Karma: Carry it with you at all times (because you really cannot do other :)

I would like to talk about Karma from my personal perspective.  This is not the common take on Karma as so many know it, "As you sow, so shall you reap" AND Karma is "OUT THERE" like the Boogey man and gonna get you.

 As you respond to life, life responds to you.  You can use your Karma to uplift you or bring you to a lower level.  The "Rice Seedling Sutra" says Karma goes through 12 stages of production to ripening.  Karma truly is "As you sow, so shall you reap." but it is not going to come up in exactly the way it was when first created.  Karma comes up in the patterns of life.  But as they say "Names have been changed  to protect the innocent."  You will not recognize John or Jane from a past life because they are clothed in different bodies, their ages relative to yours or any other of whatever attributes can differ.  What is important is how you feel and react to the circumstances at hand.

Karma is a reflection of your internal feelings, your self ideation.  Your self ideation has everything to do with how you perceive the external world. Your self ideation reflects what you have been dealt in the world.  Your self ideation reflects your rebirth and what you were then and what you are now.  People change as they put on the years.  Body images change, attitudes change etc.  Your station and circumstances in life are your reactions to Karma.

Your rebirth was due to your resonance with your parents love, and your feelings toward them, especially your mother.  Freud knew that, and he was not completely wrong in his psychological modelings.  Like any of us there is mort to it than we can see or describe.   We each have to gradually develop a bigger picture by surrendering the little picture that we hold currently, and there is always a bigger picture.

We all sort of resonate feelings and those feelings are  gained from our exterior world but they are in response to what we carry with us already.  If you want to change your Karma change how you feel about the world around you.  Surrender your old feelings and let new feelings emerge.  To uplift one's self with Karma surrender the negativities you feel and try, if not to like what is going on, be neutral and work toward liking your life.  Negative Karma is sort of self hate.  We may say we hate this or that or that one is a nogoodnik because they did this that to us once upon a time.  It could well be that that nogoodnik did you a back handed favor by doing this or that.  They pointed out a flaw in your own personality and you did not recognize the favor.  Maybe they even saved you from a worse situation.   And really the person who feels the worst about us hating someone or something else is us.  We ourselves feel it first and more acutely than what someone else picks up about what we feel about them.  And the more we try to communicate our feelings of someone else to that someone, the deeper in we are.  Is that a bad thing or a good thing?  It just depends on us.

Balance

As Swami Chetanananda  so frequently pointed out.  Balance is a dynamic.  Trying to maintain ones balance without rebalancing is not feasible.  Balance, like trying to stay balanced on a bicycle is a good metaphor for the balance life demands.  It is dynamic and ever changing.  You balance on your bicycle and when it is time to stop riding you get off and shift to a new type of balance on your feet.  Not being able to effectively shift balance while riding or not being able to balance while ascending the bicycle to the earth in walking is dangerous.  And it is not a pose of balance to be bicycling or walking, but the dynamic of balancing and rebalancing, where if one were to pretend that one has a static pose that is perpetually balanced one is liable to bump his nose in a fall.  Balance is not dangerous. Imbalance could well be though.

Practices 01

My preliminary practice is to let my heart resonate loving kindness and compassion.  My practice is to let that loving kindness resonate with the universe around me.

A Short Interpretation of "Tayatha OM Gate, Gate, Paragate, Bodhi Swaha"

Tayahta OM gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi swaha.   One who is in this way uplifted, OM, gone, gone, beyond gone, beyond ultimately gone, the pure compassionate intelligence I am that.

The Feeling of MIndfullness

We do a lot of things in our daily lives that limit our capacity to feel.  When we go inside of ourselves in meditation, we start feeling our blockages and as we drop the shields we use to wall off our feelings we start to feel again.  It isn't always pleasant.  But once we have acknowledged our feeling, then to that extent we come alive again.  This is not doing,  this is being done and getting on with it.  This is us not pretending we have such and such an attitude or self image, this is us feeling what we really feel like about our self image and what we are doing, and getting over it.

We all have our built in predilections representing the work that we have to do to free ourselves.  We might call it our "calling".  One wants to be a doctor, or a lawyer or a social worker or police man, what ever it is, it is our inner predilections calling us to do such and so.  But to grow from it we need to acknowledge what we feel like when we are living our professions or our recreations or our needs.   Who am I now and what am I feeling becomes the core of minfullness.  Mindfulness of being being aware of our body in our body,  how our body feels and how we are posturing ourselves in the physical sense and the feeling that we feel in our body, whether posturing, pain, strain or ease etc. .  Then also the body in the mind, how we look at ourselves, what our physical posture means to our self image.  Our emotions in our mind, how we feel ourselves as ourselves through such and so emotion.  And also our mind in our mind which is how we feel perceived as a being according to our image of ourselves.  There can be some dispute over whether these are accurately descriptive of the 4 Foundations of Mindfullness the Guatama put forth as a proposition and teaching.  This is how I remember them as being and what they mean to me.  Fundamentally, we are being aware of what we are, and how we are avoiding what is real.  

First Clarinet No. 2

This is the second installment of the "Clarinet" series. I just acquired the clarinet a few days ago and yesterday I finally had reeds for my instrument. Today I had the center joint fixed by getting it re-corked. Now I can actually make some coherent sounds. It still needs about $50 work repading and repairing leaks.  http://youtu.be/cfa7vVhh2gk

Yesterday's post