Mandy Kahn: Deep Dive Poetry @ PRS

Peace activist Mandy Kahn hosts Deep Dive Poetry at prs.org

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Friends, Peace Class meets on Wednesdays, but tonight we take a deep dive. On Tuesday (May 26, 2026) the Deep Dive Poetry reading series returns to Manly P. Hall's Library of World Religions at the Philosophical Research Society (PRS), with the next poetry presentation taking place in September. The last Peace Class was about Loving Boundaries, found below.

WHAT HAPPENED?

More than 40 people showed up, so many that we ran out of chairs. But there's a gallery to the side, and a few folding chairs later, Mandy Kahn got up to read. A new poem about being a "Kahn" (German Jewish Cohen) delighted readers. But the one about Mara (Death) really caught our attention:

I Do Not Fear Death, Yet Go On Living

I do not fear death, yet go on living.

I know choirs wait for me to finish,

waiting to paint this clear air with their singing,

wait in gauzy figures, just past seeing.

I know what will greet me is more vibrant

than a field of poppies in the morning

widening their petals for the daylight.

I know what is waiting, past my seeing,

know its luster. Still, I go on living,

chopping, boiling, eating, scrubbing, sweeping,

writing sonnets seen by just my ceiling,

stacking up old bills--paying, not paying,

then a bath, a walk, and it is evening.

Choirs wait to stir the air with feeling.

Angels wait to steer me towards a drawbridge

made of lighted crystal. I keep living

- Mandy Kahn, Holy Doors

WQ's Priestess of Peace Mandy

Mandy’s youthful, but one is reminded of Jen Moxley and her contemplations: When people lie awake with their thoughts, their mind often turns to how life has changed and what may come. Spinning in the dark hours, thoughts swirl with fears, hopes, and reflections. People change as they pass through time. So, too, does the world they live in, their friends and their environment and the society they live in. The Midnight Work, Jennifer Moxley’s eighth book of poetry, contemplates these changes as she enters and experiences midlife. UMaine.edu/news/2026.

Am I pretty? (Callie Siskel)

Then self-described “moribund" Callie Siskel stepped up to the podium, asking, Does loss define us, or do we define loss?

Tracing the duality of grief as it reverberates through a family, she wrestles with questions of identity and inheritance in precise, lucid language. Her book of poetry, Two Minds, indulges and therefore exposes the vanity of turning private pain into art and the pursuit of self-revelation.

Two Minds (Callie Siskel)

Drawing on ekphrasis, ars poetica, and prose poetry, Siskel expands the elegy and elegiac genre as she oscillates between childhood and adulthood, art and mythology, as well as the natural and domestic world. At once cerebral and emotional, Amazon describes Two Minds as “an essential meditation on the ways that loss cleaves and doubles our perceptive power.” Her poem about Jean says it all, reflecting on her own appearance as she sees it through the eyes of a great portraitist who repeatedly painted his wife. Who would ever guess she was once Time's person of the year? She explains in her other "Narcissus" (The Paris Review):

"Narcissus"

You. (Time Person of the Year)

Time’s Person of the Year was “You.”
I was a sophomore in college. I held the mirror up to my friend.
Outside a fraternity, I stood in a circle of women telling each other how pretty they were.
On the walk back to my room, I passed a monument: water running over granite.
The man I loved wanted me in his bed, so I could tell him he was exceptional.
There is a difference between Echo and the spring: one repeats, one colludes. More

"The Concept of Immediacy"

I fell asleep with an idea, but when I woke up, I’d lost it,

as when, approaching the rabbit on the trail,

it took off into the brush.

I followed, clearing the warblers,

fixing their gaze.

Ruining something felt like a reason to proceed.

Looking out at the view—

dense swaths of pine, the bay, all three bridges

half-submerged—

I waited for a sign to go back, the mind saying enough

or what next or there’s nothing here... More

• Callie Siskel, "Parentheses" – Vandal Poem of the Day
• "Intention to Return" | The New York Review of Books

Enough with all the words! Maybe we should meditate now (Ramón García)

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Second Tuesday Poetry ft. Ramón García

Then came a remarkable man from Eagle Rock, CSUN Prof. Ramón García, regaling the audience with poetry of travels and the most unexpected things. We thought we knew Mesoamerican/Mexican history, but we did not know about the mystic Aztec Mirror housed in The British Museum (magical mirror and case). But that's a new poem, as yet unreleased. Most of the selections he read came from Strange Signatures:

• Obsidian 'Spirit Mirror' used by Queen Elizabeth I's court astrologer has Aztec origins

Strange Signatures

Paralleling how celebrated artists create and are consumed, this book of poetry maps a zone of contact between artistic creation and the dangers of identification. A neo-baroque, lyrical treatise on encountering the Other, the poems in Strange Signatures reverse the colonial gaze and transform it into scenes of conflicted recognition.

At the origin of the Other is a queer Bluebeard, an emblem of imperialist violence and savage injustice. Resisting the patriarchy and its colonizing powers are Bluebeard's feminist phantom brides, a "bride brotherhood," the guerrilla-muses of solidarity and revolution. In poems that open the secret chambers of individual and collective histories, Bluebeard's survivors continue a phantom afterlife by way of dislocated avatars: modernist artists, estranged Latin American poets, pop stars, a taxidermized parrot and a Peruvian mummy.

This book is an international, cinematic montage of the phantasmatic and the all-too-real, locating social transformation in memory, crime and the allegorical biographies of celebrated artists and poets. More

• Ramón García finalist for 3 int'l Latino book awards | CSUN

Who could write a whole poem about a commonplace mirror? Sylvia Plath did.

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Then two veteran poets and friends came to the podium, the well-known Gail Wronsky and David St. John. While her readings were the highlight of a very uplifting night, he did more explaining and prefacing, bringing us into the interior life of a poet. Then he went to a touching early piece, "From a Bridge."

• A Review of Gail Wronsky's Imperfect… | The Poetry Foundation

(Beyond Baroque) Los Angeles book launch for Gail Wronsky and Paul Liber

"From a Bridge"

By David St. John

I saw my mother standing there below me

On the narrow bank just looking out over the river

Looking at something just beyond the taut middle rope

Of the braided swirling currents

Then she looked up quite suddenly to the far bank

Where the densely twined limbs of the cypress

Twisted violently toward the storm-struck sky

There are some things we know before we know

Also some things we wish we would not ever know

Even if as children we already knew      & so

Standing above her on that bridge that shuddered

Each time the river ripped at its wooden pilings

I knew I could never even fate willing ever

Get to her in time

• "The Last Troubadour" | The Poetry Foundation

Loving Boundaries

Walking, I looked up and saw myself.

We are here to learn to choose peace. Choosing peace looks like choosing to honor the Earth and her holy forests and waters. It is choosing to honor others with love, kindness, gentleness, and choosing to honor ourselves with self-love, self-kindness, self-gentleness.

As an aspect of this project of learning to choose peace, all will eventually learn how to share metta or universal love-without-end while still maintaining boundaries that honor self.

Only the lower mind thinks that one must choose between honoring others and honoring oneself.

Only the lower mind thinks, “Should I take an action that benefits me or one that benefits others?”

From the perspective of the higher mind, the Peace Mind, one can see that there is always an action (karma) available that both honors the self and all others.

When we are operating from the Peace Mind, we see with the Peace Mind's faculties. The Peace Mind is the place of infinite options, infinite opportunities.

Only someone outside of the Peace Mind could believe that a choice between self and others could be required.

Often, the options that honor both self and others will look like kindness with loving boundaries, or unconditional love with loving boundaries.

The gate that guards my garden of loving

Now, these boundaries are not limits on the amount of love expressed; one can express love-without-end, love-without-condition, and still engage loving boundaries.

These are boundaries that protect the individual even as s/he shares love-without-end, universal, limitless love.

What does it look like? Imagine a cottage surrounded by a tall garden wall with a locked gate.

 

Can I be safe in my garden AND share it?

To visualize love-without-end being expressed while maintaining loving boundaries, imagine being the inhabitant of that cottage. You send love-without-end over the wall, into the town, all the while still maintaining a protective wall. The inhabitant keeps her/his ground safe.

All day, every day, we can flow our love over the wall. It can flow from us without ceasing, and it can be a love without judgment, a love that surrounds and supports everyone equally, a love that enriches and heals and purifies all who are touched by it.

Our love can heal others, support others, care for others, and can still keep this boundary in place.

Because we are a part of others, it never honors others when we dishonor ourselves or give of ourselves in a way that does not serve us as we serve them. Over-giving harms others, even as it harms us.

Regardless of how others react to our boundaries in the moment, know that our lack-of-boundaries never serves others in the long run. Why? It hinders our ability to be of service to them and to everyone, and to ourselves in the future.

Service to self and service to others are aspects of the same thing. One's highest action always serves both self and others simultaneously.

Participating in service to others that does not honor self is simply a phase that many will pass through before choosing forms of service that also honor self.

Serving others feels so good to us, so right to us, that sometimes we experience “service rapture.” That selfless “service rapture” can be a kind of high. We can love the joy of serving so much that we over-give and burn out. This is simply a lesson to be learned.

When we give from grace, from strength, from fullness, we refill even as we give, and burnout is not reached. We give, fill, give, fill, give, in a harmonic flow—and when we do, we can feel when it is time to rest, and we can feel when it is time to act, and we naturally do what is called for, knowing that serving self by resting is also an aspect of serving others.

What was I doing way up there?

This flow state of service is always eventually learned by every evolving being.

Honoring self and honoring others is one. We are one. We are one in separate bodies. When we realize this, we begin to serve all parts of self—the self that appears to be us as well as the self that appears to be others—in harmonic flow.

When we learn this flow, when this flow becomes natural to us, we are of highest service.

Different situations and different relationships require different forms of loving boundaries from us.

The easiest way to see what kind of boundaries are required in any situation is to gaze at it from the place of our Peace Mind. From here, it is clear how to both honor ourselves with boundaries and to send love-without-end over our garden walls.

Even in a private magic garden, I love everyone

We will know that we have learned these lessons as a society when kindness is expressed in our penal system.

Now we live in a society that maintains a penal system that attempts to “scare people straight”—to use punishment, fear, cruelty, and harshness to build fear into an individual in an attempt to reform that penitent.

This system is based on the belief that fear could ever inspire inmates in such a system to choose more loving actions. It will not. It cannot.

Fear-based reform tactics build fear, hatred, resentment, anger, and frustration in an inmate, and those things flow back toward all of us in the collective, where such things affect everyone to our detriment.

One cannot build fear in another and not also build fear into the collective. We are all part of the collective consciousness.

But a separated mind believes, “As I punish this person, I make myself safe from punishment.” That can never be true. We are too connected for that to be possible.

That which we put into others we put into ourselves and into all whom we love and hope to protect.

When we understand this, it becomes natural for us to treat all people, even those who have acted in ways that are less than loving, with love. But we learn to do this while maintaining loving boundaries.

This is what we will learn to express in our penal system.

When we have learned this completely, when we have treated all inmates with love, while maintaining needed physical boundaries, we will have evolved to a place wherein no penal system is needed.

On the way to the experience of no penal system being required, we must first learn how to share love and maintain boundaries. That is the next lesson for us to learn.

Yes, high, thick walls may be required to create general safety. But cruelty and torture behind those walls is never required. We can have those walls, and we can send love over them. We are never safe from our own cruelty.

When there is a place within our town or our state or our country or our world where people are treated with cruelty, aspects of that cruelty affect us and those we love most.

Once we understand this, we can begin to look at the penal system as a place of opportunity. Our opportunity is to consider this question: "How can I express my love-without-end here while still maintaining needed boundaries?"

Four Divine Ways to Be

True transformation is inspired by the witnessing of acts of:

• loving-kindness-without-end,
• compassion-without-end,
• joy-in-others'-joy-without-end,
• unbiased-looking-on-in-others'-equanimity-without-end.

True transformation is inspired by the Peace Mind witnessing acts of peace.

If our goal is to see fewer unloving acts taking place in our society, we can only reach that goal by modeling acts of peace: acts of loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity.

If our penal systems become places in which acts of true peace can be observed, they will become places of true and permanent transformation.

Transformation must be chosen by the individual; it cannot be enforced. After witnessing acts of peace, some will choose transformation.

Our job, then, is to give people the opportunity to witness acts of peace.

We can give people these opportunities, and we can treat them with respect, honoring and love, and we can still create needed boundaries that protect others, and ourselves.

Fear-based “reform” tactics do not only affect those who find themselves on the receiving end of them. They also build guilt, shame, regret, and resentment in their practitioners because these practitioners will always, on some level, recognize that actions of cruelty towards others are not their highest actions.

Love-based tactics heal. They heal those who carry them out, and they heal those who are on the receiving end of them.

 

They heal the relationship between practitioner and recipient in the moment, and they begin to heal the resentment, anger, and sadness that centuries of cruelty-based reform tactics have built up in our collective consciousness.

One act of love-based interaction in this format heals many levels of trauma left over from old cruelty-based strategies. As they heal old trauma, these love-based tactics create new possibilities of peace-on-earth for all beings.

Our penal systems are wonderful places to practice kindness-without-end with loving boundaries. Our lives are also wonderful places to practice this.

Where is life giving us the opportunity to both share unconditional love and to honor—and enforce—the space, the protection, and the boundaries that we require?

Special thx to Seven for helping me express this!

Once we can create loving boundaries in our own lives, we can safely flow more love-without-end into our world.

In brief, the better our boundaries, the more fully we can be an instrument of pure and ever-flowing metta and grace.

• Zoom link to join Peace Class:
• us02web.zoom.us/j/82150472713
• Meeting ID: 821 5047 2713
• Mandy Kahn, Peace Class, May 19, 2026, with glow up and editing by Dhr. Seven, Ananda (Dharma Buddhist Meditation), Wisdom Quarterly

Orphans found, poor sent to farms

(Erased Century) First movie EVER made was about babies from cabbage plants in 1896: CP Kids

(Erased Century) Every county in America had a place where people were disappeared | They called them "poor farms" or almshouses.

• Thomas Benjamin Kennington's Orphans

Israel causes famine to kill babies

(LBC) Israeli diplomat and former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem and current Jewish Zionist Fleur Hassan-Nahoum. 

How to kill children in Israel (PBS)

(PBS News) Understanding the stages of starvation and famine

Int'l aid workers react to famine declaration

(ABC News Australia) Famine (mass starvation) officially declared as a result of Israeli war crimes

• (CNN News 18) Israel caused manmade famine in Gaza
• VIDEO: Ben Gvir taunts 'Palestinian Mandela' in unhinged prison stunt

Gaza famine confirmed for first time; Israel reacts; UN chief shoots urgent warning | IPC | Gaza City

See The Katie Halper Show

(Hindustan Times) Aug. 22, 2025: For the first time, famine has been officially declared in Gaza. A UN-backed food security monitor revealed that over half a million people are already starving, with the toll set to rise further. The IPC report described “starvation, destitution, and death” spreading across Gaza, as Israel intensified its new military campaign in Gaza City. UN Chief António Guterres made an urgent plea, warning of a man-made catastrophe. But Jewish Zionist Israel swiftly dismissed the findings as biased and flawed, releasing its own counter-report [saying everything is going just as planned]. #Gaza #Famine #Israel

• Shauna Schwartz, Ashley Wells, Pfc. Sandoval (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Iran? What about Gaza and Palestine?

The Art of Starvation: Israeli Settlers Make It a Festival

(Macintosh Team) June 7, 2025: Israeli settlers (illegal occupiers in violation of international law and committing war crimes such as ethnic cleansing, displacement, and genocide) are blocking life-saving humanitarian aid from entering Gaza — celebrating, picnicking, praying, and rejoicing while Palestinians starve just miles away. With full support from the Israeli military, these actions are part protest, part siege, and fully normalized. This report embeds with the people turning border crossings into stages for cruelty. This is not Palestine; it's our kibbutzim.

Help, Uncle Sam! Look what Iran's doing!

(JTI) Iran responds in retaliation to bully Israel with volley of drones or missiles to hit Tel Aviv

War breaks out as Israel starts it with hundreds of missiles; Iran hits back

(CJ Werleman Show) Asian banning Jewish Israeli passport holders

Pranks for Halloween: Is it bad karma?

"KARMA: It's everywhere you're going to be." Deeds have the power to produce resultants.

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Pranks are fun to watch because they're funny and because it's not us on the receiving end. It must be terrifying, if even for the first moments, to be the pranked on. But it sure is funny, at least for males. Females may have more sense and sensibility, preferring to daydream about Darcy coming to save them. They are so fun, funny, and fascinating that a question comes up: Are they unskillful karma?

That is, will they result in unpleasant, unwished for, unwanted, even unbearable results when they come to fruition and ripen?

It seems to be a matter of degrees if one thinks about it just a little. What's "better," to kill one person or two people?

• Nightmares can be silenced by a single piano chord, study shows (MSN)
• But isn't karma an "imponderable" and unanswerable question in Buddhism? No, what's imponderable is the working out (vipaka-phala) of karma (deeds). What we throw out by our mental, verbal, and physical actions will come back to us, but precisely HOW they will come back, that is imponderable and would drive one to madness to keep trying to figure out.

The answer is obvious only it's hard to answer because, between only those two choices, of course it's better to killer fewer people but it cannot in any way be said that it's "good" (and certainly not "better") to kill anyone.

In exactly the same way and for the same reason, a person pranked Halloween-style is going to be scared. That fear may dissolve and resolve again as catharsis, laughter, an adrenaline rush, a moment of clarity, hiccuplessness, or whatever, but for that span of time, one was frightened, experiencing horripilation, terrified, apoplectic, having a bowel movement -- and that can't be good to do to someone just for laughs.

If one imagines a motive -- such as to teach a valuable lesson or remind someone of something or to bring about sudden relief or whatever -- that may modify the karma and attenuate, but it certainly does not erase it, absolve it, make it good, or turn it into an indulgence to be paid off. It's still bad. It's like spanking someone. Whatever the motive, it is still bad (violent, insensitive, cruel, abusive) and potentially traumatizing. One may later thank you for traumatizing him or her, such as when that person grows up, joins the military, and kills many people instead of bowing out of a mission like a smarter or less traumatized person might think to do. But that thanks does not mean it was a good or neutral deed on the part of the doer, only that it had some effect for which the victim feels a necessity to have gratitude, like when you are beaten in prison on arrival, not because you did anything wrong or deserved it but only because stronger guys were looking out for your future and wanted you to toughen up, look alert, and mind your Ps and Qs. You may thank them when you avoid getting jumped by antagonistic opponents or get jumped but were ready for it because you remained hypervigilant after the first beating. But that won't make that beating "good." At best, it might make it "mixed." Mixed means at least partially bad, negative, harmful, an therefore resulting in suffering (dukkha) for the doer.

Message in the Teachings of Karma (bps.lk)

If one beats one's child with a "good" parental motive then imagines that as a karmic result, later on, perhaps in a future life, one is beaten by one's parent with a "good" motive, how is that going to be experienced, how is it going to feel, what are going to be the negative results (whether or not there are any positive ones)? Say that, indeed, one doesn't flip off the neighbor anymore but, on account of being beaten, starts seeing beating others (being physically violent and/or scolding) as a means to an end -- as demonstrated by one's own loving parent? Will one call that a win and say that beating is not bad karma? It is clearly bad karma even if it does some good or has some positive outcome in addition to all the negative outcomes. What if the child becomes nervous, fearful, introverted, shy, full of violent outbursts, closed in, untrusting...? "But, at least, does not flip off the neighbor anymore" will be a pathetic rationalization when trying to explain that spanking was "good karma."

Would that karma were so nice and limited, but each act has exponential results.

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Reduce debt, maximize profit

What are the motives for pranks? That is another way to know whether something is skillful (wholesome, good, meritorious, proper conduct, advantageous, beneficial, harmless, in line with the dhamma): find the motives motivating it. There are six motives to choose from, and it is never really going to be just one. It will tend to be a mixed bag. At one impulsion (javana), at one mind moment (citta), it may be just one motive, but there are thousands if not millions of such impulsions and mind moments in one act (karma). The most important quality of the karma (act) is the cetana (motive, ambition, intention behind it). The six motives are easy to remember because they flipsides of one another:

• greed (attraction), nongreed
• hatred (aversion), nonhatred
• delusion (wrong view), nondelusion.

Actions motivated by any degree of greed, hatred, or delusion we can put in the unskillful, unwholesome, harmful, producing dukkha pile.

Actions motivated by any degree of nongreed (letting go, giving up, sharing, generosity, nonstinginess, charity, compassion, caring, loving-kindness, harmlessness) we can put in the skillful pile, which produces (when it finally comes to fruition, which is whenever it meets the necessary and sufficient conditions to come to frution, much more likely later rather than sooner.

Actions motivated by aversion (FEAR, annoyance, disliking, revulsion, hatred) we can put in the unskillful pile.

Actions motviated by nonaversion (tolerance, sympathy, mercy, compassion, loving kindness, fairness, enlightened self-interest) we can put in the skillful pile.

Actions motivated by delusion (ignorance, confusion, wrong view, misplaced or blind faith, fanaticism) we can put in the unskillful pile, which produces unwelcome, unwanted results when they (those impulsions and mind moments) come to fruition and ripen.

Actions motivated by nondelusion (wisdom, direct knowing and seeing, understanding, clarity) we can put in the skillful pile.

Spite, not your boyfriend, is karma.

One thing that should be clear although it is probably not is that there is no such thing as greed or hatred without delusion. Delusion gives rise to greed. It gives rise to hatred. There could be greed without hatred, and hatred without greed, or delusion without either, but otherwise they are usually mixed up, supporting one another, producing unskillful karma.

All that one might say in condemnation of the first three mentioned might can be turned around to praise the other three, but one must understand these terms are translated from a more sophisticated and subtle language with more nuances than English. Pali, which comes from Sanskrit, has many multivalent terms, with each word having a RANGE of meanings. That's why it sounds "negative," non-this and non-that. But according to Bhikkhu Bodhi and other scholars, this is just a convention. Nondelusion (whatever it might mean in English) really does mean "wisdom" in the original languages of the Buddha (Gandhari, Magadhi, Pali, Prakrit, Sanskrit). And nonhatred (adosa) is not merely the absence of hatred but the positive aspects of loving kindness. Our English ears have trouble hearing this and we see negativity where it is not.

Another way to have looked at this question, "Is it (pranks or anything else) bad karma?" would have been to compare life to the Disciplinary Code or Rules and Regulations the Buddha set down for monastics. Bothering others, no matter the motive, is bad because it bothers them. So thoughtlessly, unmindfully, neglectfully, carelessly, inadvertently making noise that is disruptive to others is labeled "wrong" and "not to be done" in the Vinaya. One trivial example that comes to mind is that, while eating, which in olden times was done with the hand, one is not to scrape the bottom of the bowl with one's nails such as to make noise that bothers others who are eating.

There was no intention to bother them and, nevertheless, it is wrong and should be avoided. If done with the motive to disturb others, then it is clearly bad however minor it may seem or however many rationalizations we may give. So following the example of the Monastic Sangha, who are models of good behavior for Buddhists (not that they always are), we can clearly see that pranking, joking, teasing, or even unintentionally disturbing others by our walking loudly, coughing, twitches, scratching, snoring, carelessly passing wind, and so on can be deemed violations of the Code, which applies to monastics and not us but is an example to us of what the Buddha taught for the longevity of Buddhism (the Dharma in the world), the respect of others for Buddhism and the Buddha as a teacher, for the comfort of the peaceful, and for the taming of the disturbed. The Vinaya explains why each rule or regulation was set down in the first place, with a backstory to explain its necessity. Some rules are as general as just for making it comfortable to be around or for the calming of those who are not calm. Big time pranks would never be in line with this. Little teases maybe, but even that is walking the line as we never know how someone is going to take something. We might be able to know our motives, innocent or not, but they are not likely to know those motives so may grow resentful, angry, vengeful, disturbed, or motivated to strike back. For peace's sake, keep the peace. Pranks are anti-peaceful.

Karmic results

What will be the result of any intentional action? We may imagine that it is commensurate with the act, and it is, but we all fail to understand "the act." The typical misconception, based more on a popular understanding of Hinduism than what the Buddha taught, is that if we do one thing, that one thing will happen to us in return.

This is wrong for at least two reasons. One, we don't realize what constitutes "the act" (the deed, action, intention). The Abhidhamma (the "Dharma in Ultimate Terms") as a treatise of Buddhist psychology goes into extreme detail about what "consciousness" is. We may think it's a thing, but in fact it's a process, a stream of mind-moments (cittas). These are not really "thoughts" but components or "particles" of awareness. Mental formations -- such as feelings, perceptions, volitions, and 50 others -- give us "consciousness." Among these are javanas or "impulsions." If there are countless cittas streaming, there are an exponential number of javanas for each. Each of these might lay down a track, a seed, that later manifests as a karmic result. If this understanding is correct, one "deed" (with uncountable cittas and javanas) will result in an exponential number of results. The is for the good, the bad, and the neutral resulting in welcome, unwelcome, and neither welcome-nor-unwelcome results. Results are of two kinds, resultants (vipakas) and fruit (phala). It's not clear what the distinction is, but it used to be said that one referred to mental resultants and the other to physical circumstances. Thus, one can see that mental resultants might be immediate (regret, remorse, sadness, mental pain, delight, passion, joy, elation, etc.) whereas as life circumstances might be the fruit, our situation, where we are born, how our body is, our looks, health, longevity or lack of these.

Two, since ancient times, for whatever reason, people have made the mistake of thinking that if we do something in a certain way, that deed will produce the same thing for us in the same way. This is completely wrong. When the Buddha was asked about it, he said that such a view was the negation of his teachings on karma. For example, if we slap someone in public, we may worry that our deed (our karma of slapping that person in public) will result in us being slapped in public. This is so common a view that there's no convincing even most Buddhists that this is wrong. This is what sutras and stories, the media and our own thinking tell us is "fair" and proportionate. It's incorrect. The Buddha teaches a variable result of karma. For example, if someone kills, the result will not be that one is killed. That could be the result. It may even be likely that that is the result. Oh, if only it were we might learn something. The results are actually much worse. That act, that deed, because so many things led up to it, because it was motivated by so many cittas and so many more impulsions, will yield unwelcome results over and over, again and again for a long, long time. Even if the negative results are avoided in this life (we are not caught, we are not punished, we experience no remorse, regret, sadness, misgivings, worries about retribution, coarseness, insensitivity, drunkenness to try to drown the guilt or bolster the rationalizations), they will not be avoided forever.

• So "live by the sword, die by the sword" is not necessarily true. It is self-evidently untrue in the way we understand it and true in another way we do not understand. We think that because this killer who killed with a sword, who killed many people because he lived "by the sword" as a soldier, cop, or criminal must die by getting stabbed or beheaded, but he died of a heart attack or disease or old age surrounded by his loved ones. How could this be? Doesn't make the famous utterer of that adage wrong? That utterer will be vindicated because there are many lives, not just this one. So what if he doesn't "die by the sword" this time? He likely will in the future, many times over, but even if he doesn't, even if that is avoided, he will reap what he has sown and it will produce many unwelcome results (resultants and fruits, multiplying, maturing and ripening). In hell realms, one may be killed with a sword many times. And, still, having been killed many times over, having had many lives shortened by this act, incurring animosity and fear from others, bad looks, an angry disposition, aversion, fear, worry, and so on, that deed is not exhausted. It keeps producing unwelcome results when it gets the opportunity.

Even if the negative results are avoided in the very next life, which is unlikely since it is a heavy karma (course of action with the power to drag us down to the downfall or niraya and condition our rebirth in an unfortunate plane of existence, among animals, ghosts, demons, or hellions), going from brightness to darkness or darkness to darkness, there is still the probability of that deed bearing its result in subsequent lives when it gets the opportunity to produce results. When it finally catches up with us, the result will not be someone kills us and that's that. It is far more likely that it will result in sickliness, a shortened lifespan wherever one is born, ugliness, and other problems, to say nothing of the possibility that the person we killed will seek revenge life after life, in a cycle of retribution because we will strike back and get in more trouble. But, say, no bad result ever came about until one life far in the future, a fortunate rebirth on a good plane of existence on or above the human plane. And there the result was that it caused a shortened life and we died prematurely: That karma is in no way exhausted by that having happened. We are likely to have many lifespans shortened, have much sickliness, much pain, many lives in the downfall (a collective term for subhuman lives which have much suffering and very little hope of escape). When we add up what happened as a result of that "one" deed of killing, we will certainly understand that it was not worth it. Conversely, a skillful deed was more than worth it. If we give, share, help others, we will be helped many times over before that karma of giving that one time, even a small amount, is exhausted. (It depends to whom and how we give, but giving is good, which is not to say that it can't be made bad or soured or used as a pivot point for negativity. Imagine if we give to shame someone, outdo someone, belittle someone, or simply to gain more for ourselves. It looks like giving and sharing from the outside, but inside we can see a negative motive for a "good" deed. So it can bear its mixed results, perhaps ironically. What if as a result of giving, we get a fortune BUT we are limited to distributing it not enjoying it ourselves? We are made the head of a trust fund for others with a pittance of a stipend for serving on the board of its distribution. So the Buddha many times advised, for the nondoing of the unskillful and the doing of the skillful, this is what a buddha teaches. Why he teaches is that we and others around us might benefit. He wished for the whole world, far beyond this human plane, to benefit.

Kar Krashes and Karens (instant karma?)

This is the strange and seemingly "unfair" thing about karma. We only killed that one time, yet we are experiencing the unwanted, unwelcome, unbearable results over and over again. Similarly with skillful or good deeds, with merit. Though we only give a little, it comes back manifold. (Cast your bread upon the water).

Finally, what is the ultimate wisdom? It is enlightenment (bodhi, satori, kensho, vipassana, insight, epiphany, dawning, knowledge, sight, knowing-and-seeing, liberating-wisdom, awakening). Why? It is because ignorance (avijja, avidya, moha, miccha-ditthi, maya) is the root of all our problems in samsara (the cycle of rebirth, "again becoming," reappearance) which is inseparable from dukkha so long as we're trapped in it. Liberation (moksha) is no longer being trapped even when we still might be in it as in nirvana-with-remainder, the living arhat or buddha who still experiences pain (dukkhata) but has overcome all that can upset (dukkha) -- a response to pain rooted in aversion or frustration in wanting something to be other than the way it is.

Less is more. We should have said far less (words) and it would have been much more (useful). But for readers who read all the way through, comment. Is there any sense in what the Buddha taught? It's not so different than our Christian, Hindu, Jain, and even Jewish teachings, only the Buddha tweaked those misunderstandings and made them so clear that in his day, he was never called a "Buddhist" but frequently called a "Karmavadin," a teacher of the efficacy of deeds.

You may think I'm "hot," but I'm d*ad cold, so the joke's on you (Ariana Viera, RIP).

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There's great hope in what he taught because in all but five situations (regarding five heinous deeds), all karma is modifiable and may even be compensated for so that it does not ruin us. Even in the case of those five deeds, and we can look at the example of Devadatta for evidence of this, karma does not rule everything. Karma is not the cause of everything. Those five have the unfortunate power to bear the result in the very next (immediate) rebirth, and it will not be good. But what else we do now will also condition the future, even if other deeds are not powerful enough to expunge or avoid this powerful result of immediate next rebirth experience. The evidence is in what the Buddha said would happen to Devadatta, the Judas figure in Buddhism. He might have much suffering ahead of him, much explaining and accounting for his horrific misdeeds, yet he would eventually become an arhat perhaps even a silent buddha.

• Dhr. Seven, Amber Larson, Ashley Wells to Ananda (Dharma Buddhist Meditation), Wisdom Quarterly