The Karmic Cycle Can Be Broken
Destiny depends on how you choose to respond to every situation life presents to you.
I f we are able to truly manage our mind with the understanding that it is our mind that connects thoughts to form shafts of pain and pleasure and if we stay unclutched, we can stay in what Buddha calls mindfulness. We can stay in awareness and in the present moment. It is our thought process that constantly takes us from past to future and back again and does not allow us to rest in the present moment.
Understand this clearly, when we are in the present moment we can stay out of trouble without fear and desire. We can act without fear and desire. You may ask how. How can I be motivated to do something if I do not desire it? There is no need for motivation. Do you think that it is motivation that makes you breathe or digest your food? It is the intelligence of the energy that is within and without us that makes it possible for us to live and grow. We live not because of us but in spite of us.
When we act without attachment, there is no consequence to our actions, there is no karma arising from our actions.
There is a very beautiful verse in the Isa Vasya Upanishad:
*Om poornamadah poornamidam Poornaat poornamudachyate Poornasya poornamaadaaya Poornamevaavashishy ate*
From the Whole came the Whole. If you remove the Whole from the Whole, only the Whole remains. By very nature we seek the Wholeness. By very nature we seek fulfillment in anything we do.
Whether it is eating, drinking, jumping, reading, talking, sleeping, or meditating, in any activity that we engage, our being yearns to completely experience the activity and be fully involved in it. Are we fully conscious of every action we engage in? Are we aware every moment of our life?
A small story:
A man was travelling by cab to the airport. The cab driver was driving very fast even around corners and sharp turns. The passenger was getting terrified with his driving.
Finally, the cab driver seeing the terrified passenger, said, 'Why don't you do what I do when I take turns? Just shut your eyes!'
When you are not completely aware and involved in the action you are engaged in, your being remains unfulfilled in that experience. The unfulfilled experience remains inside you and keeps pulling you to do the action again with intensity to fulfill it. This is karma.
Karma is the collection of unfulfilled experiences that stay in us and constantly pull us to fulfill them.
Anything that we do and experience intensely and deeply will always leave our system. It will liberate us. Any experience that we did not go through completely, through which we did not have complete fulfillment, that did not get our full energy, attention and awareness, remains inside us as karma.
Even though we carry some karma, basically we are complete fulfillment, Wholeness. So any karma that has not been fulfilled cannot rest inside us for too long. It will try its best to fulfill itself. It will drive us again and again to go through the same activity so that it can be fulfilled. Any desire, any experience, which has not become complete in our system, will remain as karma and push us again and again to make us go through the same experience until it is fulfilled.
We think, speak and do things without clarity, without fulfillment and with deep ignorance. All these thoughts, words and actions collectively contribute towards our karmic baggage because none of them gives rise to fulfillment in us. When they do not give rise to fulfillment our karma pushes us to somehow fulfill them.
Our own thoughts, words and deeds become our karma and drive us to reach fulfillment in some way.
The present is the totality of all past decisions
Understand clearly that now you are reading this book because of all your past decisions. You decided to pay attention to the book on display. You decided to buy it. You decided to sit down and read this book now. The totality of all these decisions contributes to your sitting here.
The totality of all these past decisions is your present moment. Now, applying the same logic, the totality of your present decisions will be your future.
This is the essence of karma theory: the totality of all your past is the present, and the totality of your present is your future.
The totality of all your past is the present. The totality of your present will be your future. The problem is that we make most of our decisions unconsciously. We take thousands of decisions unconsciously. That is the reason why we are not able to connect the cause with the effect.
Flood more awareness, more intelligence into your thinking system. Flood more awareness, more consciousness into your decision-making system.
In any given moment, the future is predestined but conditionally. It will be a certain future according to all the totality of events till that time – this is the predestined future. But it is conditional. There is an important factor that can and will change it – your consciousness, your will.
A small story:
Once, two brothers met a sage who was known to be able to look into the future. The brothers paid their respect to the sage and asked him if he could tell them about their future. The hermit advised them, 'It may not be good for you to know your future. Besides, your future can change later even if I tell you now.'
The brothers insisted on knowing their future. The sage looked at the elder brother and said, 'You will become a king in a year.' Looking at the younger brother, he said, 'You are destined to die in the hands of a murderer in a year's time.' The brothers started walking back home. The elder brother was overjoyed while the younger one was depressed.
Now the elder brother started creating his fantasy world dreaming of becoming a king. The younger brother, who was destined to have less than a year to live, started spending his time in spiritual activities. He used his time to serve everyone and soon came out of his depression.
Eleven months passed. One day, the elder brother invited the younger one to his house. He wanted to look out for land for a grand palace he was planning to build since very soon he would become a king. They were walking on a huge open piece of land when the younger brother stumbled on a half-buried pot. The brothers dug the pot and removed it. It was a huge pot of gold coins.
The elder brother was thrilled and started shouting, 'This treasure is just for me! It is for me to set up my palace and kingdom! 'Just then, a bandit jumped out from a bush, gave a blow on the elder brother's head and tried to snatch the pot from him. The younger brother jumped at the bandit to protect his brother. But the bandit attacked him with a dagger he had in his hand. During the struggle the bandit dropped the pot and ran away.
The elder brother was very thankful to his younger brother for saving his life and offered him half the gold coins. The younger brother politely refused saying he was not going to live much longer in any case. The elder brother with his new treasure started living a lavish life, eating, drinking and being merry.
One year passed. There was no sign of any crown in sight. The younger brother was also enjoying good health. They decided to visit the sage again. They met him and asked, 'How did your predictions go wrong?'The sage was also surprised and went into meditation. He then explained, 'I told you your destiny can be changed.'
He looked at the elder brother and said, 'Your destiny changed because of your irresponsible actions over the past months. The crown that you were to get was reduced to a pot of gold.'
He looked at the younger brother and said, 'Your spiritual life, trust and surrender to the Divine changed your destiny also. Death in the murderer's hand was reduced to only being wounded by him.'
Understand, destiny is not something written in stone. It very much depends on how you choose to respond to every situation life presents to you. Your awareness will give you the intelligence and the courage to change the flow of events in your life.
Karma and TPS
If you don't know your past completely, you will repeat the same things in the future. If your Thoughts Per Second (TPS) can come down and you know your past as it happened, you won't repeat the same past in the future. You will then become a karma mukta, liberated from karma. As of now you are a karma bandha, bonded to karma because you have not lived your past completely.
For example, your childhood always seems golden. It is the golden past. You may feel your life in college was great, but when you were actually in college, you didn't really feel that way. Why? Because your suffering has become much more now and in comparison, the past seems very nice! Now you attribute joy to your past and if given a chance you want to repeat it. When you lived through it, did you actually experience it? No!
If you can relax in the present moment, at zero TPS, for at least 11 kshanas, you will penetrate the time shaft. If you can stay in zero TPS for 21 kshanas, you will penetrate the time shaft and can alter the future. This is in your hands.
All meditation techniques are ways to bring down your TPS so that you can penetrate the time shaft.
It is important to understand the concept of kshana. There is no equivalent for this word in the English language. So, let me explain to you what kshana means. Kshana is a measure of time. It is not a second or a minute as many people believe.
The gap between two thoughts is one kshana. We are used to thinking of time in an absolute sense. But a kshana is absolutely relative! The thoughts of every person and the rate at which they come in a person are dependent on that person. Kshana varies from person to person.
If a person is restless and gets too many thoughts in a span of one second, his kshana is shorter because the gap between two thoughts is less.
If a person is calm and collected like a meditator is, he gets fewer thoughts in a given span of time. His kshana is longer because the gap between two thoughts is more.
Your life is nothing but the totality of the conscious choices that you continuously make. Whether you want to or not, directly or indirectly, you are choosing everything. Someone else does not choose. It is you who chooses.
Understand, continuously it is your choice, your decision. You may think somebody else decides. But it is only you who is deciding.
A small example can make you understand the basic truth. If somebody criticizes you, you choose to get offended. If somebody praises you, you choose to get flattered. Because of your habit, you may choose it unconsciously. It is not someone else who chooses, it is you who choose. Because it has become your habit to think that someone else influences your decisions, you have forgotten that you are choosing.
Every time someone criticizes you, you choose to get upset. Every time someone praises you, you choose to get flattered. It is nobody else's choice but your own. You can decide either way. When someone criticizes you, you can choose not to get offended and you can choose to remain calm and relaxed. It is just your choice to feel offended or not.
All your continuous choices every minute put together decide your life. If you don't decide and if you allow incidents to decide your life you go into a mode of 'paralysis'. Our lives as of now are nothing but paralysis. It is only when you decide to live your life without any outside events, situations or decisions being forced on you, you actually decide to live.
As long as you don't understand life is your choice, your living is just paralysis.
There are three interrelated concepts, termed vasana, samskara and karma, in Sanskrit.
Vasana
Vasana is the seed of desire. For example, you are walking and you happen to see a dazzling necklace displayed outside a shop. A desire arises inside you to possess it. This is vasana.
Samskara
Samskara is the plant that grows when the seed of vasana sprouts. When you see that necklace again and again, the desire to possess it becomes stronger in you. When you feed the desire to possess the necklace, it is like supplying water and nutrition to the seed of vasana.
The corruption that happens to the inner space is what I call samskara or engraved memories. They are the memories that go and sit in your inner space and pull you to go through the same experience repeatedly. They pull you to do the same kind of actions repeatedly, pull you to run through the same kind of thought patterns, even if you don't want to. Those memories are what I call samskaras.
Any samskara that is operating in your conscious or unconscious layer is nothing but a hindrance to the fulfillment of your life. There is no such thing as good or bad samskara. No samskara is good. An inner space filled with samskaras is hell. An inner space without samskaras is heaven. Do not try to classify samskaras as good or bad.
A samskara by itself, by its very nature, is negative. By its very nature samskara is depressive. Anything done out of samskaras will reduce everything to boring emptiness. Anything that happens with a deep understanding, just out of your pure inner space, always adds value to you. Anything done out of samskaras adds more and more bondage to you.
From our young age we collect so many different samskaras in so many ways. We accumulate them and also reproduce them. Samskaras do reproduce themselves even without any further action from our part.
Samskaras get strengthened in different ways. There are some samskaras that get strengthened only by action, when you repeat the action. There are some samskaras that get strengthened just by receiving information with regard to them, when you receive input from the world about them. There are some other samskaras that need neither action nor information, just remembrance is enough, and they get strengthened!
We collect these different levels of samskaras, engraved memories, and store them in our system and expand them.