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Good karma or sometimes
namarupa
Veteran
Rather than discussing karma, I wanted to know how people felt about good and skillful actions. Do you always try to create good karma, do onto others, what goes around comes around, or do you find yourself having break this rule constantly? At most I have always been good at keeping this up. Now that I think about it, I do sometimes forget the negative actions that I have caused, it's not so easy. I can see how my time off meditation practice may be a factor. I think that karma is going to be there no matter what and that we should not find ourselves constantly having to break them by doing something negative towards others, or let it become a bad habit.
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Comments
In the main I try to help others. I meditate every day and try to cultivate a mind that organizes and enjoys my life, but that doesn't judge myself or my life as lacking and accepts what is there.
@namarupa
To the degree that selflessness unfolds, good and skillful actions follow suite.
To the degree that my selfishness unfolds, poor and unskillful actions result.
I guess I pay more attention to whether my actions result in folks responding with selfishness or selflessness than in trying to suss out karma's equations.
'Karma' for me is related to mental formations and feelings in the mind. It happens at every moment of my time. I haven't tried to go out there to do good things, although I have plan to do some volunteering work at a local charity. On a daily basis, when I am not mindful, my mind becomes clouded by all sort of nasty things and peace can't stay with me.
So, I try to watch my mind closely throughout the day to make sure any potential negative are kept away. I also notice suffering of other people (e.g. A friend who can't help talking about her weight and body image every 10 mins) around me. People are just so absorbed by their judgments and can't really enjoy the rest of their perfectly fine attributes.
There is someone but selflesness could mean generosity. Who is generous? Not a skhanda because Buddha said that the skhandas were not the self. How come self clinging is there?
@Jeffrey
Perhaps..
Seen from a heart wide enough to transcend discriminative thought, the skandhas are innately void, unstained and pure.
Here, selflessness or generosity needs no notions of self and other to be itself.
Selflessness can also describe an awakening from the ego's dream of itself.
If one needs a self beyond that, consider it to possibly be so intractably interconnected to all sentience to the degree that it makes the concept of a separate self...moot..
Thank you all for the responses!
I break the rules because I am human.
However the 8 fold path is a reminder, an ideal, an inspiration. Things become more subtle, refined and other orientated as @how mentions.
Be kind with honesty and integrity. It is a simple, 'good' and noble path worthy of a rastaman (king man) which I believe the Buddha was an early version of . . . or am I being 'bad'?
Striving to be mindful most of my waking life makes me more aware of the consequences of my actions and reactions as they unfold.
Most times, I can dwell in the nanosecond before an unskillful reaction takes place.
Others I can't.
Others, and these occasions are the strangest happenstances, I catch myself giving in to a temperamental tirade on the surface because the situation seems to call for it, but I remain totally unruffled by the storm inside.
But keeping tabs with my karma? No, I don't care.
I have experienced that actions have consequences, so I would rather make skillful choices about my life in order not to tread on a minefield of unskillful results.
But then, dependent origination can be so erratic... or my DO calculations are...
I just do what I feel is the right thing to do in any given situation, but for the most part I'm not really thinking about it, it's just done...
Accumulation of wholesome or unwholesome karma and more or less merits in the merit bank don't enter the equation...
I either feel "ok" about doing it ( a sense of satisfaction) and if I don't feel ok/right about it then, I'll try to remedy it, if possible...
I think the important thing to remember is Thought > Word > Deed... The "Intention" behind the "action"...
BTW In the conventional sense I just see the Skandhas as the neuropathways that are formed that we habitually adhere to in a reactive way, and which with effort they can be changed creating more wholesome habits/Skandhas