It's Not Your Fault (Or Is It?)
Formal equanimity practice hinges on the teaching of kamma, which means action, but more precisely "action that has ethical weight and has an impact for the doer." This is why the phrase emphasizes how we are the owners of our own actions and that our actions are what we inherit, or carry forward through time. We do have agency—we make choices, and we form intentions to act differently than our impulses and reactivity try to demand of us.
At the same time, our choices are conditioned, arising out of the available material of the past, other people's actions, the environment, and all the choices we've made up to this point. The thing that makes this not determinism is that conditions are not causes. If the past were a cause, our choices would be caused by what has already happened, inevitable, not malleable. Because the past is only a condition, there is this strange gap where we can resist the momentum of conditions and do something new.
The heart of wise effort in all its forms is learning to resist conditions and impulses that might lead us into habitual bad choices, coming up with actions that are not our nervous system's first choice. Understood in this way, the entirety of our practice is a kind of renunciation. Moment by moment we resist impulses that we know don't lead to peace, and by acting on wiser intentions, create the possibility that future better conditions will make future choices easier. To whatever degree you've managed to make a habit of kindness, focus, wise choices around eating, speaking, thinking, and all the rest, you can know that your practice is growing stronger.
Tonight we'll look at the teachings on kamma, and what they suggest for how we think about our own agency, choices, and intentions..
