And Then There’s the Jump
I mentioned karma in yesterday’s post, referring to the “deeply ingrained habit patterns” that tend to play out in one’s life over and over, so for today I thought I’d expand on that a bit by sharing what I’ve been listening to Ajahn Sucitto say about karma (kamma in Pali).
“Kamma is both action and the results of action. It can be mental action [thoughts], verbal action [words], or bodily action [physically doing something]. Kamma is a decisive engagement with a mental perception….something arises in the mind, there’s a triggering, and then there is a reaction…a “jump”.
“There is a sense of engagement and then something gets going, the story starts spinning, and then you’re off…. You don’t notice the jump, you just noticed where you’ve jumped to…and then you’re in that so-called reality.
“That’s kamma. Something decisively catches and then there’s the reaction. Something touches and there’s a hold and then the jump.
“This habitual reaction can be released.
“The release comes through disengaging from the compulsion, then starting to make increasingly wiser and more informed choices about where to place one’s attention.
“There is a shift from the trigger to the awareness of the trigger. And then the trigger is dismantled. By itself!
“Release is actually involuntary. There is a voluntary decisive engagement and action to penetrate to the place of the trigger, then to widen into the awareness of that, then to hold the awareness….but then the release is involuntary.”
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The above is very much edited. Click here to listen to the whole talk. (It’s 65 minutes long and totally worth it!!!)