Karma - The Transformation Of Each Mind-Moment

Student: Will you share Prajna on how Karma relates to severe suffering, especially with childhood sickness, disability, and abuse?

Zen Master Jok Um: I find it best to describe karma as a shorthand for the way things unfold -- the vast, layered, complex and ungraspable web of cause and effect throughout time and space. Though it's ungraspable, it's also discernable as each mind-moment arises, since each mind-moment is the emergence of all these elements in a specific place, in a specific way, with a specific flavor. If you have a spoonful of vanilla ice cream, you know immediately it's vanilla, cold, smoothe, and how good the brand is. Maybe if you have unusually good intuition, you may discern something about the people who picked the vanilla beans. Ultimately, though, there's a point beyond which you can't see, and you just have to trust. It's way of saying that each conditioned phenomena is exactly the way it is, and the way it is makes sense, in that lots of things came together in a way that created precisely this. Since all is in constant emergence, karma allows room to see how transformation happens, and to see where you stand it its ecosystem, and therefore what's in your hands and what's not in your hand. Perceiving karma, then, is more about what you see -- clear discernment -- and much less about figuring anything out. And like everything else, the more you look well, the richer your vision.

This allows room to be puzzled, of course, or frustrated, or joyful, or sad. It thus also allows room to discern how difficult, painful, abusive circumstances came to be, how they affected and still affect you, how little freedom of movement you would have had, necessarily, as a child, and what range of freedom of movement you might have access to as an adult. In a way, it makes the experience of the world larger. You might enjoy the novel Flatland, if you haven't read it already -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland

-- it's a mathematical dimensional reverie that speaks eloquently, if in image, of the human mind and experience.

So karma is not an explanatory system, not linear, not fatalistic, not assigning blame, and in a way, opening up the path to fuller agency.