Wise Awareness (​Kumāra Bhikkhu's Blog)

Some people seem to consistently fail to do well in life, and this (you may say) has to do with kamma. But what does that mean? Does it mean that there’s nothing they can do about it, and so they’re doomed to be like that for the rest of their lives? When people speak of kamma, often they mean it like it’s fate. And that is not how the Buddha meant it. We need to bear in mind that kamma means action . Of course it can mean past action that is causing present results. But viewing it that way alone can be quite disempowering. Technically, when people speak of kamma like it’s fate, they are speaking of only the result of kamma, or what the Suttas sometimes call “old kamma”. When meeting old kamma, what we normally do is to respond badly, i.e. create new bad (unskilful or unwholesome) kamma. On the issue of consistently failing to do well in life, the old kamma here is the belief or perception (saññā) of being a failure, formed based on one’s repeated past experience of failure. Regardl...

In  The Snobbish Monk , an article I wrote in 2013, I talked about seeing deeply the root of all my efforts to feel good about myself: a defective sense of self, the idea that I wasn’t good enough. I was trying to feel good about myself because I didn’t feel good about myself. Seeing that was crucial to being free from that stressful pattern, but not enough for me to actually be free from it. I also needed to consciously change the behaviour that was part of the pattern. In other words, I had to choose to stop trying to feel good about myself. Easier said than done. The urge to repeat the pattern came up again and again, but this time I was clear about what’s better for me. A major behaviour I needed to stop was looking for people to help. I recall times when the mind was actively looking for people to ‘save’. Why? So that I could be ‘the hero’ and  feel good  about myself. I needed to catch that urge, and remind myself not to do it. Volunteering to be the hero had gotten...