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199402222GRKA

0:00:00.0 First of all I have to apologize I am late. It’s not that I am usually on time, but I am quite late today, beyond the normal range. I am sorry about that.

The last couple of Tuesdays, we have been talking about the basic principles of karma and the system of how it works and its characteristics. We did talk in detail about how these functions, like karma is definite, fast growing and one never meets with the result without having created the causal karma and once having created the causal karma, no matter whatever happens, how long it takes or whatever, one definitely will get the results. That’s the four principles we talked about.

0:02:09.3 People sometimes think about karma only in terms of negative events and suffering. That’s not true. There is positive karma and positive achievements too. Even Buddha himself being able to obtain enlightenment, that is also karma. And being able to share the things he had developed himself, is also karma. And by sharing that, helping others, being received by others, benefiting others, all of them are karma too. A lot of people think when you say karma, they only think about the negative and difficult side, not about the positive side. Karma is just simply cause and effect. Both negative and positive are karma. I emphasize that because a number of people asked me, “What happens when I get completely finished with karma? When will I be able to work out my karma completely?”

0:03:51.1 Indirectly, what I read behind that question is that they think it is something you have to exhaust, go beyond, come over. They think it is only negative, but it’s not, it is positive karma too. You probably do something positive here and something negative there and you try to square it up, saying, “Well, I did some bad here, let me do something good there. We try to square it up and think that hopefully the total balance will become equal. But that doesn’t work. We mentioned that a number of times. I even went to the extent of mentioning the Tibetan saying, “You cannot take fish and be very generous with that to a dog.” You keep on killing the fish to be generous to the dog. That is not necessarily great.

0:05:18.0 You probably have two karmas. Generosity to the dog, yes, but the killing of the fish functions as a separate karma. However, the positive and negative karmas can cut each other as well. It does not necessarily mean that the positive karma cannot cut the negative karmas, nor does it mean that the negative karmas cannot cut the positive ones. They can do that too. I hope that put a seed for some confusion for you people, thinking, “if it is negative, how can they cut it? How does that work?” I was hoping to get some kind of confusion among you.

Anybody?

0:06:06.0 Audience: It worked.

Rimpoche: oh, good, so how does that work? The way it works is that if negative karma can be purified, the purification of the negative karma is positive karma and that will cut the negative karma. Am I getting you more confused?

Audience: The cause will eventually have to end up with a result, so the result must be something.

Rimpoche: You asked a deeper question. Why don’t you wait for a minute? When I just simply said that purification cuts the negative and people got a little difficulty on that, so let me make that a little clear.

The negative karma here we are referring to negativity, negative actions, such as killing, stealing and not small lies, but big lies, spiritually black lies, that is the biggest problem. The biggest objection is the spiritual black lie. People who pretend to have spiritual development, who have no spiritual development, but pretend to have it, that’s a black lie. It is cheating, letting down sentient beings. That’s why it is considered so negative. All lies are negative, but they are not all big ones. The used car sellers will tell you some negative things, some lies here and there. That’s their trade, their business. In Tibet we also have similar examples. We have horse sellers. They always tell you lies like “Look at this horse, how young it is”, but they took out their mouth and you have no idea what it is. Then you ask them, “How do you know?” and they say that when there is two teeth it is good and when there is one tooth that’s bad or whatever. Or if the horse has one tooth it is good and two teeth it is bad”, whatever it is. That sort of thing they will tell you, which is very similar to the used car dealers that people normally talk about in America.

0:08:53.6 That sort of lie is a lie and it’s negative, but we are not talking about that. We are talking about the killing of a human being and lying in that category. So lying here is a big, black lie.

0:09:14.7 That’s the lie pretending to have some development when you don’t have anything. You like to say it, “I know it”. That is actually a big lie, letting people down, actually. They believe that you have something and you don’t, so where do you lead them? Nothing but confusion. That’s why this is a black lie, a big lie over there.

0:09:59.2 Then of course sexual misconduct. Let’s take these four, that’s enough, including intoxication. That doesn’t go to that level. The biggest is really the killing of a human being, stealing of something that is very valuable to the person. That doesn’t necessarily mean value in terms of money, but some people have lost something very dear to them. It may be a piece of junk or whatever, but to them it has a lot of value and cannot be replaced. That’s the very heavy stuff – and the spiritual black lie. When you talk negativities and negative karma that’s very, very strong.

Then they add intoxication, that’s a little bit later and it’s also not that heavy, it’s a little lighter. The simple reason why that is negative is that it can influence the individual. You lose control or awareness and you end up doing all sorts of things which you don’t want to do.

They normally give you a little story here.

0:11:55.1 The traditional teachings give you a little story. There is supposed to be one monk who was protecting his vows. Then somebody came by and said to him, “You have three choices. What would you like to do? Would you like to have sexual misconduct with this woman or would you like to kill this animal or just drink this bottle?” He thought, “Killing is terrible and I don’t want to have sexual misconduct, with both of them I lose my vows, so well then, the easiest thing is to drink that bottle.” So he drank it, got drunk and then he did everything.

That’s why they add intoxication on this list. By the nature of the action itself, intoxication is not a negativity at all. It is by rule. In Buddhism there are these two things: negative by nature and negativity by rule. The negativities by rule, which are about breaking vows and things like that, are only applicable to those who have vows. For those who don’t have vows, breaking vows is not applicable at all. You don’t have vows to break.

0:13:38.2 So there is no problem. Maybe there is a problem, but not the problem of breaking vows. But there are certain negativities that are negative by nature, like killing a human being or stealing and black lies and sexual misconduct. These are on the top of the list. As for sexual misconduct, the normal western way of looking and this particular way of looking are two different things. When talking about sexual misconduct we are not talking about the normal western way of looking. In case of violence, force, etc, these are definitely sexual misconduct. Anyway, it’s not my business to say what is not in there.

0:15:03.5 Anyway, things like that are negativities and then even within killing itself there is also heavy, light, very heavy. It all depends on what sorts of thoughts you have. If a very angry person becomes totally mean and destroys or wants to make the person suffer and puts them under all sorts of different tortures they know and finally letting that person lose their life, that is the biggest, heaviest negativity. But if you don’t have that much thought it is different, like the person who is killing is crazy and doesn’t even know what he or she is doing. Or there may be a total influence of something else. It is all slightly different. It very much looks like the law here. That very much suits how the Buddha taught 2500 years ago. If a person is under the total influence of intoxication or something and accidentally kills someone or doesn’t even know they killed someone, then they do have the karma of killing, because they did kill, however, it is not that strong, because the motivation was not that strong, the action was not that strong. It is killing, but the karma is not that severe. It is like different watches. There are good Seiko watches and bad Seiko watches and the negativities are very similar to that.

0:17:23.2 That’s why Nagarjuna, the great Indian saint and scholar said

Kä pai dig pa chi yang yang

Nön du dig pa yang yang chi (spelling???)

If you are well informed, even if you have committed a heavy negativity, it will be light.

If you are not well informed, then even if it is light, it can become very heavy.

He gave an example. If have a piece of iron and you are able to flatten it and make an iron sheet, you can put it on a river or lake and it is not going to go down. It can be big but will be floating on the lake. But if you make that iron piece into a ball and throw it in the lake it will go down fast, no matter how small it is. It will go boom – down. So the most important thing is awareness, not only of what you are doing but the awareness that if you have it, how do you handle it.

0:18:39.5 As I told you earlier, it is impossible to be pure in today’s world. No one can be pure at all, no matter how much we try. We can never be perfect at all. That’s why I said sometimes we can try to be over- righteous. We feel it has to be right, the right thing and that is very difficult. Trying to be over-righteous can become very conservative too. That is not necessarily great. Very true in that way. There is no way in today’s world that somebody can be perfectly pure and right – never, not possible. Environmentally it is not possible. By any condition it is not possible, economically it is not possible, politically it is not possible. So no matter who we might be, we are bound to have plenty of negative karma and plenty of positive karma too.

0:20:19.0 So now the question comes: what are you going to do? You have to manage. You have to notice your negative karma, you have to notice your positive karma and try to clean the negative karma and save the positive karma. That is what you can do. That awareness you should bring. That’s Nagarjuna’s idea: if you are aware of it, then even a large amount of iron can float on the river, but if not, the same amount can go down.

What sort of awareness do you bring first? First you have to acknowledge, negative or positive, any action. Forget about denying. People always deny. That’s so bad. You have to accept both, blame and credit, by yourself. No one can force you. You have to acknowledge both by yourself. You can accept credit and be proud of it and congratulate yourself and boost yourself a little bit. And when you have to take blame, that should not be taken to reprimand yourself. A lot of people do that and that is a mistake. We should not reprimand ourselves. We might have done something unknowingly, without noticing. Especially we are in the habit of doing it. It is our habitual pattern. So this individual inside is not to be blamed. However, you have to notice and acknowledge and be able to correct that.

Even Buddha gave a quality for negativities. He said that even negativities have a good quality. Do you know what that is? The quality of the negativities is that you can work on it, you can work with it. This is the information we give you about karma. When you try to practice that in your daily life, that’s what you are supposed to do. If you don’t handle it, it becomes fast growing. Remember, it grows, it doubles and triples. Like the tree outside. If that grows, the inside definitely grows, remember?

0:24:24.6 If you are pushing it inside, or holding it or putting it under “pending”, then you are accumulating more negative karma unnecessarily. The negativity within ourselves is not something we have to be shy about. We don’t have to turn away from it. We have to face it. We did it, we have the karma, we have the action. Karma really means it is like a stamp on a piece of paper, something like an “I owe you” note. Very similar to that. We put a stamp on our consciousness. It is imprinted on our consciousness. Wherever we go, we go with that. It is like skunk and skunk smell or if you want a good example, perfume and its smell. So bring awareness instead of denying, instead of not paying attention, pick it up, think about it and say, “Well, I have done that, I don’t know how heavy it is, is it first class killing or second, third class or whatever it is? Who do I get rid of it?” Find that out.

0:27:15.2 If you very cautious and righteous, then purify every evening whatever you did, knowingly or unknowingly, remembering or not remembering. You can purify. Or you can do it every week, or every second week or every month. That is the benefit of knowing. If you don’t have awareness you don’t know what to do with it. So if you do that, if you acknowledge your negativities and purify them, that becomes positive karma.

Now I would like to deal with the question raised earlier. If karma is definite, how can positive karma kill negative karma? We talked a number of times about that. It is true, karma is definite, however it also depends on conditions. Karma is not permanent. It bumps up and can be bumped down. It is impermanent. So it is dependent arising. It depends on terms and conditions. Negative karma has its own terms and conditions. If you don’t meet the conditions you are not going to materialize the karma. So it gives room for people to have a second chance not to meet the conditions. You can do that. It is really a second chance over here.

For positive karmas also, it is the room for miracles to happen. People go to temples and churches and pray and do this and that and that also should have some result and it does. Even in our usual new age language we say: send good thoughts.

0:30:09.3 Send positive energy. That also has room to play. The room is found only in the conditions. Since it is dependent rise, it is not independent rise. So it depends on the terms and conditions. These might or might not rise. So great purification can completely purify, second-class purification can postpone and third-class purification can delay and things like that. So that’s the first, second and third class of what you do. And that’s why it is not governed by somebody else. Whether it is karma or anybody else, it is not governed outside of us and thrown on us and like it or not we have to take it.

0:31:30.8 However, once a particular karma has started functioning and starts giving the result already, then it is difficult to reduce it. One then has to go through with that. You can still help by making it go faster and all this. All the negativities and difficulties you really have to face may become very small and go fast. Even the dharma practitioners, if you look in the earlier history, people had heavy karma they were supposed to go through by remaining in the hell realms for a long time. Even that can be substituted by simply having a headache for half a day. Yeah, half a day, that’s right. So people who have been doing great, positive work, working very hard and honestly also suffer.

0:32:48.9 At the same time it is looks like some people who are cunning and manipulating and devious are enjoying their life. But in reality, the honest person is saving their positive karma and the little bit of difficulty they have to face they are facing it. A headache of half a day substitutes a whole life of falling into a lower realm.

On the other hand, devious people are finishing all their good karma soon so they can enjoy the lower realms later for a longer period. That’s how karma works. Sometimes some people when they do their best with honesty and integrity, say, “God has not been so kind to me.” Normal Americans say that. Perhaps God has been more kind to you than you think.

Basically, that is how karma works. In our case, knowing the karmic subject, knowing how karma works, we have not talked about what result karma gives. We have told a lot of stories. They normally tell you what happens with the result. They make you think about it and show you that it can be really that bad. Now the question rises: what can I do? Let me say it a little more selfish: what can I do for me?

0:35:21.7 You don’t even ask: what can I do for everybody, which is great, but first let’s think: what can I do for me? That is the question. Everybody has to think that. If you don’t believe in karma, then that is probably a different story altogether. But when you know it, then the question “what can I do for me?” is a very important question. Everybody has to raise that question every day for themselves. It doesn’t matter wherever you are, east or west, south or north, busy or slow, or busy for nothing. Wherever you may be, it doesn’t matter. That question is important. Try to find the answer for yourself. If you can’t find it, talk to others. See what you can do. After knowing how karma works, the next thing is what you can do about it.

0:36:52.1 I supposed I have finished talking about karma. I don’t want to go much into detail about what all the negative karmas are and what the positive karmas are. That becomes a separate point. If I go into that I don’t think I can come out for a number of weeks. There will be no end to it.

Audience: Can positive karma become negative?

Rimpoche: I did not say that. I said that positive karma can cut the negative. And negative karma can cut positive karma too. Anger for example, cuts all the positives that you have.

The action you can take to cut negative is purification. Let’s say have killed a bird. At the time you shot the bird you may have been happy to see the bird fall down, you liked it and enjoyed it, brought it home, cooked and ate it and thought, “how great”. All this was done.

0:38:20.3 In that action, when you concluded what you really did is: you don’t have the first class killing, because you were not really angry with the bird, you were not really manipulating that bird and you didn’t think, “I have to get that particular bird”. Maybe you did it for pleasure or maybe you wanted to prove how good you are at shooting or something. So you managed to do that and thought, “Wow, it’s great.” And then maybe you ate it for dinner and it was very good. Maybe you roasted that bird.

So in that process that person has deprived that bird of its most precious possession. Everybody wants to survive and stay alive. The life is the most precious thing they have. I give you an example: if somebody shows you a million dollars and tells you, “If you let me kill you, I give you that”, nobody is going to take that offer unless they are a fool. That shows how precious the life is. In that process of killing the bird you took the bird’s life, the most precious thing it had.

Not only that. Sometimes a mosquito bites and you get really angry and you can’t get the mosquito and chase it through the house until you finally corner it on the window somewhere and smash it. Then when a tiny, little blood comes out, then you feel very satisfied “Now I got you.” That is how the negativity builds in that one action.

0:41:16.9 That becomes a negative action. In reality you might have got that little mosquito, but at the same time the mosquito got you too. Now you got that karmic imprint of killing the mosquito. That negative imprint will materialize one day and that mosquito is going to get you back, whoever it might be then and whoever you may be then. You maybe a horse at that time and the mosquito maybe a hunter or something. Anything can happen. That is how karma works.

Audience: What relationships and responsibility do we have to other people? If someone kills somebody else we say that we can’t have that in our society and we try to catch that person and put them away. You can kill by accident or with anger or torture, but what does it say how we should relate to other people when we see what they do? Or should we not prevent it? Do we have a responsibility?

Rimpoche: Very interesting question. We definitely do have responsibility. However, if our responsibility could not prove better than what that person did, I don’t think it’s a great responsibility at all. In my personal opinion I am against capital punishment. I don’t know about legality or society, but in my personal opinion I don’t think that capital punishment is great. Of course we don’t want killers going around. That’s not safe. However, if we have to indulge in killing in order to stop a killer, how are we any better than them?

0:44:16.8 Besides that, there is something called collective karma. The collective karma can give you a collective result. For example, bad incidents of elements, like an earthquake. The earth is shaking somewhere, but the suffering and death it brings to the people is the collective karmic result of those people wo suffer together. So most of the environmental disasters we face today are collective karmic negative results, big and small. Wherever there is a fire burning, earthquakes, mudslides or whatever is happening, is direct [for those living right there]. For the rest of us it is indirect. That is a small example. Like that, there is something called collective karma. Collectively we either enjoy or suffer. That is collective karma. We talked about the Magadha story earlier. It is so long, but in that you have that mudslide business.

0:46:01.9 There are all these long stories and a few people escaped and they will tell you all sorts of funny stories. The Magadha story gives you a very interesting way how to look into the collective karma. I may bring that back sometime.

The vigilance of the karma – watching – is extremely strong. It supersedes all electronic surveillance that we have. Really, because it is within the individual. It is sort of an automatic karmic imprint. That’s how actually the true structure comes.

Audience: Would you say that calamities and natural catastrophies such as earthquakes are a collection of negative karma from negative energies of people?

Rimpoche: People, including insects, everything in that wash.

Audience: ….at a critical point then it becomes a natural disaster if efforts of the people make negative karma and don’t purify it.

Rimpoche: If you can contribute, shape, build, then it also does work for positive karma too. If you don’t, if you keep on creating more collective negativity, it will give you more collective disasters. Natural catastrophies are definitely results of collective karma. Among them there may be some individuals who lose their lives. Some will have nothing happen to them physically, but mentally it does affect them, or financially it affects them. Or financially it might not affect them, but physically they may have a little more inconvenience and difficulty. These are all very subtle, different karmic things that individual has to go through. We don’t have to analyze that, because somebody else is doing that anyway, in a very efficient way.

0:49:26.7 Audience: inaudible:

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Rimpoche: 0:50:07.5 I suppose that much, before I conclude tonight, we have Ed Houppermans here. He has come from Jewel Heart Holland before our retreat. Tomorrow he is leaving, going back to Holland. So we are happy that you have been able to come. I am glad you had a nice time, quite lengthy, so we are very happy to have you here and all the Jewel Heart people from here would like to send their best regards to Jewel Heart Holland.

0:50:07.5 Ed Houppermans…..inaudible…….

0:51:25.9 Rimpoche: I also have a little request to everybody. There is some paper here to work on Sunday to put together for the Dalai Lama project. We have to make a calendar for a couple of people. Either they have to put them together and we did some on Sunday here but it is not done and it has come back as something to do. If one person has to sit down and do all this it would take a little longer. Is Claire here? No. At any rate, somebody who knows how to put this together and if a couple of people could do it, I think it will take like 2,3 minutes or 4,5 minutes at the most……what else?

Announcement:

Rimpoche: inaudible….

0:53:06.6 I hope there will be no difficulty next Tuesday, but in case of bad weather please call the Jewel Heart numbers, either 313 434 4411 or 994 3387, both are area code 313. You will get a message before you start living from distance??

Audience: inaudible………

Rimpoche: inaudible 0:57:47.2 0:57:47.2 end of recording