Wow! Where Did That Come From?

As soon as you notice that negative thought has arisen, ask yourself "Where did that come from? Am I angry with him?" If you realize that you are, ask yourself why. And then give yourself a little Dharma lecture. You know being angry doesn't make you happy. You know it plants the seeds for more anger in the future. You know current enmities stem from past enmities and that if unresolved will only be worse in the future. And you know it wastes your energy. And makes you cranky. So lecture yourself. I often do so.

If it's not even someone you know or if you have no reason to be angry, you might ask ""Am I jealous?" If that strikes a chord, tell yourself to get over it. Obviously the other person has the right conditions for what they have accomplished. Figure out what the causes for those conditions are and if they're good, do them yourself. You can either spend your time envying others for what they have accomplished or spend it in planting your causes for future good conditions.

Or maybe that negative thought arose from fear. Fear of you or someone you care about losing something. This is yet another opportunity for a Dharma talk. Remind yourself that whatever happens to you and whatever you have has been determined by your previous thoughts, speech, and behavior. No one can take from you what you destined yourself to experience or have. Just as you cannot obtain something that you have not destined yourself to experience or have.

As soon as you detect a negative thought, figure out where it came from. Then determine the Buddhist principle that applies and give yourself a mini Dharma talk. In this way, you can eliminate your negative thoughts and increase the positive ones.

More Stubborn than the Proverbial Mule

As humans, we are so stubborn!

We put off doing something even though we know we always feel good doing it. Then, when we find ourselves having to do that something, having to do what we know is right, we again feel good. Just like we had remembered from before! While doing what was right, we felt like this was exactly where we were supposed to be, and we were doing exactly what we were supposed to be doing.

While engrossed in our activity, and for some time afterwards, we feel so happy for we did was truly important.

But what happens the next time we are supposed to do that activity? We hesitate! We look for excuses. We procrastinate until it is too late and the day is over.

As I said, we humans are very stubborn.

We find it so difficult to break our bad habits because it is so much easier not to do so. But break them we must.

Can it get Worse?

Question: Yesterday you wrote about changing destiny for the better. Can we change it so it becomes worse?

Response: Yes! Yuan Liaofan and his wife dedicated themselves to helping others and thus improved their current lifetime. If they had instead decided to act selfishly and do whatever it took to get what they wanted, they could have changed their difiicult lives to even worse ones.

By coasting through life, our lives will turn out as we destined them with our past karmas. But we are creating our future with our current thoughts, speech, and actions. if we focus on doing good, we will pull our destiny in one direction. If we focus on doing what is wrong, we will pull our destiny in the other direction. 

It is this ability to change our future by changing what we do in the present that makes understanding cause and effect so important. Every second, we are creating out own future.  

The Mind and Heart Disconnect

Knowing what causes us to suffer (what we tell ourselves) doesn't just make the suffering stop. Neither does understanding intellectually that what happens to us is due to our own karmic actions suddenly mean we no longer get upset when we encounter difficulties.

Intellectually understanding and emotionally reacting are two very different things!

We have the habit of reacting in certain ways. So even though there's this little voice saying “Excuse me, but you're causing your own suffering!” or “This is the result of what you did in the past!” we still act out of those habits accumulated over uncountable lifetimes. And so, acting out of habit, we become angry or afraid or disappointed or whatever.

A few days, I was listening to a translation of Master Chin Kung’s talk by one of my fellow nuns. Teacher was talking about a high level of bodhisattvas who no longer had any thoughts of selfishness, greed, anger, ignorance, or arrogance. But the habit of these afflictions is still there. So even these higher level bodhisattvas still have habits. They do not act on these habits or have thoughts that arise from them, but the traces of the habits still exist.

It is little wonder then that we—beings far less advanced on the path as these bodhisattvas—still act automatically out of habit. Yes, we know but we cannot yet do. We’re still stuck in the duality of mind and heart: the mind calmly understands but the heart still blindly reacts. We have yet to reach the point where there is no separation between knowing and doing.