Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site fortune.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!floyd!harpo!ihnp4!fortune!rpw3 From: rpw3@fortune.UUCP Newsgroups: net.religion Subject: Re: latest bright thought - (nf) Message-ID: <2393@fortune.UUCP> Date: Tue, 31-Jan-84 11:05:31 EST Article-I.D.: fortune.2393 Posted: Tue Jan 31 11:05:31 1984 Date-Received: Tue, 7-Feb-84 05:09:34 EST Sender: notes@fortune.UUCP Organization: Fortune Systems, Redwood City, CA Lines: 50 #R:utcsstat:-169100:fortune:21900008:000:2438 fortune!rpw3 Jan 31 04:40:00 1984 Laura, the traditional Buddhist view might not cheer you up, but a least it's neither of your extremes, to wit: 1. You cannot ignore your past actions (even unto previous lives, if you want to be really traditional), since the trace/echo/residue/attachment of those actions keeps popping up. (The word 'karma' literally means 'action'. Figuratively it means 'cause and effect'. It does NOT mean 'fate', unless you want to call it 'fate' that the light goes off when you turn off the switch, or that the water started running when you turned on the faucet.) 2. On the other hand, there is nothing 'originally sinful' about having a history of past actions, with all that implies. Your accumulation of karma (residue/inertia of past actions) just is, like a mountain or a cocked trigger or a tornado. Meditation practice is a bit like bird watching, in that you begin to see the (inexorable) patterns of cause and effect that go on in one's mind. 3. The only hope (having see the mechanistic way we play out our little movie scripts) is the realization that it's not really solid; we don't exist as a continual "thing"; there are "gaps". The grip of karma is in our persistence in playing the thing out, even when we know it doesn't work. Since there are "gaps", we actually have some choice about waking up vs. repeating the same old thing. Meditation helps bias that choice towards waking up; most of our past behaviour (karma) re-enforces staying asleep (i.e, angry, ignorant, passionate, jealous, prideful, etc.). As one who got really stuck for a long time (during the college years) in S.K.'s "Fear and Trembling", I would now say that the problem of the French existentialists was (is?) that they had absolutely no sense of humor, no sense of the absurdity of their "absurd". "The Problem" was declared to be such a solid immovable "thing", despite the fact that the fact of their own deaths showed it wasn't solid, either. (Kierkagaard I'm not sure about. He made such a big deal out of "cowardice" that I'm tempted to call it laziness, instead.) So I would agree. They didn't know how to live. Although they WERE trying to put SOME "meaning" into it (even if they deified it as "meaninglessness"). Rob Warnock UUCP: {sri-unix,amd70,hpda,harpo,ihnp4,allegra}!fortune!rpw3 DDD: (415)595-8444 USPS: Fortune Systems Corp, 101 Twin Dolphins Drive, Redwood City, CA 94065