by Nick Lowry
Karma is about what we do to and with ourselves—about action and consequence and about the shape of our lives. There is something quite mechanical about karma—it is sometime taken as a punitive or rewarding idea or force but really it seems more like a impersonal activity that just happens to effect us on a very personal level. Karma is like gravity; it does not care, but it is inexorable and universal, and it functions through us/on us/ in us / around us and by paying attention to it (if we pay attention) it can show us the effects of our thoughts, words and deeds with great precision. We can choose to consciously choose to interact with our karma , and learn to steer it rather than be forever steered by it, if we can but get out of our normal default state of trying to avoid its effects and so often trying to deny our culpability with those effects. So much of practice invites us to turn towards our karma , into those hard directions, so much against the grain of our habits of being, and if we manage it we find we can atone, become “at-one” with our karma and we can shape our lives by shaping our aspirations.
But before we can take up the heroic quest of atonement and resolve our karmic hairballs with anything like a serious chance of success, we must look into the ground of karma, examine the seeds from which it grows. I like to think of these as a sort of default settings that came prepackaged into our mental /emotional operating system— they are not necessarily what we would prefer but too often they are what we feel stuck with.
Our typical default settings of mind/expression/behavior in life so often revolve around the impulse toward “ pulling in -getting or gaining” which in extremis and untempered by careful reflection can become an overwhelming appetite called greed; equally popular is the converse, the diametric impulse toward “avoiding and pushing away” which in its final and most aggressive expression becomes hostility/anger/hatred; and finally there is the ever popular no mans land of the impulse to simply escape, “to deny,” to leave the scene and dull the senses, to bail on life though any number of compulsive mechanisms of addiction and habit all resulting in a sort of basic ignorance. These are the human default settings that the Buddhist world describes as the three poisons: greed anger and ignorance—they are pervasive and are the operative mechanism of the perpetuation of what people think of a “bad “karma (again karma is inevitable, impersonal, neither good nor bad, just is—the attribution of “bad” is merely subjective labeling).
One popular strategy of the tradition is to try to root out /weed out/starve out the poisons—this is the tack of purification, of most of the older sutra based styles – just get rid of this stuff and step off the wheel of suffering. See through it with insight and logic and drop it. Cold. No doubt in some cases it is just that simple and just that cut and dried— the down side is that for it to work, the inner process of this method and the structure that contains it must be really really solid—most folks must become full time vinaya monastics or forest dwellers to make headway, and it is a gruelingly slow and methodical process, but still if you can do it, it steadily results in happier lives. This is old school practice (about 2500 odd years old) and is inarguably effective.
The other more radical strategy is to take up the poisons and alchemically transform them into medicine—this is a more new fangled tantric method (arising in the area of the Himalayas and in China a mere 1500 years or so ago). It is riskier, faster, and is less often characterized as stepping off the wheel but more seen as a route to direct awakening. Aspiration here is not only to end your own pitiful suffering but must extend to the wider world , and this is due to the fact that the transformational path engages with energies where the other steps away into safe waters– here we dive in, engage the chaos and hold to it until it can open and shift and become an expression of awakening—to make such a unusual process workable and effective and safe (for both you and those around you), the container must include all the other folks that are effected by your karma and its transformation (all sentient beings, in fact) —in other words, it requires an extraordinary and big ethical container— one must “dream the impossible dream” to do this method and in some ways, though it is a faster style it can also be more painful than its counterpart.
The old school way sees its end as nirvana, the new kids see it as enlightenment, a subtle but useful distinction, that highlights whether you are you trying to “snuff out the flames” or are you trying to WAKE UP!
For most of history, which form or style you did was largely dependant on where you happened to grow up and live as certain regions became specialized in one or the other – in isolation, some even sadly fell prey to fundamentalist notions of theirs being the only right way. Small minded bickering over hinayana /mahayana distinctions still arise today, unfortunately. Each side can get pretty self satisfied and righteous . Folks are always prone to such narrow ways. Many are the voices that still insist that one can or should only do one form of practice.
I disagree. In our miraculous modern age –we have amazingly open access to the whole range of methodology and it just may be that depending on your particular default settings and attitudes combined with the even broader and more impersonal karma of your basic life situations and conditions, your heredity, the cards you were dealt so to speak—one style may be much better for you than the other ( you need to test drive and find out) or you may find that you have to move back and forth between them depending on what you are working with – what form the karma is taking.
This is pretty radical. This is a way that goes past both methods and strategies, that I think transcends and includes what has come before it – organizes it at a higher state of energy and information, so to speak. The same way that an atom is included and transcended by a molecule, a molecule by a cell, a cell by a higher organism – each stage of organization keeps all the rest within it but evolves past what came before—I think that is what is happening now with practice and tradition, particularly in this strange new land of the west, and I for one am glad to be participating in it. Our Karma being what it is, we need all the help we can get.