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experiences in relationships, but they come out of it flying. Other people have had pretty good upbringings during which nothing really horrible happened, but they ended up committing suicide. It is up to us whether we surmount our difficulties and find the way to use all that we may encounter to strengthen ourselves; or whether we go under and become embittered and obsessed with our memories, reinforcing our sense of low self-worth. Things are going to happen. What is important is how we respond.
    We meet someone, and they say something to us. How we reply will condition their next remark. If we respond in a disgruntled, angry way, they will answer in a surprised and annoyed way. Tension will escalate. Then we’re going to feel totally miserable and they’re going be upset, too. Everything will go wrong. But if we reply in a nice and friendly way, they will surely respond in kind and then everything will unfold in a more open direction.
    Far from being something very heavy and fatalistic, karma, rightly understood, expresses our total responsibility. We always have this space within which we now make a choice as to what is a skillful or unskillful response. It’s not a static situation; it’s not something set in concrete. Karma is constantly flowing and changing as we go in new directions, depending on how we meet the present moment. We can go up or we can go down: it is our choice. We can’t put the blame on others—we can’t blame our upbringing, our parents, our relationships, or the government, or the country, or the weather. It’s up to us, to each one of us, moment to moment to moment. We act skillfully or we act unskillfully—the choice is ours. And that is karma, in a nutshell.
    There many categories of karma: the kind of karma which operates immediately, the kind of karma which takes time, and so forth, but perhaps that’s not so important here. What is important is that we understand the basic ideas behind it, and understand that karma is not fate. It’s all those seeds we planted which are going to come up at some point. In every moment we plant new seeds. It’s an ongoing process. That’s very important to understand. Ultimately who we were in our past lives is totally irrelevant.
    One time, I was staying with my aunt. When I think of the “man in the street,” the ordinary person, I have to think about my family because normally I don’t really meet “ordinary” people. I meet with people who are interested in spiritual matters. Actually, I think that an interest in spirituality is normal, but apparently it isn’t!
    In any case, my middle-aged aunt once gave a dinner party to which she invited a number of very old friends. They owned shops, or they were doctors, and so on. Just ordinary nice people. During this dinner with old friends whom she had known since adolescence, one of the men said, “I think in one of my former lifetimes I must have been Spanish, because when I went to Spain I felt this tremendous empathy with the land. I felt like I was going home even though outwardly it was a very different and alien environment.” And somebody else said, “Well, that’s funny, because I feel like that about Scotland. I really felt when I went there that I must have been Scottish at some time during my past lives.” Soon everybody at the table began to talk about who they thought they were in their past lives, and my aunt was aghast! She’d never realized that her friends had had any thoughts of this nature.
    Finally one of them turned to me and said, “Ah, but Ani-la, the question is not who we were in our past lives, is it? It’s how we use this lifetime properly so that our future lifetimes will go well!”
    That’s the point. Our past lifetimes are gone, so let them go. The point is this lifetime—what do we do with what we have now? How do we use this life skillfully to set ourselves in the right direction, so that in future lifetimes, having planted so many good seeds in this