Within our Sangha we are fortunate to have amongst us a retired professor of psychology who has researched a great deal into the creation of habits and their consequences. During our conversations about karma he has repeatedly said that he just can’t buy it - well, that was true until yesterday when I said that we could think of karma as habit. ‘Oh’, he said with a smile, ‘Well in that case I have no problem’. Afterwards I went away and thought maybe I should check that I had

Karma gets a lot of bad press or maybe, just like any complicated abstract idea, it’s just easy to misunderstand. Sometimes it’s accused of being fatalism - there is nothing we can do about it. And sometimes it sounds like paying off a debt for the bad stuff we have done in the past. Of course, neither of these are true. One very ancient story, going back over two thousand years is in part about karma and how it is actually full of hope. It’s about the demon Rudra. Once upo

This is the story of Garab Dorje. It tells how when Manjushrimitra heard there was a master in the north-west of India teaching a doctrine that went beyond cause and effect, he and six other scholars from the University of Nalanda, started out to confront and defeat the master who taught this heresy. However, when they arrived and received Garab Dorje’s teaching, Manjushrimitra realised he was in fact correct and, in an act of contrition for having initially argued against th

So we have a great big bucket of karma and the question is what do we do about it? The two basic options are alter it so that it becomes good karma that brings about desirable results - like a sojourn within a heavenly realm or best of all, a precious human rebirth, or get rid of it all together - karma free which is the equivalent of being a buddha. Let’s go through these options. As always, different Buddhist traditions have slightly different approaches to this but the bas

In the last piece we delved into the mechanics of karma, how actions that are clearly formulated, intentionally carried out and which cause satisfaction create an imprint which will affect our perception and many events later in this life and in lives to come. Now let’s look at the different places this karma can land us using as our inspiration the very enlightening Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. Published in 1973 this book became one of the most influential books on

It’s strange how our understanding of an idea we have known for ever turns out to be wrong. I’ve recently had that experience with the notion of karma and it’s that which I’m going to look at here. So definition first: the word ‘karma’ translates as ‘action’ and what is meant by this is any intentioned action whether it be a thought, word or deed. Although this is a Buddhist idea, the understanding that we live in an interconnected universe where each event is the cause of ot

Is it not odd how ideas that seem incomprehensible are obvious once you understand them? I’ve just had a double whammy with this one. So idea one: according to the Buddhist tradition of Dzogchen buddha-nature expresses itself as the whole phenomenal universe BUT it resides in the heart and may be seen with the eyes where it will - with practice - appear as little mandalas with a buddha sitting at the centre of them. So a bit of a seeming contradiction there. How can something

We are on holiday on the Outer Hebrides island of Harris. Now the admission. It has many small studios where local painters and potters display their work but I usually avoid going into them because I’m very picky and I find it impossible to say something appreciative if in fact I don’t feel it. I experience it as condescending and embarrassing. So you get the picture. Now yesterday, as we paused to look at the map, Philippa popped out of the car to look at a gallery by the s

Last night our small Sangha investigated the experience of having a belief on the level of the felt sense. Interesting! This is quite a difficult thing to get hold of and I was not sure how it would go. It needed a clear distinction between the belief itself and the experience of holding it. What most of us found was that the felt sense varied with the belief: sometimes pleasant, sometimes affirming, sometimes not. These responses were still very much dependent upon the conte

Our small Sangha continues to talk about how our perception is coloured by our previous experiences and the problems this causes. This remains interesting for me because it brings together psychotherapy and the Dharma - which of course is my ‘thing’. How the patterns of our earliest hurts are a big part of what Buddhism calls our obscurations - things that make us unaware of how things really are when we are not distorting them. And I realise that this is a big one - who real

The last couple of pieces I’ve sent out on rebirth and the places we may end up reborn - I think - deserve a bit more time because they are full of interesting ideas and also lots of practical help. So here goes: Last night I was thinking about the Twelve Links that I listed in the piece on rebirth. I thought how difficult they are to read and how easily I get bored just a few in and begin to skip towards the end. Is this just me? It’s a pity because the basic observation is

Paul Williams, Emeritus Professor of Indian and Tibetan Philosophy at Bristol University, shocked everyone when he converted to Catholicism. He was distressed by the Buddhist understanding of death because it meant he would be separated from his beloved wife once he died for ever. No coming back together in their next lives or finding each other in heaven. I tell this story because while Buddhism does believe that we are reborn innumerable times, driven by the compulsion of

Last night our Jungian friend said something that really caught my attention - actually amazed me. She said that sometimes she goes back to a memory and carefully goes through all the details so that she has a feeling of every part of it. Not as a way to explore something difficult but as somethings pleasurable - or that’s how I understood her. Now that picks up something I have been thinking about since writing the last piece on Me, Me, Me that explores the nature of our p

A very old friend in both senses of the phrase recently sent me an article he had written about his time living with the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche in his home in the small Italian city of Formia. This brought back many memories for me because I too had lived in this flat for a short time after Norbu Rinpoche invited me to join him and his community right at the beginning of the 1980’s. The article contained several photos - there was the sofa I had slep

In these dark times it’s perhaps no surprise that our Sangha last night found themselves discussing the dark side of our human nature. This was started by the grim observation that when forced into a corner by something threatening our survival we would in all probability drop our bodhisattva ideals and become violent. Rats in a trap. The person who offered this insight was not happy about it but it just seemed that the evidence of our history pointed in this direction. I ch

Last night our small Sangha talked about Essence Love again - it’s strange in a way that this apparently simple idea should be the cause of so much confusion. Several things struck me about everyone’s contributions - the preponderance of the idea that it is related to and influenced by a babies good or bad attachment to her or his mother, and the opposite, that it has no biological base, that it somehow sits at a lower or deeper level and is not affected or disturbed by conf

One of the disadvantages of writing blogs for our small Sangha each week is that I have had to leave behind for the moment pieces on what is happening in our wider world. I’m one of those people who have decided that continually listening to the news is personally destructive - and perhaps because of this I have become a little insulated from the impact of the daily spiral of horror. Well, that’s what I thought …. Over the last couple of days I have been a little unwell, no

Sometimes it’s good to pause and take stock. Our small Sangha has just spent some weeks exploring what it means to be a bodhisattva. And admittedly it can all get a bit complicated - the balance between wisdom and compassion, the difference between compassion and empathy, exchanging our own wellbeing for someone else’s pain, practicing loving-kindness, giving and taking the victory and so on. Then on top of all this we have also been observing our own reactions to these pract

I don’t know about you but I have found Giving The Victory an extremely difficult practice. If fact I have more or less completely failed at it. The thing is, while I can let the other person have the last word, inside, I still think they are wrong and furthermore feel I have now taken the moral high ground. And then when it comes to imagining giving the victory to a rightwing politician, like Nigel Farage, I can’t even fake it. This has caused quite a lot of conversation be

Yesterday evening our Sangha joined others from all over the world in a practice of Loving Kindness lead by the Theravada Monks who have now completed their 108 day walk for peace across America. Just the thought of so much goodness at this time of fear and confusion makes my heart open. It was also very well timed since we have spent the last few weeks focusing on this practice and this leads me to speculate what a non-dual version of it might look like - but it is only a s