I was watching a dharma talk by a Tibetan lama on YouTube and during the Q&A, someone asked whether the dream state produces karma. I quickly intuitively answered out loud, "no", and then the lama matter-of-factly responded, "oh yes" and I quickly changed my answer to "yes". Not just because he said yes, but once he said yes it was easy to realize yes and why. So much for intuition.
My error was in too closely aligning karma with action and there is no acting per se in the dream state. If you can't act, you can't produce karma. That's wrong. Karma is rather the mental impression of all experience. Karma creation is the mind being impressed (seeded) with stimulus and karma manifestation is the form the impression takes through action when causes and conditions arise for it to manifest (germinates). That can and does happen in the dream state.
That night I had a dream that put not too fine a point on it. I don't quite remember the dream; a situation including my mother being in town and calling to ask to meet earlier than we had agreed and suggesting what I could do to make it earlier and that not sitting too well with me. I woke up and was able to identify various emotional reactions in the dream indicative of how my mind is karmically impressed.
I remember feeling pressured. I remember being anxious, stressed, resentful, resistant. Those aren't things I feel these days in the physical world, possibly/probably/obviously/definitely because I've engineered my life to avoid scenarios whereby those feelings would arise and challenge me. I can brush off external pressure and anxiety. I can fool myself into believing I don't get stressed or anxious anymore because of mindfulness practice, but in the dream, there they were.
The key about karma and transformation is, of course, how you react to and handle situations (stimulus) that arise. The usual way of living life is thinking we are simply separate, individual agents accepting reality as it's presented. We have our experience and our feelings and we accept them exactly at face value and we react to them and outside factors in the myriad ways we do, generally unmindful that karma is at work at every moment and with every thought and feeling.
Part of mindfulness practice trains the mind to pay close attention to every moment and thought and realize how we perceive and react is karma. Collectively they are not isolated or separate incidents, but part of a continuum having come from something in the past and lead to something in the future. It works on the subtlest levels. If you're thinking about something and change your mind, that's karma. What you were initially thinking about was already karma, but then something from the past made you change your mind. It didn't come out of the blue from absolutely nowhere, and what you changed your mind to may influence something in the future in ways you wouldn't notice. The idea of being able to change your mind is karma. If you're the kind of person who finds it hard to change your mind, that's also karma; that came from something. These small karma examples can be translated up to bigger things in our lives, personalities and psychologies.
Experience is important for transformation. Dreams qualify. My attitude in my present world and avoiding those situations may be totally fine and acceptable in working to change the karma in the future. It is also karma. Being neurotically avoidant isn't great, but I don't think that's necessarily what I'm doing. Not that I have a great argument against that. But it does allow me to work on cultivating attitudes and perspectives to deal with difficult interactions with people in the future, whether this life or further on. It's not like I'm not challenged at all, after all I am who I am and the challenge is always here. My situation allows me to mull over interactions and cultivate best courses of action instead of being thrown into them for reals and failing by reacting with anger and negativity.
The ideal is to become a person who doesn't automatically react to negative stimulus with anger and negativity. There are people who are like that, I shouldn't wonder, where such a reaction is totally foreign. That's a great way of being. It's a wonderful way of being to always be able to see the light side of situations and laugh things off; to not groan about how I've got the practice all wrong, but to laugh and make light of my errors and set me straight. At the very least in that dream, I felt those karmic seeds that I no doubt have, but I didn't react. I didn't snap in anger or say anything snide or sarcastic. I think I didn't say anything, which is a good neutral starting point.
The key about karma and transformation is, of course, how you react to and handle situations (stimulus) that arise. The usual way of living life is thinking we are simply separate, individual agents accepting reality as it's presented. We have our experience and our feelings and we accept them exactly at face value and we react to them and outside factors in the myriad ways we do, generally unmindful that karma is at work at every moment and with every thought and feeling.
Part of mindfulness practice trains the mind to pay close attention to every moment and thought and realize how we perceive and react is karma. Collectively they are not isolated or separate incidents, but part of a continuum having come from something in the past and lead to something in the future. It works on the subtlest levels. If you're thinking about something and change your mind, that's karma. What you were initially thinking about was already karma, but then something from the past made you change your mind. It didn't come out of the blue from absolutely nowhere, and what you changed your mind to may influence something in the future in ways you wouldn't notice. The idea of being able to change your mind is karma. If you're the kind of person who finds it hard to change your mind, that's also karma; that came from something. These small karma examples can be translated up to bigger things in our lives, personalities and psychologies.
Experience is important for transformation. Dreams qualify. My attitude in my present world and avoiding those situations may be totally fine and acceptable in working to change the karma in the future. It is also karma. Being neurotically avoidant isn't great, but I don't think that's necessarily what I'm doing. Not that I have a great argument against that. But it does allow me to work on cultivating attitudes and perspectives to deal with difficult interactions with people in the future, whether this life or further on. It's not like I'm not challenged at all, after all I am who I am and the challenge is always here. My situation allows me to mull over interactions and cultivate best courses of action instead of being thrown into them for reals and failing by reacting with anger and negativity.
The ideal is to become a person who doesn't automatically react to negative stimulus with anger and negativity. There are people who are like that, I shouldn't wonder, where such a reaction is totally foreign. That's a great way of being. It's a wonderful way of being to always be able to see the light side of situations and laugh things off; to not groan about how I've got the practice all wrong, but to laugh and make light of my errors and set me straight. At the very least in that dream, I felt those karmic seeds that I no doubt have, but I didn't react. I didn't snap in anger or say anything snide or sarcastic. I think I didn't say anything, which is a good neutral starting point.
