Help us to establish Drala Jong - a Buddhist Retreat Centre in Wales
Once we have gained an understanding of karma as perception and response, and have gained some experience of the spaciousness of mind, we can celebrate that we have utter choice and total freedom to be whatever we want to be.
We can view karma as a snare that we can avoid through practice. When we recognise that Dharma offers methods to completely explode our neurotic patterning, understanding karma inspires us to practise. Through the development of spaciousness, our patterning can become totally open and transparent. It becomes completely available to us to observe, to change, or to enjoy. We can play. Our patterning becomes a sparkling nexus of opportunity. We can view perception. We can recognise intention. We can motivate responses.
We are in control – but not with rigid, suppressive, ‘police state mind’. We are in control simply because we have become transparent to ourselves.
Ngak’chang Rinpoche explains being in
control as, … not being out of control. Being in control
does not mean that one controls phenomena – but that one has one's
hands on the steering wheel or on the reins. Holding the rein does
not mean that one completely dominates the horse. The horse always
has personal ideas about the landscape and what it contains. The
landscape is not controlled even though we attempt to follow certain
directions within it. The weather is not controlled either. In fact—little control is possible—yet nonetheless we are in control,
to the extent that we have not abdicated responsibility for what is
happening.
When our patterning becomes transparent, we can laugh at the compulsion of our desire, at the fearfulness of our aversion, and at the wilfulness of our stupidity. Every moment becomes an opportunity for freedom and realisation.
Ultimately, finding presence of awareness in the dimension of the moment is the experience of non-dual emptiness and form. Within this experience, all manifestations become the ornaments of spontaneous presence and are experienced as purely appropriate, natural, uncontrived, and free.
Karma as a cause of cyclic existence no longer exists. Spontaneous enlightened perception manifests simultaneously as spontaneous enlightened response. We are no longer tossed about on the stormy waters of hope and fear, expectation and preconception. We can quell the storm.