Page 75 - Because I know, I can let go

Kamma happens when the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, or the mind, receive sense
contacts. But if there’s a sense contact and the defilements don’t arise there won’t be

anything to cause the arising of kamma either. If desire and clinging arise in ignorance,
that will initiate manokamma, mental kamma, followed by verbal kamma, speech, and,
finally, physical activity will occur.

So the concepts of ‘good,’ and ‘bad’ must be involved here, not to mention the appropriate
desire, kamma, inevitably to be followed by the appropriate result, or vipāka, as, to go a
little deeper into this, when someone comes to exist as a God, or an animal, a hungry
ghost, a demon, a human being, or whatever.

These kinds of results, however, the still ignorant will assume refer to the next physical
life after death in this life has taken place. But according to true Buddhist principles,
like idappaccayatā and paticcasamupāda, these results, existences, or births, happen

immediately, or at least at some other time during the course of this present life, because
what we have here is the mental form of ‘birth’ known as ‘opapātika,’ it’s not birth of a
god in a heaven up in the sky, or a demon in a hell somewhere under the ground, or
whatever. If any contact, any experience of phassa makes the mind hot, in Buddhism it’s

then said that that person has been born as a ‘hell being,’ while if any sense contact makes
a person foolish they’re said to have been born as an ‘animal,’ if any sense contact makes
a person greedy they become a ‘preta,’ a ‘hungry ghost,’ they become that sort of creature
which is afflicted by desire, by hunger all of the time, if, however, there’s sense contact and

satipaññā is around to consider the event carefully then one can remain a human being.
If, on the other hand, a contact causes comfortable feeling and there’s happiness, then it’s
held that one has come to exist as a ‘devata,’ a god, or, if the mind is at peace and not at all
concerned with things sensual, then, at that time, one comes to exist as a ‘Brahma’ god.

This isn’t what’s usually taught in temples, but what’s usually taught in temples isn’t the
Buddha’s teaching.

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