The twin beliefs of karma and reincarnation are among Hinduism\'s many
jewels of knowledge. Others include dharma or our pattern of religious conduct,
worshipful communion with God and Gods, the necessary guidance of the Sat Guru,
and finally enlightenment through personal realization of our identity in and
with God. So the strong-shouldered and keen-minded rishis knew and stated in the
Vedas.
And these are not mere assumptions of probing, brilliant minds.
They are laws of the cosmos. As God\'s force of gravity shapes cosmic order,
karma shapes experiential order. Our long sequence of lives is a tapestry of
creating and resolving karmas-positive, negative and an amalgam of the two.
During the succession of a soul\'s lives-through the mysteries of our higher
chakras and God\'s and Guru\'s Grace-no karmic situation will arise that exceeds
an individual\'s ability to resolve it in love and understanding.
Many
people are very curious about their past lives and expend great time, effort and
money to explore them. Actually, this curious probing into past lives is
unnecessary. Indeed it is a natural protection from reliving past trauma or
becoming infatuated more with our past lives that our present life that the
inner recesses of the muladhara memory chakra are not easily accessed. For, as
we exist now is a sum total of all our past lives. In our present moment, our
mind and body state is the cumulative result of the entire spectrum of our past
lives. So, no matter how great the intellectual knowing of these two key
principles, it is how we currently live that positively shapes karma and unfolds
us spiritually. Knowing the laws, we are responsible to resolve blossoming
karmas from past lives and create karma that, projected into the future, will
advance, not hinder, us.
Karma literally means \"deed or act,\" but more
broadly describes the principle of cause and effect. Simply stated, karma is the
law of action and reaction which governs consciousness. In physics-the study of
energy and matter-Sir Isaac Newton postulated that for every action there is an
equal and opposite reaction. Push against a wall. Its material is molecularly
pushing back with a force exactly equal to yours. In metaphysics, karma is the
law that states that every mental, emotional and physical act, no matter how
insignificant, is projected out into the psychic mind substance and eventually
returns to the individual with equal impact.
The akashic memory in our
higher chakras faithfully records the soul\'s impressions during its series of
earthly lives, and in the astral/mental worlds in-between earth existences.
Ancient yogis, in psychically studying the time line of cause/effect, assigned
three categories to karma. The first is sanchita, the sum total of past karma
yet to be resolved. The second category is prarabdha, that portion of sanchita
karma being experienced in the present life. Kriyamana, the third type, is karma
you are presently creating. However, it must be understood that your past
negative karma can be altered into a smoother, easier state through the loving,
heart-chakra nature, through dharma and sadhana. That is the key of karmic
wisdom. Live religiously well and you will create positive karma for the future
and soften negative karma of the past. Truths and Myths About Karma
Karma operates not only individually, but also in ever-enlarging circles
of group karma where we participate in the sum karma of multiple souls. This
includes family, community, nation, race and religion, even planetary group
karma. So if we, individually or collectively, unconditionally love and give, we
will be loved and given to. The individuals or groups who act soulfully or
maliciously toward us are the vehicle of our own karmic creation. The people who
manifest your karma are also living through past karma and simultaneously
creating future karma. For example, if their karmic pattern did not include
miserliness, they would not be involved in your karma of selfishness. Another
person may express some generosity toward you, fulfilling the gifting karma of
your past experience. Imagine how intricately interconnected all the cycles of
karma are for our planet\'s life forms.
Many people believe in the
principle of karma, but don\'t apply its laws to their daily life or even to
life\'s peak experiences. There is a tendency to cry during times of personal
crisis, \"Why has God done this to me?\" or \"What did I do to deserve this?\"
While God is the creator and sustainer of the cosmic law of karma, He does not
dispense individual karma. He does not produce cancer in one person\'s body and
develop Olympic athletic prowess in another\'s. We create our own experiences.
It is really an exercising of our soul\'s powers of creation. Karma, then, is
our best spiritual teacher. We spiritually learn and grow as our actions return
to us to be resolved and dissolved. In this highest sense, there is no good and
bad karma; there is self-created experience that presents opportunities for
spiritual advancement. If we can\'t draw lessons from the karma, then we resist
and/or resent it, lashing out with mental, emotional or physical force. The
original substance of that karmic event is spent and no longer exists, but the
current reaction creates a new condition of harsh karma.
Responsibility
resolving karma is among the most important reasons that a Sat Guru is necessary
in a sincere seeker\'s life. The Guru helps the devotee to hold his mind in
focus, to become pointedly conscious of thought, word and deed. Without the
guidance and grace of the Guru, the devotee\'s mind will be splintered between
instinctive and intellectual forces, making it very difficult to resolve karma.
Only when karma is wisely harnessed can the mind become still enough to
experience its own superconscious depths.
Karma is also misunderstand as
fate, an unchangeable destiny decreed long ago by agencies or forces external to
us such as the planet and stars, or Gods. Karma is neither fate nor
predetermination. Each soul has absolute free will Its only boundary is karma.
God and Gods do not dictate the experiential events of our lives, nor do they
test us. And there is no cosmic force that molds our life. Indeed, when
beseeched through deep prayer and worship, the Supreme Being and His great Gods
may intercede within our karma, lightening its impact or shifting its location
in time to a period when we are better prepared to resolve it. Hindu astrology,
or Jyotisha, details a real relation between ourselves and the geography of the
solar system and certain star clusters, but it is not a cause-effect relation.
Planets and stars don\'t cause or dictate karma. Their orbital relationships
establish proper conditions for karmas to activate and a particular type of
personality nature to develop. Jyotisha describes a relation of revealment: it
reveals prarabdha karmic patterns for a given birth and how we will generally
react to them (kriyamana karma). This is like a pattern of different colored
windows allowing sunlight in to reveal and color a house\'s arrangement of
furniture. With astrological knowledge we are aware of our life\'s karmic
pattern and can thereby anticipate it wisely. Reincarnation: A Soul\'s Path to
Godness
The soul dwells as the inmost body of light and superconscious,
universal mind of a series of nested bodies, each more refined than the next:
physical, pranic, astral, mental. In our conscious mind we think and feel
ourselves to be a physical body with some intangible spirit within it. Yet,
right now our real identity is the soul that is sensing through its multiple
bodies physical, emotional and mental experience. Recognizing this as reality,
we powerfully know that life doesn\'t end with the death of the biological body.
The soul continues to occupy the astral body, a subtle, luminous duplicate of
the physical body. This subtle body is made of higher-energy astral matter and
dwells in a dimension called the astral plane. If the soul body itself is highly
evolved, it will occupy the astral/mental bodies on a very refined plane of the
astral known as the Devaloka, \"the world of light-shining beings.\" At death,
the soul slowly becomes totally aware in its astral/mental bodies and it
predominantly lives through those bodies in the astral dimension.
The
soul functions with complete continuity in its astral/mental bodies. It is with
these sensitive vehicles that we experience dream or \"astral\" worlds during
sleep every night. The astral world is equally as solid and beautiful, as varied
and comprehensive as the earth dimension-if not much more so. Spiritual growth,
psychic development, guidance in matters of governance and commerce, artistic
cultivation, inventions and discoveries of medicine, science and technology all
continue by astral people who are \"in-between\" earthly lives. Many of the Veda
hymns entreat the assistance of devas: advanced astral or mental people. Yet,
also in the grey, lower regions of this vast, invisible dimension exist astral
people whose present pursuits are base, selfish, even sadistic. Where the person
goes in the astral plane at sleep or death is dependent upon his earthly
pursuits and the quality of his mind.
Because certain seed karmas can
only be resolved in earth consciousness and because the soul\'s initial
realizations of Absolute Reality are only achieved in a physical body, our soul
joyously enters another biological body. At the right time, it is reborn into a
flesh body that will best fulfill its karmic pattern. In this process, the
current astral body-which is a duplicate of the last physical form-is sluffed
off as a lifeless shell that in due course disintegrates, and a new astral body
develops as the new physical body grows. This entering into another body is
called reincarnation: \"re-occupying the flesh.\"
During our thousands
of earth lives, a remarkable variety of life patterns are experienced. We exist
as male and female, often switching back and forth from life to life as the
nature becomes more harmonized into a person exhibiting both feminine nurturing
and masculine intrepidness. We come to earth as princesses and presidents, as
paupers and pirates, as tribals and scientists, as murderers and healers, as
atheists and, ultimately, God-Realized sages. We take bodies of every race and
live the many religions, faiths and philosophies as the soul gains more
knowledge and evolutionary experience.
Therefore, the Hindu knows that
the belief in a single life on earth, followed by eternal joy or pain is utterly
wrong and causes great anxiety, confusion and fear. Hindus know that all souls
reincarnate, take one body and then another, evolving through experience over
long periods of time. Like the caterpillar\'s metamorphosis into the butterfly,
death doesn\'t end our existence but frees us to pursue an even greater
development.
Understanding the laws of the death process, the Hindu is
vigilant of his thoughts and mental loyalties. He knows that the contents of his
mind at the point of death in large part dictate where he will function in the
astral plane and the quality of his next birth. Secret questionings and doubt of
Hindu belief, and associations with other belief systems will automatically
place him among like-minded people whose beliefs are alien to Hinduism. A
nominal Hindu on earth could be a selfish materialist in the astral world. The
Hindu also knows that death must come naturally, in its own course, and that
suicide only accelerates the intensity of one\'s karma, bringing a series of
immediate lesser births and requiring several lives for the soul to return to
the exact evolutionary point that existed at the moment of suicide, at which
time the still-existing karmic entanglements must again be faced and resolved.
Two other karmically sensitive processes are: 1.) artificially
sustaining life in a wholly incapacitated physical body through mechanical
devices, drugs or intravenous feeding; and 2.) euthanasia, \"mercy killing.\"
There is a critical timing in the death transition. The dying process can
involve long suffering or be peaceful or painfully sudden: all dependent on the
karma involved. To keep a person on life support with the sole intent of
continuing the body\'s biological functions nullifies the natural timing of
death. It also keeps the person\'s astral body earthbound, tethered to a lower
astral region rather than being released into higher astral levels.
An
important lesson to learn here is that karma is conditioned by intent. When the
medical staff receives a dangerously ill or injured person and they place him on
life support as part of an immediate life-saving procedure, their intent is pure
healing. If their attempts are unsuccessful, then the life-support devices are
turned off, the person dies naturally and there is no karma involved and it does
not constitute euthanasia. However, if the doctors, family or patient decide to
continue life support indefinitely to prolong biological processes, (usually
motivated by a Western belief of a single life) then the intent carries full
karmic consequences. When a person is put on long-term life support, he must be
left on it until some natural biological or environmental event brings death. If
he is killed through euthanasia, this again further disturbs the timing of the
death. As a result, the timing of future births would be drastically altered.
Euthanasia, the willful destruction of a physical body, is a very
serious karma. This applies to all cases including someone experiencing
long-term, intolerable pain. Even such difficult life experiences must be
allowed to resolve themselves naturally. Dying may be painful, but death itself
is not. All those involved (directly or indirectly) in euthanasia will
proportionately take on the remaining prarabdha karma of the dying person. And
the euthanasia participants will, to the degree contributed, face a similar
karmic situation in this or a future life.
Finally, there is exercising
wisdom-which is knowing and using divine law-in the overall context of any
situation For example, a vegetative person in a coma is on long-term life
support in a hospital when a patient is brought in for emergency treatment
requiring that same life support equipment. Weighing the two karmas, a doctor
could dharmically unplug the comatose patient in order to save the other\'s
life. Moksha: Freedom From Rebirth
Life\'s real attainment is not money,
not material luxury, not sexual or eating pleasure, not intellectual, business
or political power, or any other of the instinctive or intellectual needs. These
are natural pursuits, to be sure, but our divine purpose on this earth is to
personally realize our identity in and with God. This is now called by many
names: enlightenment, Self-Realization, God-Realization and Nirvikalpa Samadhi.
After many lifetimes of wisely controlling the creation of karma and resolving
past karmas when they return, the soul is fully matured in the knowledge of
these divine laws and the highest use of them. Through the practice of yoga, the
Hindu bursts into God\'s superconscious Mind, the experience of bliss,
all-knowingness, perfect silence. His intellect is transmuted, and he soars into
the Absolute Reality of God. He is a jnani, a knower of the Known. When the
jnani is stable in repeating his realization of the Absolute, there is no longer
a need for physical birth, for all lessons have been learned, all karmas
fulfilled and Godness is his natural mind state. That individual soul is then
naturally liberated, freed from the cycle of birth, death & rebirth on this
planet. After Moksha, our soul continues its evolution in the inner worlds,
eventually to merge back into its origin: God, the Primal Soul.
Every
Hindu expects to seek for and attain moksha. But he or she does not expect that
it will necessarily come in this present life. Hindus know this and do not
delude themselves that this life is the last. Seeking and attaining profound
spiritual relizations, they nevertheless know that there is much to be
accomplished on earth and that only mature, God-Realized souls attain Moksha.
God may seem distant and remote as the experience of our self-created
karmas cloud our mind. Yet, in reality, the Supreme Being is always closer to
you than the beat of your heart. His Mind pervades the totality of your karmic
experience and lifetimes. As karma is God\'s cosmic law of cause and effect,
dharma is God\'s law of Being, including the pattern of Hindu religiousness.
Through following dharma and controlling thought, word and deed, karma is
harnessed and wisely created. You become the master, the knowing creator, not a
helpless victim. Through being consistent in our religiousness, following the
yamas and niyamas (Hindu restraints and observances), performing the pancha
nitya karmas (five constant duties), seeing God everywhere and in everyone, our
past karma will soften. We may experience the karma indirectly through seeing
someone else going through a situation that we intuitively know was a karma we
also were to face. But because of devout religiousness, we may experience it
vicariously or in lesser intensity. For example, a physical karma may manifest
as a mental experience or a realistic dream; an emotional karmic storm may just
barely touch our mind before dying out.
The belief in karma and
reincarnation brings to each Hindu inner peace and self-assurance. The Hindu
knows that the maturing of the soul takes many lives, and that if the soul is
immature in the present birth, then there is hope, for there will be many
opportunities for learning and growing in future lives. Yes, these beliefs and
the attitudes they produce eliminate anxiety, giving the serene perception that
everything is all right as it is. And, there is also a keen insight into the
human condition and appreciation for people in all stages of spiritual
unfoldment.
Mandala on Karma and Rebirth in Dancing With Siva
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