Daily Archive

I began the meditation by thinking about how everything that appears to me arises from my karma – my past actions of body, speech and mind.

The appearance of my whole external world is produced from my karma. I thought about my body, and remembered that it too is an appearance to my mind, and the fact that I have ‘such and such’ a bodily feature is due to my karma – not ‘real’ or ‘independently existent’. Then I thought about what Geshe-la says in The New Meditation Handbook; that some people are easily pleased while others have a sour disposition. He said that these characteristics are dictated by our karma too. I thought about this and realised that all my tendencies and ‘default’ thoughts arise from my karma. I felt like there was nothing about my ‘world’ or my body or my mind that did not depend on my karma. It all lost it’s ‘substance’. (note to self – try an emptiness meditation starting here).

I got the impression of different coloured patches of colour manifesting my ‘world’ and forming the appearances I perceive – becoming concrete. The different colours represented different types of karma. I realised that all I am doing is imputing my ‘I’ onto these patches of colour as they arise. They are constantly changing, causing appearances to change and come and go.

I wondered how this cycle could be changed, and it occurred to me that it starts with a tiny spark of intention. If we have the intention to study Dharma, then we can put it into practice. If we can put it into practice, we can create positive potentialities, which then arise as positive experiences.

The image consolidated to the surface of  the liquid in a blender. The liquid represented the results of all my actions. The liquid was made up of coloured blobs of karma. As the blender worked, it churned the karma, sending random blobs of colour to the surface, where I imputed my I and my environment on them.  I then acted in dependence on these appearances, and these actions were more coloured blobs of karma which went down the side of the blender back into my reservoir of karma. They got churned up, and came to the surface again.

In this way, I visualised my good and bad potentialities stored in a vast reservoir, churning and coming to the surface, causing further karma to be created and go back into the reservoir.

I brought back my thoughts about how this cycle can change. I can do two things. I can create only virtuous actions. That would be like white karma being produced at the surface and being pulled back into my reservoir. And I can purify my negative karma. That would be like the reservoir itself losing its many colours and becoming whiter and purer. I visualised this process and slowly the contents of the blender became whiter and whiter, purer and purer.

I saw that if I impute my I and world on the karmic arisings at the surface, then my I and my world would become pure, because all the appearances that ripened would be pure.

I felt a purity as my body became pure and my world became pure – no suffering or pain, only lightness and peace.

I stayed with that image in my mind – of creating pure actions, them feeding back into my karmic reservoir, and at the same time purifying the reservoir, so that it became pure. I fixed the intention to do both these things while abiding in the result.

Dedication

May I and all living beings realise karma and purify our negativities, so that our worlds and our Is become pure.

practice in the meditation break

In dependence on this meditation, I will try to create only positive actions, and practice taking, as this is a supreme method for purifying negativity. Although my actions must become pure, it is very important to purify the results of my countless negative actions from countless lives, which, if they had physical form, would fill the universe.

Notes

This is  a pretty convoluted set of images, but it came very naturally during the meditation. I think I might do some graphics to try and explain it better. (Later – I have done four images which explain what I was thinking during the meditation. They can be found in an album on my Facebook account.)