Karmic Obstructions: A Special Series

The opposite of awareness is called karmic obstructions. If a person is not in meditative absorption and a state of high energy, then they are amid karmic obstructions. Karmic obstructions are the dark clouds in the sky of our true nature, blotting out the sky and the sun.

Karmic obstructions is an encompassing term, broadly referring to everything that distances us from awareness and the tranquility of our true nature. Since we possess innate wholeness yet cannot feel it, there must be a reason. That reason is karmic obstructions.

External karmic obstructions refer to the things discussed in Marxism—private ownership, historical materialism, the Three Great Mountains, and so on—that leave people unfree and powerless. What we commonly encounter, and what this article discusses, are internal karmic obstructions: mental burdens.

I. The origins of karmic obstructions: negative experiences, emotions, states, and the ego

II. The roots of karmic obstructions: emotions and suffering; the ego, attachments, and identification; psychological defenses, trauma, and illness.

III. The formation of karmic obstructions: inner conflicts, emotional knots, and stagnation; habitual tendencies, character, psychological patterns, and personality patterns; lumps and thorns; high walls, abysses, and quagmires. Inner demons. Ego identification.

IV. Karmic obstructions become blockages

1. Fragments of ice: Some experiences should have flowed through us, but instead they froze, becoming fragments of ice that obstruct the river of life. These frozen fragments repeat painful experiences, cooling the entire river.

Making ice: Instead of breaking up and melting these fragments, we resist, reject, fight, deny, or identify with them. This blocks awareness and release of these knots, causing the ice fragments to freeze more solidly—acting as ice nuclei and ice makers—and causing a great deal of energy and consciousness to freeze.

1. Avoiding the thorn: To prevent anything outside us from touching the thorn and causing pain, we adopt increasingly distorted and complicated forms of avoidance and defense. Life comes to be built around this thorn.

1. Stumbling blocks. Groping around in pitch darkness, with karmic obstructions scattered all over the ground like stumbling blocks, any step can trip us up and leave us unable to get back up.

1. Building high walls in the mind, shutting ourselves off and blocking the flow of life, energy, and light.

V. The removal of karmic obstructions

After pulling out the thorn, we discover that there was nothing there to begin with.

After the ice melts, the frozen energy and obstructed life are restored.

After tearing down the walls, we discover light everywhere.

VI. The difficulties of becoming aware of and removing karmic obstructions

Karmic obstructions are precisely what is difficult to notice and awaken from.

Karmic obstructions appear as character traits, such as being impatient, bad-tempered, forthright, or quick to laugh.

Karmic obstructions appear in everyday forms, such as social engagements or taking a walk while thinking things over.

Karmic obstructions appear in the form of effort and positivity: striving hard, believing that human determination can overcome heaven, the “striver’s ego.”

Karmic obstructions appear in the form of spiritual practice: the “spiritual practitioner’s ego.”

Karmic obstructions appear in the guise of the “ego,” or “I.” They appear as a “familiar sense of pain” or a “familiar sense of habit.” It is like smokers becoming accustomed to the smell of smoke and bad breath, and coming to believe that smoking actually puts them “in a better state.” Through identification as a “smoker,” smoking becomes the essence of their being, and other things must be sacrificed for it.

Karmic obstructions appear as dreams within dreams: we wake from one dream only to find ourselves still in another.

To use Adler’s idea of “present benefits”: karmic obstructions are not merely harmful remnants of the past; they have “present benefits.” Karmic obstructions create the ego, and the ego continually creates karmic obstructions. So karmic obstructions are not about the past, but only about the ego in the present. The ego considers karmic obstructions good, because they are the familiar petri dish in which it grows.

VII. The transmission of karma

A child holds a flower up to their mother’s nose and says, “Mom, look how beautiful and fragrant this flower is.” One mother smiles, picks up the child, and smells the flower, saying, “Yes, it smells wonderful. What happiness.” Another mother swats the child’s hand away and says, “Stop bothering me.” This is the most typical scene of karmic obstructions: they make us blind to the beauty and happiness around us, right before our eyes. From then on, the first child will remember this happy scene whenever they see a flower, while the second child will feel tears welling up at the sight of one. These are new karmic obstructions, the transmission of family karma.

VIII. The materialist aspect of karmic obstructions

Only recently have I begun to recognize the materialist aspect of karmic obstructions, including the lack of freedom at the Marxist level of external karmic obstructions described above. Internal karmic obstructions are like icebergs: they can only be quietly processed, rather than having all the ice and snow vanish overnight, as the spiritual practitioner’s ego imagines.

As discussed in the article “Spiritual Practice Is a False Concept,” can I control the pace at which karmic obstructions are processed? Did those masters possess methods that removed their own karmic obstructions overnight? We can only coexist with karmic obstructions and let things take their natural course.