(upbeat music) - This podcast is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for your life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you and happy listening. - So we come to the third of the mind-turning reflections. So just to recap, we've already heard about and reflected on the precious human birth, which has its emphasis on the opportunity we have in this lifetime to practice the Dharma and all the favorable conditions that have given rise to that possibility. And we've heard in the second reflection, the reflection on impermanence and death, which stimulates the sense of conviction and urgency and purity of practice. And those two talks very much go together. Those two reflections very much go together. And now we come to the third and fourth of the mind-turning reflections, which again, go together. And you could have the one on karma and rebirth first and the one on all the one on the fourths of conditioned existence first. It doesn't really matter, they go together. So I'm going to be talking about karma and rebirth, mainly in fact about karma and karma vipaka. And probably the best-known formulation of the law of karma is the one that we all know from the tama pada. So I'm just going to remind us of some of those verses from the first chapter in the dhamma pada. And this is bantas translation. And the dhamma pada must be one of the earliest Buddhist texts. It must be pretty close to what the Buddha actually taught. So the Buddha says experiences are preceded by mind, led by mind and produced by mind. If one speaks or acts with an impure mind, suffering follows, even as the cartwheel follows the hoof of the ox during the cart. Experiences are preceded by mind, led by mind and produced by mind. If one speaks or acts with a pure mind, happiness follows like a shadow that never departs. Those who entertain such thoughts as he abused me, he beat me, he conquered me, he robbed me, will not steal their hatred. Those who do not entertain such thoughts as he abused me, he beat me, he conquered me, he robbed me, will steal their hatred. Not by hatred are hatreds ever pacified here in the world. They are pacified by love. This is the eternal law. Others do not realize that we are all heading for death. Those who do realize it will compose their quarrels. The evil doer grieves in both worlds. He grieves here and he grieves there. He suffers torments and torments himself, seeing his own foul deeds. The doer of good rejoices in both worlds. He rejoices here and he rejoices there. He rejoices and is glad seeing his own pure deeds. The evil doer burns in both worlds. He burns here and he burns there. He burns with remorse, thinking he has done evil. And he burns with suffering, having gone after death to an evil state. The doer of good delights in both worlds. He delights here and he delights there. He delights in this life, thinking he has done good. And he delights after death, having gone to a state of happiness. And I think probably those verses would be enough to reflect on in terms of the law of karma. And it's actually all in those verses. They're well worth reflecting on. So the Buddha's enlightenment experience, the most essential formulation of that is the formulation that we know of as conditions co-arising or dependent origination. So this is the most essential way of expressing the experience of the Buddha at his enlightenment. So the realisation, the actual experience he had that transformed his life and answered the questions that he'd set out with on his noble quest. And one of the simplest ways of expressing that is that all things arise in dependence on conditions. And they cease when those conditions no longer hold. So it sounds very basic and it sounds quite easy, but it's so far reaching and so hard to grasp. And it's an understanding that wasn't in the world. It wasn't in this world until the Buddha saw it and realised it for himself. And that most essential formulation is given shape, is given application in many different ways. It can be applied to everything. And there are many ways in which we're familiar with it. The four noble truths, the 12 nidanas, are some of the most familiar. But it's the same thing when we come to looking at the law of karma. The law of karma is usually expressed as skillful actions lead to happiness or desirable outcomes. Unskillful actions lead to suffering or undesirable outcomes. So it's a particular way of a particular set of actions that we're looking at and we're going to look at what those actions are. So it's saying that some particular actions have particular outcomes, other actions have the opposite outcomes. Karma literally means action, although it's got many, many associations. And action in this case refers to actions of body, speech and mind. So it's not just overt actions or even just speech, but it's our mental states. In fact, it's primarily the matter of our mental states. And the distinction that's being made in the formulation of karma is between skillful or unskillful actions. So I'm sure you and all know this already, but skillful actions are those that are performed on the basis of positive mental states. That is the opposite of unskillful mental states. So unskillful mental states are usually referred to as mental states based in greed, hatred and delusion or ignorance. So anything we do when we're in a mental state that's tinged with craving or anger or hatred or ignorance is going to have a painful outcome. And anything we do that when we're in a positive mental state based on the opposite of those is going to have a good outcome in inverted commas. So that's the law of karma. And one of the first things that needs saying is that it doesn't work the other way around. So it's very, very important to make this point quite early on, which is that just because we're having, if we're having a painful experience and experience of suffering, it does not necessarily mean that that's as a result of an unskillful action. The teaching that makes sense of that is the teaching of the five niyamas, which I hope you're all familiar with. So the five niyamas explain different modes of in which conditionality can be enacted in which it takes place. There's the physical inorganic, which is the uta niyama. There's the biological, which is the bija niyama. And then there's what's referred to as the non-vallitional mental, which could be seen as the psychological in a sense, but it's non-vallitional, that's the distinction, which is chitta niyama or mano niyama. And then there's the ethical mental events. So that's the volitional aspect of conditionality which is karma niyama. And that's what we're going to be particularly looking at. And then there's a fist category, which is spiritual or dharmic niyama. It's a bit harder to say exactly what that is, but it could be seen as other power, something coming from outside of normal conditionality coming into play. It could be seen in our experience as the spiral path. So it's a sense of a different kind of conditionality, a different experience of conditionality, but to look more closely at karma niyama. So this is conditionality, which takes effect on the basis of volitional mental states, and additional activity. And maybe one of the first things to say is that there is karma and there's karma vipaka. So as a result of our karma or our volitional activity, there is an effect which is pleasurable or painful, which is the consequences that we reap as it were of our states of mind, which is our karma vipaka. And there's not much we can do about karma vipaka. In fact, there's not much we can do about pleasure and pain generally. Pleasure and pain can be caused by all sorts of things. It can be caused by other niyamas, or it can be the effect of karmic activity of our own. But either way, once we're into the effects of something, it's non-karmic at that point. There's nothing good or bad about it. It just is pleasurable or painful. Life is pleasurable or painful. It just is. So we can't do much about that. And actually, it can be quite a relief to know that. I think it can encourage us to let go of the past and not to angst too much about the past. But we can choose how we respond to pleasure and pain. And this is something that's obviously key to our understanding of how the world works. Because the alternative model would be that either that everything is just random, so that it's just luck. It's just, there's no reason why things should work one way or the other way. Why some people should seem to have more pleasurable experiences of life and other people have more suffering. It's just random. And it's not either, the opposite of that, the extreme opposite, is that somewhere it's just fate, whether that's to do with God or not, but it's kind of written in stone what's going to happen to us and there's nothing we can do about it. The in-between those two extremes is the possibility of change and the possibility of choice. And in Bantis terms, the possibility of the creative rather than a reactive response and the possibility of transformation. So this is where the whole question of free will comes in, that this is maybe something we can reflect on and talk about further. So our actions have consequences, but it's not foreordained what kind of actions will carry out. So we experience pleasure or pain. And actually, there is the potential to have a choice at that point. It's the famous gap on the wheel that we used to. And the fact that there is this possibility of change is obviously very, very significant. I asked Banty once, I remember being quite confused about I asked him, how can we change if our experience is rooted in greed, hatred, and delusion? Then how can we ever kind of think ourselves outside that box? And I remember him saying, there's nothing wrong with our experience. It's our interpretation of our experience that's the problem. So our experience is just is, our experience is how things are. But we habitually misinterpret it. But we have our experience, we have the raw material that is showing us how things are all the time. It's not as though we have to go and find how things are. They're staring us in the face the whole time. We just have to see them. But in order to see them, we need a dynamic framework. We need some way to help us shift our habitual way of seeing things. But we don't need very much in the way of a dynamic framework, actually. We probably all have everything we need in terms of a dynamic framework. So it's interesting to reflect that we have our experience and we have a dynamic framework. And actually, that's all we need. We just have to do the work. And it's the same message that's in the first of the two mind-turning reflections. We have the precious human birth and opportunity. We have come across the Dharma and we have the faculties to make sense of it. We have the ability to make sense of it. And then we have our raw experience of impermanence and death. It's around us all the time. And we just have to practice. Let's go back to karma and skilful or unskilful. It's also interesting to reflect on how do we tell whether something is skilful or unskilful. It's actually again remarkably easy. It's not as though we have to sort of sit down and get hold of our mental state and look in a book to work out whether it's based in craving or hatred. It's so simple. There's an instinctive sense once we're reasonably adult. There is actually all of us have the potential for making that distinction. It's inbuilt. We're born with the potential for making that distinction. Maybe it's very small children where the universe is an extension of us. It's a little bit harder to start to make that distinction. But it doesn't take much for... You can see that children have that ability to understand that once it's sort of spelled out in terms of, you know, if you hit him, he'll probably hit you back and he won't like it. And it would hurt if he hit you, so don't hit him. But we have this natural inbuilt ability to distinguish. We just know we're born with a conscience. We just know whether something is skillful or unskillful. It's something we need to work on. It's something we need to refine. And the more we practice, the more sensitized and clear we become about the distinction. But it's interesting that it's a law of the universe that activity based on greed, hatred or delusion will eventually result in suffering. It sort of begs the question, well, why? Why should that be the case? And you start hearing these terms like we live in an ethical universe. Well, it seems very strange that the... Why should we live in an ethical universe as opposed to an unethical universe? And I'm gonna go a little bit further on, a bit more into why that might be the case and how it actually happens, how it works. But for the moment, we'll just take it on trust that that is how it seems to work. And in terms of karma, the teaching of karma is obviously very bound up with the idea, the concept of re-becoming or rebirth. It's quite embedded, in fact. The two are quite embedded, but you don't have to necessarily embrace both. But the Buddha's enlightenment experience did arise very clearly out of a reflection or how it's come down to us, is that it was very bound up with a reflection. He saw his past, he saw his past lives, and he saw them unfolding. And he could see the past lives of all other beings, and he could see them stretching into the future. And you get a very strong sense that what he could see, the significance of this, was he could see how they unfolded, he could see the law that governs their progression. And on the basis of that was his understanding of enlightenment. So, karma seems to be very, very bound up as part of the understanding of conditioned co-production. And the Buddha's explanation behind re-becoming, we don't have to take it on, it's foreign to our culture. It may take a bit of time to see whether it fits for us, whether it makes sense for us. But it hasn't been contradicted by any of the schools of Buddhism down the ages. So it's worth giving it considerable weight. But we can see the workings of karma and karma, the parka, simply as they operate in this lifetime. It's very clear from the verses in the dharma pada, that karma has an effect in this lifetime, as well as it's postulated in future lifetimes. So they're not separate, but it's two ways to look at the workings of karma. So there's the immediate application of karma in the immediate aftermath of an event, an action. So what happens when we do something that sees a skillful or unskillful? Is there an immediate response? This is what the dharma pada is telling us. And it would imply that there's a, what the dharma pada is saying is there's an immediate sense of remorse or clear conscience rejoicing delight. So we can look at, well, do we experience that? It's saying that, do we have, if we've been unskillful, do we have an immediate natural response of free or apatrapia? Or do we have the opposite when we've been skillful? Do we have a sense of clearness, clarity, delight, gladness, clear conscience? And then there's looking further into the future in terms of how our actions play themselves out. So traditionally it would be seen as a future becoming. But we can see it just as a, we tend to see it more as a continual process that's happening, that's unfolding. It's as though sometimes that a model that we can use is as though we're a bundle of samskaras. Bantis said we're a bundle of habits and the lot of them are bad habits. So we can see ourselves as essentially a kind of momentum and it's been gathering steam for a long time and it's got lots and lots of threads to it. So it's as though we're this collection of multicolored threads and some are sickers and others. And we're, if you cut through this rope which is made up of all these threads at any one point, you'd see a particular slice of what we are at that time. And effectively that's kind of what happens when we die is that whatever we are collection of samskaras is at that point is still what's driving on into the future. But it's an ongoing process. It's not something that just happens at death. It's not something that just takes shape in a future birth. We're always recreating ourselves. We're always re-becoming. So is this our experience? Are these two aspects of the unfolding of karma and karma vipaka? Is this what actually happens if we look at our experience? So how do we feel if we've, something has happened, probably something painful and we've responded with anger? Just think how we feel. Or how do we feel if something has happened and we've responded with empathy? How do we feel if we've responded with generosity or how do we feel if we've responded with a tighter, more self-oriented response? How do we feel if we've, when we've been mindful and we've been sensitive and when we've not? So that's like the immediate experience of skillfulness or unskillfulness. And in terms of looking a bit longer into the future, well, we can look back and think, well, how have we changed over the years? And do we get a sense of our practice having influenced that change? Sometimes it's easiest to look at other people and think, how have they changed? And how are they changing? It can be quite hard to see our own process of change. Five, six years ago, we had a couple of retreats for women who'd been ordained for 10 years or more. And one of the first things we did was ask ourselves, did we think we were any nearer to stream entry than we have been when we were ordained? And everybody said yes. And it was very marked. It was as though with 10 years, with 10 years practice, it was a long enough period of time to look and have some kind, that kind of perspective and see the effect of our practice. And I felt it was very, very affirming because you can doubt it in the short term and you can sometimes despair that you've made any progress. But actually, if you look back and have that kind of perspective, you can see that, well, hopefully, you can see that your practice has had an effect and that we have changed. And in our experience, they're going to see whether our experience bears out the law of karma. Sometimes it can be hard to understand how karma works because it can seem as though, sometimes it can seem as though people get away with it or they're lucky. But the law of karma, one of the explanations of how it works is that karma will always, your viparka will always take effects, but you don't know when. But it's there, it's as though the seed has been sown every time we act, another seed has been added on one side or the other. And the theory is that different viparkas will kick into effect at different times and there's a whole theory behind the relative priority of karma taking effect. Apparently, what's most likely to happen is that weighty karma, so something that's a big karmic consequence is likely to have priority. And then if we've just died or it's like the most recent karma, so what's very fresh will be having an effect. And then there's habitual karma, which is worth bearing in mind, which is that all those little things that we do, which seem so insignificant that actually add up over a long period of time habitual karma has an effect. And finally, there's the catchall of residual karma. So we don't know exactly when things are going to have an effect. And then how do we actually put the, our understanding of karma and karma of the parka into practice? Because hopefully you know already everything that I've just said. But despite the theory, the dynamic framework and our experience, which is hopefully reflecting this back all the time, we seem to not act as though we believe it. In fact, we often seem to act as though we believe the opposite. We tend to go about life as though a favorable outcome is most likely to happen if we have, rather than if we give. And if we win, rather than if we understand. So that's worth reflecting on. In terms of what we seem to go about trying to create. It's as though we think a favorable outcome will be if we can have, have things, more and more things, rather than give. And if we can win, for example, rather than understand. I'm sure we all know this. There's a desire to get things and to hold on to them, and the desire to kind of prove ourselves right. Although if we think about the feeling associated with those different actions, we can probably get a sense of it being a more pleasant experience when we give. It's actually completely topsy-turvy. It's completely upside down. It's very, very strange. It's as though the spiritual life is a whole relearning and the turning upside down of some of our most basic assumptions. So, for example, sometimes we've had maybe an impulse to give. We have second thoughts because it means parting with something. So our worry is that we're going to have less. So it will be smaller somehow. But if we manage to do it and we give, actually, we tend to feel bigger. We tend to feel bigger and more expansive and connected. And I suppose we just have to try to be, to reflect on this. And to let it sink in more and more deeply. That actually, we'll be happier if we can give. So we tend to just dig a hole. We tend to just stand on the basis of old assumptions. We just tend to reinforce them rather than learn the lessons and start to create something new, which is more pleasant for us and others. So we need to reflect on karma because we don't, even though it's a very simple teaching and although we may believe it in theory, we don't always practice it. So we need to reflect on it to bring it alive in our lives. And the good thing about it is that as well as reflecting on it, it's a very, very practical teaching. In fact, it needs putting into action. It needs, it's something that needs to be not just thought about and reflected on, but it needs to translate into action. Karma is action. And it gives us somewhere to start. Sometimes we can, we can just feel we don't know where to start with our spiritual lives. But it's something Vantage may very clear that we can always choose and we can always choose to act skillfully rather than unschoolfully. We always have that option regardless of circumstances. So it gives us somewhere to start, but we have to put it into practice and that may well mean that we need to translate it into bite-sized chunks. So it may well be, for example, we have karma and the law of conditionality in the ethical sense, or we have the five and ten precepts. So we have, we have these guidelines as to how we can practice. But even then, we probably need to translate the precepts into something personally, particularly applicable. So it's worth bearing mind that from time to time, we probably will need to create personal precepts for ourselves. We need to make the, not to just always dwell in the theoretical realm, but to also make things tangible and concrete. And we also need to understand that there's no such thing as inaction in terms of karma. We like to think that if we're just rather vague and we don't do anything very much, that somehow nothing much will happen. This extraordinary how vague we can be around it. But Vantage said there's no, there's no standing still in the spiritual life. If you're not moving forward, you're slipping backwards, that's one of his aphorisms. So we not only need to be not doing unskillful things, we need to be doing skillful things. And so not doing is actually perpetuating a state of craving and ignorance as much as doing unskillful things is. So again, in terms of personal presences, this is something that Vantage Ashton has drawn out. Maybe something we can talk about in our groups. That it's quite useful to have this sense of the theory and the concrete and what we're moving away from and what we're moving towards. And we can use those axes to help us formulate personal presences. And the practice of karma. Well, it gives us, it gives us, as I said, it gives us somewhere to start. It gives us a way of practicing that we can always use. Because sometimes we can feel a bit stuck. We can feel either we just don't know what to do next, or we can have these leaps of enthusiasm where we think we'll try to be enlightened. We'll try and have insight, we'll try and transform ourselves in that kind of way. And actually somewhere in the middle, although we'd like change to be fast, and sometimes we feel, speaking personally, that we're prepared to do almost anything if we could just make it happen fast, it's actually a gradual process, but with profound implications. So, spiritual change is something we need to be prepared to work on for lifetimes. And so, going back to the nature of the mind turning reflections, well, traditionally, this particular reflection on karma and karma is a parker. Traditionally, it's seen as two things. It's seen as reminding ourselves of the danger of rebirth in lower realms. So, it's the waking us up to the fact that if we practice, if we commit unskillful actions, we're creating, we're building up painful experience in lower realms. And we can also understand this in terms of where we're building up painful existence for ourselves. We're building up confusion, doubt, painful experience, suffering. But the other side of that, the other side of the wake-up call, is that there's massive potential benefit to acting skillfully. So, traditionally, we often reflect on the benefits of a practice. So, we can reflect on the benefits of skillful actions. We can change ourselves for a start. We can trunk, it is the way in which we change ourselves. So, we change ourselves by acting skillfully. We change others' experience of us. And we change our experience of the world. So, there's these three connected ways in which we bring about transformation by choosing to act skillfully. And I'm going to go into each of these headings a little bit. So, first of all, in terms of changing ourselves. Well, changing ourselves is probably got a sense that it's about, well, what are we? We're trying to change our being, we're trying to change our consciousness, we're trying to change our essence, our nature. And there's a danger. There's a danger of thinking that we're somehow misunderstanding the nature of change. There's a danger of thinking that we'll still be who we are, but we'll just understand things differently. So, the danger in spiritual life of thinking that we'll still be essentially who we are, we'll be able to hold on to that, but we'll just have understood something. We'll have done enough reading, we've read enough books, and we'll have enough grasp of enough dynamic formulations, and somehow that will mean that everything's different. But actually, as I was saying in terms of the nature of change, the nature of change actually has to be very gradual. We have to lay the foundations, we have to prepare the foundations. The whole thing about the path of gradual steps is that we do the work, we do the gradual steps, and then radical transformation, real transformation will arise, but we can't force it, we can't make it happen, we can't choose to make it happen, we have to just keep preparing the ground. So, for example, in meditation, we understand that the importance of deonic mental states, for example, is not that they're in ending themselves, but that if we have some experience of deanna, it has an effect on our consciousness. When we're in deanna, we're in a very, very different state of consciousness, and with a bit of familiarity with that and a bit of that having a longer lasting effect, apparently our consciousness becomes more pliable and more amenable to being able to actually absorb and make use of an experience of insight. So, it's not that insight doesn't, with all of our moments of insight, and they will have had an effect on us, but for them to really have a long-lasting transformative effect on us, we need to have loosened up our consciousness, we need to have prepared it, it needs to be habitually more positive and more receptive, and less identified, less fixed, and the practice of ethics too. So, speaking of somebody who doesn't experience a lot of deanna, I find it very reassuring that the practice of ethics kind of is working on the same ground, because the practice of ethics, the practice of skill, practicing skillfully, so the practice of karma in terms of skillful actions, is not just about becoming more skillful, and that therefore the action, the consequences will be that we're happier. This seems to be something that we hit it over and over again in our spiritual lives, it's so easy to end up with the view that somehow we're practicing in order to just make samsara more acceptable, I'm sure this is something my tray will be going into. So ultimately the motivation for practicing spiritually, and for practicing ethically, is that ultimately we're trying to transcend karma altogether. There's something that's quite hard to get our heads around, but the Buddha had gone beyond being skillful or unskillful. It's something we don't, it is hard to imagine, it sounds a bit blank, but there comes a point where although karma of the parka may still be playing itself out, we no longer need to act to be making that choice to act skillfully or unskillfully, because our whole being, our whole consciousness, is so different, that we just naturally are responding from a basis of understanding of reality, and that's of a different order to simply being skillful or unskillful. Being skillful is kind of by definition a duality. It's the opposite of being unskillful, so while we've got that choice, we're still having to make that choice, that effort to be skillful, but there comes a time when it just would be our nature to be compassionate and wise, because that's how we would be. But we have to begin by transforming ourselves, and one way in which we do this is ethically. So we're changing from a narrow, tight, self-interested experience of the world, to something that's broader, more flexible, more empathic. We can get a sense of that shift in quality, and this is what we need to do in a way, and one way of looking at the practice of ethics is that it is how an enlightened being would naturally be. So although we're practicing on a different level, and we're practicing in a rather imperfect way, the fact that we make the effort to practice skillfully gradually changes our being. It's as though you have these two scales. The scales are very useful in terms of explaining how change comes about, so it's as though we're just dropping seeds of skillfulness in one side of the scales, or unskillfulness in the other side of the scales, and at some point, out of all those little drops, something shifts. And as this happens at different times in our spiritual life, this shift, it happens at stream entry, it happens at enlightenment, where qualitatively there's a whole shift in the process. But we need to be doing these little drops, we need to be doing that in order for that shift to then come about. And there's a very deep-seated change that we're trying to bring about, we're trying to root out ignorance, craving, hatred. But we can't really get at it immediately, we can't get at it head on, and say we have to work at it from this point of skillfulness, until such time as we are in a different kind of relationship with the world, and then something happens. And the Yoga Chara has a model for this, which I'm going to manage not to go into in too much detail, this time, which says that at the heart of our delusion and the root of our craving is the fact that we have four delusions about self. These are the four Atma kleshas, and they are self-view or Atma drishti, self-delusion or Atma mohar, self-conceit Atma mana, and attachment to self, which is Atma sineha. So self-view is the collection of views we have about our self, we think that we're substantial, we think that we're something we can rely on and get hold of. And the other side of that is that it's a delusion. Actually, there is no fixed self. And another side of this is self-conceit, which is, it's that we are, we are the centre of the universe. It's just, it's this concease of our experiences very deeply, that we are where everything is. And attachment to self, which goes with that, is that, and we are wonderful, we're very deeply attached to ourselves. This may also take, it can take a sort of perverted form of the opposite of that, but essentially we love, we're very, very important to ourselves. And the usefulness of the Ogechara model is that this is hardwired, it's just how we are. It's a bit like the way our consciousness is. We can only make sense of things in terms of time and space, but actually they're just relative, that they're not absolute things, they're part of our relative reality, but we can't experience outside of them. It's the nature of human beings to have experience in a particular way. And part of our experience, the nature of our experience is to have this wrong, deluded understanding of ourselves. And that is the problem, that's what we're trying to root out, that's what we're trying to transform, but we can't get it at its head on. So although it's really, really important, we do get down to these views and these experiences. We also, what's helpful about this model is that we shouldn't give ourselves a hard time for having these views, having these wrong views. They're not an ethical matter as such. There's nothing, you know, we can't immediately do anything about them, they're just how we are. And in fact, we maybe need to, we need to approach them quite differently. So we approach them sideways, we approach them gradually, we approach them by practicing ethically, by practicing skillfully. Until such time as our experience is a much more positive one, our relationship between self and other is much more positive. And then what happens as a basis of having created a much more skillful and much more in line with reality experience is that one of these shifts can then take place. So it's not something that we make happen, but it's as though we we can prepare the ground and then at some point some fundamental shift happens. It's called a turning about in the deepest seat of consciousness. And that's when wisdom really arises, that's when ignorance is really transformed. So the practice of ethics does actually go a very long way, because ethics is about karma, ethics is about the relationship between self and other. And fundamentally, that is the root of all our delusion and our craving. So ethics, our practice of ethics, is a gradual process with enormous potential and implications that if you follow a logical conclusion of that, it is a path which takes us all the way to enlightenment. It's not separate from the practice of meditation and the practice of the arising of wisdom. It's a continual process, but we start with ethics and yeah, that is where we need to start. But it's not just about transforming ourselves, it is about transforming ourselves and it's about transforming ourselves into enlightened beings. But there's a danger maybe of getting a little self-absorbed in which case we won't get anywhere. So we also need to be aware that the practice of ethics, the practice of being aware of karma and karma vipaka, is an understanding of the fact that we have an effect on other beings. It's very much about the relationship between ourselves and others. If we act unskillfully, we don't just harm ourselves, we cause pain to others. And we need to be awake to that, we need to take in the reality of other beings. It can be very, very helpful to actually, it can be very painful, very siatry to understand the effect we've had on someone else. Sometimes we need that, we need to hear how our actions have landed to actually really be motivated to change them in the future. So we have a responsibility. Again, we can't just fall back on in action, we can't just think that, well, we're not doing anything terribly bad, so we just get by and not cause too much of a ripple in the world. Actually, there's a huge responsibility that goes with the understanding of karma and karma vipaka. We have an effect, we have an effect by our interaction as well. So there's this huge potential, and with potential comes responsibility. So we can just reflect on the responsibility that we have in terms of the effect we have on other beings. And we have an effect not only immediately on just making worth, we have an effect not just on the beings that we actually impact on immediately, but we have an effect on the world collectively. Bantis talked about a kind of cloud of skillfulness or unschoolfulness. And it's as though the Buddha's teaching of conditionality is so massive. When you start to look at it more deeply, you start to see how deeply conditioned we and all beings are and how each of us condition and effect, not only the causes of any experience are so myriad, that you start to see the net of the web of conditionality that is so all-embracing. So if we, again, there's this drop of skillful or unschoolful in the scales that affect ourselves. It doesn't just affect ourselves. It's as though that does have a cumulative effect in the world, and we add to that in one way or the other. We can't just, it's not a weight that lands just on our shoulders. We're not going to be able to just personally, as a fixed self, we're not going to be able to transform the world. But if we take responsibility for our part in the world, we are sharing in the Bodhisattva ideal, and we're sharing in that responsibility that we have, we and others have an effect in the world, and the knock-on effect of our actions is just so much bigger than we sometimes realise. One act of, for example, one act of matter, it affects the next person. They're then feeling more positive, so their actions are more likely to be positive. When you think about it, the knock-on effect is enormous. The ripple effect is enormous. It's the model of a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the world, and you have a hurricane on the other. So we don't just affect ourselves and transform ourselves and affect others, both immediately and more broadly. We do affect the world, but however the world is, we also, if we choose to act skilfully or unskilfully, we also, strangely, miraculously, we affect our experience of the world. So however the world is, actually, we can completely transform our experience of the world. And we can see this in terms of, sometimes when there's been a disagreement about something. It's quite extraordinary how you can come out of the study experience of this recently, come out of a meeting and someone draws up the minutes, and you read them and you think, "That's not quite what I've always happened at the meeting," or "We're still no one writes any minutes," and you all try and remember what happened at the meeting, and actually you've all got a different memory. So our memory, but our experience of events, is very, very different. So we can't extrapolate, for example, if we experience something as painful, it means that we can't just rest in blaming the outside agent and just feel that, "Well, it's all happening out there," and they should have been more skilful because then that would have been nicer for us. And that may be true, but we can't affect that. But what we can affect is our response, and we have a huge, going back to the very beginning of my talk, we have a huge repertoire of choices, of responses that we can make, and the fact that this is so gives us actually just huge freedom. So whatever our circumstances, we have enormous freedom. It may not be something that we can just do overnight, but over time we can create a very different world for ourselves, and we have some very dramatic accounts of this. There are accounts all the way through the Buddhist scriptures, some of the most, and there are striking modern accounts, for example, I always remember Nelson Mandela's biography, his autobiography, and his account of freedom at the end. So I'll just end with another quote, "The rain has stopped, the clouds have drifted away, and the weather is clear again. If your heart is pure, then all things in your world are pure. Abandon this fleeting world, abandon yourself, then the moon and flowers will guide you along the way." That's right, okay. We hope you enjoyed this week's podcast. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. And thank you.
