Follow Me IN! Follow Me IN! Relation of Rituals with Karma
another body.' Only when you lose your body consciousness, you can see the Divine also as formless. Until that happens, you need some form, some reminding rituals, some deities to worship.
You see, in my first three years of the mission, from 2003 to 2006, I never gave any ritual along with meditation. Only in 2006, I added the GuruPuja to the everyday meditation - Nithya Dhyaan.
From 2003 to 2005, only 20% to 30% of the people who were initiated into meditation continued the meditation for at least three months. After three months, that also stopped.
But now, after I added the Guru Puja to Nithya Dhyaan, after it became more or less a ritual, more than 80% who take initiation follow it! I did a statistical study and discovered this. So I think it is good to have a ritual along with meditation, so that the regular habit of doing some sadhana – penance - will get cultivated.
Otherwise you won't do it regularly. The first day, you will think, 'Today my mother-in-law is here,' or 'I have too much work' and you will skip it. After two days, when your mother-in-law has gone, or the work is done, you will think, 'Let me enjoy my vacation after saying goodbye to my mother-in-law. I don't want to do it today.' Or, if you are happy, you will think, 'Today I am happy, then why meditate?' Or if you are depressed, you will think, 'Oh, today I am depressed. How can I focus on meditation?' Your mind tries to find some logic to skip it! But if it is made into a ritual, you will not find any logic to skip it. You will simply do it.
Now we will see how we go through the janma marana chakra, (cycle of life and death) and how these initiations and rituals can liberate us from it, how they can take us out of this cycle.
Sanchita, Prarabdha Sanchita, Prarabdha and Agamya Karma
Basically we have three layers of karmas: sanchita, prarabdha and agamya. Sanchita karma is like a bank, a reserve bank. See, this may not be the first time you have taken a body and come to planet earth. You might have taken millions of bodies before! In those millions of bodies, whatever you learnt, whatever you did, all those engrams put together is called sanchita. In Sanskrit, there is one more word samoochita. That's one more Sanskrit word that they use for sanchita. When I say 'bank', it is not a collection or saving; it is a debt! You will have to finish all the credit out!
The next type of karma is prarabdha karma. Prarabdha means from this sanchita bank of the entire karmas, you take a little karma, create your body out of it, and decide to enjoy all those karmas through that body when you take birth. So prarabdha is just a small bit which you brought to enjoy or exhaust through this body.
The third type of karma is the worst thing. It is the agamya karma - the karma that you start collecting because of fresh thoughts, words and deeds after coming down to planet earth.
Now, anybody who lands on the planet earth has to exhaust his prarabdha karma. For example, let us say, you have 1000 karmas in your sanchita. I am just giving an example. Let us say, when you take up your body, when you assume your body, you take only ten karmas, saying, 'Let me exhaust these ten.' After coming