You Don't Have to Be Afraid of Missing Out on Your Karmic Legacy

Question: Kamma and Rebirth, second try. How does individual kamma migrate from this life to the next one? Is this a relevant question? If no, how can our next life be better if we don’t have the benefit of a kind of karmic legacy? Thank you, Ajaan, for clarifying this “critical” question.

Thanissaro Bhikkhu: It’s not a matter of migrating. Our kamma is actually what creates our experience of the next life — or rather, it supplies the raw material for our experience of the next life. When we leave this life and go to the next one, it doesn’t feel like we’re going someplace else. Just as we have a sense of our present life as “right here,” the next life will also have a sense of being “right here,” right at our consciousness. It’s like going from one dream to another. Even though the appearance of the location in the second dream is different from the location in the first, it still has a sense of happening “right here” just as the first one did.

To give another example, when you’re in France, France seems like “right here.” When you’re in Florida, Florida seems like “right here.” So the kamma that we create right now does create, as I said, the raw material for our next lifetime, but it doesn’t have to go anyplace else to do that. It all stays right here. So you don’t have to be afraid of missing out on your legacy. Just make sure that your legacy is good — because even if it’s not good, it will still be your legacy.

~ The Karma of Mindfulness: The Buddha's Teachings on Sati and Kamma

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