kamma

The kamma the buddha taught was different to the karma of his day. He accepts that karma might come back to you in many ways, but kamma is focused on how it changes your internal world, and how that changes your sim. 

All mentions of rebirth due to kamma are referring to the rebirth as described here. Every action with intent, including conditioned reactions due to deep encoding within your sim, falls under the umbrella of kamma.

If you kill someone you will be reborn a tiger. All this means is that if you kill someone you will be reborn with a mind more inclined to kill again. This is the type of rebirth he was talking about.

The clearest sutta describing his view on kamma is here.

It is important to remember that conditioned responses also fall under kamma, and can be removed by clearing cmem. An example of a conditioned response is a near-instinctive reaction to people of a certain appearance due to a past negative data, real or imagined. Racial profiling, for example, is kamma on both the individual and societal level. This is how our own kamma feeds into kamma for other people; how our local sim feeds into the global sim. If enough of us fear a specific demographic then our media will paint them in a certain way and more of us will learn to fear them. Same for fashion trends. Same for religions. Same for business. Same for everything.

This is the reason for the global shift toward insular populist political narratives, hoarding, fear and hatred. Greed makes people fearful which makes the global narrative insular which makes them elect hateful leaders which feeds into more greed and fear. It is a looped thought, on a societal level, and the only way to change the global sim is for enough of us to change our local sims. 

The 4 types of deed the buddha describes are:

• dark deeds with dark results;

• bright deeds with bright results;

• dark and bright deeds with dark and bright results; and

• neither dark nor bright deeds with neither dark nor bright results, which lead to the ending of deeds.

His words on dark deeds are:

And what are dark deeds with dark results? It’s when someone makes hurtful choices by way of body, speech, and mind. Having made these choices, they’re reborn in a hurtful world, where hurtful contacts strike them. Touched by hurtful contacts, they experience hurtful feelings that are exclusively painful—like the beings in hell. These are called dark deeds with dark results.

The simplistic and mistaken understanding of karma is that if you do something bad to others then it comes back to bite you. This is one potential outcome but this is not what he was referring to.

The buddha was talking about how these dark deeds affect our sim. The second we even *think* a dark thought (a dark deed of the mind) we make our sim worse. We start to obsess about how much more someone has than us, how they might do us harm, how we might scheme and steal from them, or they from us, and we lose the ability to live in a joyful world. Our world rapidly becomes one of dark alleys and vengeful abusers. We are reborn in a hurtful world, where hurtful contacts strike us. We compare and we cajole and we convince ourselves we are at the top or at the bottom because of our superiority or victimhood and we become incapable of enjoying the life that is in front of us; the only life that ever can be. We are reborn in hell.

We go on to do dark deeds to the people around us, pushing them closer to hell too. This is how kamma becomes a feedback loop.

The same is said for bright deeds:

And what are bright deeds with bright results? It’s when someone makes pleasing choices by way of body, speech, and mind. Having made these choices, they’re reborn in a pleasing world, where pleasing contacts strike them. Touched by pleasing contacts, they experience pleasing feelings of perfect happiness—like the gods of universal beauty. These are called bright deeds with bright results.

This is a positive reprogramming of your sim. People may not always be nice, but you will have a far better time of things if you see the truth: they are living in a dark world, and they see hatred and greed wherever they turn. They are suffering and you can maybe help them with understanding and forgiveness, or better yet, by showing them the truth of their suffering. The least you can do is walk away and make sure they do not infect you and yours with their contagion. You are the average of the five people you spend time with, after all, and fighting with them is what makes you sick.

These actions will result in your rebirth in a positive realm. Be careful though - these positive realms are also subject to change, and if you chase the high that you feel from charity then you will wind up committing a dark deed of the mind motivated by greed for a mind-state, and that charity will rapidly stop satisfying you.

The third one sounds complicated but isn’t really. Don’t overthink it.

And what are dark and bright deeds with dark and bright results? It’s when someone makes both hurtful and pleasing choices by way of body, speech, and mind. Having made these choices, they are reborn in a world that is both hurtful and pleasing, where hurtful and pleasing contacts strike them.

Let’s say you’re an athlete and you sprint to the finish line to overtake someone at the last second. You will be overjoyed and they will be miserable. Or you are a businessbody like I was, and you introduce someone to a couple of employers with the best intentions but they get abused by both and wind up killing themselves while your fee still sits there in your bank account. That was a tough one. You had good intentions, but you also had a vested interest, and you went from feeling happy to having overwhelming guilt for years afterward, even though logically speaking you know it wasn’t your intention or fault. This is why I felt dirty in my job, and why the best recruitment I ever did was the stuff I didn’t get paid for; there was no ‘dark deed’ of greed involved in my action.

The fourth is the key to liberation:

And what are neither dark nor bright deeds with neither dark nor bright results, which lead to the ending of deeds? It’s the intention to give up dark deeds with dark results, bright deeds with bright results, and both dark and bright deeds with both dark and bright results. These are called neither dark nor bright deeds with neither dark nor bright results, which lead to the ending of deeds.

This - in a nutshell - is going with the flow. But not yet! 

First you have to clear your cmem. Remember how I said that even conditioned responses can fall into the kamma category? Well I was carrying around a lifetime of repressed trauma and self-loathing. A lifetime of inadequacy and jealousy and anger and victimhood. My world remained dark despite decades of effortful surface-level reprogramming.

The way I cleared this cmem (and it’s an ongoing process) is by taking action without intent, while in a meditative state. I was held in the HTLP state by medicine and meditation and I sat there and made knives without a plan in the world; all I knew was I needed to let things ‘spool out’ of my memory. And spool out they did, as you can see in the 88 hells. Then one day I looked up and realised ‘enough’ and hit the install button for my upgrade.

The idea since then: go with the flow. Do not be attached to outcomes.

Because that’s where kamma will trip you up. It is when you are attached to the outcomes that you end up making your world worse. 

This is why all forms of action-with-intent lead to rebirth and suffering. You are either reborn as a hateful, jealous creature; reborn as a heavenly creature who is bound to change and may cling to the past; or reborn as a combination of the two, as most of us are.

Charity is great, as is trying to change the world. But the key is to do it without being attached to the outcome. Only the deed is in your control, not the result. 

Kamma is a deed committed with intent to produce a result. 

If you can help people without becoming attached to the idea that you are a good person then you will be better able to look at your darker side too, and to let the both of them spool out so that your cmem is clearer and you can experience a flow state with your reality.

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