Buddhism: Open Heart, Open Mind, Karma and Magic  

Pick up that piece of trash, not because you dropped it, but because someone did, and we’re all in this together, so if you don’t pick it up, then who will? And this goes straight to karma, because that depends on everybody’s cooperation to make the sacred proverb work, not some magic trick by goblins that only work on Sunday. Most religion works like that, accomplishing with mass messaging what no one can accomplish with a simple bag of tricks. The magic is in your belief system, not anyone’s superpowers. 

Exploring new worlds is good. Creating them is better. Adapting an old one is maybe best. But isn’t that an act of magic in its own right? Nothing possesses a soul by natural birthright but only by the actions that it performs and the results that accrue to it. This is karma at its best, assuming a form and acting as if it is a free actor on an empty stage, though nothing could be further from the truth. We are all lab rats in one great experiment, and the mind is the master of it all, capable of creating new worlds where none previously existed. 

An open mind accepts new ideas. An open heart accepts new people. They’re really the same thing, of course, both simulations of an idea given its place in our bodies and awareness by virtue of its emotional gravity and psychological primacy. Thai language formalizes that idea with the compounding of both organs and concepts into a new compound word jitjai to formalize the marriage and immortalize the union. We can count breaths and even heartbeats to meditate, but we’ll never be able to count brainwaves, I don’t think…