พระอาจารย์อธิบายว่าใจที่หมองคล้ำจะดึงดูดวิบากกรรมเก่าให้ได้ช่องส่งผล ส่วนใจที่ใสสว่างด้วยการนั่งสมาธิและทำบุญเป็นประจำจะดึงดูดแต่สิ่งดีงามเข้ามา ทำให้ชีวิตสามารถพยากรณ์ไปในทางที่ดีได้The teacher explains that a clouded mind draws in old bad karma to ripen, while a mind kept bright through daily meditation and frequent merit-making draws in only good things, allowing life to be steered toward a genuinely predictable, good outcome.
Someone asked the teacher to expand on a teaching of the late Khun Yai Acharn about how to keep bad karma from finding its opportunity to ripen: when the mind is clouded, or troubled by stress and worry, and we let ourselves stay gloomy about it, before long more bad things tend to follow, deepening the gloom further — because a clouded mind has a natural pull that draws old karma in to ripen more easily.
A clouded mind — weighed down by boredom, distress, stress, irritation, discouragement, or restlessness — is an opening through which unwholesome forces can take hold and steer us toward wrong thought, speech, and action, creating fresh bad karma that in turn draws in old bad karma to join it. The more clouded the mind, the more such openings accumulate. The opposite is also true: when the mind is bright with , it has a natural pull that draws in old merit accumulated in the past, or several scattered pockets of weakened merit, bringing them together to bear fruit — much like a magnet drawing together several pieces of scattered iron. When merit converges and ripens this way, life becomes smooth, prosperous, and safe from harm and illness.
The way to keep the mind bright is to meditate daily and make merit often, so that a steady stream of merit keeps flowing in and connecting at . Doing so keeps past bad karma from finding its opportunity to ripen. The teacher also touched on a well-known disagreement in science between two opposing views — one holding that everything can be predicted, the other that nothing can. The Buddha's teaching points to a middle position: some things can be predicted and some cannot. If life is simply left to chance, nothing can be predicted at all. But if one abides in system, one can predict with certainty that ruin will follow; and if one abides in system, one can predict with equal certainty that and prosperity will follow — even where karma has already been set down on life's timeline. By continuously abiding in the wholesome system, that karma can be refined and weakened until it can no longer fully ripen.
The wise, therefore, should always be thinking of how to keep the mind bright and nourished by merit, avoiding activities that leave the mind gloomy — such as dwelling on distressing content, or clinging to things not going our way until the mind turns turbulent — since all of these continuously draw in unwholesome energy.