Karma: Why Everything You Know About It Is Wrong

by Acharya Prashant

If your decisions lead to peace, joy, and contentment for you, then they are right. Otherwise, they are wrong.

What is the impact of your choices on your life? That is what you must look at. Are your choices making you more insecure, anxious, jealous, unsettled, restless? Then it would be dishonest to call these as right choices for you. And it is not in a relative sense; it is not as if one choice that is right for this person will be right for the other one also.

What is the option all about? The option is: you could choose either from your heartful intelligence, or you could choose and decide from your conditioned self.

Choosing, deciding, acting from your conditioned self is apparently easy because it hardly requires any effort. Therefore, most people allow their life, actions, thoughts, decisions, everything to come from their conditioned centres. It feels comfortable.

But then, the option to operate from the centre of heartful intelligence is available. That is what brings joy and contentment to you. That is what brings liberation to you. But that option is scarcely chosen because ther...

We are lazy and stingy. We don’t want to work hard enough; we want to avoid exertion. We don’t want to pay the price, so...

Thought is useful, but in matters of living, loving, and Truth, the utility of thought is limited.

There is no more a final arbiter than action, deeds, life. What else is life but a continuous flow of actions? One finally has to give oneself the liberty to do it. Talking as a precursor to doing is all right, acceptable, but talking as a substitute to doing is evil.

If you want to use talking or thinking or discussing as a preparatory method before leaping into action, it is okay. Sometimes, the beginner needs that. Sometimes, everybody needs to think a little before taking a leap. Sometimes, one needs to talk to herself, sometimes to

others. All that is understandable. But if one becomes a professional thinker specializing in nothing but thought and deliberation, and therefore vacillation and...

Also, I must warn you against the temptation to be fully sure at the level of thought. No absolute clarity is p...

So, if you insist that unless you are totally clear with your thoughts you will not move, then you have ensured that you are never really going to move; then you will always have a reason to think a little more because thought by its very design can never be fully certain. An iota of doubt will always be residually present, and you can very well exploit that last iota to keep stretching the thought.

This is where faith is important. Faith is needed, so that you can act without being fully certain. At the level of thought, thought is still raising its habitual objections, but you say to thought, ‘You might not be clear. I am clear.’

Have you ever found thought coming to a final conclusion? That which appears like concluded tonight reopens for discussion tomorrow morning because a final ...

So, think if you must, but never expect thought to come to a solution. Thought is useful, but in matters of living, loving, and Truth, the utility of thought is limited. Do not try to overexploit thought. You will end up being exploited.

What is bigger, your demand for security or your love for Truth? This answer will determine your life.

If all seems to be going comfortably, chances are all is going wrong. If all seems to be nice, proper, sweet, hunky-dory, chances are everything is just patterned, known, conditioned.

there is no action that is inherently bad. The only bad action is a misplaced action.

One’s role is to just know the mind. In knowing the mind, the fakeness of the mind does not become too powerful. When you know that you are just acting as per how you have been taught to act, then you cannot be too serious about that acting. Then you create an empty space from where some other action can happen, and it happens on its own.

Just know where the false action comes from. It is easy to know that because it is in action all the time, visible all the time, operational all the time. Just know and honestly acknowledge that. Forget about the real. The real is self-sufficient, it takes care of itself. You need not bother about it.

When you step back and let your personal priorities be subservient to something far bigger than yourself, that is the right action.

For thought to continue, there must be uncertainty. For you to be relaxed, there must be certainty.

Have the spontaneity of a free person and not that of a slave.

This is the condition of every human being. We have two masters: one is our own body, second is the society outside of us. Our body rules us from within, society rules us from without. We do not want either of these slaveries. We do not want to be ruled by our body, nor do we want to be ruled by society. That is freedom.

We talked of the conditioned flow and the free flow. The conditioned flow includes two currents: the physical, biological current, and the social current. The free flow includes none of this. In the free flow, there is just freedom, there is true spontaneity. That’s the aim of living. That’s the aim in all genuine decision-making.

Decide in a way that your decision is uninfluenced by your physical tendencies and your social conditioning. Only then would your dec...

It is difficult to be born in India and be passionate towards ice hockey. You will have very few kids saying that they want to make rugby or ice hockey their career, whereas so many kids are very passionate about cricket.

So, we know where passion comes from. It is not internal. Passion, too, comes from surroundings. It is a type of deeply internalized conditioning.

But passion is deceptively dangerous because it presents itself as something internal. Not only that but it also decorate...

you didn’t even get to know when you absorbed and internalized all these things. And you have started saying, ‘Well, my heart beats for cricket.’ Were you born in Brazil or Russia, would your heart still beat for cricket? So, passion is as much an external thing as peer pressure.

Compared to these two conditions, there is a distinct third possibility as well: a decision, an action, that comes from the centre of understanding. This third possibility deserves our attention. You realize what is valuable, you realize what is life-affirmative, and you find it missing. You find that there is something that needs to be promoted, something

that needs to be done, and then you do it. Not because you want to do it, but because you must do it. You don’t do it because it is something quite attractive or remunerative; you do it because it needs to be done. There is no option. It is a call, it is sacred duty. You cannot avoid it. And only then is the work chosen by you really appropriate.

These are two words that you must be very careful about: ‘want’ and ‘must’. ‘I want to do this thing’ versus ‘I must do this thing’. These ...

All ‘want’ is conditioned. ‘Must-ness’ is an entirely different thing. ‘This must be done. In front of this, it doesn’t matter what I feel, how I think, what my ideals are, what my situations and conditi...

The one who starts living, abiding in this must-ness starts living at the pinnacle of life. It is a different zone of existence altogether: a point where you have just silently achieved all the spiritual goods. Detachment? You have achieved. Renunciation? You have achieved. Witnessing? Yes, you are there. Dispassion? Yes, you are there. Commitment? De...

goodies. They just come to you in a bunch as if they are all s...

This must-ness is classically called as Dharma: doing not what you desire to do, doing that which you must do.

And that is the only thing that makes all the difference in life. Are you doing something because you desire to do it or are you doing something because you must do it?

And remember, this must-ness is not a thing of duty or external pressure or moral responsibility; this must-ness does not come from those places. It is not about saying you must help your neighbour or you must be kind to people. No, not that kind of must-ness. We aren’t talking moral...

Once you know what is Right, then surrender your right to not choose the Right. If you continue to hold that dangerous right, then inevitably at some point you will use that right and un-choose the Right. This is what is meant by surrender. Must-ness necessarily involves surrender.

I am asking you, with no bias against tree plantation, how would you know that planting trees is the best way to counter this menace? Do you have the numbers? Without having the numbers, why do you just want to offer a nominal service to the cause? Must you not first of all study, for example, the UN reports? And there are so many other organizations keeping a watch over the climate. Should you not find time to go through those reports and know what the whole thing is really about? Or do you just want to be a do-gooder? A self-deceptive feel-gooder? It is often fashionable to do all these things. It doesn’t help.

If your action is founded on understanding, then your action becomes vigorous and irreversible. But if it is coming from some flimsy point, then such action has no momentum. It doesn’t have longevity because it doesn’t have sincerity.

The moment you say, ‘I am not taking ownership of these actions,’ the choice has been made. The choice is: ‘I do not need to choose. If the action does not belong to my province, then all the choices will be made by the province to which it belongs. I stay away. I stay aloof. I don’t need to make any further choices.’

When I say body, I also mean the brain. If the brain really needs something, the intellect will go in the direction of finding that thing. You don’t need to interfere. You are redundant, useless. The entire system, the whole mechanism knows how to take care of its own interests, and its interests are purely material. Your interests are not material. Let the material take care of the material itself. It is a self-sufficient system. It will do what it wants to do, plus it has intellect as its servant.

Remember that intellect is also material. Remember that intellect, too, is a property of the brain. If the stomach needs water, the intellect will function in a way that will get it to water. Why do you need to meddle?’ But I like to control things!’

Survival of the fittest is also Prakriti. If I am competitive at work or if I think somebody is moving ahead of me or if I take unnecessary pressures, then this competitiveness is also Prakriti, right? AP: Survival of fittest applies to animals. Their survival means physical survival. In your case, if there is physical survival without peace to the consciousness, then it is worse than not surviving.

You are not the animal. You are, unfortunately, a little different. You have the animal’s body, but you have something that is not animalistic: you have a consciousness that is not content being an animal; you have a consciousness that seeks liberation.

You are not the cell. You are not the body. Remember who you are. You are the confined consciousness clamoring for liberation.

In the right battle, there can be no wrong result. Defeat is possible only when one is fighting the wrong battle. If you find yourself defeated, and defeated regularly, just know that you have picked up a battle that you should never have been fighting in the first place.

What has begun wrongly cannot be corrected by the finesse involved in the process. Since it has begun wrongly, it will lead to more despair. We are often more concerned about winning and losing than simply knowing whether we are fighting the right battle. If you are fighting the wrong battle and you win, is it not worse than losing?