If you bring forth what is within you,
what you have will save you.
If you do not have that within you,
what you do not have within you will kill you.
– Gospel of Thomas
How I define karma – what is already in me, I can sow. In other words, the effects are what I get from what I am conditioned to cause. If I have wisdom, wisdom will be my result. If I have ignorance, ignorance will be my result. If wisdom is in hand, wisdom will help me in time of distress or joy; if ignorance is my base, I could not imagine the illusionary horrors that will come my way, be it happiness or distress.
The mind is domesticated and thus whatever I experience I will be experiencing from an old idea, so long as I don’t take the initiative to question myself. Whether I change my job or not, due to frustration or wanting a new experience – if I don’t recognize what motivates me, changing either one makes no difference. I remembered reading a section from Broken Open where the author asked the oracle whether she should or should not divorce and the answer that came about is pretty wise – it is not about either one, it is about whether you learn anything from it or not.
Everything I am experiencing are all recycled. Whether I call it new or creative, each one is old, put into a so-called new perspective. I can be spending my time from one place to another, experiencing new experiences – moving from one prison to another – that is what I am doing, like a fish in a bowl, not knowing what is beyond it. For the mind has not experience anything new other than what it already knows.
What can I truly call an experience? Unborn. That makes the difference between getting an answer and realization. An answer is just another thought that comes from the level of questioning. Realization comes from understanding what you are experiencing in a new found way. That is truly an experience.
New experience is when the mind gets out of its way from the already-know-mind to a non-knowing mind – inquiring, exploring with innocence and inquisitiveness – and that means a total reform to my comfort zone of normality. The mind loves to be in status quo, attaching itself to whatever it experience.
If I truly wish to experience something that is totally beyond the mind, I have first to understand how the mind works. And that is an inward journey – a aloneness journey – instead of chasing after the world. It is not to mean meditating under a tree, or in seclusion, though that is a small part of the equation – it is important to have time for retreat, for rejuvenation. But more so, it is to be with the world instead of against the world. To make resistance is to bring one closer; to be with is to understand its working, thus disentangling and transcending it. So you can be wherever you are – just a shift of perception is all you need.
A Master is quite a different cat. It is one that sees the day as an opportunity in time to create avenues of reality and emotions that are unborn, of realities that are unborn that the day becomes a fertilization of infinite tomorrows.
– What the BLEEP – Down the Rabbit Hole, Quantum Edition, vol. 2, 42 min.