â€Okay, not bear-hunting.â€

Aw, shucks! (I was hoping for some kind of interesting metaphorical bear.)

Have fun [wave].

Where you’re going, the Wifi gods are not jealous. Lots of free wifi in public places, to say nothing of other.

(Do I have time to visit the Capitol?)

Mr. Emptywheel’s NFC North driving tour. Hmmm.

Chicago Bears – Bye
Detroit Lions vs. Denver 1PM
Green Bay Packers @ KC
Minnesota Vikings vs. San Diego 1PM

Chicago, Green Bay, Minneapolis and Detroit and back in five days? You’re skipping Minneapolic right?

Have a safe trip!

Marcy I will be gone when you get back see you thank you for everything and Mr EW

Neil — That’s some driving for an NFC North tour, since they are all away games this weekend

Have fun EW and make sure Mr. EW ties your food up to a tree, nothing in the tent or car, bears are crafty

Holy smokes J. Thomason, sounds like you’ve had an awful couple of months. Best wishes for a full recovery and return to disc golf…

Next time I’m in Siberia, I’ll be sure to swing by

Have a great trip – drive safe!

While you ’wheels are rolling North, the dollar (as you predicted) is going South.

Also, we had a jumper this morning – Coffin left Chewbacca’s old seat in Shooter’s Office.

For this light posting weekend, I’ll be retreating at the meditation hut to track (and record field notes on) the Bear of Karma – which, in general, is poorly understood by us Westerners.

Speaking of Bears, here are some of the lyrics to an abolutely hilarious song/story by Jimmy Buffet called â€God’s Own Drunk†–

http://www.tsrocks.com/j/jimmy…..drunk.html

(snip)

…And that’s when I first saw the Bear. He was a Kodiak lookin’ fella ’bout 19 feet tall, he rambled up over the hill ’spectin’ me to do one of two things: flip or fly, I didn’t do either one. It hung him up. He starts sniffin’ ’round my body tryin’ to smell fear, but he ain’t gonna smell no fear, ’cause I’m God’s own drunk and a fearless man. It hung him up. He looked me right in my eyes and my eyes was a lot redder than his was. It hung him up.

So I approached him and I said, â€Mr. Bear, I love every hair on your 27 acre body. I know you got a lotta friends over there on the other side of the hill. There’s ole’ Rare Bear, Tall Bear, Freddy Bear, Kelly Bear, Relly Bear, Smelly the Bear, Smokey the Bear, Pokey the Bear; I want you to go back over there tonight and tell ’em I’m feelin’ right. You tell ’em I love each and every one of ’em like a brother and a sister; but if they give me any trouble tonight, I’m gonna run every Goddamned one of ’em off the hill.â€

He took two steps backwards and didn’t know what to think…

(snip)

Have a great trip!

phred,

I think the Lions and Vikings are at home. The packers are at KC and the Bears have a bye week. Still, it would be a lot of driving. When EW gives us a title like â€Mr. Emtywheels NFC North†driving tour, I want to decode it. I think they’re headed to Wisconin via Chicago, not sure about Minnesota or Detroit.

bmaz,

It sounds like the Chargers Vikes game will be the one to watch. I asked my friends last night who they like in the Colts @ Patriots showdown 4:15 pm on Sunday. I like Pats for the win in addition to wanting them to win it. How about you-bmaz et al.?

Neil — thanks, I misread your earlier comment, oops! FWIW, I hope they head on north to Green Bay and the UP before heading back south in MI. It should be lovely up there this time of year. If they do head that way, they may indeed find themselves a bear (less likely in the southern part of WI).

Chargers Vikes, really? MN has been awful and LT has picked up the Chargers, I may be wrong, but I don’t think we’re looking at a close game there. Colts-Pats should be good, Colts have home field advantage, don’t know if it will be enough. My game to watch will be GB-KC, but then you knew that, right? Go Pack!

*My* local Colts fan doesn’t think they have much chance of winning this game. (This is a guy from Indiana who actually flew there *from LA* for one of last season’s home games, a guy who is wearing an all-Colts outfit today.)

Schumer and DiFi to vote YES on Mukasey. Damn.

Marcy – Verizon has wireless internet that works over the cellular network. The new Rev-A network regularly gives me 800kbps-1Mbps download speed and 300-400kbps upload – it’s my primary internet connection. About $60/month, and worth every dime if you travel much or even, as I do, need internet access at client sites.

Karma refers to “the intensity of egoic action.â€

Karma operates based on how intensely you ‘desire’ mental and physical outcomes in the world of your circumstances – How strongly does your world have to be the way you want it, as opposed to how it is?

To make reference back to the Going Fishing meditation on the Buddha Mind, Karma is the Energy of Desire involved in selectively Grasping at Objects in the Stream of Thoughts.

http://thenexthurrah.typepad.c…..shing.html

To recap, the mere act of Grasping at Objects in the Stream of Thoughts ‘creates’ the evanescent sense of ‘self’ as actor, as a ‘separate’ and unique person, as an Ego living ‘inside’ a dramatic life story.

In grasping at Objects in the Stream of Thoughts, an ego attempts to control outcomes within its perceived circumstances.

Very simply put, from a mental and physical point of view, Ego desires More Pleasure [fame, fortune and ‘feeling good’] and Less Pain [ignominy, dispossession and ‘feeling bad’].

When an Ego gets what it wants – more pleasure, less pain – it’s happy.

When an Ego gets what it doesn’t want – more pain, less pleasure – it’s sad.

The Intensity with which an Ego is driven to ‘want’ outcomes is Karma.

—

In the orthodox ‘ego-centric’ Judeo-Christian traditions, God deals ‘you’ a one-time hand at birth and has a plan for ‘your’ life that gives you the opportunity to ‘get back to Him’ at the time of ‘your’ death. The sum total of your ‘being-ness’ is said to take place in this life and the after-life to come.

It’s accepted as one of God’s Mysteries that people are scattered all over the socio-economic spectrum, and that some endure greater hardships than others. Some people live longer than others. Some people are afflicted with disease, while others are disease free. Bad things happen to good people, and good things happen to bad people. It doesn’t seem to make sense that God loves all his children the same, because some – without any obvious rhyme or reason – appear to have His favor more than others.

In non-dual (not two, and not one, either – no separate existence) Eastern spiritual traditions, ‘you’ are born because of Karma, the good things and bad things that happen to ‘you’ during your life are due to Karma, and ‘you’ die because of Karma.

Karma is the ‘ego cloak’ that covers every sentient being’s radiant, perfect, non-separate primordial essence – it’s the cloud of confusion that is generated by ‘grasping at objects in the stream of thoughts.’ Underneath that cloak, the essential ‘you’ is timeless, spaceless, non-separate sentient being-ness, in any socio-economic circumstance. In the Eastern traditions, the Spiritual Journey is about removing the Cloak of Ego that covers your true essence – liberating the primordial essence from the grip of Karma.

And that’s one of the major differences between the Judeo-Christian Model and the Eastern Model – in the East, your primordial essence keeps coming back until it’s liberated from its confusion, from its Karma. Mind you, it’s not the same personal consciousness coming back every time, rather it’s the same cloaked primordial essence coming back with the same Karma that it left off with from the previous instantiation – wrapped in a new set of circumstances and personality – a fresh body/mind that you know and believe is a separate, unique entity, ‘yourself.’

Karma is so powerful, that your primordial essence will wear-out a confused body/mind with suffering, discard it, and pick-up another one – over and over. As an Ego reading this, you are not aware of the previous instantiations of your primordial essence – ‘they’ are shrouded by this current lifetime’s grasping identification between its current body/mind and current circumstances – locked into a fearful and doubting awareness, bounded by birth and death.

However, Karma accounts for why you were born into the circumstances you were in this lifetime. Depending on where the previous instantiation of ‘you’ left off working on the Karma surrounding your primordial essence, is where ‘you’ started in this life – with a personality and socio-economic position exactly tailored to your Karma. And, where you leave it at the end of this life will be where the follow-on instantiation of your primordial essence begins its next leg through the suffering World on its way back to its original home.

So, in the Eastern conception, primordial essence journeys spiritually through thousands and thousands of different iterations of life, in thousands and thousands of different circumstances, with thousands and thousands of different living body/minds – serially according to the workings of Karma, which I’ll go into in greater detail tomorrow.

The good news here is – each Ego – your Ego – has the opportunity during this lifetime to improve its Karmic situation (or make it worse!). Depending on the spiritual work an individual does in this life, one can completely throw-off the Cloak of Confusion and realize Liberation while living – unexcelled complete perfect enlightenment – thus ending the cycle of rebirth – or, one can keep journeying on, wandering in confusion through the suffering World.

Tomorrow – Heaven, Earth and Hell: The Rhyme and Reason of Karma
Monday – A Model for Ending Karma through Practice

More on our ‘Can’t leave Home without it’ Karma Bear.

But, first, Primordial Awareness – the essential you – reading these words right now – ‘knows’ that true being-ness, liberated awareness, is characterized by five qualities:

Durable – un-moved by changing circumstances
Serene – fully satisfied in the here and now
Beautiful – attracted to all experience
Clear-sighted – not confused, seeing ’things as they are’
Highest – above all notions of subject and object

That’s what gets obscured when we leave the Home of our Primordial Being-ness. Awareness that doesn’t change in its presentation gives no sense of Time, and since it is the same awareness everywhere, it is experienced as Spaceless – where could an Ego hide?

If we were to take the time to sit down and reflect on the World we live in, we would see that the still-expanding Universe is a perfect harmony of balanced unfoldment whose tendency is to move towards expressions of increasing conscious awareness of itself.

In the Eastern traditions, humans are the ultimate expression of the Universe’s capacity to be consciously aware of itself. The Universe spent a long time making this blue, spinning ball before we flowered upon it.

All beings come into this World shrouded from their Primordial Essence. What makes humans unique amongst all the manifestations in the entire Universe is we have the capacity to ‘lift the veil of confusion’ to reveal, to liberate, the unbounded and most excellent being-ness of All – to arrive at the end of existential suffering, the end of fear and doubt about an impermanent and unsatisfying experience, to instead, directly realize the full potential of the opportunity that Life provides, to transcend the profane for the sacred forever and realize that everything is perfect, as is,

—

Okay, back to the Rhyme and Reason of Karma. It will be helpful to use a diagram. Draw a mountain – up at a 45 degree angle to a peak, and down at a 45 degree angle again. Use dashed lines to segment the mountain into lower third, middle third and upper third. Label the lower third Hell, middle third Earth, and the upper third Heaven.

The upper third is characterized as ‘less intense, more pleasurable.’
The middle third is characterized as ‘somewhat intense, neutral.’
The lower third is characterized as ‘more intense, more painful.’

As a human, your Karma has brought ‘you’ into being somewhere in the middle third – ‘somewhat’ grasping at objects in the stream of thoughts – on Earth.

Now, draw a stick-figure ‘you’ on Earth. Broadly drawn, you have four options, Karmically speaking, during this lifetime.

1 – You can decrease the intensity of your world having to be your way, being more accepting and sharing of the natural order, decreasing your Karma, and go to Heaven for the next lifetime
2 – You can ‘drone-on,’ neither increasing nor decreasing your Karma, just suffering punctuated by small relative ‘happinesses’, and come back to try again as a human.
3 – You can increase the intensity of your world, being more judging, more taking, increasing your Karma, and go to Hell for a lifetime.
4 – You can stop grasping at objects in the stream of thoughts altogether, ending Karma, and Liberate.

So, Karma delivers you to Earth with a ‘latent’ tendency to ‘Grasp Objects in the Stream of Thoughts’ – bequeathed to you by the last instantiation of your Primordial Essence. You are born to parents and socio-economic circumstances that match your incoming Karmic intensity. The further along the Spiritual Path you are, the better your birth – Buddha was a Prince when he woke-up (it’s presumably easier for people with more free time, like Princes), but the truth is any human can potentially wake-up from any socio-economic circumstance. As you grow-up, that latent tendency to grasp objects in the stream of your thoughts builds a repertoire of conditioned habits to ‘get what you want’ in order to have the World that ‘you’ live in.

An interesting characteristic of Karma is that all lifetimes are temporary and followed by another temporary lifetime. This is both a good and bad thing from the point of view of awakening. It’s good because it means if you fuck-up and end-up in Hell where the suffering is truly intense – it’s only for a while, a hell of a painful while, but it ends and, depending on how the next ‘you’ fares down there, the follow-on instantiation can be boosted out to a better circumstance. Also, it’s a bad thing because it means you can get to Heaven, only to come tumbling down at the end of that lifetime.

The reason humans are the best birth to have is because Heaven is said to be too pleasurable and Hell too painful to liberate from. The only true release from Suffering is to ‘win’ a human life, as we have, and overcome our Karma altogether – in the whole of the Universe, only humans can be Buddhas.

So, the Rhyme and Reason of Karma is directly related to the intensity with which one grasps objects in the stream of thoughts – movements towards more intensity result in a more Hell-like life leading to a stint in Hell – whereas movements towards less intensity result in a more Heaven-like life leading to a time in Heaven.

Best of All is to cease grasping altogether, and just Be.

Tomorrow – A Model for Ending Karma through Practice