SUTRA #1 Karma is about becoming the source of one"s own creation. In shifting responsibility from heaven to oneself, one becomes the very maker of one"s destiny. Instead, karma is action on three levels: body, mind, and energy. Whatever you do on these three levels leaves a certain residue or imprint upon you. What does this mean? It is quite simple. Your five senses are collecting data from the outside world every moment of your life. You are literally being bombarded with stimuli at every instant. Over time, this enormous volume of sense impressions begins to assume a certain distinctive pattern within you. This pattern slowly shapes itself into behavioral tendencies. A cluster of tendencies hardens over time into what you call your personality, or what you claim to be your true nature. It works in the reverse as well: Your mind shapes the way you experience the world around you. This becomes your karma—an orientation to life that you have created for yourself in relative unawareness. You are not aware of how these tendencies develop. But what you consider to be “myself” is just an accumulation of habits, predispositions, and tendencies you have acquired over time without being conscious of the process. Do not forget that in addition to being unconscious and compulsive, karma is also deeply cyclical. The karmic information within your system is encoded in different kinds of cycles. The largest cycle is the solar cycle, because everything—animate and inanimate—in this solar system is deeply influenced by the sun. Our planet is no exception. The solar cycle is a period of 4,356 days (nearly 12 years). Someone who lives according to the solar cycle leads a life of great health, well-being, alignment, and minimal friction. As the length of a karmic cycle decreases, life becomes progressively more unbalanced. If your life runs in three- or six-month cycles, you are in a serious state of psychological imbalance. The same inner upheavals or life situations will keep recurring every few months. If your life is determined by a twenty-eight-day cycle—the lunar cycle, which is also the shortest one—you could well be considered deranged or psychotic. The word loony, as you know, is linked to the word lunar, and this is no coincidence. It should be remembered, however, that the karmic cycle has nothing to do with the reproductive cycles of the female body. Now, if we do not break these internal and external patterns, nothing new will ever happen. You might have noticed that the more successful you become, the more frustrated you get, because somewhere unconsciously you sense that you are simply going around in circles. You may have learned to ride the cycle, but you are not free from it. With yogic practices, the aspiration is to move toward the solar cycle so your balance and stability are assured. You may not be able to change your past action and the mental and emotional karma you accumulated, but you no longer slide into short-spin cycles. You no longer wear your karma as a skin-tight garment; you learn to wear it loosely. You hold it at a distance. SUTRA #2 Ultimately, life is neither suffering nor bliss. It is what you make it. Look at this closely. You will see that volition is shaped fundamentally by your belief that you are a separate being—an individual. In other words, it is your identification with your individuality that determines your volition. The operative word here is identification . If you were not identified with this sense of separateness, you would not be accumulating karma. If your identification were all-inclusive, that would be the end of the karmic cycle! Unfortunately, people"s identification with narrow notions of individuality makes them engage with the world selectively rather than inclusively. The endless oscillation between like and dislike, attraction and aversion, further hardens their sense of separateness. Over time, likes and dislikes freeze into a personality and produce more karma. Individuality now becomes a prison rather than a privilege. Gautama the Buddha"s teachings on this subject—his emphasis on desirelessness, in particular—have unfortunately been misinterpreted and mutilated by many. Now, this was an incredibly perceptive man who would have known only too well that without desire, there can be no existence. What he was pointing to was the importance of operating out of a state of inner fulfillment rather than inner hankering. Once this is accomplished, your life becomes an expression of bliss, not a pursuit of it . Your desire does not evaporate; instead, it becomes conscious. Your desire is no longer the unconscious fuel for your personal identity. It is the conscious tool by which you function. You will now desire the well-being of the entire planet. The crux of the matter, therefore, is identification with your desires. When you are no longer identified with your desire, when there is a distance between you and your mind, you simply do what is needed for the moment and for the situation. You learn to play with desire. The desires are no longer about “you” anymore. Now your karmic bondage vanishes entirely. How can one “dis-identify” with desire? How can there be desire without individuality, intention without identity? The logic is simple: individuality is a myth. It is an idea, not an existential reality. We have fragmented our world out of ignorance. Suppression simply means you are experiencing life half-heartedly . To live fully is to allow yourself to experience something totally. If you allow yourself to experience hunger totally, it is wonderful and liberating. If you allow yourself to experience food totally, it is also wonderful and liberating. Unfortunately, people do not experience either hunger or food totally. If you avoid any experience—whether pain or pleasure, sorrow or joy—it is big karma. But if you go through the experience without resisting it, the karma dissolves. This is why Krishna in the great Indian epic the Mahabharata says that hesitation is the worst of all crimes . Today, in the name of civilization and etiquette, educated people often do not experience any of their emotions fully. They cannot cry fully. They cannot laugh loudly. Over a period of time, frustration sets in and they turn joyless. Their karmic accumulation also increases. You will see that simpler people who allow themselves to laugh and cry uninhibitedly as the impetus arises are often much freer. They work out their karma by experiencing each emotional state fully. Living totally does not mean just having a good time. It means experiencing anything that comes your way fully and intensely. The very process of life is the dissolution of karma . If you live every moment of your life totally, you dissolve an enormous volume of karma. So it is not the physical situation that causes misery. It is the way you react to it. Your karma is not in what is happening to you; your karma is in the way you respond to what is happening to you. Human beings are capable of suffering just about anything. Someone could not get into college, so they suffer. Someone else gets into college and can"t get out, so they suffer! Someone cannot get a job, so they suffer. Someone is given a job, and now they suffer even more. Someone isn"t married, so they suffer. Someone gets married, and they are in agony! Someone has no children, so they suffer. Someone has children, and so they are in constant torment. Your suffering is not because of your circumstances. Your suffering is because of the way you have made yourself. And that is what you need to look at. ====== In the East, we simply say “Your life is your karma.” This means that how much karma you can take into your hands depends on how much of you has become conscious. If you have mastery over your physical body, fifteen to twenty percent of your life and destiny will be in your hands. If you have mastery over your psychological process, fifty to sixty percent of your life and destiny will be in your hands. If you have mastery over your very life energies, a hundred percent of your life and destiny could be in your hands. Suppose I plant a mango seed. Can I expect that coconuts will fall out of the mango tree when it grows up? Can I expect cherries or apples? Now, that obviously would be absurd. If you plant a mango seed, you can expect only mangoes. That much is determined by the seed. But there are other considerations over which you do have control: How many mangoes will the tree yield? What will be the quality of the mangoes? How long will it yield them? Over these factors, you certainly do have control. I should add a caveat. If you dig deep enough into life, you can change even the nature of the seed. But that takes a level of yogic accomplishment that is beyond the scope of this book. So that is a story we won"t get into here. What most people call luck is just your ability to be at the right place at the right time. Many of your capabilities are still unconscious, so you do not have complete control over the kind of circumstances you attract. But there is something over which you do have control: how you react to what happens to you. Maybe you win a lottery ticket today, but, still, how happily you live is something you decide. A poor man might be ecstatic if he wins a million dollars. But a rich man might have much more in his bank balance and still be unhappy. So luck alone does not determine your happiness. Generally, the word karma is used in a rudimentary way to suggest that you did something bad and so bad things will happen to you. This is a very limited and simplistic way of looking at life. Karma has nothing to do with moralistic categories of good and bad; it is related only to cause and effect. ====== The karmic substance within you may happen to contain all the necessary ingredients to create suffering. Perhaps you planted all these ingredients unconsciously in your past. So what can you do about this today? The answer is simple: don"t manufacture suffering for yourself today! Maybe terrible things happened to you yesterday. Maybe you lost everything that is precious to you. But this morning when you get up, you still have the choice not to manufacture suffering for yourself. Yes, the ingredients of misery are present. They are waiting, perhaps even tempting you. But they cannot become suffering by themselves. Suffering has to be freshly baked every day. In other words, your karma cannot turn into suffering without your cooperation. Once you are aware, that is the end of your suffering. So the source of your misery is not your past actions. The source of your misery is how you"re processing the imprint of the past now. You may be carrying around a sackful of stinking garbage. Either you can smear yourself with it and get terribly miserable, or you can make good manure out of it and create a wonderful garden. Karma is the seed. What you are going to make out of this seed is entirely up to you. If I am given a packet of assorted seeds and I throw them all into my garden, perhaps all of them will sprout. Some of the mango seeds will yield very sweet fruit. But there may be some bitter seeds, too. The parthenium grass may be an unwelcome weed. And yet I still have the choice to pull it out. I can remove what is superfluous and keep the rest. That is how your food is grown every day. A large part of agriculture is just weeding. There are actually more weeds than plants growing even in your own garden. If you keep weeding, you will have a garden. If you sit back defeated, you will have a patch of weeds. (Well, of course, some have learned to enjoy the weeds, too!) The same holds true for your life. You have your seed karma. But you also have your weeding karma. This is where volition comes in. This is where intention becomes paramount. If you decide not to perform your weeding karma, your life will be just an overgrown wilderness. If you choose to perform this simple function, your life could yield an incredibly rich harvest.
