Our afflictions, our neuroses, our delusions do not come from our parents – our good qualities, either: not one tiny bit of our mind comes from our parents. This idea that they do is completely, totally nonsense, Buddha says – a very shocking thing to hear.
And, of course, we don’t come from a creator, either.
If we’re a Christian or a Muslim, we know that the essence of ourselves, our soul, comes from God, and so that’s why we think we’re made by God, nothing wrong. If we’re a philosophical materialist, we’d say the mother and father give us a body and a mind – well, Christians and Muslims agree with this too.
Buddha would agree they give you a body, but his crucial point is your mind isn’t physical and doesn’t come from anyone else.
It’s not easy in our culture to open our minds to the possibility the mind is not physical. And if you just look at the Indians well before the Buddha, those genius Hindus, this was their observation as well.
As His Holiness says, it was these amazing Indians more than three thousand years ago who were the ones actually who began the investigation into the nature of self. They’re the ones – not Freud a hundred years ago! Buddha came along after that, he was educated in that system.
If you look into the literature, the body of knowledge, it’s all there about this technique that they created to achieve samadhi, subtle concentration; this ability to go to subtler levels of mind that don’t depend upon the brain. It’s not as if it’s a cosmic idea – it’s just a surprise to us, that’s all.
The Buddha’s idea and the Hindus’ is that our consciousness, our mind, comes into this life, finding its way, due to strong karma, to my mother and father when they hopped into bed: my father, Teddy, and my mother, Billie – actually, her name was Agnes, but they called her Billie because they wanted a boy.
Anyway, there they were in bed, doing what you do, and then the egg and sperm joined, and that’s the condition for my consciousness to go there – having left a previous body not more than a few weeks before, could be less, and after biding my time in the intermediate state, I now go like a magnet and leap into that egg and sperm.
From the Buddha’s observation, that consciousness is a beginningless and endless continuity of mental moments that is not physical, is not the handiwork of a creator, and is absolutely not the handiwork of Mummy and Daddy.
All of the teachings in Buddhism are based upon this view. The whole of Buddhism would collapse into a heap of incoherent nonsense if we can prove that this is not true: all the Buddha’s views about karma, about suffering, about becoming a buddha, about everything are all based upon this assumption.
This doesn’t mean parents don’t play a role – it’s clear they do. My mother was a classical musician, right? And then she saw her little Bobsie, me, and she saw I had some potential, so she taught me music. So everybody would say, well, obviously Robina got her music from her mother. Well, she didn’t. My mother came into this life with a tendency to be good at music, for example, due to her own past practice of it, and so did I – I just happened to have the good fortune to be born to a mother who could help me nourish my own tendency to be good at music.
My mother did give me genes, she did give me a brain, she did give me a body, she did give me DNA – all those physical things are coming from my mother. But I find the simplest way to put it, without insulting neuroscientists and doctors in Western medicine, they are the physical indicators of what’s going on in my mind and my karma.
We’ve just got to squeeze our brains a bit to work it out because it’s so opposite to what we think. Many Buddhists don’t even think about karma and don’t like it, and just think it’s boring – “So what’s the point, who cares?” – but it’s got massive implications experientially.
The way ego feels, we say it like a joke: “I didn’t ask to get born, it’s not my fault.” We feel that, we utterly believe that: this feeling of an innocent victim – and this is not being cruel – is deep in the bones of how we all feel when bad things happen. The first instinct is, “It’s not my fault, it shouldn’t have happened, it’s not happening, why is it happening, I don’t deserve it, they don’t deserve it.” That view is deep inside us.
The view of karma radically changes that if you take it on board. For me, when I first heard the Buddhist teachings, that was the one that really blew my mind. I loved that idea, I love the view of karma. For me I thought that is what I had been missing all my life – because it means I’m responsible, it means I’m accountable, it means I am the creator of myself, quite literally. I think it’s an amazing idea.
Yes, I learned from my mother and father, yes, the world is interdependent and things happen out there, but when you understand the view of karma and the mind, this is radical in the way that it informs your way of practicing. You take responsibility, you own the good and the bad, you become much more powerful, much more accountable, and you’re therefore able to change. Because if I believe it’s my mother’s fault, then we demand she changes: “What do you mean I should change? It’s her fault.”
This view of the mind and karma is a huge view in Buddha’s teachings, but it takes time, of course – it’s so opposite to what we think. We don’t have to be taught that we’re made by God or our mother: we just feel when someone else is to blame, we just kind of feel like this innocent victim. We just feel that way, and that’s really the way ego-grasping causes us to feel: this separate, bereft, lonely victim.
This view takes time, but it’s huge experientially. Many people feel about karma, “Well, who cares, like what’s it got to do with the price of fish?” Well, everything!