Karma: A Yogi's Guide to Crafting Your Destiny

by Sadhguru

Conceptual knowledge is the way of the academic. Perceptual knowing is the way of the yogi.

Karma simply means we have created the blueprint for our lives. It means we are the makers of our own fate. When we say “This is my karma,” we are actually saying “I am responsible for my life.” Karma is about becoming the source of one’s own creation. In shifting responsibility from heaven to oneself, one becomes the very maker of one’s destiny.

karma is action on three levels: body, mind, and energy. Whatever you do on these three levels leaves a certain residue or imprint upon you. What does this mean? It is quite simple. Your five senses are collecting data from the outside world every moment of your life. You are literally being bombarded with stimuli at every instant. Over time, this enormous volume of sense impressions begins to assume a certain distinctive pattern within you. This pattern slowly shapes itself into behavioral tendencies. A cluster of tendencies hardens over time into what you call your personality, or what you claim to be your true nature. It works in the reverse as well: Your mind shapes the way you experience the world around you. This becomes your karma—an orientation to life that you have created for yourself in relative unawareness. You are not aware of how these tendencies develop. But what you consider to be “myself” is just an accumulation of habits, predispositions, and tendencies you have acquired over time without being conscious of the process.

We now know that the human being is a psychosomatic organism—that whatever happens in the mind immediately imprints itself on the body as a chemical process. If you think of mountains, for instance, your chemistry will react in one way; if you think of tigers, it reacts in another. So for every minute mental fluctuation, there is a certain type of chemical reaction and sensation. You may not even be aware of it unless the sensations become acute. All these sensations register and over time become the blueprint of your unconscious mind. You are therefore a living repository of karmic memory on levels you are not aware of.

karma is not some external system of crime and punishment. It is an internal cycle generated by you. These patterns are not oppressing you from without, but from within. Externally, it may be a new day. You may have a new job, a new home, a new life partner, a new baby. You may even be in a new country. But, internally, you are experiencing the same cycles—the same internal oscillations, the same behavioral shifts, the same mental reactions, the same psychological tendencies. Everything has changed except for your experience. You can keep modifying the outer environment, but nothing will work because you haven’t figured out how to change your karma. Something else seems to be pushing your buttons. Someone else seems to be driving your car.

The Smell of Bondage As we have seen, whatever you do with your body, mind, or energy leaves a certain imprint. These imprints configure themselves into tendencies. These tendencies have been traditionally described in India by a wonderfully apt word:

Consciousness is not a matter of behavior. It is the nature of existence. Compulsiveness, however, is behavioral. The moment you wait before you engage in a compulsion, you are aligning yourself with the conscious nature of existence. Over time, this helps weaken the compulsive nature of your behavior.

importance of operating out of a state of inner fulfillment rather than inner hankering. Once this is accomplished, your life becomes an expression of bliss, not a pursuit of it. Your desire does not evaporate; instead, it becomes conscious. Your desire is no longer the unconscious fuel for your personal identity. It is the conscious tool by which you function. You will now desire the well-being of the entire planet. The crux of the matter, therefore, is identification with your desires. When you are no longer identified with your desire, when there is a distance between you and your mind, you simply do what is needed for the moment and for the situation. You learn to play with desire. The desires are no longer about “you” anymore. Now your karmic bondage vanishes entirely. How can one “dis-identify” with desire? How can there be desire without individuality, intention without identity? The logic is simple: individuality is a myth. It is an idea, not an existential reality. We have fragmented our world out of ignorance.

If you avoid any experience—whether pain or pleasure, sorrow or joy—it is big karma. But if you go through the experience without resisting it, the karma dissolves. This is why Krishna in the great Indian epic the Mahabharata says that hesitation is the worst of all crimes. Today, in the name of civilization and etiquette, educated people often do not experience any of their emotions fully. They cannot cry fully. They cannot laugh loudly. Over a period of time, frustration sets in and they turn joyless. Their karmic accumulation also increases. You will see that simpler people who allow themselves to laugh and cry uninhibitedly as the impetus arises are often much freer. They work out their karma by experiencing each emotional state fully. Living totally does not mean just having a good time. It means experiencing anything that comes your way fully and intensely. The very process of life is the dissolution of karma. If you live every moment of your life totally, you dissolve an enormous volume of karma.

So the source of your misery is not your past actions. The source of your misery is how you’re processing the imprint of the past now. You may be carrying around a sackful of stinking garbage. Either you can smear yourself with it and get terribly miserable, or you can make good manure out of it and create a wonderful garden. Karma is the seed. What you are going to make out of this seed is entirely up to you. If I am given a packet of assorted seeds and I throw them all into my garden, perhaps all of them will sprout. Some of the mango seeds will yield very sweet fruit. But there may be some bitter seeds, too. The parthenium grass may be an unwelcome weed. And yet I still have the choice to pull it out. I can remove what is superfluous and keep the rest. That is how your food is grown every day. A large part of agriculture is just weeding. There are actually more weeds than plants growing even in your own garden. If you keep weeding, you will have a garden. If you sit back defeated, you will have a patch of weeds. (Well, of course, some have learned to enjoy the weeds, too!) The same holds true for your life. You have your seed karma. But you also have your weeding karma. This is where volition comes in. This is where intention becomes paramount. If you decide not to perform your weeding karma, your life will be just an overgrown wilderness. If you choose to perform this simple function, your life could yield an incredibly rich harvest.

yogic tradition has an elaborate method of differentiating memory. It distinguishes between eight dimensions, or “membranes,” of memory: elemental, atomic, evolutionary, genetic, karmic, sensory, articulate, and inarticulate. All eight can be seen essentially as human karma. The first four are types of memory in which personal volition plays no role. The next four are those in which personal volition does play a role. In other words, the first four constitute our collective karma; the next four constitute our individual karma. Let us examine the first four aspects of memory, the ones in which personal volition plays no role: Elemental memory refers to the way the building blocks of your system—earth, water, fire, air, and ether—shape who you are. They carry with them memories from the very beginning of creation. Atomic memory—the fluctuating patterns of atoms that make up your body—molds your system further. Evolutionary memory hones your biology: It is this evolutionary software that makes you a human being, for instance, and not an animal. Even if you eat dog food, you remain a human being! This evolutionary code is imprinted deeply upon your DNA. What

When you live by the memory of a single book, you are religious. When you live by the memory of several books, you are intellectual. When you live by the memory of several generations of people, you become a truly compassionate human being. But when you live beyond the memory of generations of people, you become a mystic. Those who share our genes absorb our legacies so much more easily than others. However, the science of yoga is about raising yourself to a place where your genetic memory has no influence upon you whatsoever. Now you become what the world regards as a seer—someone who sees ahead with piercing clarity and insight. With deepening yogic practice, you find your samskaras are no longer limited by categories of class, tribe, or community. You are now capable of influencing just about anybody. As a world citizen, your bequest becomes truly global.

The implications of physical memory are many. The sexual act creates maximum runanubandha between people. In this exchange, the female body, being more receptive, registers physical intimacy much more deeply than the male. When the woman bears a child, a large part of this memory is downloaded onto her offspring. This explains a common occurrence: when a woman becomes pregnant, her partner often becomes a much less important presence in her life. That is because a deep transference of memory—in terms of genetic and physical karma—is taking place for a new generation to be created. The earlier receptivity to her partner is replaced by her new role as a transmitter of physical memory to her offspring.

From the vast storehouse of sanchita, a segment of memory ripens. It surfaces and comes to the fore, demanding immediate attention. This is your Allotted Karma. Every human being has a certain allotment of karma for a lifetime, called prarabdha karma in the Indian tradition: it is the karma that needs to be handled now. The rest continues to remain latent and unripe, in the vast storehouse of accumulated memory. So your current lifetime is a certain allotment of karma—a distinct amount of memory—playing itself out. The nature of this allotment varies from person to person. For each person, the life energy works differently. Each person has a different percentage of energy dedicated to physical activity; a different percentage to intellectual activity; a different percentage to emotional activity; a different percentage to energy activity; and a different percentage to the capacity for meditativeness, or inner stillness. The nature of a person’s allotment is actually visible at an early age. Parents can see it clearly in two children. One may have a certain propensity for physical activity, while the other may be quieter. These differences are sometimes even subtly visible in newborn infants in a hospital maternity ward! Later, of course, differences grow because of the type of environment the child grows up in—the food they eat, the type of attitudes they develop. But very early differences are determined by the nature of each child’s Allotted Karma. Now, every spiritual p...

The problem with karmic memory is that it has stuck to you. If everything that passes by sticks to this mirror, it is a no-good mirror. Your mirror can no longer show you life the way it is. Your perception is now seriously clouded. Now karma becomes a limitation. Of course, there is much to celebrate about memory. Memory makes us unique. Memory makes every individual dazzlingly singular. It is responsible for the biodiversity and cultural variety we see around us today. It is memory that makes the world such an incredibly interesting place to live in. Memory is undeniably a privilege. An enormous privilege. The rub is that memory is not just a glue. It is also a boundary. It offers you form and definition, but over time, that very form becomes a limitation, and the definition becomes a wall. You are gradually fettered by the definitions you seek to acquire. You joyfully celebrate these definitions—perhaps of family, clan, tribe, class, gender, religion, culture, language—but over time these definitions harden into rigid markers of identity. Before you know it, you have crafted your own prison. Whether gilded or iron barred, a cage is still a cage. The tragedy is that you are imprisoned by walls of your own making. These are walls and bars you have erected unconsciously, and which now do not allow you to escape. You are the builder, but you have now imprisoned yourself in your own home. Your creation that was a source of sanctuary and identity has now turned into a carapac...

When my daughter was twelve years of age, she came to me, a little troubled. I gave her just one guidance: “Never look up to anyone; never look down on anyone.” If people practiced this simple sadhana, they would see everything just the way it is. If you look up to someone, you will exaggerate their positive qualities; if you look down on someone, you will exaggerate their negative qualities. But if you simply look—not for something, but just look—you will see things just as they are. Now your ability to navigate your way through life is greatly enhanced.

The problem is just that most people cannot do something unless they are personally invested in it. “This is the most important cause in the world,” they think. Or “God has chosen me to do this work.” People are always looking for their mission in life. What they never realize is that this is the way you build your karma! God has ordained no one. It is people themselves who build a false sense of self-importance by claiming that their work is divinely ordained. If they learned to plunge into something that does not mean anything to them with absolute involvement, they would find their karma disentangling in no time. The basis of karma yoga is to be involved in the process, not the product. Whether you approach your karma through awareness or abandon, the point is to immerse oneself in the journey and not be anxious about the destination.

Human beings have no choice but to act. That is the nature of our lives. But the two alternatives before us are just these: Do we want to rule or do we want to serve? Now, I do not mean perform service in some self-conscious, holier-than-thou way. That is more an intensification of the ego than anything else. When I say serve, I mean an act of immersion, not conquest. Every human being wants to have an impact upon the world, but how you leave this impact is the moot point. Do not think you are incapable of being a despot. Most people want to rule the world. It is just that because they are half-hearted that they end up ruling only their households! They may not have the capacity, the intensity, the one-pointed focus that is necessary to rule the world. But secretly they wish they could. What makes a tyrant different is that their self-image is powerful. They might believe so strongly that they are going to rule the world that sometimes it almost comes true! This is something many human beings have yet to discover for themselves: that if they create a continuous mental focus toward a particular self-image, it will, in fact, come true.

lives have become an expression of love—not love as “I love you” and “you love me,” but as a basic ambience of their interiority.

If you look carefully at people who have gone through a certain level of emotional stress recently, you will notice small changes in their physical appearance. Often, if the left eye appears slightly smaller than the right, you can be quite certain that they have been going through some emotional distress in the past six months (unless, of course, they were born that way). This is because the left side of the body is always associated in yoga with the emotional life of the human being and the feminine dimension, symbolized by the moon with its cycles of waxing and waning.

The old songs and poems of the East, from the ancient love lyrics to pop songs in cinema, extolled lifetimes—janam janam (life after life)—of togetherness, not merely for romantic reasons. Continuity and stability were valorized because they ensured a firm and reliable basis to your life from which you could aspire to the ultimate. Marriage was not just about two people’s little romance and their little families. It was about two people coming together for their ultimate liberation. This is why so many traditions view marriage as a sacrament. In traditional Hindu ritual, the mantras chanted while the couple circles the sacred fire is about consecrating the relationship and energy of two people so that they can both grow together to their ultimate possibility. Today, at Isha, we are conducting what is known as the bhuta shuddhi vivaha. This is a marriage based on bringing about an elemental cohesiveness between two people. In a world where couples see relationships as more and more hard work—where love has become labor—this kind of marriage creates harmony on the most fundamental level possible, making it a more lubricated and graceful partnership. When a certain stability in physical, genetic, emotional, and social relationships is attained, individual human life can grow to its peak. When there is instability, the physical memory grows confused and, over a period of time, can create serious psychological and physiological imbalances. If your ultimate aim is liberation, if...

SADHANA The physical world is a product of polarities: masculine and feminine, yin and yang, ida and pingala, Shiva and Shakti, right brain and left brain. The longing to find the union of polarities finds expression through ambition, conquest, love, sex, and yoga. Yoga, as we all know, means union. The simplest form of yoga is to put your hands together in namaskar. Namaskar brings harmony between the two polarities within you. Try putting your hands together, bringing both palms together in proper alignment, and looking at someone or something with loving attention. In three to five minutes, you will begin to harmonize. Namaskar yourself into peace. Namaskar yourself into love. Namaskar yourself into union. Let us put our hands together and unite the world. May you unfold your being with folded hands.

The whole point of the spiritual process is to take on more of a karmic load than your allotted one in order to finish off as much as possible. It means you do not want to keep repeating the same cycles again and again. So if you are in an active spiritual process, you may find everything moving at a bewildering pace. Physical troubles that used to beset you every six months are now coming up every six hours! This is only because you have chosen to work out your karma as soon as possible. You are choosing not to live a sanitized life that regards spirituality as mere placidity. If your karma were to unwind slowly, it would probably create small aches over a long period of time. But the fast-forward of karma often means you might experience intense pain fleetingly. Many people have become less alive and less joyful and their lives slower and more apathetic because they experience low-level pain for stretches of time. A spiritual journey simply cranks up the process so what might have spread over three months or a year happens in a few minutes. It is important to allow this fast-forward karmic process to happen. Do not suppress it. It is wisest to let your physical body burn up your Allotted Karma as soon as possible. The basis of hatha yoga is just this: You learn to handle pain in the same way as you handle pleasure. If you learn this, you achieve an equanimity that will carry you beyond the turbulence of the karmic process. In yoga, the practice of kriya often hastens the...

shed vast volumes of karmic baggage so we can become receptive to grace. Now, human beings, as we all know, experience time as three different dimensions: past, present, and future. Our lives and our languages are structured around this. But let us look at this afresh. In actual fact, all that you call your past exists only as memory. Do you see this? All the life events that have shaped you; all the work you have ever done; all the money in your bank balance; all the vacations you have been on; all the conversations and arguments you have had; all the relationships of love and hatred and indifference; all the friendships and enmities you have nurtured; all the books you have read and movies you have seen; all the scriptures you have read—all this exists only in your memory. Similarly, all that you call future exists only as imagination. All that you long for and dread—your dream house; your perfect mate; your baby; your promotion; your pay hike; your beach home; the accolades you believe you deserve; all the horrific illnesses you could contract; all the terrible accidents that could befall all those you love; all the gruesome ways in which you could lose your money, your property, your family, your life; all the apocalyptic ways in which this planet could meet its end—all this exists only in your imagination. And so these are the only two things that you are suffering right now: your memory and your imagination. Nothing more. Both memory and imagination exist only in you...

But there is a difference between using the mind and being used by it. It is time to stop being ruled by a hallucination, to stop being tyrannized by a dream. Now, once you accept something, you own it. Whatever you accept becomes a part of you. Whatever you do not accept stands apart like a huge hurdle.

What prevents human beings from discovering the profoundly transformative potential of the present moment? The answer is simple: a vagrant mind.

SADHANA Most human beings do not realize the tremendous power of creativity they have been endowed with. This is because most of their creations are determined by their compulsiveness, not by their freedom. Anything created by limitation will be limited. But if you see your ability to respond as limitless, the power to create is super-enhanced. Here is something you can try for yourself. If you drop your self-image completely, you will find yourself in a state of great freedom. You now have the power to live without a self-image at all. You also have the power to transform your image altogether. Basically, you can pick up an image and drop it at will. Either way, nothing will stick to you. I will not tell you how you should be. But stop now and create yourself anew in your mind. Start with the skeletal structure. Slowly, move into the flesh and blood. Close your eyes and visualize how you would like other people to experience you. How would you like the fundamental nature of your thought and emotion to be? What kind of impact would you like to have on the world? Create a whole new being. Then see if this new image is any closer to your notion of the divine than the old. Is it really better than the earlier image? Examine it in great detail. Is this new image more capable, more human, more loving, more blissful? Visualize this new image as powerfully as you can. Make it come alive within you. If your thought is powerful enough, if your visualization is powerful enough, it c...

SADHANA It is important to remind yourself as often as possible that everything you consider to be yourself is an acquired identity. One simple way to approach this realization is to make sure you are physically exhausted every night before you head off to bed. You will always sleep well and deeply. Many superfluous ideas about yourself will fall away, and so sleep of this kind can also be karmically rejuvenating. But there is a more conscious exercise you could perform. Every night, sit on your bed, preferably cross-legged, with your eyes closed. Remind yourself that all memory is accumulation. Everything about you is acquired: your ideas of nationality, race, religion, all your relationships of like and dislike, love and hate. Slowly, gently, start setting aside everything with which you have a relationship. This could mean setting aside people, as well as your material possessions. Remind yourself that even your body is an accumulation. Imagine that you are on your deathbed and that you are going to die in two minutes. Put away everything that is not you—your sensations, thoughts, and emotions. See your sleep as impending death. You may feel a certain fear and struggle within you initially. But it will pass. Leave your body sitting and simply lie back with your eyes closed. Go to bed like this. If you do this each night, a great deal of karma can be worked out each night. If you fall asleep as if you’re dying, you will see that your karma barely has any impact on you. Y...

questioner: Sadhguru, you say that our life is entirely of our making. But questions come up for which I have no answers. When I read a news report about a little girl being raped, for instance, can I really say that she deserved it because it is her karma? sadhguru: Not her karma. Our karma. questioner: What does that mean? sadhguru: It is our karma. Karma does not mean God is sitting up there punishing bad people and rewarding good ones. There is no such thing. But what kind of society we live in—is that not our collective karma? That we are living uninvolved in a society in which horrific things happen—is that not our karma? If all of us live without any humanity in our hearts for all the atrocities going on around us, that is our karma. We get the society we deserve. So don’t think of it as her karma. Think of it as your own. Inaction is also karma.

It doesn’t matter whether you can perceive how you shaped your collective karma or not. Just see yourself as the creator of your karma. If you see that this is your karmic web, that this is your doing, the next moment will naturally be conscious. If you attribute your fortune to someone else, you will act only unconsciously. But if you see yourself as the creator of your karma, it will shape the way you think, feel, and act. And you now realize you have the power to affect the lives of many, many others around you. But remember this: for every thought that you generate, there is a consequence. Don’t ever try to fix the consequence. The consequence will happen anyway. It is not something you can control. But the process is your doing. If you manage the process well, the consequence will be good. You can be sure of that.

Just looking into the past can make you feel absolutely stupid. The more you have seen something, the less fascinating it becomes. If you see that you have enacted the same patterns again and again, they become less compelling. If you look back on dozens of lives, you will have no urge to go through the same nonsense again and again. Once you know that the mortal way is just a repetition, you will seek another way—the eternal way. No one really wants to keep repeating the same rigmarole time and again. Few are that foolish; most people are just forgetful. The problem is that when you undergo experiences unconsciously, you do not learn from them. It does not matter how many times it happens: if you keep forgetting, you will repeat the same actions. If it is a conscious experience, however, it will always transform you. In Samyama, you do not work out your karma on the level of memory, but on the level of conscious energy experience.

Experience is like this. In experiencing consciously, there is no imprint of karma. Every experience and action becomes liberating. Once you have tasted something consciously, there is no need to keep revisiting it. That aspect of karma is finished.

Now, how do you not gather karma? As we’ve seen, the simplest thing you can do is to make your involvement absolute, not selective. The air that you breathe, the sound you hear, the ground you sit on—be absolutely involved with all of it. Unbridled involvement is the nature of life itself. The tree standing here is involved with everything—the earth, the water, the breeze, the sky, everything. Life will blossom only if involvement is total. Once you discriminate, karma multiplies big-time. This is what every human being should aspire to: discrimination only on the level of action, not involvement. Action is necessarily limited. It involves a certain expenditure of energy, time, competence, and other factors. Discretion is necessary only on the level of action; otherwise, you will waste yourself. But involvement is an internal state, and it needs to be all-inclusive. Ideas based on selectivity—“this is my house,” “this is my work,” “this is my country”—are relevant only on the level of external behavior and action. It is a fact that you cannot physically give birth to all the people on this planet. But, internally, you can be as involved as you would be with your own children. You may not be able to feed or educate every child, but you can still be involved wholeheartedly with all of creation. The moment you try to curtail and concretize this natural movement of life that is constantly trying to evolve and burst forth, you turn into a monument! Life cannot be owned. The nee...

SUTRA #15 You have the choice and ability to be any way you want in a given moment. That is the freedom and the curse. Most human beings are suffering their freedom.

…A day is but a piece of time That lets us live and die. …This day let us live and Live totally. —SADHGURU