Karma
I've heard Zen masters say that daily meditation
practice could turn bad karma into good karma. I
always chalked this up to a quaint moralistic sales
pitch. It took me years to get the point. I guess that's
my karma.
Karma means that this happens because that
happened. B is connected in some way to A, every
effect has an antecedent cause, and every cause an
effect that is its measure and its consequence, at
least at the non-quantum level. Overall, when we
speak of a person's karma, it means the sum total of
the person's direction in life and the tenor of the
things that occur around that person, caused by
antecedent conditions, actions, thoughts, feelings,
sense impressions, desires. Karma is often wrongly
confused with the notion of a fixed destiny. It is more
like an accumulation of tendencies that can lock us
into particular behavior patterns, which themselves
result in further accumulations of tendencies of a
similar nature. So, it is easy to become imprisoned by
our karma and to think that the cause always lies
elsewhere - with other people and conditions beyond
our control, never within ourselves. But it is not
necessary to be a prisoner of old karma. It is always