Who’s Your Momma?

Or, more commonly, who’s your Daddy?

It’s up to you to decide if you want to say this to your biological parents, but from a Buddhist perspective, they’re not your parents. According to Buddhism, karma mostly determines what your life is like, so it determines who your parent are and what your relationship with them is like. If you feel like you have a lot to blame your parents for, this may come as a relief, except that it’s your karma. Remember, we’re all responsible, but no one is to blame.

A common metaphor for karma is seeds. You planted seeds in many previous lifetimes that may blossom in this lifetime. As with real seeds, what grows depends on what kind of seeds they are, but also on the conditions when they blossom. If you behave morally now, you can mitigate the effects of bad karma and increase the effects of good karma.

But in terms of right now, the present moment, the only moment there is, your parent is ultimate consciousness, or conscious awareness. It creates the context in which we exist. As Alan Watts points out, human consciousness excludes as much as, or more than, it includes. This is adaptive from the perspective of daily social existence, but it is the problem from the perspective of the Buddhist path. One way to understand awakening on the Buddhist path is as accession to the full range of possible human knowledge and understanding. By awakening, we let go of the defense mechanisms that cause us to ignore/exclude much of what is going on around us.

This can be a bit terrifying going it, although it is enormously gratifying and satisfying once you get over the hump. In some sense, when we meditate, we are eroding the defense mechanisms and inviting the accession of all that ultimate consciousness contains.

So keep up your consistent meditation practice and find ultimate peace.

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