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| Karma |
Just realised that this is my 100th blog. I must have done something very very wrong way back when. Which makes me think of karma and all the various notions and ideas about it.
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| Karma (again) |
The word seems to have infiltrated everyday thought. I often hear someone say, when witnessing some act of which they disapprove, that "karma will get them". Which possibly brings them a degree of satisfaction. Kick someone in the teeth and hey! look out for your teeth in the future. That is how it works. Or does it?
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| Instant Karma |
Consider for a moment that sense of "satisfaction". Buried deep in the Buddhist texts is the teaching that we are our karma. No outside power, force or deity is plotting revenge.
Thinking about it - not always a good thing I admit - it is much like having poor circulation and thus cold extremities. Yet without comparison we might never know and simply go through life none the wiser, thinking ourselves warm. And so, as a thief who has stolen an old ladies purse drinks a beer bought from his ill gotten gains, how deep is his sense of enjoyment? How would he ever know that in fact he is in hell while thinking it a heaven.
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| Heaven of Hell? |
Thus have I heard:-
The end of the world can never be reached by walking. However, without having reached the world's end there is no release from suffering.
I declare that it is in this fathom-long body, with its perceptions and thoughts, that there is the world, the origin of the world, the cessation of the world, and the path leading to the cessation of the world
(Anguttara Nikaya 4:45, Theravada Buddhist Text)
All the sins committed throughout the worlds will fade and disappear together with myself
(Ikkyu)
In the world of Reality there is no self, there is no other than Self
(Sengstan)
Be not conformed to this world
(St Paul)
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| "Love keeps no record of wrongs" (New Testament) |
This whole awful idea of Someone keeping tabs. Yet it seems to me that is exactly what the "self" often is, a way of keeping tabs; the world of judgement, the world of discrimination.
Yet love has no why.
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| Love has no why |
Related Quote:-
Of James Joyce..... "The initial and determining act of judgement in his work is the justification of the commonplace......Joyce saw joined what others held separate: the point of view that life is unspeakable and to be exposed, and the point of view that it is ineffable and to be distilled......he denudes man of what we are accustomed to respect, then summons us to sympathise"
(Richard Ellmann, from the introduction to his biography of James Joyce)
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| James Joyce |
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