Some of you may have been waiting for this podcast to come to light. Learning that you have an enormous amount of negative karma just sitting waiting to pounce on you at any given moment is a frightening thought. Having an attitude that it won't happen to me, is very dangerous. No one has any guarantee that their life will be sweet sailing the entire time. We all have to face negative experiences at some point in our lives, whether it is losing things we love or not being able to get things we desire, falling ill or even dying. It happens to all of us.
How do you know you need to purify? If you have anything going wrong in your life, then you need to purify your negative karma. If you are unable to get things you want, you need to purify. If you are disturbed by things you don't want, you need to purify. If you suffer from any illness or injury, you need to purify. If you are not happy with any part of your life, you need to purify. To be honest, the fact that you are living here on this Earth during these degenerate times means you need to purify. We all do.
A couple of podcasts ago, you learned about protecting your positive karma so that you do not destroy it whenever you do something negative, even getting angry. That helps to keep the positive karma in your storage unit to benefit you some time in the future. Now, I will try to explain the 4 steps it takes to reduce the gigantic pile of negative karma you have stored. All 4 steps need to be followed or you will not clear it up and you will have to suffer for the negative actions you have taken. I learned these steps from the Joyful Path of Good Fortune book written by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, one of my spiritual guides. These are things I continuously work on because I am afraid of having to encounter more suffering in my life then I have already had and I certainly don't want any of my future lives to be as bad as this one or worse.
The first step in purifying is to regret the negative actions you have performed. Whatever negative action you can remember doing, you need to genuinely regret having done that. You can regret the harm you caused others by behaving that way or at the very least regret the terrible karma you have created for yourself. You cannot pretend to regret the action, because your mind knows what you are doing. At least be honest with yourself. This is for you, to benefit you, not to make you look good in the eyes of others, that would be completely pointless. You need to regret each and every negative action you have ever done that you can remember. Now there will be actions you don't remember from this life and of course all of your past lives, so you need to develop the regret for every negative action you have ever done.
You need to regret all of those you have killed, in this life you may not have killed anyone, but you most likely have killed an insect, so you have killed. You have killed in your past lives for sure, because those lives were completely different from the one you have now. Assume that you have done the worst things in your past lives and all of them multiple times, so you don't miss out on removing anything from your storage locker. Keep working on regretting every negative thing you have ever done in this life and all of your countless past lives. If it helps, you may think of negative things you would be terrified of happening to you and all the things you don't want to happen to you. Then realize you have done those things to others in your past lives and need to clear those up so they don't actually happen to you. That can be good motivation for purifying your negative karma and ensuring you do all four steps.
The second step you can take is to develop a mind of compassion. You need to have compassion for others in order to make real spiritual progress. You need to understand the suffering you feel is the suffering everyone goes through, all living beings. You need to realize that some people go through worse things than you and suffer even more than you do, also. You need to understand the harm your negative actions cause others and have compassion for what you have done to them. Compassion is one of the most important things to develop. Without compassion you will spiral downwards spiritually and never clear up your negative karma. You will continue to believe that others deserve to be hurt and that will cause you great harm in the future. Compassion is the key to your liberation.
The third step is what Geshe Kelsang Gyatso refers to as applying the opponent force. This step requires you to do positive actions with the intention of purifying your negative karma. Let's say you punched someone in a moment of anger, you could give that person a gift while having the intention to purify your previous negative action of punching them. You can do anything positive to purify any of your negative karma, like volunteering to help others to purify negative actions perhaps.
It would be good for you to do the opposite action to your negative action to purify. Telling the truth to purify your negative actions of lying, not only helps you to purify but helps your mind to become familiar with telling the truth instead of lying. Giving things rather than stealing, saving lives rather than killing and so on would be examples of doing the opposite actions. Do these things with the intention of purifying the opposite negative karma you have. Just doing something positive without having the intention firmly in your mind of purifying does not purify anything. Without the intention you are just doing something good, which is wonderful and gives you positive karma, however it won't clear up any negative karma.
The fourth and final step is to promise to stop doing all those negative things. Not only do you have to promise to stop doing negative actions, but you actually have to do your best to stop doing them. You cannot make an empty promise without any intention of changing your behaviour. If there is a negative action you have hardly ever done or perhaps have never done, then you can make the promise easily to never do that action again. However, if you are constantly lying to people, then you will have an extremely difficult time to completely stop lying. Start by making the promise that you won't lie for the next five minutes. If you want to purify all of your negative karma completely you will have to continue building up your resistance to lying until you no longer lie at all and can promise to never do it again. You need to make this fourth step for every negative action there is. You need to do your upmost best to stop behaving negatively in order to purify everything.
Now remember if you fail to do any of the four steps, you will not purify your negative karma and will have to live through it some time in the future. The choice is yours. Do you want all your suffering to come to an end, or do you want to gamble with your health, happiness and safety in the future? Are you willing to risk having your worst nightmares come true at some point?
If you want examples of people who have purified their karma, look at any footage you can find for natural disasters. I mentioned previously in another podcast how you may see an entire neighbourhood completely flatten and destroyed by the disaster except for one house that seems to have been untouched. Every other house around them is gone, but theirs is still standing. That is because they purified their karma so that they did not lose their house. They did not purify the karma of experiencing the natural disaster, but they saved their house anyway. It is the same for a plane crash where one person survives and walks away unscathed when everyone else on board died. They purified the karma that would have caused them to die in the crash, but did not purify enough and still went threw that disaster. These things have nothing to do with luck, unless you want to say they were lucky they purified their karma before these disasters hit. It is because these people purified that they did not experience the full brunt of the disasters happening around them. I'm sure you could come up with more examples perhaps even from your own life.
An example from my own life happened when I was a teenager. We had family visiting from out of town. The adults all went out and left us kids at home with me in charge. The other kids were all just a couple of years younger than me. My younger step-brother decided to turn the power off in the house for whatever reason he was upset. All of us kids went down to the basement and I ordered him to put the power back on, because I didn't know exactly what he had done, so didn't know how to fix it myself. He refused. I yelled at him. He punched me square in the face. I didn't even flinch. In fact, I never felt the punch at all. There was no pain with it. Now, that worked to scare the crap out of my younger brothers and cousins who witnessed that. My younger step-brother then put the power back on. They all said they would never mess with me again, cause they were shocked that I never reacted to being punched. From my side, I never felt any pain at all, not even afterwards. I know now that is because I purified the effect of the pain, although I did not purify being punched or the situation I found myself in.
Whether or not you are enjoying a good life is mainly due to how much you have purified in the past. The very fact that you are able to listen to this podcast and learn how to purify shows you that you have purified enough to be learning this now. We all need to work on doing this continually throughout the rest of our lives to make the most progress we can towards being free from suffering once and for all. The less negative karma that ripens upon us in the future will make it easier for us to stop engaging in bad behaviour, so we don't create any more.
I'm working on purifying my negative karma not only because I don't want to experience anymore suffering, but also because I don't want any of it to continue to cause harm to others. My negative karma includes collective karma, so I am not the only one that suffers from it. I would like to clear it up entirely, so I don't have to worry about the harm it may cause to anyone. I would like to purify enough to be completely free from all suffering or at the very least to be able to take rebirth in a pure land, so that I can continue to work on it until it is all gone.
We can work on these four steps together and clear up as much negative karma as we can before we die and take rebirth in different circumstances. Wouldn't it be wonderful to be born in a pure land with no negative karma to disturb us? We can all work towards making this a reality, if we choose to.
You can hear the full podcast at this link: https://youtu.be/tDByDRnP328
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