I think that taking things too personally is a cause of a lot of inner suffering. You've probably done it before: you say something of not a lot of consequence to someone to tease them and they blow up in your face with something they don't like about you.
And then you later learn that their family member was given a bad diagnosis that day. After your ego has been bruised from the tiff.
When you are in the academic realm of Buddhism, you are given many opportunities to gain awareness of your mental afflictions. One way out of ignorance is to learn that your world is governed by the rules of karma - that what goes around comes around, that your life is a mirror of your actions. If someone is angry at you, you were angry at someone before. If someone is nice to you, you were nice to someone before. The implication is empowering, that you can create your destiny because your life directly builds on your actions, even starting today. Since what you do will come back at you, if you give out positivity and share what you want, you in return get positivity and your wishes come true.
That is a beautiful notion, but I feel that the same Buddhist thought of karma unfairly creates an enormous overwhelm. Its because people take things personally. When people hear about Karma, and are in fact directly told that their lives are a result of their personal actions in the past, it is incredibly personal and blameworthy.
Remember that I started out with saying that taking things too personally is a cause of personal suffering?
Here you get some poor person who is just so unhappy, they are told that their lives mirror what they have done in the past, and what do they think to themselves? They think of their lack, of their unhappiness, of unmet needs, of mean people in their lives, of their pain. And they come to the conclusion, its an unfortunately easy argument to make, that all of their pain is all their fault.
Now its just fuel added to the fire. If you didn't used to hate yourself before, you're going to have to try not to a lot harder, now. The self blame game is in full throttle. Now that they've begun, they could just keep going and going: the time they took something they wanted and didn't give it back is why someone broke into the apartment and stole their laptop, the time they yelled at someone is why they have a mean stepmom. Isn't the blame endless? It goes as far as far as their unmet needs span.
Do they feel empowered now? Enthusiastic to create and share happiness?
No, they've beat themselves up, and they feel bad. They can only blame themselves, since they can't blame others (since they were told its all about themselves), and someone must be to blame, or else they would just be perfectly happy beings, right? That someone must be themselves. Then they exist in a perpetual wariness of all that is happening that is bad because it means they have been bad. Maybe they don't even have a right to complain about pain anymore, since its all their fault anyway, from a past action.
The laws of karma are so personal.
In writing this post, I am thinking about a Buddhist classmate who said something along the lines of 'I'm going to keep suffering so much in the future given all my past karma'. It just made me gape and it made me sad (and questioning), since I really like this girl and I don't want her to feel so overwhelmed by her karmic baggage, and I think she's great. Below is my attempt to explain why all the above is bullshit, and ways to make Karma less personal. I want to write this post as an offering to her since she deserves it.
The first issue that comes up is right up there in the beginning. Someone is explained Karma, and they start thinking in the negative, this is - either things they lack, or pain they have. They were just told that what they experience is a result of their actions. Well, we are human, and negativity sticks with us. A totally neutral drive except for the one car who annoyed you, becomes about the one car who annoyed you.
So, if your life is the result of your past actions, what is your life? Are you currently thirsty? If no - you have access to water, its because you gave someone what they needed in the past. Did someone chat with you today? If yes - its because you gave company to someone earlier. Did the sun shine on you and feel nice? Perhaps you deserve it since you like sun and you've done so many good things in the past. Isn't it endless? You babysat, you cooked dinner, you cleaned dinner, you bought a birthday present for someone, you showed someone a video or book they also liked.
Its just as endless as the lists of things you could have done wrong. And I don't want to be preachy, but its a lot to be thankful for, too.
Is someone currently doing something mean to you, now? Are they yelling at you, judging you, right now? If no, that's because of all the times that you just were just being your good self, just checking some email (or whatever) and not hurting anyone.
You're probably a pretty good person. You probably have a lot of neutral, or positive things happen to you that you aren't giving yourself credit for.
Its just about your perspective.
So, stop blaming yourself and start thanking yourself.
Its good that you learn about Karma and gain awareness, and ponder on your past actions and how they connect to your past. Just please, don't fall into the trap of letting yourself solely focus on the negative, and blame yourself. If you notice some trends in your poor behavior, please try to let yourself notice some trends in your good behavior. And please be gentle with yourself and try to minimize blame or self hatred about the negative. Whats done is done, and you don't have to keep beating the whip on yourself. That's not what Buddhism is about. I don't even know if its a stipulation of Karma that there has to be a reason, that someone or something must be to blame.
If you assume that's you, stop because you're taking it too personally.
In fact, I have heard many a time about a healthy sense of detachment from your thoughts and issues. It can be called detachment in Buddhism, defusion in ACT (Acceptance and Commitment therapy). From ACT principles, people become too fused to their thoughts or labels, and are taught ways to effectively reduce the power/intensity of their unhelpful thoughts through 'cognitive defusion' exercises.
For example, what if, since always it seems, you have been compared to your older sibling who does better at you in school, and you've come to believe 'I'm stupid'. You are fused to that thought, you believe it strongly, it is you, you forget that there are other parts of you that are stupid. So you go in to take a test, which is a trigger for you to have that 'I'm stupid' judgment pass through you, and you start 'I'm stupid'-ing yourself and run into trouble.
A cognitive defusion would be to take that thought and soften it or lighten it, such as 'oh, I'm in that chapter of my story called 'I'm stupid', I should stop reading that since other chapters have been better. Or, take the words and change them somehow, seem them written tiny, or in pink in your mind. These are ways to take the thoughts, or the words in the thoughts and create a little space so they can't occupy your being at the moment of stress and cause undue pain.
Its true that, you do things and you affect others by your actions and even thoughts, its a ripple effect. To some extent you do have responsibility. But I want to create a way to lessen the responsibility so it doesn't result in complete overwhelm. I want to lighten the perspective.
Realize that everything is vast and interconnected, and your life is in a web with everyone else. So, you don't have to go ahead and make it so personal, when you know logically that you are a small part of such a big thing going on. You know that even yourself, much less the world, is made up of so many parts, and so your actions are just a little fish in a sea.
Your actions create ripples and they affect others. Sometimes, you are going to be hit by the ripple, and maybe its an offshoot of your original ripple, since Karma tells you that what you did comes back to you. But maybe the ripples all mixed together in the ocean. Maybe you're just getting tossed around a bit in the mix of things. Its seriously not solely about what you did or didn't do.
You are affected by everyone else, because it just goes to say that if you're actions affect others, their actions affect you. And as you practice, you don't have to meet the expectation of perfection.
You're in a world with billions of other imperfect beings. If you start comparing your entire life history against the ideal of perfection, you know that you are going to come up short. Your karma isn't jutting out there as an impossible ideal that you are never going to reach and yet are massively responsible for. Your karma is just a law of the universe that what goes around comes around - good and bad.
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