Supposedly so-called "my" karma is my karma, and your karma is so-called "Your's." At the same time, my karma is not so-called "just" my karma, so-called "alone." Karma is personal and Universal at the same so-called "time." Why am I emphasizing "So-called?" I invite you to practice zazen, breakthrough the mind chatter and thought noise, and discover that each of us, in our own way, is the totality of the Universe operating through what can appear to most as a so-called "individual."
Instead of being fixated on the idea... the thought... the craving to be autonomous operating humans vehicles of whatever, with maturity can an eventually notice that are actualy are autonomous interdependence in action. This is what it means that "to harm another is to harm oneself." When we place principles before personality, this is obvious.
When personality is before principle, the reality doesn't even register as a fart, though we know it happened, wondering who brougth so-called "their," unpleantness to so-called "us."
When we drop a pebble or rock in a lake, from the moment it goes in, we can clearly see the ripple... and may even call it so-called "our" ripple. But in reality, every person, animal, insect, plant, rock, wind, and rain, are also contributing pebbles into the same Universal lake of existence, from so-called different perspectives and angles.
When two or more ripples bump, flow, merge, this creates what's known in quantum physics... the level of the very small… So small in fact that we can't see it with our eyes, hear it with our ears or smell it with our nose... is known as an interference wave (interconnection) pattern.
In Zen, which stems from Mahayana Buddhism, our practice, experience, and life are not merely about our personal and discrete existence. They encompass all of us collectively, because our karma is effectively a group project. Truly, there is no siloed existence.
Ram Dass is often famously and endlessly quoted as saying, "We are all just walking each other home." Very nice... but there could be an error in his formulation. To be more percise "We are all Home, efforting to realize there's nowhere else to go, nothing else to do, and no one self to be, other than the Universal Idenity of Loving Presence, which is beyond so-called.
一We Are the Practice Itself
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