This kamma talk brings to mind a paradigm shifting insight from several years ago. A moment when an old, old long known teaching transformed from an intellectualI object, to a full blown living realization of potent clarity with a few words from an offhand conversation, i was only mildly listening to...   It was a comment made in passing, from the backseat of my truck, by a participant at a Wang Li Ping retreat.  We'd just left dinner and were heading back to the hotel.  I was blissed out and sated from my one meal of the day and was more tuning into the body than the conversation, but tuned back in to catch this bit...   The subject was the founding of a great school and all various aspects of it, and all the potential good it would do and how it would build great merit and the person speaking was confused when another local master declined to endorse, or get involved with the project, despite it garnering what seemed like obvious merit.   "Some Masters seek to generate no kamma, either good or bad."   woof!  everyone paused, considering. then...   "Good karma generates response and connection in the wheel of Samsara just as surely as does bad." and viola!  I finally got it. chains of gold or chains of lead...   I'd heard it and read it countless times... but only ever in mind. not in heartmind... not in presence... only thought.   We were waiting to turn left, into the hotel.  and the flash of that realization went off and in that moment I recall the rush of intense revealed energetic insight.  The physical body cascade, the piercing mental clarity and calm... the near tuning out of local reality.   In that realization, looking at the hotel... the last week of experience expanded outwardly, within me and I suddenly 'saw' and could 'palpably feel' the causative impact being generated in the lives of the 23 people and two instructors at our simple retreat, by this one teacher, in this one non-descript hotel in a major city.  The reality of kamma was far more than the ramifications of cause and effect, it was the living, co-arising utterly intralinked life flowing through my own local process and the entirety of reality.   Utter neutrality.  Causation, reaction among the Co-Arising Conditions.  Aggregate.  Perceptual lensing.  Assumptions. Projections.  Emotional inter-influencing...  Exponential intra-connection... Indra's Net...   The web of energetic connections that spiraled out into all the lives affected by just the two dozen folks at our little retreat was utterly overwhelming to my local mind.  We sat there a few moments longer than necessary while the simple truth of that reality resonated through my physical body, my mind, before I could drive again.   That insight resulted in utterly dissolving my former paradigm of 'assuming one of the prime purposes of life was to make things better'.   better for whom?  For years I'd been willing to push certain agendas I was certain were good for everyone... but this moment.   It prompted a shift in my life as profound as it would prove challenging.  For quite some years, my suspicion, unspoken, unrealized had been that for me to assume I know the correct and right course of action of life was vaporous projectionism.   In that moment, I no longer understood chains of gold or chains of lead, I was living it.   We are all of us, wittingly or not... Gardeners.   Each action, word and thought, a seed planted in the soil of all of those we affect.   Good, bad... who sees the end?   The question more and more is... not what seeds to plant...   but if all these seeds need planting?     just my musings, not claiming anything, or trying to convince... but wanted to share a potent moment.