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karma can become wounding and deeply entangling if we do not learn how to handle it.
Suffering has to be freshly baked every day. In other words, your karma cannot turn into suffering without your cooperation. Once you are aware, that is the end of your suffering.
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.
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.
when each of us realizes the enormous consequences of our volition, thoughts, and actions, it could be the dawn of a great possibility: a conscious planet.
If it is volition that determines karma, the inevitable question is, From where does your volition arise? As we have seen, it is from your identification with the notion of separateness. From where then does this identification arise? From memory.
The attraction to one’s own karmic patterns can be powerful, because most people experience a sense of safety in the familiar. Whether the patterns or cycles are small or big is irrelevant. Their recurrence can offer a sense of security, identity, and even power for those who fear the unfamiliar.
Evolution is accumulated memory constantly building upon itself to reach higher and higher possibilities of life. But human beings, being the very peak of evolution, can transcend this entire volume of accumulated memory and become the architects of their own destinies.
Only an individual can be transformed, or transcend the narrow identification with separateness. It is impossible for a collective to ever be enlightened. Enlightenment can happen only to an individual.
This is a deep, inexplicable pain, because security has been given but freedom has been taken away. The loss of freedom is the deepest suffering for a human being.
Whether your freedom is taken away by a prison, by your own samskaras, or by genetic or evolutionary memory doesn’t really matter. Either way, you will find, after a while, that your life will be permeated by unexplained suffering. You will not know why, but your entire existence will seem stifling, repetitive, constraining.
This milestone experiment is a reminder of how insidiously samskaras can work. It is a reminder of how your impressions today can influence generations after you. You need genetic memory for survival, continuity, and well-being, but you also need a distance from it to live a life of consciousness, joy, and freedom.
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.
is quite simple. Whether you walk or dance, work or play, cook or sing, just do it with total attention and awareness. Or else, do it with total abandon. Both ways, you are closer to creation.
If action is performed in such a way that it is not about yourself anymore, you will see that your ability to work is almost limitless. You can be active almost twenty-four hours a day without exhaustion. This is the remarkable thing about karma yoga.
A spiritual person is one who has found action in inaction, and inaction in action. Spirituality is about dynamism and stillness cohabiting within you to give you a taste of living death all the 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.
Above all, a game is won only when you play it well, not because you desire to win.
Karma yoga reminds us that action is never a problem. It is the expectation of the fruit of the action that causes suffering. If you simply enjoy what you do and work at it wholeheartedly, there is no question of suffering at all. You would work joyfully, and your ability to work would be hugely enhanced.
Only a human being who is utterly blissful would be able to recommend renouncing the fruit of one’s actions.
If you saw your life as an expression of your happiness, rather than as a pursuit of it, you would find you have made a significant paradigm shift. You would effortlessly immerse yourself in whatever you are doing, without any expectation, for the pure joy of the activity.
There is, however, another way to create. It does not entail asking for anything, or even thinking about what needs to happen. Here, things just happen as they are needed. No forethought, no plotting or scheming is required here. Once you choose this approach, all you need to do is to act with tremendous intensity, without wavering for an instant in your focus and determination. Then, one day, you will reach a point where no action is needed. You are capable of acting, but you are not compelled to. You choose to engage with life, but you are no longer entangled
But before you arrive at this state, some fired-up action is required.
Those who have never known intense action will never be able to move into inaction. Their inaction will simply be lethargy, apathy.
You will see after rigorous, immersive work that there is suddenly no intention left in you to do anything. Now the real spiritual process unfolds.
Once your energies get to a boiling point, it is very easy to transform them and make your life happen in the most harmonious way possible. That is the whole purpose of karma yoga.
Karma has to be worked out, but engaging with action with great involvement and intensity, without caring a hoot for it, is the most effective way to work your karma out.
Only if you are in states of bliss or love can you work intensely and still not be bothered about the result.
The very way you live becomes a yagna. This is the deepest meaning of sacrifice. You are not interested in inviting an expert to perform rituals to enable you to manipulate certain forces. Your very life process is an offering.
Do not think of sacrifice as cheerless self-denial. When one’s entire life becomes an offering, it brings its own unique joy.
The ascetic calmly replied, “I come from a land of sacrifice. And I know the bliss of sacrifice far exceeds the pleasures of the world. I am not afraid of your pleasures, and I am not denying or denouncing them. But once you taste a deeper joy, these become childish toys, mere sops, minor distractions.”
Their 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. Now their lives are one ceaseless flow of karma yoga, an endless outpouring of their inner joy. No more is needed.
There are many imperceptible ways in which the karmic structure influences and even distorts the physical body. It is not merely your lifestyle—what you eat, what you drink, what you inhale—that has an impact on your body. The subtlest aspects of your thought and emotion can also influence the physical.
This is why yoga works so closely with posture, breath, attitude, and intention. If a certain awareness is brought into these aspects of the self, what is happening in the mind or in the outside world will not affect the body. When you are psychologically distraught, it is particularly important to hold your body consciously, because your karmic substance is trying to shape your body according to its distortions.
Creation is simply reminding you that you are taking the virtual to be real. It is the magnanimity of creation that allows you an experience of individuality, even though you actually have nothing that you can call your own. Of course, you can have fun with the game of individuality and the dance of duality. I do not want to discredit your lived experience in any way. But I do want to remind you that it is a game—and one created by you. Go ahead and enjoy the ride, if it appeals to you. Just don’t take it too seriously, that’s all!
If you are consciously in this moment, you will see that only this moment is inevitable. The next moment? It is a million possibilities. If you are aware, you become a positive, dynamic acceptance of this moment. Happiness that one strives for is a natural ambience that you will live in. There is no other way to be, because happiness is not an occasion, a goal, a destination. Happiness is just your constant state of existence. And this is the end of suffering.
Accepting this moment is not a formula or a concept. It is the very basis of creation. It is in the lap of this moment that creation is happening. All you need to do is to accept this moment in its entirety. An uninhibited response to it, with all that you are—in thought, emotion, and the very life that you are—delivers you to a blessed reality—the very source of creation.
With equanimity, your entire structure of karma begins to collapse. All it takes is a willingness to experience everything the way it is. You are not avoiding experience or pursuing it. You are simply open to enjoying the different flavors of life without seeking one and escaping the other.
Most of the time, people pass the buck to their old karma. The tragedy is that in the process, they miss the enormous potential of this moment. They barter away the transformative power of the present by ensuring the future is a repetition of their past. Your old karma is not the problem. The problem is that your present karma is looking for an escape route. It wants to blame someone else. It wants to go to the past, or the future, and escape the present. And so the same old cycle of victimhood and passivity perpetuates itself. Stop and see: you might well find you are doing it right now.
Irrespective of past karma, if you handle your present moment right, things can change fundamentally. This is the beauty of being human. It doesn’t matter what kind of baggage you are carrying; if you are willing to be absolutely conscious, the past has no impact upon you.
What you call karma—the bags of tendencies and predispositions you carry with you—is only in your memory and imagination. So if you inhabit this moment deeply, fully, completely, you have dropped your karmic load.
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.
Whatever you do, if it is done with joy and gratitude and if it moves you toward freedom from cycles, it makes all the difference. If a certain prayerful attitude grows within you out of your joy and gratitude, that is beautiful. It is the context, not the content of your life, that determines karmic accumulation.
This is how deep the science of yoga is: it journeys from the outer to the inner, reminding us that working consciously on the physical level can alter the way one thinks, feels, and experiences life and can ultimately lead one to higher spiritual possibilities.
Purification, or karmic burning, is necessary for those who are entangled and compulsive. Without that burning, most people will not be able to meditate. But once meditation begins, the path is no longer about burning; it is instead an illuminating process of creating a certain distance between yourself and your physical and mental dimensions. This is the journey to freedom.
The ultimate guidance you can offer is to help someone transcend their suffering. This is what the great sages and mystics down the ages have done. They remind the world that there is a way out of suffering. Even if there is pain, there need be no suffering. The ability to see this difference is the supreme human attainment.
As far as the laws of existence are concerned, there is no good and bad, no crime and punishment. It is just that for every action, there is a consequence. Actions may happen knowingly or unknowingly. So when you perform any action, only one question is relevant: Are you ready for the consequence? If you can joyfully accept any consequence, do whatever you please. But if the consequences matter to you, you must perform conscious action.
It is time to stop thinking of good and bad. We urgently need sensible people on this planet now—people who will do the right thing with life. People who operate on the basis of life sense.
So, socially, if we create a situation that does not set up discrimination or an atmosphere that is not overly dripping with sentimental pity, there would be no problem. If you treat your friend as you would treat yourself, he would be fine. Don’t treat him with any self-conscious sympathy because you see him as an object of pity.
When you’re looking at your karma, just look at those areas of bondage that are a reality for you. Start from where your experience begins. You can start only from where you are. Efforts to start with something that is not in your experience will lead to hallucinatory states.
