The past can never be the same as the present, but in karma consciousness our mind always works, “That is how I was, this is how I’m supposed to be, how I will be.” That is how our mind consciousness goes, supporting our “self”. When you have separation, you might say, “I am bothered by you,” you feel you are bothered by someone. But you are never bothered by someone. A red rose is not red, that is, it has no such red color. Separation is like that. In the twentieth century we seek perfect freedom, and there is perfect freedom, but we still think we are not free. That is a very strange thing. We see someone suffering, from the outside, so we feel we are not free. Actually, our karma consciousness is not free. When you see a dying person, they are not different from you, so you are not free from them. But if they die, they are freed from your karma consciousness.
If you’re chased by ten people and you decide, “I’ll never be captured,” this is how you exist, actually. No one can cling to you. Even if a million people cling to you, you are always free from their clinging. If you say, “Oh, they are clinging to me!” that is your clinging to them!
Karma consciousness is very heavy, because the reality of our life is so heavy. A woman saw her friend falling from a cliff. She carries this woman’s life because she died in her sight, so she lives with her. She saw the fall, so she has to work on it. If she ignored it she would be ignoring herself. At this point, I, this body, has never had the experience of killing human life. But if you speak of a “murderer” I begin to feel I am that murderer. And I am that murderer’s mother, too. What is difficult is how the people who are left perceive an occasion. If the mother can save the life of her dead son, the murder is over, it drops off. Murder continues because of the mother’s attachment to her dead son, which means freed mind has to be in the mother’s mind and not in the dead son. This is how the son and mother live together. The murderer’s life bears the suffering, because one was born as an unusual human body and mind. He lives in a completely different world, staying among people.
But a murderer can become Buddha, too, if someone appears and makes him Buddha, sees him, sees what he is. This point is very important. Otherwise, if once in your life you hit a person with your car, you bear this your whole life long. Even if we have no feeling of hurting anyone, even if we live a life full of love, we can make this kind of problem, because of this occasion we can be burdened for our whole life. We may feel we have to be taken care of by someone else who is free from this action. But being taken care of by someone, I need to take care of myself. It’s not like I drive and hit something, freely putting myself and him in Buddha’s world. If I recognize something I’ve done, I have to express it, without discriminating. And actually, that is what we are expressing, in the same way, when we say, “This is my wife, my children, this is Buddha.” Whether it is our innermost, deepest thinking, worry, or impression, we express it. If I speak an untruth and discover, “I spoke an untruth,” I have to admit it was my mistake. “I misspoke.” In this way we try not to cause delusion by our mistake of ignorance or unclearness. By not expressing our mistake we waste our lives and waste others’ lives. You cannot change a situation to make it the same as before, but if you realize it, you can say, “I did it. I killed it, so I cannot give life to it again.” How to maintain the life which you killed is all your recognition and your responsibility.
If you are walking outside in the darkness and step on a spider, what is the difference between that spider and yourself? How hard it is to live in repentance, and how wonderful it is to repent! Every moment of this life is the complete death of everything so this being can continue to live. Even ghosts and past Buddhas cannot continue to live because you live. You take the place of all beings and exist in this way.
So karma consciousness appears as a full effort. That is our mind working. But even so, our life is always free from this karma consciousness.