Karma arises from the delusion of a "self". This is the basis of dualityand the cause of suffering. Our delusion of a self is the thought of a individual, someone we can identify from the outside as "me". As soon as we have a "me" we start to triangulate its position through the identification of likes and dislikes. This causes desire and aversion which evolves into grouping everything into"us" and "them" as a way of representing ourselves. The intense focus on this is a life long quest of trying to define ourselves through outside sources. This focus distracts us from the beings we were meant to be. The beings we were meant to be exist in complete harmony with each other and our surroundings. In our deepest hearts we know this to be true and it is the true object we seek. By defining ourselves we hope to define happiness in a form we can then possess. Possession requires a possessor, a "me", and so we never break from this cycle. Our Karma is an energy formed by the splitting of ourselves from reality and manipulating the energy field for our own gain. This causes a wave of energy which, since it is manufactured, cannot coincide with reality and is reverberated back to us in the hills and valleys we experience in"life". We never discover that you cannot hold happiness while being immersed in and experiencing it. We must drop the "me" to find happiness.
The "self" is an awareness of our presence in this reality unrelated to the rest of reality. This is, in essence, duality. It is the beginning of our separating ourselves from the "all". The self exists only in the future and the past, for we are experiencing the moment. We disconnect from the moment, what is now, reality and begin to experience it in a sort of broadcast delay where we extrapolate from the past and anticipate the future which is completely reliant on a "self" to experience all this.
The soul cannot point to the body and say "me" without ignoring its existence. Once you place the value of yourself on your physical form you've denied your soul and your very connection to everyone and everything. You cannot be in abuilding while at the same time point it out and identify it, yet we completely believe this is possible with "me". We believe we exist and can still point to ourselves from an outside perspective. How can we be two places at once? You might say our very nature is divine and there by all present. I don't believe the divine would deny its divinity and claim a solid form as it's all, it would identify as all things, as all present. This is a delusion whereby we identify a "me" and disavow our true nature and become engrossed inthe delusion of the mind.
Desire and aversion are the yin and yang of "me". They are the two opposing forces which intersect at the "me" pinpointing it. We desire that which supports the "me" and avoid that which threatens it. We can see on the obvious level the basis ofdesire and aversion as being non-threatening. I like the warm summer and desire it. I dislike the cold of winter and wish to avoid it. It all seems quite simple and harmless. Let's look for a moment at desire and what it leads us to do and experience. We desire comfort which in the reference of enjoying summer and disliking winter seems benign, but where do we draw the line of desire? We want ease and comfort at the expense of natural balance. There has to be a winter for there to be a summer. If we do nothing but pull pleasant to us, we fear the bad which balances it and begin to run from it. We begin a cycle of getting all the good we can while avoiding all the bad we can. It is a system we were born into and so we understand nothing but this and view it as normal. However we can simply observe the actions of nature and see that our perceived existence is unnatural. The cycle of the moon brings light and dark, as does the sun. All living things will die. The growth of spring begets the harvest of summer into fall and the death in winter provides the sources of birth again in the spring.There is a natural ebb and flow to all which exists and we attempt to avoid this process and live always in summer. We wish to tilt the playing field so the good pools with us and the bad pools elsewhere. If we understand and accept the cyclic nature of all of existence, and understand our place in existence we can see that we are due our fair share of good and bad. By hoarding good and dodging bad we create an imbalance which, on a universal scale, will be balanced. If the recoil of "bad" is dodged by us, we are by our very aversion,deflecting our share onto some one else. We cannot gain with out others losing. This is finite; there is no gray area, even when we consider the act of living. We take in food and oxygen and water. The food we take cannot be used byanother, nor can the air or water. Desire and aversion are the act of shifting the balance of the universe to favor "me".
The focus of the whole of our lives then becomes "keeping me happy". We go to school, form social groups, governments, own land, affix taxes, hold jobs, date, marry, procreate, own cars, have animals, own houses, live in good neighborhoods all to make "me" happy. We run and run from the "bad" by continuing to grasp at the "good". The fundamental flaw in this approach is that "good" and "bad" are completely arbitrary. Fire is bad for the trees and creatures living in that ecosystem at the moment, but overall it is good for the land. The land grows rich which is then good for trees and the creatures of the ecosystem. Good and bad are given their designations by "me". I don't like cantaloupe, I don't care for the taste. Perhaps you do, but we know someone who does. It is both good and bad depending on the perspective. The perspective is a viewing of a singular vantage point of all of reality. If our perspective is that of the tree, we don't want fire. If our perspective is that of a creature in the fire, we don't want it. If our perspective is that of the earth, we understand the fire is necessary and want it. If our perspective is of that of the universe we want the cycles played out on Earth because we know they are necessary. What if we have no perspective? What if we purposefully, knowing our connection to the earth and to the universe, shift our perspective to the broadest scope possible? Then we wouldn't want or avoid anything because we know it is all necessary.We would understand that stopping the cycle of desire and aversion would free up the energy and focus needed to experience life from the perspective of all. Desire and aversion is a paradox which saps our energy and focus all for the purpose of identifying "me", which is a delusion because we cannot bein two places at once.
If we could stop time and observe reality of a completely unbiased perspective we would see, clearly, the nature of reality and its inherent balance. We could see the value of each bee in the hive while not seeing any bee as more important. The queen cannot exist without the drones and the drones cannot exist without the queen and so on. If we could maintain this understanding and expand our perception to the global leve lwe can see how we are no more important than anyone else and vice versa. We can see past profession, possession, worth, reputation, status, and all other identifiers of worth. We can see that those identifiers are fleeting and momentary. You can't take it with you and this body is not who you actually are. We could see that we all are part of a field of energy in which we all contribute and use. We could then see that things like religion, nationality, culture, race, age, gender, sexual orientation,etc mean nothing. We could see that every living thing has lived before and been reborn anew. We could see that ultimately we are all related, whether we can relate or not. We were meant to work symbiotically, no beginning and no end, no me and no you, no us, no them, no definition at all.
We separate from the all in order to possess. We want happiness and separate in order to possess it. For there to be possession there must be a possessor and you have to separate from all and define who that possessor is. We define the possessor through desire and aversion. I am a white, heterosexual, male, democrat, Buddhist, tree hugging, individual who is anti-war, anti-slavery, anti-corruption, anti-oppression, pro-government, anti-politician, pro-fairtrade, pro-recycling, etc. Those aren't who I actually am. I cannot put that into words. These are simply expressions, fixed to a moment in time set to represent me. I possess physical things to identify myself such as Birkenstocks. I possess these outlooks in order to define my character, who I am. All of this for the sole purpose of possessing happiness. By defining who I am in this way I ignore my innate nature, that which I cannot describe. That being is energy, not physical. By ignoring that which I am in order to create that which I am not for the purposes of owning the source of happiness I am in discord with myself, my true being. That discord is an energy wave which is karma.
Karma is the energetic field of discordance and disharmony caused by our projection of our "selves" into this reality being other than our truest form.There is an energy we all emit in this reality which is interdependent on the energies of all other living things. We are meant to mesh and compliment this energy field by our presence. The feeling of "being meant forsomething", I believe, comes from this. When we are manipulating our "me" through life wanting only desire and pushing away what we deem unpleasant we cause a discord in the energy field. We emit this discordant energy which is bounced off of all other things and sent back to us, coloring our reality. It cannot be absorbed by or used by anything so it is reflected back to us which shifts our perception. At this point we attempt to adapt, refusing to see this for what it is and instead seeing it as "bad things" which are happening "to me". By refusing to see actual reality and using this disrupted reflection of reality as the new reality we are in effect sticking a magnet on the back of the compass of our soul. We will never find happiness.
Manipulating the energy of who we are to identify a "me" is a manufacturing of energy to create a reality. Since the energy is then filtered through this "me" the reality formed is only an interpretation of actual reality.This delusion gains its power by the person believing in it. They have shifted their focus from their true form through a "me" and exist only in this manufactured reality. In the best of times this reality coexists harmoniously with the manufactured realities of others. In the worst of times it is discordant with the realities of others. We believe everything is happening "to me". We then fight this by chasing desire while avoiding that which we feel is unpleasant. This action only causes us to become even more ensnared in the delusion. Eventually we believe nothing else but this. The Matrix, looking in the pensive, hamster on the wheel are all metaphors for this. We are chasing a carrot we ourselves have placed out of reach.
In the end we desire and avoid that which we can't exactly remember. The stimuli become too overwhelming to handle all at once and our reality begins to degrade. When we use the disrupted reflection, or sonic ping, of reality created by the reverberation of our manufactured energy we create an alternate reality. Even if the differences between actual reality and manufactured reality are not perceivable to the naked eye they are there. We continue the cycle by continuing to manufacture our energy in order to manipulate the now alternate reality only to have our manufactured energy once again reverberated back to us causing a shift and new alternate reality. It's like making a copy of a copy of a copy. Eventually it degrades to become useless and illegible. We may never see this error as we completely commit to the "me" which brings the alternate reality. We have ignored our true selves to the point where we can no longer even believe in the possibility of it. The delusion becomes reality; we get lost in the matrix and define happiness as the absence of sadness. True happiness simply doesn't exist in the matrix. We cannot manipulate energy outside of ourselves into happiness then take it into ourselves. It is, by the act of manufacturing it, foreign, an illusion. Happiness doesn't exist there.
We finally discover that true happiness is actually the very makeup of our true selves. It is the energy field of all. We all exist in it all the time; we area part of the happiness solution, not a colloid. It is when we extract ourselves from the whole in order to own the whole in order to own happiness that we experience the lack of happiness. We create the paradox of samsara, which is the delusion that we are anything other than a part of the whole. Understanding this we begin to cut away at our delusions, at the cords ofattachment which we have put in place while we thought we were chasing happiness. The cords of attachment only serve to hold us against the natural ebb and flow of life. When we cut them and let go, really let go and float with the current we become the current, we become the stream, the continent, the planet, the galaxy, the universe, nothing. We are one giant schizophrenic mind which has forgotten that it is one voice, one being, one energy containing all. If we, as a whole, can remember that maybe we can remember that we are no mind at all and fully realize nothingness, the complete surrender, the absence of control, the blending of ebb and flow, nothing and everything all at once.
I believe to find this each of us has to let go, drop the illusion, awaken and simply be. We must walk within the light of truth always and become the light until the light becomes the beam it projects. Until there is no beginning and no ending. Only then can we understand true happiness, until then it is only an interpretation of a memory of being whole many lifetimes ago, covered by the bodies of ego we and others have inhabited in order to find what was innately there to begin with. We can't be two places at once, but we can be everywhere and nowhere at once.
The "self" is an awareness of our presence in this reality unrelated to the rest of reality. This is, in essence, duality. It is the beginning of our separating ourselves from the "all". The self exists only in the future and the past, for we are experiencing the moment. We disconnect from the moment, what is now, reality and begin to experience it in a sort of broadcast delay where we extrapolate from the past and anticipate the future which is completely reliant on a "self" to experience all this.
The soul cannot point to the body and say "me" without ignoring its existence. Once you place the value of yourself on your physical form you've denied your soul and your very connection to everyone and everything. You cannot be in abuilding while at the same time point it out and identify it, yet we completely believe this is possible with "me". We believe we exist and can still point to ourselves from an outside perspective. How can we be two places at once? You might say our very nature is divine and there by all present. I don't believe the divine would deny its divinity and claim a solid form as it's all, it would identify as all things, as all present. This is a delusion whereby we identify a "me" and disavow our true nature and become engrossed inthe delusion of the mind.
Desire and aversion are the yin and yang of "me". They are the two opposing forces which intersect at the "me" pinpointing it. We desire that which supports the "me" and avoid that which threatens it. We can see on the obvious level the basis ofdesire and aversion as being non-threatening. I like the warm summer and desire it. I dislike the cold of winter and wish to avoid it. It all seems quite simple and harmless. Let's look for a moment at desire and what it leads us to do and experience. We desire comfort which in the reference of enjoying summer and disliking winter seems benign, but where do we draw the line of desire? We want ease and comfort at the expense of natural balance. There has to be a winter for there to be a summer. If we do nothing but pull pleasant to us, we fear the bad which balances it and begin to run from it. We begin a cycle of getting all the good we can while avoiding all the bad we can. It is a system we were born into and so we understand nothing but this and view it as normal. However we can simply observe the actions of nature and see that our perceived existence is unnatural. The cycle of the moon brings light and dark, as does the sun. All living things will die. The growth of spring begets the harvest of summer into fall and the death in winter provides the sources of birth again in the spring.There is a natural ebb and flow to all which exists and we attempt to avoid this process and live always in summer. We wish to tilt the playing field so the good pools with us and the bad pools elsewhere. If we understand and accept the cyclic nature of all of existence, and understand our place in existence we can see that we are due our fair share of good and bad. By hoarding good and dodging bad we create an imbalance which, on a universal scale, will be balanced. If the recoil of "bad" is dodged by us, we are by our very aversion,deflecting our share onto some one else. We cannot gain with out others losing. This is finite; there is no gray area, even when we consider the act of living. We take in food and oxygen and water. The food we take cannot be used byanother, nor can the air or water. Desire and aversion are the act of shifting the balance of the universe to favor "me".
The focus of the whole of our lives then becomes "keeping me happy". We go to school, form social groups, governments, own land, affix taxes, hold jobs, date, marry, procreate, own cars, have animals, own houses, live in good neighborhoods all to make "me" happy. We run and run from the "bad" by continuing to grasp at the "good". The fundamental flaw in this approach is that "good" and "bad" are completely arbitrary. Fire is bad for the trees and creatures living in that ecosystem at the moment, but overall it is good for the land. The land grows rich which is then good for trees and the creatures of the ecosystem. Good and bad are given their designations by "me". I don't like cantaloupe, I don't care for the taste. Perhaps you do, but we know someone who does. It is both good and bad depending on the perspective. The perspective is a viewing of a singular vantage point of all of reality. If our perspective is that of the tree, we don't want fire. If our perspective is that of a creature in the fire, we don't want it. If our perspective is that of the earth, we understand the fire is necessary and want it. If our perspective is of that of the universe we want the cycles played out on Earth because we know they are necessary. What if we have no perspective? What if we purposefully, knowing our connection to the earth and to the universe, shift our perspective to the broadest scope possible? Then we wouldn't want or avoid anything because we know it is all necessary.We would understand that stopping the cycle of desire and aversion would free up the energy and focus needed to experience life from the perspective of all. Desire and aversion is a paradox which saps our energy and focus all for the purpose of identifying "me", which is a delusion because we cannot bein two places at once.
If we could stop time and observe reality of a completely unbiased perspective we would see, clearly, the nature of reality and its inherent balance. We could see the value of each bee in the hive while not seeing any bee as more important. The queen cannot exist without the drones and the drones cannot exist without the queen and so on. If we could maintain this understanding and expand our perception to the global leve lwe can see how we are no more important than anyone else and vice versa. We can see past profession, possession, worth, reputation, status, and all other identifiers of worth. We can see that those identifiers are fleeting and momentary. You can't take it with you and this body is not who you actually are. We could see that we all are part of a field of energy in which we all contribute and use. We could then see that things like religion, nationality, culture, race, age, gender, sexual orientation,etc mean nothing. We could see that every living thing has lived before and been reborn anew. We could see that ultimately we are all related, whether we can relate or not. We were meant to work symbiotically, no beginning and no end, no me and no you, no us, no them, no definition at all.
We separate from the all in order to possess. We want happiness and separate in order to possess it. For there to be possession there must be a possessor and you have to separate from all and define who that possessor is. We define the possessor through desire and aversion. I am a white, heterosexual, male, democrat, Buddhist, tree hugging, individual who is anti-war, anti-slavery, anti-corruption, anti-oppression, pro-government, anti-politician, pro-fairtrade, pro-recycling, etc. Those aren't who I actually am. I cannot put that into words. These are simply expressions, fixed to a moment in time set to represent me. I possess physical things to identify myself such as Birkenstocks. I possess these outlooks in order to define my character, who I am. All of this for the sole purpose of possessing happiness. By defining who I am in this way I ignore my innate nature, that which I cannot describe. That being is energy, not physical. By ignoring that which I am in order to create that which I am not for the purposes of owning the source of happiness I am in discord with myself, my true being. That discord is an energy wave which is karma.
Karma is the energetic field of discordance and disharmony caused by our projection of our "selves" into this reality being other than our truest form.There is an energy we all emit in this reality which is interdependent on the energies of all other living things. We are meant to mesh and compliment this energy field by our presence. The feeling of "being meant forsomething", I believe, comes from this. When we are manipulating our "me" through life wanting only desire and pushing away what we deem unpleasant we cause a discord in the energy field. We emit this discordant energy which is bounced off of all other things and sent back to us, coloring our reality. It cannot be absorbed by or used by anything so it is reflected back to us which shifts our perception. At this point we attempt to adapt, refusing to see this for what it is and instead seeing it as "bad things" which are happening "to me". By refusing to see actual reality and using this disrupted reflection of reality as the new reality we are in effect sticking a magnet on the back of the compass of our soul. We will never find happiness.
Manipulating the energy of who we are to identify a "me" is a manufacturing of energy to create a reality. Since the energy is then filtered through this "me" the reality formed is only an interpretation of actual reality.This delusion gains its power by the person believing in it. They have shifted their focus from their true form through a "me" and exist only in this manufactured reality. In the best of times this reality coexists harmoniously with the manufactured realities of others. In the worst of times it is discordant with the realities of others. We believe everything is happening "to me". We then fight this by chasing desire while avoiding that which we feel is unpleasant. This action only causes us to become even more ensnared in the delusion. Eventually we believe nothing else but this. The Matrix, looking in the pensive, hamster on the wheel are all metaphors for this. We are chasing a carrot we ourselves have placed out of reach.
In the end we desire and avoid that which we can't exactly remember. The stimuli become too overwhelming to handle all at once and our reality begins to degrade. When we use the disrupted reflection, or sonic ping, of reality created by the reverberation of our manufactured energy we create an alternate reality. Even if the differences between actual reality and manufactured reality are not perceivable to the naked eye they are there. We continue the cycle by continuing to manufacture our energy in order to manipulate the now alternate reality only to have our manufactured energy once again reverberated back to us causing a shift and new alternate reality. It's like making a copy of a copy of a copy. Eventually it degrades to become useless and illegible. We may never see this error as we completely commit to the "me" which brings the alternate reality. We have ignored our true selves to the point where we can no longer even believe in the possibility of it. The delusion becomes reality; we get lost in the matrix and define happiness as the absence of sadness. True happiness simply doesn't exist in the matrix. We cannot manipulate energy outside of ourselves into happiness then take it into ourselves. It is, by the act of manufacturing it, foreign, an illusion. Happiness doesn't exist there.
We finally discover that true happiness is actually the very makeup of our true selves. It is the energy field of all. We all exist in it all the time; we area part of the happiness solution, not a colloid. It is when we extract ourselves from the whole in order to own the whole in order to own happiness that we experience the lack of happiness. We create the paradox of samsara, which is the delusion that we are anything other than a part of the whole. Understanding this we begin to cut away at our delusions, at the cords ofattachment which we have put in place while we thought we were chasing happiness. The cords of attachment only serve to hold us against the natural ebb and flow of life. When we cut them and let go, really let go and float with the current we become the current, we become the stream, the continent, the planet, the galaxy, the universe, nothing. We are one giant schizophrenic mind which has forgotten that it is one voice, one being, one energy containing all. If we, as a whole, can remember that maybe we can remember that we are no mind at all and fully realize nothingness, the complete surrender, the absence of control, the blending of ebb and flow, nothing and everything all at once.
I believe to find this each of us has to let go, drop the illusion, awaken and simply be. We must walk within the light of truth always and become the light until the light becomes the beam it projects. Until there is no beginning and no ending. Only then can we understand true happiness, until then it is only an interpretation of a memory of being whole many lifetimes ago, covered by the bodies of ego we and others have inhabited in order to find what was innately there to begin with. We can't be two places at once, but we can be everywhere and nowhere at once.
