These are the building blocks with which we construct our world. Every action which creates karma is represented on this chart. It is meant as an exhaustive categorization of all conditioned human experience. Try examining each of these options, one at a time, and look for examples of such activity in your own life and practice. You will find that such a matrix of experience provides a generic and de-personalized way of looking at what is taking place moment by moment, which supports the investigative aspects of insight meditation. As we begin to see more clearly the arising and passing away of both mental and physical events, and see them as an expression of underlying causal patterns rather than as the agency of a stable self, it becomes easier to penetrate the web of illusions that bind us.
“These states, bhikkhus, are aflicted by ignorance. But with the complete fading away and cessation of ignorance, there is no longer that body/speech/mind conditioned by which pleasure and pain arises in oneself. There is not longer a field, a basis, a sphere, or a cause, conditioned by which pleasure and pain arises in oneself.” (A4:171)
When ignorance acts as a causal influence on the formation of intentions, the craving that necessarily comes with it ensures that every action will involve grasping and will thus formulate karmic substrates that require further rebirth and suffering. When ignorance is replaced with wisdom, as with an arahant, or with moments of insight more generally, then this karmic mechanism is undermined and there occurs a moment of freedom from such conditioning.
