence, you’re seeing attachment. There’s nothing mystical, you know. You can just look at behavior, you can tell. So then you can deduce quite quickly it’s suffering, you know. I mean, just put yourself in that position, being eaten alive leg by leg by somebody.
Excuse me, come on, say that’s not suffering? We have all these concepts in the west where their brains are small so they don’t feel it. But you just get a micro you know, you get even just a magnifying glass on a suffering ant. I’m sorry, it’s got the physical behavior of any suffering being. It’s writhing in agony.
I mean, you don’t have to be clairvoyant to see that. You look at the eyes of a dog if it’s in pain. You don’t have to be clairvoyant to see it suffering. I’m sorry. Brain or not brain?
Come on, please. This is the Buddhist view, they’re sentient beings and they’re suffering. And you look at no being likes to suffer. You just see how it behaves, you know. So to try and look at animals in a different way and then of course to have this this new view that there’s a link between me and an animal in the sense that they’ve all got they’ve got they’ve got a mind, I’ve got a mind and they are at this moment experiencing the fruit of their karma as as I am.
And so that, you know, and it’s the fruit negative karma. If you suffer, it’s called the fruit of negative karma. So do I want that? You know, just look at how an animal behaves, look at their life, and then think, well, would I like to be like this? Would I like to have that suffering?
Would I like to be ripped, have my guts ripped out? Would I like to be a rat where any being who sees it just is hysterical and wants a stamp on it and kill it immediately? Can you imagine being so loathed by everybody? I mean, we think now people don’t like us. I mean, look at a rat.
What kind of karma did it pull thing that create, you know, that everybody who sees it is hysterical, loathes it, thinks it’s repulsive, you know. I mean, can you imagine the paranoia in its poor little mind and the negative karma it must have created? This is the idea, you know. So thinking in a different way about the suffering of these beings and thinking, well, you know, thank you very much, but I don’t want that kind of suffering. Because Buddha says we’re all sentient beings, we’ve all got Buddha nature, and we’re all experiencing at different stages, you know, of our own karma, different experiences.
So linking it to oneself, you which is a new thing for us. We don’t think like this. So this would be a contemplation here, to contemplate the suffering. And what we’re doing here again is increasing our wish, as we’ve been saying along these steps, not to waste this precious life. So the next step that would come inevitably next would be the contemplation of, well, whom can I turn to?
So in this context, we’re talking about the Buddha and Buddha’s methods. So we would turn for refuge, for reliance upon the Buddha, his methods, his community. You know, like that. Two, three. It’s time for a tea break, I think.
And we won’t mention that too much here. So then we so having then turned to the Buddha whose methods we’re wishing to use, we then start to look at the methods themselves. We start now to also to look at the Buddha’s view of karma, which is, you know, where we learn to abide by the laws of karma and that’s this point, which is the culmination of this first scope as we discussed this morning. This is where we begin to put our money where our mouth is. This is where we begin to practice, abiding by the law of karma.
Buddha says this is a natural law, no one invented it, it’s simply his observation. Through his observation, he has seen it to be so that this is the law that determines whatever sentient beings exist. They’re not created, their consciousness is beginningless, every living being at any given moment is experiencing the fruit of their past actions, positive or negative, you check it out. Do you want suffering? No, thank you.
Well, I better stop sowing those seeds. Do I want happiness? Yes, please. Well, I better start sowing those seeds. So it’s an extremely practical approach.
And these various contemplations, you know, certainly from all the way, I just like ways of priming the mind to get to this point where no choice but to abide by the laws of karma. And we’re not even discussing compassion yet, we’re looking at oneself, you know. We’re looking at oneself. We’re learning to see what is suffering and how to avoid it. At this very gross level, how to avoid gross suffering.
So that the minimal level of practice is, as we said before, to merely refrain from negative karma, which means simply to merely refrain from harming others with our body and speech. This is the basic and yet profound level of practice at this very first scope, this first stage of practice. To abide, to to to not harm, not bad mouth, not lie, not steal, not kill. It’s like they usually define it in terms of that there’s a ten things not to do, you know. Just very simple guidelines of how to behave.
To protect oneself in order at the time of death to prevent our consciousness from being propelled into a suffering rebirth. This is the logic behind it, you know. Extremely practical. In other words, if you see that certain foods will cause you suffering, will cause you to have, you know, indigestion or even worse suffering, obviously, you are happy to learn about that and you will happily avoid those foods. So like right now, they’ve told me that I shouldn’t have gluten food, so I avoid eating gluten, you know, because it stops me from getting all my whatever it was in my stomach and I can see the immediate result.
So even though I prefer bread, nice, delicious, fluffy bread with lovely things on it, and I adore, you know. But, no, even though I prefer the bread, I have to discipline because I don’t want the future suffering results, which is too much acidity, you know, and blah blah blah. So we know we know this logic very comfortably. So one has to then think about it and then look into these things, you know. So the law of karma, let’s look a bit more at karma.
We talked about it last night, but we can talk about it now again. Okay. So karma. It’s me it’s Sanskrit. It means action.
As I said before, it means action, but it has this dynamic implication of reaction. Action reaction. Action reaction. When I say action, I mean, we don’t think of any reaction. Just think, oh, you know, action, big deal.
But the point here is it has this dynamic meaning that everything we do, say and think is necessarily an action that will bring a reaction. Everything. There’s no, oh, every now and again things are calmer, but things just otherwise just happen, not like that. Everything I say, do and think is a seed if you like. We all know the very nature of what a seed is, is something that brings a fruit.
So we’ve got to learn to know what seeds we better plant, haven’t we? So Buddha’s saying certain seeds we plant, which are called the negative seeds, this is when we’re gonna get into establishing what’s negative, what’s positive, to answer your point. We have to establish what the negative seeds are because we know we’re, at the moment, we’re taking it as a given that negative seeds produce suffering, and we don’t want suffering, please. And that positive seeds will produce what we do want, is called happiness, and yes, please, we want happiness. So this first level of practice is primarily for your own benefit.
We’re not even looking at compassion. We’ve got to learn to know what to do to benefit oneself first. But we’ve to have compassion for oneself, you know. Excuse me. So there are different ways of seeing about karma.
There’s a simple law, simple basic rules, you know, if you like. The Buddha the general point I’ve just made now. Also, you can say, you know, a simple principle of karma is if you sow a seed, well, it will bring a fruit. You give it all the right conditions, the fruit will come. And equally, if the fruit is there, as much as you might not like it, you have to deduce it came from a seed and it came from a seed you planted.
This is the interesting simple principle of karma. So as I said last night, let’s go to more detail here. karma ripens The seeds we plant ripen in four different ways and there’s no fifth way. This is really a way of describing the entire universe, the entirety of one’s life, all the conditions in one’s life, these four ways of karma ripening. The first one, as I mentioned already, is what they call a throwing karma, which is the one that ripens at the time of your death, which is the predominant one that you’ve practiced in that life.
So if you spent your life working on your mind, practicing discipline, going against the delusions, not harming others, not lying, not killing, not bad mouthing, you know, practicing positive qualities, you’ve you’ve developed a very strong propensity for so called morality because this is all that morality means in Buddhism. Morality is refraining from harming others and then on the bodhisattva path actively benefiting others. So if you’re practicing the morality, you know, the propensity, the main propensity of your life is is, you know, is this morality, then naturally at the time of death, a karmic seed of morality will ripen. Just it’s just the nature of, you know, whatever you’ve practiced most will ripen first. It’s reasonable.
So then, this, as I said, will throw your When your very subtle consciousness leaves the body, this very subtle consciousness, as I said, they call it indestructible consciousness, but another way of talking about it is that it is like the repository of all the karmic imprints. It’s like all the computer programming. Everything’s All the programming’s there. And so depending on which button you press, you know, whichever program will come. So let’s say it’s the human program, it’ll be morality.
Morality will ripen and then when eventually that very subtle consciousness leaves the body, it will go to that intermediate state that I discussed before and then eventually when the karma ripens between the new parents, you’ll go zapping in and off you go, a new life, you know. Or if the propensity of negative karma depending on the variation of it is highly complex, I’m talking the simple principles here. If an immorality karma, a negative karma ripens, a throwing karma, that will propel your consciousness inexorably into the lioness’s womb, for example, or whatever, depending on the karma, which was more know, like, if you got animal karma, you might be born you know, but not not much not much aggression. You could be born as a deer, you know, a vegetarian. Don’t harm anybody.
Don’t hurt anybody. Do they? The deers? The deer? I’ve heard they’re vegetarians.
It means they don’t kill. I mean, it’s extraordinary, isn’t it? So that’s, you know, not as bad a life. Although there’s a lot of fear there naturally because of ignorance. There’s enormous ignorance.
They’re born as this deer. They’re kind of limited. As a lion, much more aggressive, much more violent, much more harmful, much more attachment too. So depending on the karma, that ripens, you know. So the throwing karma is the first one, and then let’s say, okay, for us we can deduce that it was morality karma that ripened at the time of our past death, not more than forty-nine human days before this present conception.
So then the first one is we’ve got the throwing karma of being a human. But not only just that, we know then you got the other karmas that will make, determine the difference between the Hitlers and the Mother Teresa’s, that determine the difference between a person living in a starving desert where they can’t even get a grain of rice and somebody else who’s got access to lots of food. This is where you get into the other karmas, you know. So the second one is then the name that’s given to all tendencies within us and this is called actions similar to the cause. So if you look into your mind, you have the tendency to be generous, then you can deduce that it’s the result, it’s the action similar to the cause of past generosity.
You’ve practiced generosity. It’s a habit you brought with you. So basically, all our tendencies are a bunch of habits, Buddha says. And this is where we really understanding karma. You know, that we tend to have this view, which I’ve got a feeling is in both of your women’s questions.
There’s this assumption that somehow we have this free will and people are kind of weak and lazy and they can use excuses just to get away with things and there’s no power there and you’re just copying out. I mean, there’s assumption here of kind of like we have this free will, you know, we can all make choices. Well, actually it’s a load of rubbish. It’s naive. I’m saying Buddha would say that, but of course he’s more polite than me, but I’m saying it in my way.
So it’s more complex than that. Complex than that. In the the Buddhist view is you can say, you know, that we’re propelled by the force of our past karma to do what we do, to make the choices we make. We think we make, we have free will. We think, oh, I’m gonna make a rational choice to be a nice person, so why can’t anybody else?
So they’re gonna use excuses, they’re just lazy, they’re just weak, you know, just putting, you know, having an excuse. I mean, that’s arrogance beyond belief. I’m not talking about you two now, forgive me, but, you know, it’s like there’s a general view like this. We’ve all got free will, look at these lazy, smelly, homeless people, they can get a job anytime. If I can get a job, they can get a job, we say, you know, it’s how we think.
I mean, it’s so much more subtle than that, know. Every person is the fruit of all their past tendencies. So if a person, due to strong habit of killing in the past, that person will be born with that tendency firmly in place, they will start meeting conditions immediately that they can start walking and moving to kill. They will meet lots of sentient beings who have the karma to be killed by them. And so from that point of view, depending on the way they do the killing, so if it’s called fishing, one will criticize them.
So why on earth should a fisherman think they’re creating any negative karma? No one in this society criticizes. People actually say it is a really good thing to do. It’s sport, it’s really, you know, it’s nature. If no one criticizes you and you’re following your instinct, excuse me, you don’t have a choice but not to kill.
And that’s not saying you don’t have free will. It’s not saying you don’t have a choice in an ultimate sense, but it’s meaningless when you look at experientially because the tendencies in a certain person, if they’re extremely extremely strong, then virtually you can say when the more strong your tendency, because you’ve practiced it before, then the more blind you are to even seeing the option, you know? This really takes thinking about. But it’s not an excuse, it simply explains to you why. So it’s always a good meaning to take extreme examples.
So I always think of this example of Jeffrey Dahmer, this American guy who was a serial killer years ago, right? Actually, got murdered in prison. A friend of mine, his friend murdered him. I have these interesting connections, you see. We even sent him a book, but he didn’t want it.
My friend told me to send him a book, the murderer of Jeffrey Dahmer. Have you heard of Jeffrey Dahmer? This guy years ago, American, who did the most appalling things. Mean the most bizarre things like would, you know, skin being people alive and eat them and just have sex with dead bodies. I mean the most, I don’t remember all the details but things that we’d all call insane, he’s a devil, he’s from hell, murder him, he’s in and have and think the whole person is this evil person, you know?
This is how we tend to think in the world. The Buddhist explanation is very interesting. So I’m telling you my observation because I saw him on the television. I saw a video a film about him. Okay?
And it was a film about these serial killers, and he was one, and there’s another guy, still also famous in America called I can’t think of his name. But it’s very interesting using my understanding of Buddhist psychology, doing my own assessment, I’ll tell you my experience. I’m not saying I’m absolutely right, but I’m telling you my observation using Buddha’s view about karma and the mind. One of them, this Jeffrey Dahmer was actually, it seemed to me, just looking at him, a really nice human being. Had many, so this action similar to the cause by the way is the name given to all your tendencies.
So we all know, if we look at ourselves, we’ve got many tendencies, haven’t we? And we all know that we’ve got some anger and some jealousy, lot of kindness and very generous and a bit loving and quite intelligent. We’re a whole package of tendencies, you know? And now we know when someone just, you know, who doesn’t like us, for example, just sees us, we’re always angry. We know that all they’re doing whenever they see us is interpreting me as an angry person.
We kind of feel hurt because we know it’s not the whole story. We know that, you know. So it’s the same with everybody. So, but this Jeffrey Dahmer, it seemed to me, he was very honest. They interviewed him, know, because I mean they wanted kind of records of how he was and they kept this, you know, these long interviews with him asking all kinds of questions.
He was very honest, very straightforward, quite unassuming, quite humble, you know, recognized clearly that what he did was wrong. But the way he described it is fitting perfectly with his view of karma. He said since a tiny boy, from the time he could remember, he was unbelievably magnetized, attracted to the action of torturing creatures and then killing them. He said he didn’t know why. He knew his parents didn’t teach him this, but he just couldn’t resist.
Now we don’t accept that. You see, again, the views you’re having. We don’t accept that we think, oh, he’s just just it’s an excuse we say, you know. Taking away power is free will. But when we have the view of karma, this explains why you explains why you have any tendencies, any tendencies at all.
Why we have even the propensity to be lazy. We think it’s we just we we find it so hard to go against it, don’t we? If we have the propensity to be angry when it’s really strong, look how hard it is in your life to go against it. Whatever the propensity is, we can see it. Mild ones like this.
We’re not talking about, you know, doing what he did. So the point is Buddha would say he’s had countless lives. He’s had countless lives of animals and whatever, all kinds, and he’s brought with him this along with with kindness and intelligence and good qualities and straightforward and honest and all this, which is what I observed. He’s a busy man there. Oh, it’s a busy lady this time.
Okay. So he had all these incredible, you know, this propensity, this incredible tendency, you know, to from much familiarity from past lives that he just brought with him and it was just, it arose almost as soon as he began to even grow, you know. He was attracted like a magnet to all these creatures and he couldn’t, and was propelled to do it, and then as he got older, of course he graduated to humans. And then when he started to get into trouble then, you know. So the point is, so this is where we really begin to try and understand karma, there’s many factors involved.
First of all, know, our personality is made up only of karmic tendencies. There’s no personality from its own side. There’s no personality that just simply exists because it exists, you know. Everything we say, everything we do, and everything we think is only a tendency, otherwise we wouldn’t do it for God’s sake. So we’re made up of many tendencies, and why you have any tendency at all to do anything is because you’ve done it before.
It’s such a simple principle that it’s almost embarrassing, you know. It seems to be more complicated to think your mother made you, because you can’t always find the answer. How come those two boys who, you know, how come Jeffrey Dahmer, his mother didn’t teach him to skin animals alive and and rape and eat people, you know? I’m sorry. Where did he get that from?
And the same as that little three year old boy as I mentioned, you know, the story where he cried for the for the compassion for the lice. Who taught him that? Nobody. So this is why in scientific answers we get, we get more confusion and we can’t answer any of these questions. Excuse me, even I remember, what’s his name?
That scientist who’s got MS. Hawking. Stephen Hawking. I remember I looked at his little book a little bit, The Brief History of Time, and I remember something in there and I’m paraphrasing. He said something like, and this is very telling, he said, We’ve almost learned to know the mind of God, and I think most fascinating that many scientists come to this conclusion.
The world’s so amazing they deduce there must be a creator. We’ve almost learned the mind of God, he said, but, he said, it hasn’t told us the first thing about human behavior. And this is what the Buddhists view where there’s this huge gap. You can look at the universe, the external universe until the cows come home, but until you understand the mind, which is even the creator of the universe, which is the karmic view which I’ll talk more about, you’ll never begin to understand human beings or any beings for that matter, you know. So this is the Anyway, this is the karmic view.
So there’s this Jeffrey Dahmer. Has many good propensities but he has this one unfortunate one, you know, of a powerful I mean, incredibly what we call distorted, deluded, powerful attraction like a magnet running towards it to harm and torture and do these dreadful things. Now what’s fascinating about this is this, you know, that the Buddhist view is the more strong your tendency, let’s say negative one or positive for that matter, yeah, same, the more strong your tendency, what does that mean? It means you’ve got this groove dug very deep in your mind, if you like. That means you go to it like a magnet, you just fall into that pattern.
And that means too what you’re propelled to do gives you pleasure. You’re attracted to it like a magnet. Look at when we’re angry. You think you’re so clever when you’re angry. Mean, look at us.
We’re so full of importance, we’re so arrogant and we’re so righteous and we feel so good it so don’t we? We get pleasure from it. It’s only afterwards we feel a bit embarrassed, you know? Whenever we do anything, we’re attracted to it. So what you’re attracted to gives you pleasure.
So okay, with someone like Jeffrey Dahmer, his attraction was so deep, so profound that he got his sexual pleasure, got his orgasms from it. So it’s virtually impossible to resist for this reason, you know, because everything in him, from habit, he just kind of narrowed into that groove and he went there like a magnet, he couldn’t resist it. It was so powerful. It gave him pleasure and that level of pleasure is mind boggling, know. So I know we look at our attractions.
You know, even a person who’s a fisherman, there’s a story I always tell about karma. This friend of mine, her son was a professional fisherman. She said since the time he could remember he was attracted to fishing like a magnet. He even called himself salmon. And he he went like to the river.
He just went like a duck to water, and he fished, and he was a professional fisherman for thirteen years, you know. And so she said she went fishing with him one time, and it was unbearable for her. This fish, this boat full of flapping creatures, for her, patently suffering. It was unbearable to see this fish who didn’t want to be there, wanted to be in the water, please, but he was a kind, good man, but because he had this strong karmic imprint to kill, he simply was blind to the suffering of the fish. Like when you’re angry, you’re blind to the suffering you’re causing.
Someone else who’s patient, this is still a bit longer, keep going Amy. When you’re patient, a person who’s patient watching me get angry with somebody, they can see the harm we’re doing. They’re shocked, know, they can feel it immediately. So this is what the Buddha says, this teaching on karma, explains a lot to us. The deeper the habit, the negative habit, the more caught up we are in our righteousness to do it, the more we then almost write a philosophy that supports our right to do it, but intuitively, virtually instinctively, the habit’s so strong, it just gives us this enormous pleasure.
So you know, okay, this guy who was a fisherman didn’t get orgasms from it, but he got enormous pleasure. Of course, he thinks the pleasure comes from the moon and the stars and all this, which is nature, it’s lovely. But, you know, also, like a lot of fishermen, just attack you you can’t not do it. You have to go fishing. And even they put the fish back, they still have to do the action, you know.
That’s just karmic habit. So one is it causes you to go running towards them. The thing that you go running towards like a magic is obviously what attracts you. What attracts you is what gives you pleasure. I mean, if every time we did something wrong, we got an electric shock, we’d all be Buddha now, you know?
But unfortunately, we don’t. We get pleasure instead. And then we write a philosophy to support it, you know? I’ve got my gangster friends, my Mexican gangster friends. I mean, since, you know, they’re tiny kids, get into the gangs totally involved in this whole kind of culture and all the rules are so complex, you know, how you behave and everything and so it’s just natural that you would, you know, the way you harm a boy who disrespects you, you stab them or shoot them and the way you disrespect, you know the way you harm a girl who disrespects you, you rape her.
Even the initiation they get into in their gangs, you know the two boys will fight almost to the death and if really brave and don’t give up, then you get into the gang and the girls will be gang raped. It’s just a law. So this is what you do, it’s called good, you know. So this is their view, it’s their view, you know. And you build up a very big story that it’s the correct thing to do.
Whatever we do, we defend our position. We have this whole view, and that’s why we do it so strongly. When I was being a bit of an old hippie and an old communist, I totally was into stealing. I had this clear philosophy that it was that this this white, rich world, I had a right to steal. So Janet, my sister and I would go down Oxford Street because we lived in London for a while, Christmas time and we would just ransack the shops, know, send them all home to Australia and we’re very generous and hundreds of thousands, you know, not thousands, but many hundreds of pounds worth of gifts for all our family, you know.
And okay, at some point when I was living in Alice Springs, came back to Australia, still stealing, it was just a habit, you know, but I totally defended my right to do it. It felt completely comfortable, I completely rationalized. I had a very clear philosophy, so I did therefore, I didn’t feel bad. And then at some point, I just noticed it was just demented, you know. I was just insane, constantly taking something I didn’t need because I felt right.
Was just a habit, and I realized it was just ridiculous, so luckily, I stopped. I mean, sister stopped because she got arrested. You know, was her wake up call. So, you know, it was how fortunate we can see the fault of our ways by looking, you know. So, you get habits and then you build up your position that it’s correct to have these things.
This is how we all do it. And so when you’ve got it as primordial as poor old Jeffrey Dahmer, what choice do you have? You know? I mean, talk about choice. It is pathetic.
I’m sorry to say choice. Free will in Buddhist terms is a bit of a fantasy, really, you know? But it it sort of implies that everyone is equal and we all have, you know, have a six choices here. I think I’ll rape, know, I’ll rape and then skin alive and then murder this person or I won’t. I think I’ll choose to do it.
I mean, don’t be ridiculous. I mean, who don’t don’t be ridiculous. Look at your own mind. Do you say, oh, I think I’ll be angry now. I mean, I’m sorry, you do not do that.
So then don’t say we’ve got free will, it’s a load of rubbish. We have deep propensities in our mind, then due to various conditions ripening, we go like a magnet and we follow it and then we think, oh my god, what did I do? Why did I do that? We say. We all know our habits.
Here we go again we think, we’re lazy again, we’re depressed again, we’re angry again, we don’t choose to be depressed. Mean it is inappropriate to think that. It’s kind of just inappropriate. Look at your own mind and you’ll see it’s not true, you know. This is not an excuse.
This is an incredibly intelligent way to understand yourself and when you understand yourself, you can understand the solution, you know. But it’s extremely hard to change ourselves. We’re not talking for old Jeffrey Dahmer’s habits, we’re talking our mild little baby habits, know? Of being depressed and lazy and lying, know, bad mouthing and lying and deceitful and arrogant. Look at it, know?
I mean look how hard we find it to change. This is the power of karma, you know. Then when we can see this, we can have much more reasonable view of how to change ourself, and then we can have compassion for other people too, you know. It’s not an excuse. Who needs an excuse, you know.
It’s ridiculous to talk that way. We make excuses all the time. Of course we do. Because we don’t understand karma, that’s why. And actually we use the excuses to harm ourselves, really.
So we’re talking karma here. The way Buddha says how our our what our makeup is. And this is second kind of karma I’m describing, which is called the actions similar to the cause, which is the tendencies, you know, we have, positive or negative, which is simply the things we’ve practiced before. They’re habits, basically. We’re a bunch of habits, basically.
And this is why the Buddhist view is the approach to this is you have to have a basis of correct behavior, of what is good, what is bad, and we’re discuss this still. Okay? A valid basis to use as a reference point for what I would do, what I should do and what I shouldn’t do for your benefit. That’s all. There are rules that you should do.
There’s rules to make cakes, there’s rules to do carpentry, there’s rules to how to behave. No one’s putting it upon you. And you know our own guilt is our own problem. Our guilt is like our inner policeman beating us up. It’s not valid or relevant.
But you know, we have to learn, we have to and we have to check up what we think is valid behavior. Don’t just believe it because someone tells you. To look at it and this is the Buddhist view, we can investigate, which we’re gonna do, investigate what it is that makes something so called good and so called bad. It’s not Buddha who says this is good, do it. Not true.
This is not the Buddhist view at all. We can recognize what is good and what is bad in the sense that a good thing is a seed that will bring a fruit that you want. That’s always practical, you know? And a negative thing is a seed that brings a fruit you don’t want. It causes suffering.
So once has a basis, then through meditation, through contemplating, through seeing one’s own mind, one can learn to see one’s propensities, and then one can make an assessment, is it valid or is it not in relation to this basis that I’m using? And then when we make a decision that it’s not valid, then you start to exercise your ability to slowly, gradually, step by step change your habits, you know, by using your intelligence and your will as all these things as we say, you know, slowly, slowly. So the third kind of karma is called experiences similar to the cause and this is the name given to all the things that happen to you out there. So okay, we can maybe be brave enough to take responsibility for our own thoughts and feelings, our own karma, but to actually take responsibility for John’s punch, that’s a bit stretching it, isn’t it? I mean, excuse me, I’m happy to say my anger’s mine, but to say that that he punches me because of my karma as well, wow, that takes thinking about.
But again, this is the Buddha’s view. There is nothing, there is nothing that any living being would do to me, no experience that I have from out there that isn’t the fruit of my karma. So sort of the analogy would be that whatever’s in my life or the people I meet, the rats that pass my, you know, pass and walk in my kitchen, the mosquitoes that take my blood, the people who punch me in the nose, the people who give me a million dollars, whatever it is out there as we say, all the good or the bad, whatever it is, you think of it as that’s my garden and whatever arises in front of me, whatever I meet, whatever I get, that’s mine. That’s my garden, that’s my weed, it’s my flower. Whereas we have the view now that I didn’t ask to get born, I’m this innocent victim, I got plunked here by somebody else and all these things that happened to me out there kind of like a random, the good things and the bad.
Now we’re happy to have the good ones. Oh, wow, we tend to think they’re our right, you know? Well, of course, good things will happen. We’re gonna shove it in, you know? But how dare bad things happen?
I do deserve the good things we think and yet even actually we don’t even think that. We We can’t even accept the good, you know. We’re so self loathing, it’s kind of interesting. But we are very shocked when the bad things come, so it’s an interesting way of seeing, you know. Or we tend to think good things are our right, although sabotage ourselves.
This is the way we are so harmful to ourselves. We sabotage ourselves all the time, you know, because of our self loathing, which is the irony of ego, which we’re gonna talk about. And then the bad things, it’s just completely wrong and just shouldn’t be happening. And if you look at the voices of all our delusions like anger, what are the voices of anger? How dare you do that to me?
Who do you think you are? Why is this happening to me? It’s like total shock because we don’t think it’s appropriate that it’s happening because we don’t think we you know? In other words, we don’t think we created the cause for it, is the Buddha’s view of karma. It’s like seeing your garden and being completely shocked there are weeds in there.
Who put weeds in my garden? You know? How dare you plant weeds in my garden? I mean, why assume somebody else did it? It’s your garden, you know.
It’s a way to say it. It’s your garden. Your life is your garden. Whatever comes in your life, that’s yours, baby. If you see it, if you taste it, if you smell it, if it happens to you, you created the cause to have it.
It’s yours. It’s a very interesting kind of tasty way to just to say about this karma, know, experience is similar to the cause. So you can see, you know, if we took a negative karma, the Okay, so the All of the actions we do have these four karmic results and the fourth one actually is called environmental karma. Environmental karma. This is even the way we experience the environment.
So we can see one person you’re born in a country where it’s disgusting and filthy and or, you know, like if you’re born on the West Bank. I mean, when I was in Israel last year, I nearly got to go to the West Bank, but it got canceled. But, know, it’s just you’re surrounded incredible destruction. You know, smashed buildings, paranoia, enemies, people with guns. That’s your own particular environmental karma as a result of particular negative actions, you know.
If you’re born like here in a very pleasing environment where the elements are very harmonious and not exploding all over you all the time, where people aren’t murdering you every day, you know, where it’s reasonably harmonious and reasonably quiet and peaceful and still, that’s the result of enormous virtuous karma, you know. So even the elements, the way we experience the elements, you’re born, let’s say, where you can’t eat food. No matter what food you eat or, you know, some food, they’ll kill you just about. Look at the number of kids now born with these incredible environmental diseases where you can’t drink milk, can’t eat peanuts, they would literally kill you. That’s the direct result of negative karma again.
So everything we experience is not an accident, it’s due to my actions, you know. This is the creative principle. So, you know, every action has all four results but obviously all four don’t come simultaneously. Simultaneously. So, for example, the simple action of killing, the throwing karma of killing is to be born in a lower realm.
The action similar to the cause of killing is a tendency to kill, your tendency to kill. The experience similar to the cause of killing is you get killed or you die young or you get sick because getting sick, what’s that? It’s like the breakdown of the elements, isn’t it? It’s opposite to health. And then the fourth one, environmental karma.
The environmental karma of killing is this one of it, you know, like being the food is actually not conducive to health, it’s conducive to ill health. The water’s poison, you know, polluted water, this kind of thing. And we can look at the world more and more. Who drinks out of rivers? Nobody, God, you know?
Because it’s the collective karma of killing, the environmental karma, polluted environment, you know? Talking in a more so called cosmic way, but when start to get the realizations of karma, it’s like this, that everything we experience, we’re completely interdependently connected to. You can’t just say it’s out there happening unfairly to me, which is how we all think now due to ego, you know, and due to this very mistaken wrong view that everything has an inherent nature and we’re in this dualistic world of things happen to innocent me, you know? And it really is like this right now, even the good things. It’s like, you know, if I get the delicious chocolate cake, I kind of blame the chocolate cake for making me happy.
It’s sort of it’s the chocolate cake’s the cause of my happiness. We don’t say blame, but it’s like that, you know? So that’s why we grasp at it so strongly. Oh, look, chocolate cake, shove it in, get happiness. And then we blame, you know, John for punching me, for causing my suffering.
We put the causes out there. Buddha says it’s a dualistic view, it isn’t like that. We’re actually experiencing everything interdependently. It’s almost like you’re like a little what’s the parts of flowers? What’s the — a pistil is part of a flower, isn’t it?
It’s like you’re the pistil in the flower and you think all the rest of the flower is this hostile environment. How dare they all do these things to you? But actually, you’re a part of you’re an integrated part of the flower. How can you say you’re separate, you know? But you’ve so got this isolated sense of ego that you just think you’re so separate and all these bits doing their thing and they’re gonna take from me.
I’m gonna have the best water and how do they take the water when they pour it? You see my point? It’s demented. You’re an integrated part of the whole flower. How can you be separate, you know?
So ego is like this. We’re in this insane world of our own invention, of dualistic. Everything out there is hostile or it’s delicious and so we’ll grasp it in and eat it up like a vampire, you know? We everything is through our own filter of our own needs. This is the deluded way we all are.
This is Samsāra, Buddha says. So when we get to understand karma, is actually an extremely profound view, you get the sense of integration, interconnectedness, you know, interconnectedness, which is how Buddha says things exist. Which actually by understanding karma, it helps us understand emptiness, which we’ll talk about, you know. What time is it? It’s not any time to go home.
It’s too late for a tea break. Don’t you want a tea break? Put a tea break and we’ll finish. What do you want, tea break? Wouldn’t mind just standing up and Well, you have a wriggle.
Go on. Have a five minute wriggle and a quick drink or whatever, and then we can come back and we can finish. So I really I want to lead you a meditation. So, okay. So if Okay, so let’s look more at how we create karma.
We already did look a bit at this when we looked at the fishermen business and the Jeffrey Dahmer business, looking at some of the consequences of karmic habit, you know. We’ve we’ve looked a bit at that. But let’s look in more detail. So, in order okay. In order for any complete action which would bring the result of a throwing karma which they call the fully ripened result which is let’s say a rebirth or in whatever kind, you know.
There need to be four conditions in place when we do that action. So the first one which really is almost the meaning of karma, it’s the intention to do it. Intention. It’s it’s virtually the meaning. It’s synonymous.
Intention. Which is the mind. This is why everything comes from the mind, Buddha says. Then you’ve got a second one, as I say, let’s say it says killing an ant. What does it say?
So first of all, you have the intention. Then there has to be an object, which is a living, kicking ant, a real ant, you know. Then you’ve got the third action, the third condition, which is you do the action or you get someone else to do it. And usually the generally speaking, the closer you are to the action, the heavier the karma in terms of negative. And the closer you are to the action in virtuous karma, the more powerful the response, the more powerful the virtue.
And the fourth is the result, ant is dead. Okay, finished. You see it, you know. So now, that’s that’s just the bare bones. Now, once the intention is there, there are various other factors that play the major role in determining whether what you’re doing, whether that killing action of killing is good or bad.
These are what determine whether it’s a so called good action or a so called bad action. And in Buddhist terms, what a good action is is that which is which generally broadly speaking, but I’ll go into it now, is what will bring a benefit to others and benefit to you therefore add benefit to others. Which will rip ripen us happiness for you and will benefit others. And a negative action, a bad action, a negative action is that which will bring suffering to you and will cause you to harm others. This is the broad terms, you know.
So okay, how do you define what’s negative and what’s positive? So this way we can see immediately, when we look at the motivation, we can see that in general, why in the world we call why in the world we call killing bad isn’t, you know, if we were a Christian, the reason would be is because God said not to do it, and that’s valid. If God is the creator, then it’s correct. The criterion of something’s being negative or a sin, as as my Catholic friend told me, is that it’s against that if it goes against the will of God, that’s what defines it as being bad. That’s not the Buddhist view.
It’s defined in itself, Buddha says, based on what’s in the mind. So, motivation, in other words, the first condition, the first major one, under the heading of intention, once the intention is there, these are the various factors that play the major role, the role in determining if it’s good or bad. So like I said, in general, if we look at the world, somehow killing is a harmful action. So, okay, in the world we can certainly see that killing everything isn’t seen that way although somehow there’s a discomfort about it. This is why some people really resist killing fish even though in our culture it’s seen as valid.
Some people Like in America, huge number of people go hunting. Some people think it’s awful because it’s killing and it’s harmful. Everybody would, I think, agree that if they saw the person cutting the fish into small pieces and laughing while the fish was harmed, we would then say that’s too much, that killing is not fair. We would then be sort of moved by it. So we have to see that we do all have this view.
So the Buddhist view of why killing is bad is not because inherently it’s bad, and I’ll give an example to show how it can be not a bad action due to karma, in terms of karma. It’s it’s because over the eons of time of sentient beings existing, killing is usually motivated by aversion, by anger, by dislike, isn’t it? Look at the world. I mean, sometimes it can be attachment if you’re attached to eating the flesh of that ant, you know. We kill for attachment, but the the why it’s killing a scene so fearful.
We’ve got this kind of resistance to it is because the motivation is bad. Motivation is the wish to harm. Why do you think people go to war? Not because they love each other. Come on.
Why do you kill the ant on the kitchen counter? Not because you love it, it’s because you don’t like it. Because you think how dare that ant be on my kitchen counter? It’s obvious, you know. That’s why so it’s a buildup of energy over the eons of time amongst sentient beings that when the motivation is harmful, when it’s and that, you know, we’ll go more detail into what and why it’s harmful, where that comes from, you know.
We’ll talk about it psychologically when we talk about the second scope, which we’ll do tomorrow morning. We’ll go more deeply into Buddhist psychology tomorrow, you know. But here we can see that this is a convention that the motivation is harmful. You harm the ant. There’s a mozzie, you know.
How dare, You know? Boom. Take my blood. One tiny tiny drop of my blood as Lama Zopa says, you know. That’s all it wants.
It’s just one tiny drop of blood. But look how upset. Even mildly, but it’s still like, you know, excuse me. You know? How dare it?
That’s called aversion, you know. It’s called anger. It comes it it leads to what’s called anger. Aversion is the state of mind that the when I am confronted with what I don’t want, I get this thing out of my way. I harm it, you know.
Well, that’s where killing comes from. That’s why we call it bad. This is convention, you know. But it’s not ultimately bad. We can see in a minute, I’ll explain.
The other condition that plays a major role in the karma we create, and we’re talking here about the karma that we create. And this one we can see in the Jeffrey Dahmer case, habit. The more strong the habit, the deeper the karma. And then the other factor, again poor Jeffrey Dahmer, he had all three unfortunately, poor thing, you know.