[…] awakening to the impermanence of all things becomes manifest, while at the same time our activity manifests our recognition of the law of cause and effect or karma.

In this routine matter of preparing tomorrow’s gruel as this evening’s work lies the key to the attitude necessary for coping with this absolute contradiction of impermanence […]

[…] Tibetan tradition. So, after Buddha Amitabha, Avalokiteshvara, then he goes into the Nyingma tradition, which is Padmakara, that’s Guru Padmasambhava. His consort is Yeshe Tsogyal, and the karma and terma lineages. And then Trimé Özer, I believe is one of the names for Longchenpa, who codified all of the Nyingma teachings. And then Lord […]

[…] something crazy and do whatever you feel like, this is utterly nonsense. Everything that we do evolves into an experienced result. This is the basic working of karma. And when we’re training—when we’re practicing—we act in such a way as to create the conditions for practice. That’s what supports our waking up. It’s very, […]

[…] it can manifest a bit more than it would in ordinary things. What happens is that for whatever reason—and we talked about this in the section on karma, and so forth—there are certain things that have arisen in our lives that we weren’t able to experience when they arise; we don’t want to experience […]

[…] perfection of generosity?” And the same with all the other ones when we get there. And again, when we talk about result, you’ve heard me talk about karma as evolution and we’ve used the term genesis to give this idea of things growing into other things like acorns growing into oak trees and apple […]

[…] have a quotation from a very famous prayer (The King of Prayers): Limitless is the extent of space. Limitless is the number of beings. Limitless is the karma and delusions of beings. Such are the limits of my aspirations. The Jewel Ornament of Liberation, Gampopa, Konchog Gyaltsen (translator), p. 151 We find this in […]

[…] the third one is basically asking the question, What really runs our life? What does our life consist of? And takes us into the whole realm of karma. And then the fourth one is that when life is run by habituated patterns, emotional reactions and so forth, we can never ever really know any […]

[…] fair range of thinking or a very common way of thinking within the Tibetan tradition is, for the people it doesn’t work, well, they don’t have the karma. And basically it’s, “Better luck next life.” [Chuckling] And that always struck me as actually a very cruel answer. And I just could never accept that. […]

[…] into being completely in that experience, which is usually quite uncomfortable, I’ve found. Closely related to this: an exercise I’ve often given students when we’ve been discussing karma—and heaven knows how much bad karma this one will have earned for me, but it’s too late now—is, I tell them to go out and do […]