Karma Theory and Managing Part 2

[Guest guest]

The Ten Principles for Effective Karma Management

Speaking on enlightenment, stressing that it is a gradual process, a deepening

of the ability to experience God, starting with seeing God as the light in the

eyes of everyone you look at. Modern trend of Hindus is to consider the

traditional wisdom given by swamis as old-fashioned and not lend it much weight.

Instead, many Hindus are fascinated with the modern, secular

self-improvement-seminar approach, which quite often takes its principles from

Hindu thinking but gives them a modern packaging. So, today we are taking that

modern approach to karma. You've heard of stress management workshops? Well,

this a karma management program, designed for workshops, in which we will learn

the ten principles for effective karma management, drawn from the teachings of

Satguru (Gurudeva). This fulfills the third step of learning about karma, which

is to apply our understanding of karma to our own life and thus refine the way

we act in and react to life. Gurudeva taught: " It is easy to

study the law of karma and to appreciate it philosophically, but to realize it,

to apply it to everything that happens to you, to understand the workings of it

as the day goes by, requires an ability to which you must awaken. "

First Principle: Forego Retaliation

There is no need for you to be the instrument to return a karmic reaction to

someone else. For example, an individual is really nasty to you, so you feel the

impulse to retaliate and be nasty to him. If you follow that tack, you will

create a new unseemly karma to face in the future. Better to let the law of

karma take its own course without your intervention, which will generally happen

through some other person with less self-control who does not understand this

law of life.

Let us take another example: a classic cowboy movie plot. Someone shoots and

kills the hero's brother during a robbery, and the rest of the film is devoted

to his chasing down the outlaw and shooting him in revenge. What, then, happens

in the next life, the sequel? There is definitely a karma to be faced for

killing in revenge. Perhaps another robbery will take place and the hero will be

killed. Wisdom tells us that it is better to let the sheriff apprehend the

outlaw and bring him to justice. The sheriff has taken an oath and is authorized

to uphold the law and therefore creates no negative karma in capturing the

outlaw, even if he has no choice but to kill him in the process.

Gurudeva said, " Retaliation is a terrible, negative force. When we retaliate

against others, we build up a bank account of negative karma that will come back

on us full force when we least expect it. "

Tirukural: " Forget anger toward all who have offended you, for it gives rise

to teeming troubles. "

Second Principle: Accept Responsibility

Karma generally manifests through other people, and thus it is easy to see the

other person as totally responsible for what happens to us. For example, you are

attacked by a mugger who strikes you and steals your valuables. You are quite

upset with the malicious thief. However, the mystical perspective is to see

yourself as responsible for whatever happens to you. You are, through your

actions in the past, the creator of all that you experience in the present. You

caused your loss; the thief is just the instrument for returning your karma to

you.

Of course, it is easy to apply this principle when the effect is an enjoyable

one (we know intuitively when we get good things that we deserve them) and not

so easy to apply it when it is not enjoyable, but in both cases we are equally

responsible. In the end, you have no one to praise but yourself when your life

is filled with successes and no one to blame but yourself when your life is

filled with difficulties.

Gurudeva said, " As long as we externalize the source of our successes and

failures, we perpetuate the cycles of karma, good or bad. There is no one out

there making it all happen. Our actions, thoughts and attitudes make it all

happen. We must accept and bear our karma cheerfully. "

Tirukural: " Why should those who rejoice when destiny brings them good moan

when that same destiny decrees misfortune? "

Third Principle: Forgive the Offender

Take as an example a teenage boy on the way home from school. One day a gang

of boys teases him for being different in some way and beats him up. A common

response is for the teenager to feel angry at the boys and harbor ill feelings

toward them for years. This is problematic, however, as it keeps the lower

emotions of anger constantly churning in his subconscious mind. Unless he

forgives them, he perpetuates the event in his own mind, long after it is over.

Gurudeva often told the story of when a man attacked Swami Sivananda, hitting

him forcefully in the head with an axe during evening satsang at his Rishikesh

ashram. Swamiji's followers were outraged and angrily subdued the man. But Swami

Sivananda responded with the opposite sentiment. He asked that the man not be

punished or turned over to the police. The next day he met with his attacker and

gave him a train ticket home, several spiritual books and money. Swami said,

" Thank you so much for being the instrument to bring this karma back to me. Now

I am free of it. " He felt no anger toward the man whatsoever.

Tirukural: " If you return kindness for injuries received and forget both,

those who harmed you will be punished by their own shame. "

Fourth Principle: Consider the Consequences

Quite often our actions are based upon an emotional reaction to what someone

has done or said to us. The consequences of such actions are often not clearly

and carefully thought about. For example, someone insults you, so you insult

them back. If you did reflect, you would see that the consequence of harming

someone else with your words in the present is for you to be harmed again in the

future by someone else's words. This behavior creates an endless cycle of being

harmed and harming others, which is only stopped by considering the consequences

before acting and not harming back. Mahatma Gandhi once said, " An eye for an eye

makes the whole world blind. " So, too, instinctive retaliation ultimately makes

the whole world angry. The principle of considering the karmic consequences

pertains equally to positive actions. The wisest approach is to not simply react

to things that happen to us, but to take time to consider the karmic

repercussions of all actions before we take

them.

The habit of considering the consequences before acting can be developed at an

early age when parents and teachers utilize positive discipline methods to help

children face the natural and logical consequences of their actions. An

insightful letter from Lord Ganesha on consequences in Gurudeva's book Loving

Ganesha reminds us: " Keep track of your paces, for your walk makes marks. Each

mark is a reward or a stumbling block. Learn to look at the step you have made

and the step you have not made yet. This brings you close to Me. "

Gurudeva elucidates our fourth principle: " It is our reaction to karmas

through lack of understanding that creates most karmas we shall experience at a

future time. "

Tirukural: " All suffering recoils on the wrongdoer himself. Thus, those

desiring not to suffer refrain from causing others pain. "

Fifth Principle: Create No Negative Karmas

Now that we have a good grasp of the karmic consequences of various kinds of

actions, what is needed next to progress even further in the management of karma

is a firm commitment to refrain from actions that create new negative karma.

Perhaps we should all take a pledge, such as " I promise henceforth to refrain

from all actions that create negative karmas. "

This is actually not as difficult as it sounds. How do we know if a specific

action will create negative karma or not? Scriptures such as the Tirukural may

make mention of it. We can ask a Hindu religious leader his or her opinion. We

can ask our parents or elders. And once we get the knack of it, our own

conscience will be able to provide the answer most of the time.

Gurudeva advises us: " Wise handling of karma begins with the decision to carry

the karma we now have cheerfully, and not add to it. A firm decision to live in

such a way as to create no new negative karmas is a sound basis for living a

religious life, for following the precepts of dharma and avoiding that which is

adharmic. "

Tirukural: " What good is a man's knowledge unless it prompts him to prevent

the pain of others as if it were his own pain? "

Sixth Principle: Seek Divine Guidance

We don't have to manage our karma totally on our own. Help is available,

divine help, in fact. Such help comes from none other than Lord Ganesha, who has

the duty of helping sincere devotees manage their karma in the best way

possible.

Once, through sincere worship, an individual develops a personal relationship

with Ganesha, he naturally drops off any remaining adharmic patterns of behavior

and becomes fully established in a dharmic life. Not only does Lord Ganesha help

you become established in dharma, but in the best personal dharmic pattern for

this life, known as svadharma, your natural occupation and duties to family,

friends, relatives, deceased relatives, community, guru and temple.

When we seek His permission and blessings before every undertaking, Ganesha,

as the Lord of Obstacles, guides our karmas through creating and removing

obstacles from our path, similar to a mother's watching over her young children

at play. He also has an extraordinary knack for unweaving complicated situations

and making them simple. He can unweave His devotees from their karma, clarifying

and purifying their lives. How can we invoke this divine guidance when we

encounter karmic difficulties? Simply by chanting His name or a simple mantra,

or placing a flower at His feet, visiting His temples for puja, meditating on

Him or just visualizing His holy form and inviting Him mentally to help in our

time of need. He will respond.

Gurudeva comments on svadharma, " Such a life is the fulfillment of all

previous efforts and thus erases the uncomplimentary deeds and adds beneficial

ones, so a next birth can be most rewardingly great and useful to the whole of

mankind. "

Tirukural: " Draw near the Feet of Him who is free of desire and aversion, and

live forever free of suffering. "

Seventh Principle: Mitigate Past Karma

Once we have stopped acting in ways that create new negative karma, our life

will be sublime enough to focus on ridding ourselves of karmas of the past,

mitigating them, meaning to make less harsh, painful or severe.

To better understand mitigation, let's make another comparison to the judicial

system. A man commits armed robbery and receives a ten- to twenty-year sentence.

But due to good behavior in prison, he is paroled after only five years. He has

mitigated his sentence, made it less severe, through his good behavior.

Let's now take an example of karma that is mitigated. You are destined to lose

a leg in this life because you caused someone to lose his in a past life. If you

are living a selfish, low-minded kind of life, the karma would come full force

and you would lose your leg. However, if you are a kindly person who regularly

helps others, the karma would be mitigated and you might read in the morning

paper about someone losing a leg and take on the emotion of that experience as

if it had happened to you. Later on when hiking you stumble and your leg is

injured, but not severely. The full force of the karma was softened by your kind

and helpful actions.

Following Dharma: Living virtuously, in itself, helps modulate the release of

karmic seeds, evening out the ebb and flow of karma and minimizing " karmic

explosions " that might otherwise occur. Thus negative karmas in one's individual

pattern are naturally avoided or mollified and positive karmas accentuated and

brought into fruition.

Karma Yoga: Helping others—karma yoga, performing good deeds—and thus

acquiring merit which registers as a new and positive karma is one way of

alleviating the heaviness of some of our past karma.

Bhakti Yoga: Worship, bhakti yoga, that is intense enough to cause us to

receive the grace of the Gods can change the patterns of karma dating back many

past lives, clearing and clarifying conditions that were created hundreds of

years ago and are but seeds now, waiting to manifest in the future. The key

concept here is intensity. Dropping by the temple for fifteen minutes on the way

home from work is unlikely to accomplish such a transformation.

Pilgrimage: Pilgrimage is an excellent way to generate an intensity of

worship. Over the years, visiting major temples such as Mt.Kailash,

Amarnath,12Jyotir Lingam, 108 Divya Desam, 6 abodes of Lord Muruga 64 Sakthi

Sthal apart from Sai baba, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Mata Amritanada Mayi Mut,ISKON.

Many have come back transformed. They physically look a little different, behave

differently and fit back into life in a more positive way than before. Their

karma was changed by the grace of the Gods.

Vows: A vrata, or vow, can also generate an intensity of worship, such as

fasting during the day and attending the temple on each of the six days of

Skanda Shashthi or the 21 days of Vinayaga Viratam.

Penance: Penance, prayashchitta, is a forth way to mitigate karma. This is

like punishing yourself now and getting it over with instead of waiting for your

karma to manifest a punishment in the future. A typical form of penance is to

perform walking prostrations, such as around a sacred lake or mountain, up a

sacred path or around a temple.

Often it is advised to perform penance that is directly related to a misdeed.

Let's take the example of a teacher who frequently used corporal punishment to

discipline students but now strongly feels hitting children for any reason, even

for discipline, is wrong. An appropriate penance would be to print and

distribute to teachers literature on alternatives to corporal punishment. This

type of penance should only be undertaken after a certain degree of remorse is

shown and the urgency is felt by the devotee to rid his mind of the plaguing

matter.

Gurudeva said, " When pre-dawn morning pujas, scriptural reading, devotionals

to the guru and meditation are performed without fail, the deeper side of

ourselves is cultivated, and that in itself softens our karmas and prolongs

life. "

Tirukural: " Be unremitting in the doing of good deeds; do them with all your

might and by every possible means. "

Eighth Principle: Accelerate Karma

Why wait twenty more births to achieve spiritual maturity when you could

achieve it in two births? That is the idea behind accelerating karma. When we

begin meditating and performing regular daily sadhana, preferably at the same

time each day, our individual karma is intensified. In our first four or five

years of striving on the path we face the karmic patterns that we would never

have faced in this life had we not consciously intensified our spiritual

practices. Those on the spiritual path resolve much more karma in a lifetime

than others. They could be called professional karma managers.

Of course, family duties in the grihastha ashrama don't allow much time for

sadhana. Thus, the principle of karma acceleration is best fulfilled in the

stage called sannyasa, both by those following the path of the monk and by

everyone after age seventy-two. Retirement can be more than playing golf. It is

an opportunity to intensify our spiritual practices and thus accelerate our

karma.

Gurudeva said, " By this conscious process of purification, of inner striving,

of refining and maturing, the karmas come more swiftly, evolution speeds up and

things can and usually do get more intense. Don't worry though. That is natural

and necessary. That intensity is the way the mind experiences the added cosmic

energies that begin to flow through the nervous system. "

Tirukural: " Not allowing a day to pass without doing some good is a boulder

that will block your passage on the path to rebirth. "

Ninth Principle: Resolve Dream Karma

Though some of our dreams are only the result of thoughts occurring in our own

mind, other dreams are astral experiences, of being conscious in our astral body

and interacting with others in their astral body. These astral plane actions

create karma, just as do our physical plane actions. This is the basis of the

Hindu ideal that one would not steal or injure even in a dream. Why? Because

such transgressions create negative karma that will come back to you. These are

real karmas that may eventually manifest on the physical plane. However, this

can be avoided if you happen to have further dream experiences in which

appropriate actions are taken to dissolve the karma. More commonly, though, we

can resolve dream or astral-plane karmas in the same way we would physical-world

experiences, by performing penance for them in our waking state, while

remembering the high standards of virtue and good conduct that should always be

maintained, even during sleep. For instance, if in an

emotional dream you injured someone intentionally, you could perform a simple

penance the next day to atone, such as fasting one meal.

Gurudeva said, " These kinds of dreams—when a person is in his astral body

and can feel what he touches, emote to his experiences, think and talk—are not

what is known as the dream state. This is an astral experience, similar to the

death experience, but the astral body is still connected to the physical body. "

Tirukural: " The highest principle is this: never knowingly harm anyone at any

time in any way. "

Tenth Principle: Incinerate Karma

In the practice of yoga, we can burn up negative seed karmas without ever

having to live through them. What we have to do is find the seed and dissolve it

in intense inner light. Let's take the analogy of growing alfalfa spouts. You

place the seeds in a jar and keep them moist until they sprout. But if you heat

the seeds in a frying pan before putting them into the jar, they will no longer

sprout. Similarly, karmas exposed to intense inner light are destroyed.

A meditation adept, having pinpointed an unmanifested karmic seed, can either

dissolve it in intense light or inwardly live through the reaction of his past

action. If his meditation is successful, he will be able to throw out the

vibrating experiences or desires which are consuming the mind. In doing this, in

traveling past the world of desire, he breaks the wheel of karma which binds him

to the specific reaction which must follow every action. That experience will

never have to happen on the physical plane, for its vibrating power has already

been absorbed in his nerve system. This incineration of karmic seeds can also

happen during sleep.

Gurudeva explains it in this way, " It is the held-back force of sanchita karma

that the yogi seeks to burn out with his kundalini flame, to disempower it

within the karmic reservoir of anandamaya kosa, the soul body. "

Tirukural: " As the intense fire of the furnace refines gold to brilliance, so

does the burning suffering of austerity purify the soul to resplendence. "

 

 

 

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