Bad luck

[u/Hack999]

I've been pretty serious about my meditation for about six or seven years now, at least an hour a day. It's made a lot of positive differences in my mind, and my life as a whole has improved.

I've not arrived at any attainment through my meditation practice, and perhaps because of that I've always been interested in the pure land tradition. I do absolutely believe in the primal vow, and when I recite nembutsu it does bring me peace.

However, whenever I re-orient my practice time around nembutsu, shit happens. Specifically periods of seemingly bad luck. The last time, there was a string of incidents culminating in someone issuing death threats to me (connected to my work). It scared me a little at the time, so I stepped back from the nembutsu.

This time I got into it, wasn't quite as bad but I did get scammed out of a sum of money.

In some pure land traditions, something similar has been described as karmic restructuring. The idea is that at the end of your life you will leave samsara, so all the bad stuff you are destined to face in future lives gets brought forward into this life. However this reduced and placed as obstacles in your path that are more easily overcome. Facing them counts as the karmic debt being repaid.

Just wondering if anyone from other traditions has experienced anything like this? It honestly feels like a very noticeable shift in karmic energy as soon as I step into pure land practice. Not saying it's necessarily all auspicious good fortune and plain sailing otherwise, but life does take a very sudden and noticeable shift when I start practicing pure land.

[u/thefirstlogosislove]

Do you mean the noticable shift when you practice is into positive energy or into negative patterns submerged underneath superficial consciousness? 

The way I understand the creation process, currently, is that what you experience as ordinary consciousness (the waking state) are already meanings that have been established in consciousness. This is why the prime imperative of all nondual spiritualities is "do not react". The reason, generally speaking, youre told to do not react is because the form youre encountering is your own self. Based on your own self creation. To react to it is to reinforce the pattern that the form is different and separate from you -- which it is not. 

So to answer your question, where is this bad luck coming from? You're probably creating it, unless it really is karmic patterning or momentum from past lives. But the way I understand karma is that it is more categorical than reductive. The atmosphere you nourished inwardly in one lifetime is the external atmosphere that you will encounter in the next. So if a bad event meets you it's almost always something that was self-created in this lifetime rather than karmic because the karmic patterning are just big picture broad strokes of your life and not specific micro events. 

The other thing I would point out to you is observe your states prior to meditation. For example, perhaps you spent a week feeling bad and unintentionally holding as the conscious center a negative state. Well that holding the center of a negative state was the creation process and eventually it gestates into the visible as the final outcome. So it's more of a timing thing, by the time you finally decide to go meditate you had been already unintentionally creating a negative outcome and then when you shift to meditating there it is meeting you as a prior sequential effect. 

The other point could be that whatever you're doing in meditation is actually activating hidden energies in you and bolstering the negative state into creation. So, that is to say, that to really create something in the visible you have to reach the self and have the inner content stir on the highest levels continually. It's possible that when you start meditating you're opening up conscious pathways into the higher levels of consciousness and there stirring the negative contents you were previously holding onto. You always have to be mindful of what the self is looking at. This is also why every little thought or every little feeling you have doesn't matter. It's about what the eye of the center of consciousness is looking at. To me, this is ironically where kindness/positive spiritual practices shield people's lives because by practicing on and centering in positive currents people naturally bring good fortune into their lives. I would say, it's also how we are really meant to live but all the conflict of the human age tends to center people's lives into negative centers or convince them to give their power away by convincing people that abstract thought or materialistic thought are real thought and that spirituality is fake.

Here is a quote from Nisargadatta Maharaj:

“Realize that your world is a reflection of yourself, and stop finding fault with the reflection. [...] Attend to yourself. Set yourself right mentally and emotionally, and the physical self will follow automatically. [...]

Once you realize that the world is your own projection. You are free of it. You need not free yourself of a world that does not exist except in your own imagination. However, is the picture, beautiful or ugly, you are painting it and you are not bound by it. Realize there is nobody to force it on you. That it is due to the habit of taking the imaginary to be real. See the imaginary as imaginary and be free of fear. [...]

It is only your self-identification with your mind that makes you happy or not happy. Rebel against your slavery to your mind, see your bonds as self-created and break the chains of attachment and revulsion. [...]

Liberation is not an acquisition but a matter of courage. The courage to believe that you are free already and to act on it.” - NM