Karma: A Yogi's Guide to Crafting Your Destiny

by Sadhguru

What is karma? Literally, the word means action.

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.

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.

So karma is not some external system of crime and punishment. It is an internal cycle generated by you.

So what moves toward you and also what moves away from you are determined by the smell that emanates from you. Your vasana depends, of course, entirely on the kind of residual memory or karmic content you carry.

Some people seem to constantly attract pleasant situations; others seem to constantly attract unpleasant ones. Or perhaps you see this in different phases in your life. In some phases, wonderful things seem to keep happening; in others, adverse circumstances keep recurring. Now, this simply depends on what you have in your karmic reservoir. Today you have rotten fish, so you attract some terrible situations; tomorrow you have flowers, so you attract better situations. One thing that we are trying to change through yoga (and hopefully, this book) is the kind of fragrance you throw out into the world.

SUTRA #2 Ultimately, life is neither suffering nor bliss. It is what you make it.

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.

SUTRA #3 There is only one crime against life: to make believe that you are something other than life.

Everything you consider to be yourself is a result of memory. What you call “me” is a product—in every sense of the term—of your past.

You can alter your future simply by performing the right kind of actions in the present. You can transform your future without any spiritual process, without any elevation in consciousness. When you perform the right actions today, a positive future is assured.

When you become meditative, you do not merely create positive karma, you stop breeding karma altogether. In all spiritual traditions, to become an ascetic means just this: you stop breeding karmic consequences.

But now that human beings have become so inactive, almost every person suffers from some kind of anxiety or unease. This is simply because of trapped physical energy.

According to Buddhist lore, Gautama the Buddha said he would rather serve in hell than go to heaven because, anyway, he was incapable of suffering. That was his freedom.

It is time to let go of the past. Live consciously, and you will see that this moment cannot be fragmented into past and future, into now and then. All that ever was in this creation is only in this moment, and all that will ever be is only in this moment.

The miracle that I am, the miracle that I want to manifest on this planet, is that it is possible to be involved and immersed and engaged in this world and yet remain untouched by it.

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.

Those who long to leave a footprint shall never fly.