Karma: A Yogi’s Guide to Crafting Your Destiny

by Sadhguru

So the very way in which you experience life—whether you see it as sweet or sour, beautiful or ugly, pleasant or unpleasant—is your responsibility, as your ability to respond is what determines the nature of your experience.

If a sensation arises, you have a choice whether to react. Once you are able to exercise this choice, you simply experience the sensation for what it is. If you generate a strong reaction, you will distort the experience. But if you remain equanimous, the karma attached to that type of sensation begins to crumble within you.

Whether you smoke or drink or pray all day, your actions can still be compulsive. 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.

Try as we might, neither love nor the spiritual process can ever be made utilitarian. They are simply part of the beauty of life. The moment you try to harness love or spirituality, you find your arms are empty. The moment you try to concretize them, you end up with a marriage or a religion. You may acquire many other things—a home, a family, a god, a heaven—but you lose the very exuberance of life. When you try to institutionalize an inner experience, all you are left with is an institution!

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.