Beyond Karma
Beloved Master,
One usually understands karma as the cause and effect phenomenon. We have heard you say that karma is unfulfilled desires. You have also said not to worry about karma*. Does this mean what we do now does not affect us at all?*
A young initiate was under training by the older monks in the monastery.
One day, two older monks accompanied him into the meditation hall, which was just across a small lake from their living quarters. They walked all the way around the lake to reach the hall and were about to sit down.
'Oh, no', said one monk, 'I forgot my meditation mat. Let me go fetch it.'
He walked to the lake, and as the initiate looked with disbelief, walked over the water! He disappeared into the living area, came out and again calmly and walked across the lake again. He then sat down quietly on his mat.
Just then, the second monk said, 'Oh, no, I forgot my rosary. Let me go and fetch it.'
He too walked across the lake as if it was solid ground, picked up his rosary and walked back into the meditation hall.
They meditated for some time. At the end of the session, the initiate rushed out of the meditation hall and ran straight toward the water. He couldn't wait to walk on the water like how the other two monks had walked. He stepped into the water and promptly went under water. Embarrassed and wet, he stepped out of water and looked at the older monks accusingly.
One monk said to the other, 'We should have told him where the stones are!'
An interesting question on karma.
Cause and effect. Science tells you that cause causes the effect. Let me tell you, it is actually the effect that causes the cause.
According to scientific laws, whatever you see as the final effect is created by a set of events called causes. According to spiritual law, the desire of the effect, the effect itself in a subtle form is what causes the effect. In other words, effect produces the causes, which in turn produces the effect.
If you have deep desire, a very deep desire, that desire carries its own energy for fulfillment. You need to do nothing. The desire will fulfill itself!
When we are born, the universe ensures that we are born with all our needs provided for, that we shall not suffer because our needs go unfulfilled. This is a promise of the universe. All that we need to do is to believe this truth and we will see that the universe is fulfilling it every moment of our life on planet Earth.
The problem is that the needs we are born with become inflated as we grow up. We watch others, we learn from others, we imitate others and we want what others have. Our needs then turn into wants. Needs are what we are born with. Wants are what we acquire after being born.
Bhagwan Ramana Maharishi has said, 'The Earth can fulfill the needs of all its children, but it cannot fulfill the wants of even one person.'
Our greed is such that the wants of one person can become greater than the needs of billions of people. There is no end to greed. Greed does not know the sufferings of others; it only knows the burning desire to possess all, at all costs and at any cost.
When I say that you are born with needs that the universe will fulfill, I mean that you bring with you these needs. These needs are called your prārabda karma. Throughout your life you live through experiences, which have a common thread of desire. This desire may be of many types. It can be for money, for name or fame, for health, for physical beauty, for intelligence, for sensual pleasures, for spiritual awakening and many other things. There is one core thread to all your desires.
If you are in politics, your desire is for power. That rules over everything else for you. You believe that once you have political power, all else will come to you – name, fame, wealth and so on. will automatically follow. If you don't have power, you believe that nothing has happened in your life.
If you are a business person, by and large, money will be the driving force behind you. You will use money to build name, fame and power. Without money you will feel impotent and unimportant.
If you are an actor, physical appearance may be the most important factor. I heard that a famous actress insured her legs for millions of dollars! For actors, no beauty means no success, and therefore life without physical attractiveness is filled with suffering.
This deep driving desire that you have is what determines your life. That's why the Upaniṣad says, as is your desire, so is your will; as is your will so are your actions; as are your actions, so your life becomes.
Your intent is what you become.
The truth is that not only do these desires make your life now, but they also determine your life for your future births.
Your intent is what you become, now and forever.
Krishna explains this so beautifully in the Bhagavad Gita. He says that your body is like a garment that the spirit leaves behind, changing it for another body. The spirit is indestructible, it cannot be destroyed by a weapon, it cannot be burnt by fire, it cannot be wetted by water and it cannot be dried by air. The spirit lives on, it moves on.
Krishna further says: this indestructible spirit seeks another body based on the last desires carried by it. These desires at the point of death determine what body it occupies next and what life it leads next.
You may ask, 'What it is this? Krishna has said that the spirit is pure, nothing can affect it, and nothing can harm it. Then, how can desires hang on to the spirit, and influence the next birth?'
What hangs on to the spirit is the subtle essence of the mindset caused by the desires in you. These are termed vāsanā. The vāsanā tinges the spirit. A spirit with no desires, in which all desires have been extinguished, as that of an enlightened master, has no vāsanā, not even for any spiritual growth.
Some people tell me, 'I too can say, "Hey Ram," as Mahatma Gandhi said before he died, when he was shot dead.' Understand that Mahatma Gandhi had the word 'Hey Ram' on his lips and heart all through his life and this was articulated when he died. If all through your life you had only the thought of money, your last thoughts would be on who owed you how much. If your mind was possessed by lust throughout your life, you last thoughts would certainly be focused on men or women for sensual pleasures. If it had been a focus on power, your thoughts and desires would center around power as you died.
It is impossible to break that thread that runs through your life at the last moment of your life. That thread carries on with your spirit into your next birth. That thread is the vasana.
This vasana or mindset that carries forward as a subtle mental attitude into the next body is the prarabda karma or the starting balance that manifests itself as the basic needs you are born with. These needs carry their own energy for fulfillment.
For the intellectually minded, let me explain the different types of karma. There are three types of karma: sanchita, prarabda and agamya karmas. Sanchita karma is like your opening bank balance, the karmic account credited to you at birth. Of this, is a certain amount that is meant for this life and that is prarabda karma. This is your current account balance, with no overdraft facility. Agamya karma is what you can do in this life to make changes to your account, which in turn affects your sanchita and prarabda karma. So each part affects the other, and all together, these three determine what your life is.
Your current account balance, the prarabda karma, is what determines all that you do in this lifetime. You may not believe in rebirth or incarnation. Your religion may deny this, but not biological sciences.
There is in your brain a part today accepted as the R Complex or reptilian brain. No scientist can explain how this functions, but they all agree that this part of the brain is a carry over from our pre-human days, not just from primates and monkeys but from the very beginning of evolution, from the reptiles, according to the term. The term reptiles is just a term. There is no distinction that can be made about whether this came from the single cellular living system or the fish or reptiles. At that level it is all guess work.
What is known, however, is that this part of our human brain is driven instinctively from deep memories of our distant past. It is known that this part of the brain dictates what is called the flight or fight responses, survival instinct, mating instinct, xenophobic response to strangers and so on. Biologists believe that these are animal instincts that operate from our unconscious and determine our behavior.
Just try to understand this: if I speak about the Dasavatara, the 10 incarnations of Vishnu as Hindu mythology explains evolution, you will laugh, but scientists are not laughing. The Hindu concept of dasavatara is a brilliant exposition of evolution from the simplest form of life, matsya, the fish, to the enlightened human being. This model was developed some 10 thousand years ago, with no modern scientific tools whatsoever.
Here, we are talking not merely about reincarnation and rebirth within one species, but over millions of years through variegated species. Throughout this evolution, there is one part that has continued without change and which still drives us as human beings. What does religion have to say about this? Can any one explain rationally how the woman was created from the rib of man? It is a metaphor and without understanding the basis of the metaphor, people believe it without doubt because someone's scriptures say so. However, when it comes from a culture that they do not understand and accept, one quotes science and laughs.
It is known today scientifically that the woman is the default species and that man is the modification. So, do we rewrite that part of the Old Testament? Or do we try and understand what the story of Adam and Eve meant metaphorically instead of believing it as factual?
All scriptural truths of ancient religions and cultures, whether Hindu or Judaic, the truly ancient religions which came far before Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, like the Veda and the Old Testament, reflect incidents not as mere history but as major shifts in human consciousness. These truths are the expressions of enlightened masters who actually had these experiences; experiences of these incidents.
These masters conveyed these truths in a form that only equally enlightened masters can understand. Otherwise, every other person who has access to this knowledge can corrupt and convert the truth to suit his needs. So these truths were initially passed on personally. That is why some of the Vedic scriptures are called Upanishad, which in Sanskrit literally means sitting beside (the master). These truths were passed by master to disciple, mouth to ear, so in other cultures too.
Masters wanted to ensure that general public had no chance to corrupt these truths and coded them as metaphors, metaphors that only another trained disciple or another enlightened being could understand. A personally trained disciple could pass it down his lineage without corruption. An enlightened master, who becomes one with Existence, understands it without having to be told.
The rest read these scriptures like bedtime stories, with no understanding of what they mean. So, sex becomes the original sin. What is pure, what can be pure becomes a sin. You need to pay someone to be absolved of that sin. This was the first and most successful religious business model.
Science accepts today that something carries over from birth to birth, from species to species. Molecular biologists like Bruce Lipton categorically state that it is our conditioning that defines our cellular structure, not the other way around.
According to recent scientific studies, our cells and constituent DNA do not genetically program us; our experiences, memories and conditioning program our genes. Scientific truths have been made to stand on their head, not giving a chance for religion to meddle. Vedic scriptures had said the same things tens of thousands of years earlier. Your mindset, your vasana, carries on. The body perishes no doubt, but the thin veneer of mindset based on conditioning lingers on. This vasana determines who you will be in your next birth, based on who you are today. Krishna said this in the Gita, thousands of years ago.
To some religious beliefs, this may not be acceptable, but not to scientists.
We are born with our needs, based on vasana or prarabda karma, the opening balance. As we grow, we accumulate wants. These wants are imposed on us based on our experiences and get embedded in our unconscious as samskara – memories lacking fulfillment. These unfulfilled desires, samskara, drive all our decisions and actions unconsciously, with no control on our part. They result in the karma that we accumulate during this birth, which in turn forms the common thread, the mental attitude that determines the last desires, the vasana, that we die with.
So, the vicious cycle continues: vasana, prarabda karma, samskara, karma, mindset, opening balance, conditioned memories and action, resulting from unfulfilled desires.
Vasana, mindset, is like a seed. Samskara, conditioned memories, is like a growing plant. Karma, action resulting from unfulfilled desires, is the tree that finally happens.
Imagine yourself in a mall, idly window shopping. You see a tie or a shoe. The first time you see it, perhaps you have no reaction. You see it again and again on the window, for the second or third time, and a seed of desire sprouts within you. You must possess the tie or shoe. This is vasana.
Soon, when you keep seeing it repeatedly, you start visualizing scenarios that make you strongly want to buy the tie. You imagine yourself in a job interview wearing that tie or at a party wearing the shoe and being the center of attention. You bask in that attention and the desire grows stronger. This is samskara.
Finally, you end up buying that tie or shoe. This is karma, action. For the first week or two, you almost constantly wear the tie or shoe. Then the frequency reduces to once in a while. After a few months you stop wearing it completely. After 6 months, it gets stored in an attic or you don't even know where it is.
Then, one day you see a tie or a shoe on the window as you shop in the mall. The story repeats! The desire repeats till it is fulfilled completely.
What do I mean by saying fulfilled completely?
Look at a poor man who has just one pair of footwear. He will wear it till it completely wears out. He cannot afford to do anything else. It is his basic need. It is not a want.
When that footwear is no longer wearable, he will buy another, till then he has no desire to buy another pair.
World famous actors accumulate thousands of shoes, many that they wear once. For them, the purchase is a status symbol, a symbol of their ability to buy and display. Indulging in that want can never fulfill such a want. It will never die; it becomes an addiction.
All addictions are wants that are unfulfilled. Some are driven by physiological impulses, but most are driven by psychological play.
A young man starts drinking or smoking or using drugs to prove his independence from his parents and elders and to gain what he thinks is peer respect. He gets addicted. More he drinks or smokes, less and less is the enjoyment. He needs to consume more and more to get less and less pleasure. In the end, the cigarette smokes him, the liquor consumes him.
A young man came to me saying that he smoked and he wanted to quit. I asked him why and how he started smoking in the first place.
He said that once, many years ago, his father saw him with friends who were smoking. Though he himself was not smoking his father refused to believe him and scolded him. In retaliation, he decided to teach his father a lesson and started smoking in earnest.
This was a need to prove himself. I explained to him that this was a long time ago and that there was no longer a need to prove anything to anyone. He was successful on his own. He knew that smoking was harmful.
He said he knew all this intellectually but still found it difficult to give up. So, I told him, 'smoke as much as you wish, and as much as you can. But, finish each cigarette that you light. Another thing, be completely aware of what is happening to you when you inhale and exhale the smoke.'
He came back to me after two days and said he had given up smoking completely. I asked him what happened that was now different. He said 'when I became aware of the smoking, each inhalation and exhalation burnt my windpipe and lungs. I could feel the damage that the smoke was causing inside me. Why would I want to continue?'
A rich man addicted to liquor approached Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. This man was also a great devotee of Goddess Kali. He sought help. Ramakrishna told him 'drink as much as you want, but before you take a sip, offer it to Kali and then drink'.
Ramakrishna's disciples were horrified. They asked their master, 'What are you saying? How can you advise him to offer liquor to Kali? It is a sacrilege.'
Ramakrishna just smiled and kept quiet. After a few days, this man came to Ramakrishna and fell at his feet crying. I thought I could keep doing it, but I found there was no way I could abuse Mother Kali with the poison I was consuming myself. I have now stopped completely.
When such people come to THE SUPREME PONTIFF OF HINDUISM BHAGAWAN SRI NITHYANANDA PARAMASHIVAM, I tell them to smoke or drink as much as they want but to do it with utmost awareness. Smoke, I tell them, smoke as much as you want, but smoke each cigarette completely, to inhale fully and taste the smoke. Within a day or two they stop smoking. It is impossible to inhale all that destructive smoke into your lungs without the body crying out to stop it.
Any addiction that you are plagued by can be dissolved if you become aware of its control over you and the destruction that it is causing to you.
The cycle of karma continues only till desires are unfulfilled. Once the desire is truly fulfilled, it leaves you, it is dissolved.
Sitting in a forest or a mountain, far from other people and material possessions may reduce the wants, but cannot dissolve the wants. When the myths say that the sage Viswamitra was diverted by the celestial maiden Menaka, it is only metaphorical. If that were true, and tapas or penance can attract celestial nymphs, most of the men will go into deep meditation immediately! It was Viswamitra's fantasies, his unfulfilled desires, which had been suppressed, that burst forth as he meditated and diverted him, not any real-time maiden! Many of you do not need meditation for the maidens to appear. You can day dream and fantasize about celestial or earthly nymphs without a problem!
You need to understand the futility of continuing with such desires, such wants which carry you again and again into the cycle of birth and death. This is what Buddha meant when he said that desires cause suffering. Desires have no logical end, no finish line. Since they cannot be fulfilled unless dropped, any expectation of fulfillment causes sorrow when it fails to materialize.
Listen to Krishna to learn the first step to dropping desires. He says, do whatever you have to do but do not get attached to the result of your actions. He says, carry on with what you do, what you need to do, without thought of success or failure, without happiness in achievement or sorrow in non-achievement. He says, do your duty and leave the rest to me; sacrifice the result of your action to me.
If these words are burnt deep into your psyche, you will never suffer another moment in your life. Once you drop your attachment to the results of your actions, you will feel liberated. You just do, that is all.
You are in the present moment, focused on what you do at that point in time, without any worries about the outcome. The work continues; there is no pressure on you and you are in bliss.
People tell me: master, it is easy for you to say all this. How can we, people working in corporate jobs, not be worried about what we have to achieve. Our entire life, our career depends on how successfully we produce results. How can we let go?'
I ask them: does worrying about the result and being obsessed with the result, guarantee success?'
If that were so, there would be no failures in corporate life, because everyone is obsessed.
What is important is how you do your job and your being focused on the process of what you do, not constantly worrying about whether results are happening or not. If the process is right, results would be right.
The so-called quarterly result syndrome of Western corporations is what would kill them eventually. They are driven by greed, the greed of the stock market. When you are so obsessed with such a goal, you cannot focus on the present; you cannot focus on what you need. Instead, you resort to manipulation. The result is your corporate scandals of Enron, Tyco and others.
In fact, modern management theory reinforces the truth of Krishna. Celebrated and successful management techniques such as Six Sigma are based on controlling the process, the present moment, and not the end product. If you wish to achieve quality, you need to control the process. It is through this approach that they have reach such minuscular defect levels of products.
If the path is right, the destination will be right. In fact, if you follow the right path, whatever destination you reach will be the right destination for you!
When you lead a material life, whether corporate or otherwise, you will need to plan. I call this chronological planning. You need to decide when you will do what and how. You may set some directional end results. All this is essential since you interact with so many people and so many events and you need to interconnect. You are not living isolated in a forest. However, there is no need to get obsessed with such directional end results as if they are matters of life and death, or even if they are matters of life and death, there is no need to be stressed about them all the time. People get so stressed and they keep reviewing their plans all the time, without doing what needs to be done to achieve the results!
You are only one person in the system, even if you are the Chairman or CEO. Results depend upon so many people, not just one. Even if it depended on one person, what is the guarantee that this one person will still be breathing after an hour?
Of course, thinking that results are uncertain, you cannot stop planning and acting. Just understand the thread: instead of planning and worrying about execution, plan and be in deep awareness and do the work. The very quality of the awareness will make you do things without bothering about the end results and not only that, the awareness itself will never allow you to sit idle. It will constantly keep you moving to do things. The energy within you will be so bubbling and powerful that it will not allow you to laze around. You will intuitively know how to move and you will.
In the same way, never use karma as an excuse. Karma is not destiny as you imagine. It is not a frozen path that you must follow. As a human being, you have the freedom and will to make your own decisions. When you make a decision, results follow. As long as you do not judge the result to be good or bad, whatever you do is ok.
It is only when you start judging, for example, when you say: , 'when I make money it is right and when I lose money it is wrong', then problems arise. When you make money, if someone else loses, is it right for him? If what is right for you is wrong for another person, is that still ok and so on.
You rise in spiritual awareness when you face gains and losses with equanimity, when you are no longer disturbed by what you consider to be a success or failure. You become aware that all that happens, happens for a cause, even if it is a cause that you do not understand.
Nothing is accidental, nothing is coincidental, everything happens for a cause and with a meaning.
People get locked up in karma. They say, 'What can I do, this is my karma. I have to bear what happens. I am helpless.'
Part of this is true. You have to bear what happens if that is a result of your actions. However, you are not helpless. You have freedom to act; you have the freewill to act.
Act with awareness. It is time. Act with consciousness.
Everyone talks about conscience and want to act in accordance with conscience. Conscience is just your social conditioning. It is what society wants you to do. You must differentiate between conscience and consciousness. Consciousness is your inner voice. You need to shut all your outer noise to hear this inner voice. You need to meditate in order to hear it.
Awaken your consciousness. Only then you are truly awake. When you are awake, you are in bliss, nithyananda!