Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Robina Courtin offers a radical reframing of Buddhism in this 30-minute Q&A: the Buddha was not a religious figure but an investigator—and being Buddhist means testing his findings yourself, not accepting them on blind faith. Building a systematic framework, she shows consciousness as non-physical, beginningless, and not created by parents or God; operating instead by natural law, cause and effect, like gravity. Rebirth follows from the unbroken continuity of consciousness through successive bodies. She maps levels of consciousness—gross, subtle, very subtle—explaining how meditation accesses subtler depths. Finally, she presents karma as the law governing all minds. A practical, skeptical take on foundational Buddhism.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2011 09 22 Track 1 -3.mp3
UUID: c5e23899-87a5-4bd3-8d12-8d5ca6919d35
Teacher: Ven Robina Courtin
Collection: z Robina Courtin 2011 – too hard (Ven Robina Courtin)
Date: 2011-09-22
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 29.9 minutes
Words: ~5,555
Do several practices and one of them is a medicine Buddha. We’ll do a short one for those who want to stay together. I thought I’d just talk a little bit about Lama Yeshe and the Kopan monastery. It’s just helpful. It’s nice.
We can do that after the question and answer. So let’s just do a little motivating, a little prayer we can sing. The first two lines of this prayer express our reliance upon the Buddha and his teachings. And so if that’s how we feel, if we’re like Buddhist already, we can remind ourselves of this. And the second two lines are expressing an altruistic motivation for us sitting here together for this hour, two hours, whatever, thinking, okay, I’m gonna listen to these things, ask some questions, get some answers, think things through, why?
So I can take away with me when I leave some tools, you know, that I can use in my life to help me become a better person, less neurotic, less miserable, less fearful, less depressed, more kind, more wise. This is the point. This is the bottom line. If the stuff if Buddhism doesn’t help us do this, then we’re missing the point, you know. Something’s not working.
So thinking like this. So that in turn, once I do this for myself, I can be of use to others then. So thinking this way expressed by this prayer. Okay. So I think you can ask me some questions, Or tell me something you’d like me to talk about.
I don’t quite know how this is supposed to go. Yes. Go. Go, Ke. Go, Rebirth and future lives.
Well that means you have to understand again talk about karma, doesn’t it? The sort of practical way how it works. Okay, tell me something else first. I will. Yes.
Go darling. Yes. Purification. Yes. Okay, okay.
Okay. Yes. Right, exactly. I understand. I understand.
Okay. So by answering that, it’ll start to bring some things Ken’s asked. So the fundamental point the Buddha’s making I’m gonna answer slowly. It’ll come to it. Okay?
I’m gonna answer here as well. It seems to me, you know, over the years I’m trying to be a Buddhist using all this stuff as my working hypothesis. This is the way I think about Buddhism. I don’t just say I believe in it. I think that’s kind of intellectually lazy.
Because you sit back and say, oh yeah, I believe in karma. What’s it mean? Oh, don’t know. What good is that? Oh, it’s like saying I believe in one on one is two.
What does it mean? Oh, I don’t know. So believing is not enough. Okay? It’s intellectual laziness much of the time.
The intelligent approach to being a Buddhist as we’ve surely discussed before, you know, like if you’re a decent scientist, if I were Einstein here about, you know, presenting to you my findings, and you know it’s my findings about, let’s say, relativity. Now you know perfectly well. I didn’t have a vision about it last night. Someone didn’t reveal it to me in a dream. And if I did tell you this, you’d chuck me out the door.
What a wacko you are, you know. And then I’m gonna then I’m gonna ask you to believe it. I’m sorry. That’s a bit superstitious. That’s not appropriate.
I’m not trying to be sarcastic here. So Buddha’s Buddha I’m not I’m not kidding when I say that Buddha is more like a scientist in so far as he is not a creator. Therefore, it was not revealed to him. Therefore, whatever he presents as Buddhism is his findings. It’s really simple point.
But we don’t quite get that because we’re so used to thinking of as a religious person, you know, all these holy people who watch their navels and everything. We mystify it all, you know. But it’s really quite insulting. We’ve got to see that the very bare bones of what Buddha is is this he’s a per he was a person who from his own investigation discovered the world to be a certain way, and the and then the experiential implications of those findings. That is the Buddha.
So then if we listen to what he says, listen to his findings, then we some of it rings a few bells and we go, oh, that sounds interesting. Well, I’ll give it a go, we say. And then the crucial point is, this is the real meaning of being a Buddhist, you know, right past all the concepts we have about being mindful, all this. They are necessary. But as Lama Zopa says, excuse me, being mindful, thieves need mindfulness.
It’s not innately holy to be mindful. Don’t get all mistake mistaken. Mindfulness is a necessary tool we need to use in our mind to help us focus and understand things. But really what being a Buddhist means is we listen to what Buddha says. We listen.
We think about it. We check it out, and then we’re prepared to give it a go. We’re prepared to start, if you like, trying to think like the Buddha, trying to use Buddha’s way of interpreting the world as our interpretation. That actually is what Buddhist practice is. You listen to Buddha’s view, and then you take it on board, and so you take it as your hypothesis.
So me being a person who’s attempting to, you know, be a Buddhist, all it means is I listen to Buddhist teachings, I think about the meaning, I have made a decision to take it on board, I’ve made a decision to take as my working hypothesis in life, this is the simplest way to put it, Buddha’s view of the universe. That’s it. That’s it. You know? That’s what I’m trying to do.
That’s what a Buddhist means. So you can you know, and you don’t therefore, you don’t have to believe it. It’s not a question of this squeezing it down your throat and indigestible, you know, and shoving it and saying, oh, I believe it now. This is so superstitious to think this way. It’s inappropriate and it’s unnecessary.
So you can take on board whatever you feel, what works for you. You can be a one percent Buddhist. It’s really okay. You’re the boss, not Buddha. It’s up to there for us to just consider what he says or not.
He’s not forcing us. He does not ask us to believe it. That’s absurd. He’s not even asking us to check it up. That’s up to us.
The onus is on us, you know. So I would I would say really from my experience of studying Buddhism, the two essentials that we have got to get clear in order for everything in Buddhism to make some sense even intellectually is the intellectually is the teachings on what the mind is and the teachings on karma. These are like the pillars for me, you know. You think about it, it’s common sense actually. So the first point has to be the mind.
Because if you look us into the world okay. The mind. So if you look the world, it seems to have we have views that are called religious, which are usually views of a creator, aren’t they? There’s a superior being, all knowing, all loving, all compassionate, all wise, who has always been this way, who was never created, who then, for whatever reasons, best known to himself, god, you know, different religions say different things, created us, created the universe. He’s the boss, and our job is to do his wishes.
I’m not complaining about this. Great good comes from this. All I’m saying is that ain’t the Buddha’s view. That’s one view. The next one is the materialist view.
We know that. It’s the other extreme, basically, isn’t it? That we’re only physical, and we’re trying to work out the answers still as we know the physical world, the scientific world. They’re the two views. You’ve either got a materialist, the extreme view of which would be the communist view and all the fanatics on that extreme.
And the other one is the extreme view of all the fanatic religious people in the in terms of being fanatic. They’re the two extremes. Now interestingly, Buddha would say the materialist one is what he would call the nihilistic view, philosophical position that basically says there’s nothing. Just a bunch of material, you know, nihilistic. The other extreme, he would call it the eternalistic view.
He says they’re actually they’re actually philosophies made by the human mind. Then you’ve got Buddha’s view, really is like a third option, another way, which is radically different. But unless you go into Buddha’s teachings, you don’t notice it. You just sort of look at this religious person looking like they’re holy, Buddhist like karma, Buddhist like meditation. We don’t think it through to see how the radical differences between this view and, say, the Christian view, the creator view.
You know? So the Buddha’s view is this. We have a consciousness. There is mind. And for him, this is the central player in everything.
For him, mind is a word that’s used synonymously with the word consciousness. It is not physical. Does not come from mommy or daddy or anyone else or a creator, which is a big shock. Because if you’re a materialist, you agree at least with one point when it comes to other religions with creators that someone else made you. Hear this point now.
The usual view we have in this universe whether we believe in a creator or mommy and daddy, they’re both my creator. Mommy and daddy made me or god made me. One way or the other, isn’t it? For the Buddha, this is the nuttiest idea he’s ever heard. We don’t need creating, he says.
We don’t need beginning. We all desperately think there has to be a beginning, but but but there must be, we’ll say. I have to begin somewhere. A big big bang sort of, you know, magic wand beginning. Buddha says everything’s cause and effect.
Everything exists according to the natural law of cause and effect. It’s a natural law. No one created it. No one made it. It’s like botany.
It’s like gravity. It’s a natural law. It just happens, you know. So his expertise is the law of cause and effect when it comes to mind. So he says a mind is not physical, it doesn’t come from mommy or daddy, doesn’t come from creator, and doesn’t begin somewhere.
So the question is if mommy didn’t make me and give me a brain, and they gave me a brain, sorry, but that ain’t my mind. Buddha says brain is fine. You’re happy with brains, but it’s not your mind, dear. And then he disagrees with the Christian and the Muslim teachings where where where God gave us a soul. He would say, not necessary.
Not because he’s being rude. He just says we don’t need a soul. He would suggest even there’s no such thing existing, and we don’t need creating. And so what’s he mean by this, you know, that we have this mind. His position is this pretty simple.
Just take it as your hypothesis. Consciousness is not physical, not coming from mommy deity, not coming from a creator. And it also happens to be radically different insofar as Buddha’s view of how subtle it can go and the degree to which it can cognize things, because cognition is the job of mind, and also the radical level of to which we can develop the mind. He says we can develop it to perfection. That’s the meaning of the word Buddha.
That’s the meaning of the word enlightenment. The word Buddha in Tibetan, I think. I don’t speak Tibetan. The first syllable implies the complete eradication from the mind of all suffering and its causes. The second syllable, implies the complete development in that mind of all the positive qualities beyond which they can’t be developed further.
This is what Buddha is saying is the potential of all minds. This what they mean by all possess Buddha nature. Buddha says this about every single mind. Every mind has this potential. And minds, you know, we’re all mind possessors.
The universe is full of mind possessors, the term in Tibetan sentient being, mind possessor. So the world is full of countless mind possessors, some of whom have a human body. The vast majority don’t. So Buddhist psychology, therefore, refers to all sentient beings. Buddha would assert this entire this vast spectrum of types of minds and types of experiences that they have in connection with some level of physicality.
So also as far as the Buddha’s concerned, there’s only two types of phenomena in the universe, simply speaking. Okay. There’s some more abstract ways of talking, but in general, there are minds and then there is matter. And matter, he believe, you know, the Buddhist talk about like Copernicus and all the Galileos of the medieval times of our scientific world. They agree it’s made up of the four elements.
That’s how he they still talk to Buddhist, you know. Now we talk about quarks and atoms and Lord knows what, you know. But matter is matter of the four elements. And as his Holiness said one time, big bang, no problem. Just not the first big bang, that’s all.
Because matter is also beginning. So Buddha’s point is this, if you have the law of cause and effect, then you cannot have a first chicken. It’s like chicken and egg. You can’t have a first one. By definition.
The law of cause and effect which he says runs the show is completely natural. This demands that minds are beginningless and matter is beginningless. So he says we don’t need creating, but we have this idea that we somehow came out of nothing, you know. This is he says if you pause it this is a simple answer to the question of rebirth, we’ll go into it a bit more, and coming to now I forget your question. What was it?
Oh, you’re killing somebody. That’s right. I get you. I remember. It’ll come.
It’ll come. It’ll come. Okay. It’ll come. Okay.
So consciousness, if you think of it as a river of mental moments, everything is a river of mental moments. You know, this cup you can track it back, can’t you? It’s been a yellow lid for quite a while. You can track it back from the first second when it became a yellow lid in the oven with the yellow paint on it and little things. But before that, it came from clay, which came from you know?
And you can keep tracking the clay back. And if you kept going, we know you’d go back billions of years because every second of the continuity of this that you’d posit, you’ve got to keep going because it came from a previous moment, didn’t it? That piece of something came from a previous moment, which came from a previous moment. And you get back to the first moment of this universe, wouldn’t you? Trillions maybe of years ago.
You cannot find a moment in time where you say, well, the continuity between then and now, there’s something, nothing was there. You can’t have that. You have to track this back in an unbroken chain of mental moments. In other words, you will never get to a point where you say it gets to the beginning, the big bang beginning before which there was nothing. We want that moment.
We think there’s a moment where everything began. You know? But if you think of cause and effect, if you track that lid back to its beginning as we want to find the first moment before which there was nothing, how can you have nothing? If you have truly nothing, how can something come out of nothing? It’s it’s a it’s it’s a complete contradiction.
So therefore, you have to posit that even the first moment of this universe, part of which gets to become this cup right now, that’s logical. Right? Logical, isn’t it? And you can’t find a moment in that continuity of billions of years, and you get to this first moment of what we call this universe, well then we have to posit a previous moment of that matter for it to become. Therefore, how can you find a first moment?
You simply can’t. If you posit the law of cause and effect, you cannot have a first big moment before which there was nothing. That is an utter impossibility, but we frantically want it. But but but there must be, we’ll say. It’s completely irrational.
So mine’s the same. Now as his holiness Dalai Lama said one time, last year in Dharmasala, oh, it’s easy to prove reincarnation, he said. He meant intellectually, deposit it as a hypothesis. Easy, no problem. So first you have to establish, like I just proved the reincarnation of the lid, know.
Hasn’t always been a lid, we know that perfectly well. You look at the substance, isn’t it? Good evening. You look at the substance, We know it’s called a lid at the moment, but we know perfectly well two trillion years ago the stuff which is an unbroken continuity up to now was not like this. We know that.
But there’s an unbroken continuity, isn’t there? And like turns into this, which becomes this, which turns into that, which transmits into this. But you can track it back that unbroken continuity. Well, that’s the same as minds. The mind then we have to posit what is its stuff?
What’s the stuff of mind? In other words, they say in Buddhism, the substantial cause, or the substantial cause here is clay. The previous moment of that clay, you know. So what’s the stuff of mind? The Buddha would suggest it is not physical.
Now this is very abstract for us. We can’t conceive you know, we can conceive of something not physical. Time is not physical, is it? Time is not physical. That’s fine.
We can posit something is not physical. But we’re so used to thinking the brain is the mind. The Buddha says the brain’s fine, but you ask some Tibetan meditator, where’s his brain? He wouldn’t have a clue. They don’t learn about brains.
They learn about minds. And what’s a mind? It’s not physical. It’s the a word which we can use synonymously with the word consciousness that refers to your thoughts, feelings, emotions, unconscious, subconscious, instinct, intuition, you name it. The entire spectrum of our being, all our thoughts, our feelings, emotions, unhappiness, the anger, the violence, the lust, the killing, the bliss, the clarity, the subtle, the gross, you name it.
That is your mind, and that consciousness is kind of like packed is this this body this is the four elements here. This Robina’s body is the four elements, basically. The same four elements as that cup. If we use that model, you know, the four elements. Earth, air, fire, water, they say.
So this body is the same body as the as the as the as the, you know, as the water, as the fire, the earth, and the air. The four elements are everything’s a combination of the four elements, you know. It’s it’s it’s the old fashioned model. So this body, although it’s the same elements as this, there’s a difference. This body is imbued with a consciousness, we can label it Rubina’s consciousness, Rubina’s thoughts.
This person, in other words. So a person is a name we give to a combination of a bunch of bits with fingers and feet, which is the four elements, and eyes and noses and you know, pee pee and caca inside and all the rest, which isn’t yet turned rotten. You can deduce there must be still a mind here because I’m not turning I’m not going rotten, am I? I’m not starting to stink. You get my point?
Which would be a body that didn’t have a mind in it. So the the life force, the life, the energy, all these words you like to use, that is the difference between a live body and a dead body is a mind. This is what Buddha calls mind, consciousness. It’s the person there, the thoughts, the feelings, the emotions, the Hitler mind, the Mother Teresa mind, the dog mind, the ant mind, the giraffe mind. They’re all sentient beings.
They’ve all got a mind mixed with a body, and they’ve all got shapes and forms and like this. That’s a person. An animal is a person in this sense. Now the mind of Rubina and the mind of, you know, every person, Kath. Right?
Kath. Kath. No. Betsy. Sorry.
Betsy. Betsy. The the mind of Betsy, the mind of, you know, this ant we might discover under the lid here, It too is an unbroken chain of mental moments that goes back and back and back to beginningless time, Buddha says. Not that you can’t see the beginning, but there necessarily can’t be one. Now this is again the nuttiest idea we have ever heard.
Because the reason mainly is because we grasp primordially at this person, I’m real, mommy and daddy made me, god made me, and they’re the two views. Right? And they both assert that you began big b big bang capital b begin in your mother’s womb. If you’re a Christian, God put the soul there which makes you a person. If you’re just materialist, mommy and daddy worked very hard to get the egg and sperm together.
So there was a beginning. So the the the agreement there is there was nothing about rabina before that first moment of rabina. Right? That’s the view. Buddha disagrees fundamentally with this.
He says it’s completely irrational. It’s completely illogical. Cannot be such a thing, he would say. So his view is this consciousness of Rabina is again, like the lid, we track it back. We will track it back in an unbroken chain of mental moments, and we have to get back, don’t we, to the first, second when you come out the mummy’s womb.
Well, maybe I began then, we’ll say. No. Because if little screaming Robina, and this is my mummy called me, Robina came shouting out of the womb, which he probably did, we have to deduce there’s a mind there, and we have to track that mind back to the second before she came kicking out the womb, isn’t it? So the body we can track right back to the egg and sperm. This we know logically.
We can see this easily with our eyes and with science. We can track the egg and sperm. Sperm was in daddy’s body, egg was in mommy’s body. They did their thing, did their trip, and they came together in the fallopian tube or wherever. So the consciousness we can track that back to because it’s a separate entity, not physical.
It’s a nonphysical entity and not physical chain of mental moments. This general generalized rabina ness, this mind of rabina tracking it back, the components of which are anger and jealousy and all the rest. You track it back each moment before that maybe it began then, no, it has come before. Get to the first moment, it’s popping out the womb. You have to track it back to the first moment before it came out the womb while it was a fetus.
You track it back, you know. I think I was seven months in the womb or something, not nine. Eager to get out. Track it back seven months, six months, five months, four months, three months, you keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going to when it was a two cell thing. Right?
The egg and the sperm. Two cells, boom. So then we think, well, has to have begun then. Come on. No.
If it was existing there and you’ve checked it back in an unbroken chain of mental moments from right now, you’ve got to go a previous moment. You have nowhere else to go. You cannot. If we posit, it is not physical. If we posit this particular entity, then we’re tracking you have to posit that it goes back to a previous moment before that birth, for that conception.
And then a previous moment, and then a previous, and a previous, and a previous. So roughly speaking in the Buddhist teachings, they say, you know, that that consciousness can be tracked back a few weeks before, and it will you’ll find it in a previous form, in a previous body, in a previous body, a previous body. It would be in the body of a previous mind possessor, which could be a god, the Buddha would suggest. There’s a whole spectrum of possibilities of types of minds. They’re all psychological states. They they are all simply mind mixed with a certain level of physicality, and there’s a spectrum of of experiences from the most intense bliss to the most intense suffering.
This is in one lot of sentient beings which the Buddhists would call the desire realm. There’s a whole spectrum of possibilities of intense bliss. It’s called the god realms. It’s an experiential psychological state of mind that has certain, you know, certain experiences and a certain level of physicality. This mind is very subtle and very blissful, so its level of physicality is very subtle.
It’s called light body. But it’s and it’s okay, this gets us a bit here to describe I haven’t forgotten your question. I’m answering now Betsy’s question. What can I do? I went off.
I’ll come back to yours. But this will answer your question too. It will. It’ll give you a big picture, okay? So you know the never mind, I’ll go into too much detail here, but the subtle consciousness oh okay, no, I will.
In the tantric model, the more esoteric teachings in Buddhism which is coming from India, which is the same system that Tibetan medical system uses, posits gross consciousness and, you know, the way they describe body and mind. There’s gross consciousness and gross body, and this is us now as humans. Our level of consciousness, our level of capacity for cognition, which is the job of mind to cognize, is very, very gross. And it’s and it’s like I said, it’s mixed with this gross body so that our own mind is limited because it’s sort of infused this body is infused. This this junky sort of walking sewer is infused with a consciousness.
You know, it’s sort of polluted by it. It’s so gross. So we have very gross conceptuality. We don’t remember most of today. If you get about a past life, it’s a joke.
You know, even at ten o’clock in the morning you’ve forgotten most of the day. The cognitive, the conceptual state of mind, which is the gross level of our cognition, does not have the capability to remember very much. We’re very limited. And our senses are extremely limited. They function through the body.
You can’t see very far. We can’t hear very far. You know? Very very limited. And that, of course, is the Western model.
That’s all we posit as existing. That’s our that’s our accepted view of a person. Right? The Buddha says it’s the grossest of gross level according to this model. Then you’ve got a subtler level of mind that, you know, the Tibetan medical system, this tantric model, would assert, which is the only time we ever touch that is when we dream.
Okay? That’s our dream consciousness. It’s subtle. Now we all know dreams are weird and wonderful, aren’t they? You can leave your body, you can fly in the sky, you can go here, you can go there.
There’s no usual sense of space and time. The mind is more subtle, and it’s still mixed with a subtle level of physical energy. The wind energy, the kundalini energy, they have these words for it in the Tibetan medical system. The same as the Chinese, a bit similar. And so anytime we ever touch that subtle consciousness is what we dream, but it’s weird and strange.
We don’t know how to focus and don’t know to use it. Whereas great meditators, and this is the point, in these marvelous meditation techniques, these very sophisticated psychological techniques that have been around pre the Buddha. The Hindus were expert at them. You know? These marvelous I mean I’m not kidding, Sophisticated psychological techniques that enable one to go to the to to use to cultivate profound focus and concentration.
That enables a person to go beyond the gross level of consciousness and access the subtle level. And at that level, that level does not depend upon a gross body or the brain or the gross nervous system for its function. It’s got its own level of physicality. It doesn’t depend upon the gross body. That’s why you can the reported experience of people leaving their bodies, ordinary people have this.
It doesn’t fit in our model in the West because it’s too weird. It’s either a soul and who knows. We know the brain doesn’t pop out of the body and go somewhere. I mean a friend of mine recently talking about her intense, you know, sexual abuse as a child. The way she dealt with it was leave her body every day.
She’d be up in the clouds of the fairies looking down her little body being abused knowing that she’d have to go back down there, you know. It was a daily experience. Everyone reports this. But if you’ve got the view as the West has, the materialist view that the brain is all there is, this does not fit so you just have to put it over there as strange and unexplainable, you know. So one of the key functions of this subtle consciousness is well, unless we’ve accomplished it through meditation, and everyone has the capability, it has the capacity for clairvoyance, clear seeing.
So in other words, at that level of consciousness because it is more subtle with a subtler level of physicality, it then can cognize phenomena that the gross consciousness can’t. It can see beyond walls. It’s not the gross consciousness, it’s a subtle level. It can cognize phenomena that aren’t here. It can cognize the past.
It can cognize the future. That’s its job. That’s the job of mind. Mind is clear, Buddha says. So you keep purifying your mind through meditation as you keep advancing as well as practicing morality every day, and you purify your mind at this level, but then you’re through meditation, you access ever more subtle levels, ever more subtle levels of your consciousness.
Until you eventually are able to get to what they call the very subtle level. So you got gross, subtle, very subtle. This is the subtlest level of one’s own capacity for cognition, the mind, beyond which it can’t be subtler. And that also is linked to a very subtle level of physical energy. And this is the subtle wind energy, the four elements subsumed down to the wind energy.
And that’s the beginning of this universe, subtle wind energy. And then due to various causes and conditions called karma, which I’m about to get to, which is the law that runs these minds, that runs the universe due to the various causes and conditions called karma, this universe then grew into this universe that we know, you know. So this person goes down to this very subtle level. So at the time of death, that’s what happens. The mind goes through this deconstructing process.
The gross, you stop breathing in out the subtle level, you keep going more subtle, ever more subtle, you keep throwing off these levels of gross consciousness and physicality until eventually you get down to what they call the very subtle consciousness, which is inextricably linked to this very subtle level of wind energy, the subtle physical. And this is like the building blocks of the new person. So now the thing the law that runs what goes on in that mind, the experiences of that mind is called karma. So Buddha calls cause and effect karma when it comes to minds. It’s a natural law, he says.
It runs the universe, runs the show, runs the world. It runs all minds. It’s a law, a natural law. No one has to make it. It’s like gravity, you know.
You just observed it. So what karma is is this. It’s it means action, it has this dynamic meaning of implying reaction, action reaction, cause effect. Isn’t it? So what’s totally interesting though, the word karma also is synonymous with the word intention, And that’s the key thing about the mind.