Date: 2008-04-27 14:09 Subject: On Buddhism, Karma, Reincarnation Security: Public

This is a post I put in reply to someone's thread on bluelight. It sort of condenses what can be condensed about the highest thoughts about Buddhism that have come from my recent meditations and thinking, partly inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead (which stimulated very intense dreams when I watched it before bed):

What people are saying about the sort of turning inward and doing the knot tie/untie dissapearing act, exaltation of everything because of its inescapability and lightness, almost a kind of existentialism - that's the way i think of buddhism. (*existentialism is philosophical atheism)
But as I've studied its techniques a little more recently I've found that there is a lot of practical knowhow about directing the energy in your daily life to ends  that bring joy, peace, and well-being.

BurnOneDown...I think of karma and reincarnation in terms of the doctrine of mutual arising...this is the Buddhist theory of causality; I think of karma as the form of action that arises from that interior/exterior warp thing, where emptiness and clarity emanate and encompass flowstates in which you feel entirely in control but without grasping. This would be the de to the dao. Pure action, the stroke of the Zen Master's brush an embodiment...What goes around comes around because all experiences leave imprints in your mind, in the ground of mind. And this is where reincarnation connects: effects on our physical environment, always filtered through this totality of our personal ground, leave imprints in the collective ground; every evidence of a sentient beings touch will be absorbed by those sentient beings that encounter it - my teacher calls this "interbeing". And it's all an artwork...it's all about our richness of experience, how we feel and articulate the currents that feed us from the environment. Heh...like a karma flow, rushing rivers of water, seen? Reincarnation as a precise thing is related to the concept of "immortality", the capacity for a being to express a very cohesive presence and leave a bold, unmistakable mark upon the world. Some cultures have ghosts, others have spirits.