Tag Archives: causality

September 30, 2014 · 1:21 pm

Impermanence And The Psychophysical Personality

By: David Xi-Ken Astor, Sensei

One of the core principles of Buddhism that is accepted by all traditions is that of no-self (anatman). It is an essential teaching of Buddhism that states that there is no permanent enduring substance within any entity. The Buddha taught that the notion of a self is just an idea. In our contemporary language when we consider “who we are” we encounter the term psychophysical personality that introduces us to all kinds of interpretations. No matter the complexity surrounding coming to terms with no permanent self, we also must reconcile that this impermanent universal nature is also of a non-dual nature too. When we say we have no permanent self we are rejecting the metaphysical self which presents a problem that man has two distinct entities in the form of mind and matter. For the time being, we will not discuss 21st century physics and string theory for now. The Buddha was skillful in not speaking of man’s having a dual nature in a single entity. This is not always clear when we read many of the legacy teachings, especially when they seek to explain how conscientiousness interacts with the psycho-physicality of our “humaness”.

What is clear though, is that the Buddha was not willing to consider that a mind can have independent existence. When he spoke of human nature, he did so by always associating the body and mental capabilities as making up a single physical personality; there could be no consciousness unless it was associated with a living physical entity. He said that consciousness is nothing more than the act of being conscious. Both at the time of the Buddha, as it is now in our time, there was/is a universal tendency to look upon the mind and the body as two distinct “things” both existing independently. Based on the Buddha’s personal experience he came to consider this notion to be unsubstantiated. To take the opposite view would be to surrender to an unknown notion that “something” is of a permanent nature in each of us that is hidden to scientific investigation.

Siddhartha (the Buddha) was centuries ahead of his peers in empirical reasoning. When considering the interplay between the body and mind he referred to the material body as “contact with resistance” (patigha-samphassa), and the mind as “contact with concepts” (adhivacana-samphassa)1 . In doing this he was reducing both the mind and body to contact elements and processes of experience, and avoiding making them both have material characteristics. This also avoids any metaphysical entanglements. It is an example of the Buddha abandoning metaphysical notions that would result in the doctrine of Dependent Origination (causality) being put into question.

For Siddhartha, any thought of something that has permanence although hidden, even though subject to metaphysical theories and the evidence of the “creativity of man” to try to explain the unexplainable, does not hold strong against validated personal experience, either subjective or objective. The psychophysical personality considered by the Buddha emphasizes the dependence of consciousness on the physical personality as well as the interconnectiveness of the body-mind that answers to how the causal universe is expressed in us as we strive to be positive agents for change. This change is effective at the same time as having the properties of impermanence too. How we humans effect change is dependent on our dispositions. Not only our personalities, but how we live, what we find of interests, the art we create, our culture and civilization, what drives our exploration toward new horizons, is all dominated by our dispositions. Our dispositions, not our consciousness as a substantial entity, drives the human contribution to the causal-chain. Another reason for us to study and refine our dispositions as we struggle to understand the power of a non-permanent self in a world that matters.

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1 Digha Nikaya 2, 62

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March 15, 2014 · 7:55 am

Transforming Negative Experiences Into The Positive

I would like to share with our readers a response I gave to a question received on the EDIG website about the duel posting on Karma: Where The Ideal Meets The Real.  The question was, “How does one keep positive thoughts when harmed by others?”  Here is my answer:

One thing we must realize about karma is that it has no value until we give it value.  Cause and effect is a universal reality and is pervasive in all things.  Nothing is permanent, even happiness.  The most we might experience is a sustained state of mind that is free from disharmony.  But even that mind state has limits.  It is not unreasonable to assume that bad things happen to good people.  I am not speaking about natural events that is built into our human condition, such as illness, old age, and death.

It takes some practice to see situations separate form their causes, and eventual consequences.  But neither thoughts or actions are without a cause.  There is always a chain of causes.  This starts effecting us before our birth and continues throughout our lives and even beyond our deaths.  When we experience an event, either good or unpleasant, it is natural to ask questions.  The what if game, or the blame game, or the why me game, or the thank-god game.  This especially is what happens when we feel we have been harmed by others.  It may seem more natural if something bad happens as an “act of nature.”  But when it happens at the hand of others, we generally take it personally.  And this is where our practice and a more enounced understanding of how our mind process events comes into Buddhist perspective.  Especially relative to karmic consequences.

It is easy to say that our mind is up to its old tricks trying to justify, rationalize, and find ways to make ourselves feel better.  The real question might be, “Who is harmed here?”  Our everyday-mind (ego) answers me!  Negative karma and positive karma are like seeds.  If either are not planted in soil, will they ever grow?  If they are planted in soil, but given no water, will they grow?  What if they are planted in soil, given water, but never allowed light to reach them, will they grow?  Karma is like seeds.  Causal conditions must be just right in order for them to grow into effects.  Without conditions they will never flourish.  This is why we must always be sure to avoid creating conditions for negative karma to ripen, and instead create conditions only for good karma to grow.  This is most important with our thoughts.  If we identify, nourish, and expand harmful events, either real or perceived, we only continue to harm ourselves.  Harm is a value we give to an event.  Harm retards the feeling of happiness.  When this happens, it growns into resentment and the chance that we will continue the harm by expanding it towards others.  A process that if not checked at the very beginning of an unsatisfactory action, it could quickly get out of hand.

Do you know the problem here?  To much thinking!  Thinking about the past, especially going over bad things that have happened in our minds again and again, serves no purpose.  It is completely useless mental activity.  In fact, it is worse than useless, because it can only harm our happiness.  This is not to mean we should never analyze perceived harmful events in a way to find lessons that adds to our wisdom-file.  This is how a mature Buddhist practice develops insight.  It is the uncontrolled thought constructions that holds on to the negative and labels them harmful.  The mind which gets caught up in useless fantasy and projection is only a self-serving mechanism that has the potential of separating us from others, even if it is clothed with higher purpose.  When we trip on something on our path we did not see coming, we pick ourselves up, maybe apply a band aid to a scratch, and keep walking.   This accident will cause us to be more watchful.  So it is a learning experience.  This is the same with negative causes.  We get up, fix the problem if necessary, and keep walking the path with renewed or additional experiences to add to our wisdom-bag.  We do not hold on to them, we store our experiences for later reference if needed.

Out of every adversity is an equal or greater opportunity.  It is up to us to see through the fog of negative thinking.  It is hard not to think negatively about a harmful experience.  It is that self generated negative thinking we need to abandon.  Another’s harm is only momentary, self inflected negative emotions can last a life time.  Live happy, live with compassion, live with maximum enjoyment, share with others, all these things will override the unhappy.  It is not as important what people do to us, as it is what we do to ourselves that counts.  Because it may effect how we treat others.  Be a duck, let water roll off your back.  When you learn to do that, the water will return to its source eventually.  And that is how karma works, and quacks.

/\ David Xi-Ken Shi

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March 12, 2014 · 2:37 pm

Karma: Where The Ideal Meets The Real

By: David Xi-Ken Astor, Sensei

Karma is one of those terms that is in popular use, but interesting enough, not by many individuals that know anything about what it really is.   Most of the time when I encounter the term it is not how I have come to understand it’s meaning at all.  Karma is also know as the law of cause and effect.  As a Buddhist principle, it is know as Dependent Origination, or Relational Origination, or Co-dependent Origination.  So as you see, karma is know by many names.   Buddhism does not own the term.  What is most unusual, is that karma is not unusual at all.  It fact, it is in most moments evident when we know how to look at the world around us.  Karma is seen in action, and also what is behind action.  Karma is not linear, but is multi-directional.  In fact, it might be helpful to consider karma as circular.   When we think about interconnectiveness, we should think that karma effects all points of a single connection, and possibly throughout the net of connections.  When you come to think about it, when we turn on a light, switch on our computers, or turn the ignition key in the car, we demonstrate the karmic consequences of these actions.

Everything in the material world acts in accordance with this law.  Nothing is caused by chance.  Nothing.  This is also the case with our minds.  Every thought we have, every word we say, every intentional action we take, creates a cause.  Over time these causes ripen to become effects.  Time being a relative term.  Our thoughts emerge as words; the words we use can manifest into actions; these actions develop into habits; and our habits hardens into character.  We should watch our thoughts and their results with great care, and let it arise for the compassionate concern for self and others.   Remember the adage: “As we think, so we become.” Continue reading →

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March 10, 2014 · 10:59 am

Can Metaphysics Stand With Contemporary Science & Technology?

By: David Xi-Ken Astor, Sensei

When we contemplate the tremendous gains science and technological capabilities have given modern man, a capacity to reach beyond the limitations our planet has imposed on the pre-technological age, it might be said that science may be challenging the long held and deeply entrenched notion of the nature of “creation” which has always been based on metaphysical thought, theology, and the development of cultural myths.    That nature being a belief in a “creator-god”.   Once what seemed to be a mystery relative to how the Universe came to be and functioned, may now be explained by our understanding from the study of physics, astronomy, biology, and earth-sciences as well as other academic disciplines.   A good example of impermanence and how change comes to effect the human thought process by the way.  It is still important that we understand that a scientific view of the universe is yet another point of view.

In the 21st century we are not even close to overcoming the universal mysteries, even if it were possible considering the limitations of the human species.  Yet, many are convinced that a good chance exists that science will ultimately resolve enough of the puzzle of the unknown that it would leave very little ground for a god as we have come to define it.  We only need to look at how modern science has narrowed the sphere of influence that religious institutions have enjoyed over the centuries in setting “universal-standards” of how the universe is.    I include some Buddhist tradition’s ancient beliefs that still survive into the modern age.  As we learn more about how science is informing us of how the Universe is, there is little need to look outside of it’s boundaries for spiritual direction.  I personally find the more I understand how science is giving us a better picture of universal realities, my spiritual life is strengthened and my interests in metaphysical explanations is declining.  In fact, I am more suspicious than ever of supernatural experience.  But the big question that all of this engenders is, “can the sciences explain everything?”  Can science and spirituality sit side by side in harmony?

Even as I sit and write this, there are individuals in our government leadership that very recently have disavowed what science is “teaching”, like the big-bang theory or what we can learn from quantum physics, and offer their belief that the earth was only created 9,000 years ago.  They place their worldview on documentation written in the early period of the dark ages.  Then there are theologians and religious leaders that try to reconcile scientific discovery and theory to conform to existing religious text and argue that events like the big-bang if true must have been initiated by a god, or at least an unmoved-mover.  My own thought is that even the big-bang theory will be resolved in ways beyond current science’s ability to understand.  The Buddha always took a pragmatic approach on these issues by just saying it is unknowable and not important in resolving human suffering and how we can contribute to our own positive self-flourishing.  Yet it is interesting that some of the core Buddhist principles associated with Dependent (Relational) Origination comes close to reflect the understanding of quantum theory. Continue reading →

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February 27, 2014 · 6:01 pm

Karma Is Empty Until It Is Given Value

By: David Xi-Ken Astor, Sensei

I have been thinking a lot recently about karma and how we can learn through our Buddhist practice if it is possible to drive our own karma, or at least, what are we going to do about it.  There is no point in pretending that karma has now become problematic for Western contemporary Buddhism.  If we are honest with ourselves, most of us are not sure how to understand it.  This is something I have become aware of in my own teaching and through group discussions.  Karma has always been an essential element of the core Buddhist principle of mutual-causality, but we may not know how literally it should be understood using today’s language .  Karma is often taken as an impersonal “moral law” of the universe, with a precise calculus of cause and effect comparable I suppose to Newton’s laws of physics.  This understanding, however, can lead to a server case of “cognitive dissonance” for modern Buddhists, since the physical causality that modern science has discovered about the world seems to allow for no such mechanism.

Then again, some important Buddhist teachings make more sense to us today than they did to people living at the time of the Buddha.  What Buddhism has to say about “no-self”, for example, is consistent with what modern psychology has discovered about how the ego and self-nature is constructed.   In some aspects Buddhism can fit quite nicely into contemporary ways of understanding.  But not traditional views of karma.  Of course, this by itself does not disprove anything.  It does, however, encourage us to think more deeply about karma.

There are at least two other problems with the ways that karma has traditionally been understood.  One of them is its unfortunate implications for many Eastern-centric traditional Buddhist cultures, where a split has developed between how the Sangha is defined.  In most of the East, and in many Western Centers as well, the Sangha is considered divided between the monastic community and the laity.  Although the Pali Canon makes it quite clear that laypeople too can achieve an awakening, the main spiritual responsibility of lay Buddhists as popularly understood in the East,  is not to follow a life of purposeful isolation behind walls themselves but to support the monastic’s that do, and by doing so gain merit.  By accumulating merit they hope to attain a favorable rebirth, which for some offers the opportunity to become monks next time around.   From my way of thinking, this approach makes Buddhism into a form of spiritual materialism, because Buddhist teachings are being used to gain material rewards.  The result is that many Sangha’s and their supporters are locked into a co-dependent relationship where it is difficult for either partner to change. Continue reading →

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