If you’re sensitive to your present actions, you can through your present skillful kamma provide conditions for pleasure and happiness now and into the future.

"If a teaching is going to protect you, the first level of protection has to be on the theoretical level: You have to understand that your present actions are free, to at least some extent, to shape the present moment — for good or bad — and to have an impact on the future. This understanding of kamma would then provide you with motivation for looking carefully at what should and shouldn’t be done right now to avoid causing suffering.

And this is precisely the understanding of kamma that the Buddha taught: As he pointed out in AN 3:101, past actions do have their impact on the present moment, but your experience of that impact is filtered through your present-moment state mind. This is one of the reasons why Buddhist meditation focuses on being alert to what the mind is doing right now. If you’re sensitive to your present actions, you can shape them well enough to mitigate the influences from any past bad kamma and, through your present skillful kamma, to provide conditions for pleasure and happiness now and into the future."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Safety in a Duality"

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