So I had this talk with someone before, but I wanted to clarify this thing to myself by jotting down here. Can you eliminate karma by purifying your sins? An example would be chanting a mantra that would relieve you from a karma of killing a bug.
In my opinion sin can be get rid of, but not the karma. Karma can be get rid of only by facing and going thru it. To make it less confusing, let’s define and distinguish the two – sin and karma. Sin is more virtual and karma is more physical.
Let’s go back to the example where I killed a mosquito fly in my previous life. This year I can eliminate the sin I acquired from doing so by chanting and doing good deeds. But regardless how good of compassionate person I turn myself into this year, I will still have to face the karma eventually by taking birth and getting killed by that bug (most likely in a human form and me as a bug).
Sin, IMO, is like a token that leads you to having bad moments; it is nothing specific. You may have committed a sin in one situation but you can suffer in a totally unrelated one. On the other hand, karma is very specific – i.e. what you do is what you get.
I recently read a few lines of “lam rim chen mo” and came across the following quote, taken out of “garland of birth stories”:
From the sky to the earth is a long way. From the distant shore of the ocean to the closest edge is also a long way. From the mountains of the east to the mountains of the west is an even longer way. But from the ordinary person to the sublime teaching is longer yet than that.
Hopefully one day we will be a better students. And meanwhile let’s continue our way…
In Buddhism, I think the most important thing to consider in any kind of situation is the intention. There are times in our lives when we mean to do something but people see it differently. A pure Buddhist wouldn’t care about what other people think, the only thing he or she would care about is carrying a pure, good heart intention.
To give a real life example, a parent gets rid of cable television at home so that the child could focus more on their education, which in the future would help this child achieve a successful career. On the other hand, the kid’s friends and the neighbor might consider the parent’s act as a way to save money or worse make the child’s life less entertaining and enjoyable. But see the parent doesn’t care what others are saying because their intention is for the betterment of their child.
I once heard this old story from cwmenturies ago where a Buddhist guru killed a bug. Now we might accuse him of committing a sin and having to face that karma in the future live, but his intention was a pure one. Because of his high spiritual achievement he could tell that bug was his mother in one of his past lives; and he was so bothered about this bug suffering that he killed her to make her free of this suffering. What a pure compassionate intention for he didn’t care about him committing a sin as long as he was able to help get rid of someone else’s suffering.
So looks like my local, but giant, electronic store Best Buy has declared October 30th as the National Vampire Awareness Day. According to the best buy, 40 percent of all the electricity used are wasted by electronic devices and appliiances that are just plugged in just for the convenience and nothing more – meaning these gadgets are not being used during these times. About $4 billion could be easily saved if these electricity powered gadgets are not only turned off but also not plugged-in.
The worst energy sucking electronics are plasma tvs, computers, DVRs, and adapters for mp3 players and cell phones.
I thought it is pretty interesting to note that the chargers we use for our cell phones, mp3 players and laptops use only 5 percent of the power they draw for charging; the rest of the 95 percent are just practically for nothing more than for wasting.
A typical US household spends an average of $1300 ever year on energy bills. Experts recommend using power strip so you can easily turn off many devices at the same time. But I wonder if unplugging the power strip entirely would help more.
Pretty often I find myself asking if we believe in karma (the law of cause and effect) and in rebirth?! Do we really believe in it or are we just saying so?
…if we really do believe in it, what makes us better than the stranger? Why do I have the impression that in our society it mostly is the “me” and not the “us”? Why does it seem to be easy to kill “my so called enemy” or a mosquito? Isn’t it right that we have lived so many lives before, and it is our personal and our shared karma that we are experiencing? So this “enemy” or mosquito could have been a dear person before, with whom we share a special karma?!
If we really do understand that there are no such things existing as country boarders, the attachment to something which we call “mine” or “me” and so on – won’t it be easier then to practice loving kindness without questioning it?!
It is getting colder and colder everyday. I just can’t imagine drving in a snow, especially the freeways would suck. Too much traffic along with slippery roads are hazardous.
Before we even start discussing this topic, lets first of all define what socialist is. Socialism is a political system that advocates the members of the community to own the property, resources,means of production, and control the distribution of goods. It basically is opposite to capitalism. United States of America is probably still the largest capitalist nation in the world. But there have been some controversies surrounding the United States 2008 Presidential Candidate Barack Obama.
Barack Obama recent campaign speech has generated some enthusiasm in public about his political and economical viewpoints, especially the one where he mentions the the phrase “redistribution of wealth.” Here is what he said, a transcript, about it in year 2001 in a radio interview:
Radio Host: Good morning and welcome to Odyssey on WBEZ Chicago 91.5 FM and we’re joined by Barack Obama who is Illinois State Senator from the 13th district and senior lecturer in the law school at the University of Chicago.
Barack Obama: If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples. So that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be okay.
But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as people tried to characterize the Warren court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can’t do to you, it says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted. One of the I think tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributed change and in some ways we still suffer from that.
Radio Host: Let’s talk with Karen. Good morning, Karen, you’re on Chicago Public Radio.
Karen (radio guest): Hi. The gentleman made the point that the Warren court wasn’t terribly radical with economic changes. My question is, is it too late for that kind of reparative work economically and is that that the appropriate place for reparative economic work to take place – the court – or would it be legislation at this point?
Barack Obama: Maybe I’m showing my bias here as a legislator as well as a law professor, but I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. The institution just isn’t structured that way.
You just look at very rare examples during the desegregation era the court was willing to for example order changes that cost money to a local school district. The court was very uncomfortable with it. It was very hard to manage, it was hard to figure out. You start getting into all sorts of separation of powers issues in terms of the court monitoring or engaging in a process that essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time.
The court’s just not very good at it and politically it’s very hard to legitimize opinions from the court in that regard. So I think that although you can craft theoretical justifications for it legally. Any three of us sitting here could come up with a rational for bringing about economic change through the courts.
The concept of redistribution of wealth is very interesting since it has both advantages and disadvantages. In one sentence: socialism will bring economic equality – regardless of who works hard and who doesn’t; who is born wealthy and who is born poor.
So just when we thought Apple’s super cool iPod touch and smart iPhone is like no other and the best one out there, China seemed to have reverse engineered these touch screen mp3 players and phone. Chinese people are typically smart at things like this, it could be because they have so many people (remember billions of people) that at least some of them are born to be good at making fake iPhone and iPod Touch.
The name of the company that makes this fake iPod Touch and iPhone is iorgane. iOrgane sounds like iOrange doesn’t it? And it kinda goes against Apple, the original maker of iPhone and iPod? This fake counterfeited iPod Touch is called Cool Touch and seem to have everything genuine one has to offer.
One thing that is fake iPod seem to be missing is the charger slot that every Apple iPhone and iPod products have at the bottom. It is an irony that this fake iPhone company even describes in detail how to distinguish between the counterfeit and genuine one: “from the phone to control the sensitivity to differentiate genuine and orange. All genuine orange used by the Apple Iphone is the same as the capacitance of the new global multi-point touch-screen technology. Capacitive touch screen is to use the human body to carry out the work of the current sensors. When the fingers touch the metal layer, the electric field due to the human body, and touch-screen user surface of a capacitive coupling, the current points from the four corners of the touch screen on the outflow of electrodes, and flows through the electrodes of the four current and four fingers to the In direct proportion to the distance, the controller through the four current ratio of precision calculated touch points. The use of capacitive screens such as mobile phones Iphone, orange mobile phones have a very high sensitivity, the user only lightly touch on the screen or slide will be able to do the necessary operation.”
Here is the video where you will see this fake iPod Touch demo:
There is this saying called “honesty is the best policy.” But can it always hold up – in any time and type of circumstaces. This is where I think we get to really judge who lives by honesty all the time and who just on different occassions.
Let me briefly elaborate on what I mean by that: let’s say George, Tenzin and I are in a discussion group. We all agree that being honest is a good characteristics that will make others look upto you. But we all talk about honesty bit differently. George says honesty is always the best policy; however, Tenzin claims that there are times and situaions where you can’t be totally honest for one reason or another.
Therefore, from what George and Tenzin said, we can conclude that George tend to be more honest and more often than Tenzin.
