An excerpt from a teaching called Perception and Karma by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo, July 19, 1989

Every single kind of perception that we have, no matter what it is, is based on the false presupposition that self is inherently real.  The belief in self as being inherently real, absolutely lays out that other is inherently real. Once that idea of self has been borne and is fixed, you must develop walls of ideation and conceptualization to surround it and maintain it.  You must constantly separate other.  In order to separate other, you must continue to determine how other and self interact.  That’s the basic process.  Having done that since time out of mind, you are involved in cause and effect relationships complete with lots of exaggeration. The residue and reality of that is experienced as karma.

Karma is nothing other than cause and effect.  That’s all it is.  It’s not somebody up there making check marks in a book. It’s simply cause and effect.  It’s as simple to understand as a leaf falling from a tree.  There are irrefutable laws of cause and effect.

The experience that we have is based on this karma, which has been based on a long-term relationship with cause and effect, which is based on the underlying belief in self-nature as being inherently real.  Why then, hearing this, can’t we just stop?  Why can’t we just stop reacting?  Why can’t we just stop judging things?  Why can’t we do this?

We can’t stop because we are no longer in a position where we are truly cognizant of the choice between self-nature being inherently real or not.  It is now automatically so.  It is now so rigid that survival has become a big deal. You believe that this is what you are.  You must continue that continuum that you think is survival because you do not know that there is anything without the continuation of self-nature. It is so far buried, it is such a primal experience, it is so beneath reason, so much deeper than reason, due to the constant building up of cause and effect relationships, of karmic relationships and the constant exaggeration that has occurred since time out of mind, from the first perception that implied self.

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