What causes a person to have a pleasant or painful experience?
According to the Buddha, if we hold the view that it is all caused by what we have done in the past, or it is being done by a god, it is considered wrong view.
What is the right view?
That is a tough one because definitely a lot of it is the past.
But karma is both past and present.
So,
The point is it's not all karma because there's what you've done and then there's the circumstances, the people around you.
So you have past karma that you've done and that's caused people to hate you.
There's people who hate you and therefore they're causing you to suffer.
but the fact that they're perpetuating it in the present is is a part of that so they can still choose to follow their hatred or to acknowledge it be mindful let go of it and so as an example this is a part of the cause for you to feel pain in that case so and if people love you that's your past karma that you the good things that you've done but
They may hold out or things may happen in their lives that change the way they behave, the way they perceive you and so on.
And that affects whether you experience pleasure or pain from them.
So karma is not everything.
That's what the Buddha said.
And so there's someone who held this view that karma was everything.
And then it's like past karma is everything.
I said, well, then it's not possible to change.
It's not possible to become enlightened or...
It's not reasonable to practice.
There's no point in practicing.
It's a bad view to hold.
One way of looking at it is the idea of what's true and what's not true isn't the most important thing.
The most important thing is what is useful, what is practical.
It's hard to get your mind around, but think of it like this.
Even if it were true,
that we had no free will and it was all determined by the past, say, which the Buddha denied, but suppose that were the case, it still would be a bad idea to hold such a view.
It's ironic, you see, and so if anyone who held that view would be in trouble, because they would be disinclined to benefit, to better themselves, and so that such a person would be more likely to suffer than a person who held the view that we can change, that we can benefit ourselves, you see.
Reality according to Buddhism is a bit of a slippery thing, I would say, because we don't go that step of creating theories.
I've talked about this before, the idea of free will determinism.
It takes an assumption of an underlying universe outside of our experience.
which can support the idea of a being who has free will or a being who is deterministic or physical realities or physical entities, quantums that are deterministic.
So, since Buddhism doesn't go for that, we're better able to appreciate and to deal with reality, how to act.
Because a person who's deterministic can't say, well, I'm going to better myself, because they're not really going to better themselves.
and they may better themselves but they'll do so thinking that it's deterministic and I think definitely there's a danger for these people to become complacent and to be less inclined to
better themselves.
More inclined to, I mean there's something good about it, because more inclined to accept their faults, so less inclined to blame themselves.
There's something there.
A person who believes in free will has similar problems.
They tend to blame themselves, to hate themselves, to feel frustrated when they can't change certain things.
But this is why Buddhism does away with both of those.
So what causes, to directly answer your question in brief, what causes a person to have these experiences?
Well, yes, so karma is a big part of it, but a lot of it is past karma and a lot of it is present karma.
But it seems like there's also some vaguely defined processes like natural physical processes, maybe even you could say quantum processes, maybe even random processes
elements, I don't know if that's even
even valid, but the point is not everything is karma.
What you can say is a lot of it is karma, past karma, and a lot of it is present karma.
So that's where we should watch out because obviously the rest of it is out of our control.
We should cultivate those actions that are actually going to benefit us in the present and be forgiving of our own past and of the pasts of others.
So be forgiving of the past and be able to let go
and bear with the results of our bad past karma.
So not to become upset when bad things happen to us.
We should understand that there's various factors that we have to take into account.
Those we can affect and those we cannot change.
I think that's it.