Part One

Chapter One: Karma: The Eternal Enigma

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.

The Karmic Cycle

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.

The Tedium and Tyranny of Karma

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.

Chapter Two: Volition: The Basis of Karma

SUTRA #2

Ultimately, life is neither suffering nor bliss. It is what you make it.

Seeds of Volition

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.

Avoidance Accelerates Karmic Accumulation

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.

Why Do Some People Suffer More Than Others?

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.

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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.

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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.

Chapter Four: The Great Karmic Warehouse

SUTRA #4

However profound it is, everything that comes from memory spells karmic bondage.

Categories of Consequence

Now, within this vast storehouse of accumulated memory, there is an important dimension called Allotted Karma. This, in turn, contains two aspects. Let us call them Actionable Karma in the Present, and Actionable Karma in the Future.

Let us look at what these terms imply.

From the vast storehouse of sanchita, a segment of memory ripens. It surfaces and comes to the fore, demanding immediate attention. This is your Allotted Karma. Every human being has a certain allotment of karma for a lifetime, called prarabdha karma in the Indian tradition: it is the karma that needs to be handled now. The rest continues to remain latent and unripe, in the vast storehouse of accumulated memory.

So your current lifetime is a certain allotment of karma—a distinct amount of memory—playing itself out. The nature of this allotment varies from person to person. For each person, the life energy works differently. Each person has a different percentage of energy dedicated to physical activity; a different percentage to intellectual activity; a different percentage to emotional activity; a different percentage to energy activity; and a different percentage to the capacity for meditativeness, or inner stillness.

The nature of a person’s allotment is actually visible at an early age. Parents can see it clearly in two children. One may have a certain propensity for physical activity, while the other may be quieter. These differences are sometimes even subtly visible in newborn infants in a hospital maternity ward! Later, of course, differences grow because of the type of environment the child grows up in—the food they eat, the type of attitudes they develop. But very early differences are determined by the nature of each child’s Allotted Karma.

Now, every spiritual process is essentially about digging into the storehouse of Accumulated Karma. Spiritual practitioners are people in a hurry. They want to dig up as much as possible and work it out, rather than wait for each allotment to ripen in its own time. This is why so much of the spiritual process is action oriented. Spiritual seekers want to handle ten lifetimes of karma in a single lifetime if they can. The spiritual journey also teaches them to avoid accumulating new karma and to limit the consequences of their Allotted Karma. In this manner, they work through large karmic volumes at great speed.

How does one feel when one has emptied out one’s Allotted Karma? Usually, life grows more relaxed, less reactive, less compulsive. Strong likes and dislikes, whether about people, places, food, work, or politics, begin to weaken; comfort zones become less important. Initially, you may find you want to slow down and live quietly. After that, you will choose to engage with the world again, but this time it will be in a wonderfully conscious way. Your life is now full of choices.

We now come to another aspect of Allotted Karma. This is Actionable Karma in the Present (kriyamana karma), or karma that compels outward action. We cannot resist its power. There are many impulses and propensities in a human being, but not all of them propel us to external action. However, every individual carries another type of karma that must be acted upon externally. The rest can be handled internally. How you handle your externally Actionable Karma in the Present is significant because it creates consequences for the future.

When some trigger compels action, how consciously you perform that action becomes important. If you do it unconsciously, that unconsciousness will generate an enormous amount of karma. And that is how karma perpetuates itself.

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But if you become meditative, you go a step further. Every spiritual tradition has encouraged people to meditate for this reason. When you become meditative, you do not merely create positive karma, you stop breeding karma altogether. In all spiritual traditions, to become an ascetic means just this: you stop breeding karmic consequences.

Let me offer a personal example. As a guru, when I am conducting a spiritual program, I am in a particular mode. If I embrace everyone before me with tears of joy and inclusiveness, it will not breed any karmic consequences. But if I do the same thing only with one person whom I know well, that same embrace will create consequences. This is because the inclusive embrace has no karmic substance to it. It is absolutely conscious action.

This is why, at a program, I never focus on the faces I know well. If I choose to meet another’s gaze, I always pick a totally unknown face to address. As soon as you focus on someone you know and talk to them, it can turn into an entangling process. It would breed consequences for them, for me, and for the entire situation.

However, if I am developing a project, I do, of course, talk to intimate groups of people. I know this will not breed any entangling consequences for them, because what we are evolving is not about them or me, but about a larger vision. This is not entanglement, because it is an all-inclusive involvement. There is nothing selective about it.

Look at it this way. If your actions are coming from memory, they will most certainly breed karma. We always say, therefore, that all human actions can be only of two kinds: those that destroy karma (karma-nashana) and those that breed karma (karma-vriddhi). As a guru, my business is to impart the technologies that promote the former.

So how you handle your Actionable Karma in the Present is very important. If you are not conscious about it, you may think you are being spiritual, but you may simply be spiraling into entanglement.

In modern-day terminology, you could see the unconscious mind as Accumulated Karma (sanchita); the subconscious mind as Allotted Karma (prarabdha); and your conscious mind as Actionable Karma in the Present (kriyamana). This is not entirely accurate, but in its most broad terms it is a useful way to understand the differences.

We now come to the other aspect of Allotted Karma. This is Actionable Karma in the Future (agami karma). Your unconscious action today (in terms of thought, emotion, or action) will lead to consequences that compel your actions tomorrow or a year later—or, some would say, even a lifetime later. In other words, no matter what you do, life will drive you into a place where you have to act.

If you borrow from a bank, for instance, or have a mortgage, your karma of tomorrow is determined by today’s action. Similarly, if you have a child, you are committing yourself to at least a twenty-year project. You have to think about providing for the child, sending them to school, putting them through college, ensuring that they stand on their own feet. What you do or do not do tomorrow is not decided by a whim. A simple action breeds enormous consequences.

It is Actionable Karma in the Future that perpetuates the human cycles of compulsive action, leading to what the Indian spiritual tradition sees as cycles of birth and death. It propels human beings to return to the embodied state, time and again, in order to work out their karmic inheritance.

If you find the idea of future lifetimes problematic, do not be distracted by it at this stage. Nor is it essential to an understanding of karma. For the true yogi, there is just one life. Yesterday you may have been dressed in one way, and today you may be dressed in another! Life, however, stays unchanged.

If you handle your Actionable Karma in the Present consciously, you will not breed any compulsive Actionable Karma in the Future. That is the key to handling memory. Let me stress that there is nothing wrong with a bank loan, a mortgage, or a family. Indeed, the more complex your karmic memory is, the more varied and interesting your life becomes. But the aim is to enjoy the process of life, not be trapped by it. Hence the importance of eliminating all manner of unconscious karma. You do not want to accumulate any karma that will compel you to act compulsively in the future.

To continue with the earlier analogy, when conducting a program, I embrace everyone inclusively and choicelessly. I do not choose to favor one over the other. If I were selective, the spiritual transmission would not be as effective. It is the choicelessness of my action that makes it impactful.

The karmic trap is always in the choosing. Choice is the great human gift; freedom is the great human possibility. However, instead of choosing inclusively, most human beings choose selectively. Most choose on the basis of compulsive likes and dislikes, on the basis of attraction and aversion. But when your involvement is absolute—that is, inclusive—you are not operating out of past memory. This means there is no compulsion, no consequence, no entanglement, no choice, no friend, no foe. When you perform Actionable Karma in the Present like this, you breed no Actionable Karma in the Future whatsoever.

On the other hand, if you choose to involve yourself selectively, based on past memory, the consequence lives with you. You are breeding more memory, whether physical, emotional, or intellectual. You are creating karma that will compel you into situations where you have to act in the future.

Once you understand how the karmic mechanism works, you know a basic difference: between involvement and entanglement. Most people do not understand the fact that it is possible to be absolutely involved without getting entangled.

For instance, whether I meet a stranger or a friend, my interiority remains the same. My involvement is total. I may communicate and act differently, but internally I remain the same. My way of being remains unchanged, although what I do or say is relevant to the situation and the person. This breeds no karma.

When involvement is selective, you fall into the trap of entanglement. Here is the central problem: Selective involvement leads to suffering and karma; detachment leads to lifelessness.

But involvement need not come from a place of memory. It can be conscious. For most people, involvement springs from memory and is compulsive. Once memory enters, action is enslaving. Without memory, however, you can operate consciously. When your action is unsullied by past impressions, it is liberating.

From Being to Doing to Having

The human equation was always meant to be like this: to move from being to doing to having.This means we were never meant to act in order to find fulfillment. Fulfillment was seen as an inner condition. It could not be pursued externally. We act in order to express our fulfillment, not to acquire it. We act in order to celebrate our inner completeness, not to pursue it.

For most people, however, this simple equation is reversed.

Most people do in order to be. They act because they feel incomplete. Their action is prompted by a desire to acquire something or to enhance their identity in some way. This is the ancient hunter-gatherer impulse, which still endures in human beings. It is the need to act in order to accumulate—whether it is physical, emotional, or intellectual satisfaction. It is action impelled by a desire to augment themselves, to become more than what they are. They act in order to have; they have in order to be.

This is tragic.

Most people have already determined what they want to have. Therefore, their doing is invariably to acquire something. Someone wants to earn fame so they might get into the movies or write a book, for instance. Their identity is now film star or author. They identify with this label. It now determines their being. Similarly, someone else wants to acquire the status of sportsman or politician or businessman. People even go around calling themselves golfers. I play golf and write books and ride motorcycles, but I am not a golfer, an author, or a biker!

I am not doing in order to acquire an identity. The way I am is untouched by what I do. I am not a yogi because I teach yoga. It is not my activity that makes me a yogi. It is my being that makes me a yogi. “Yogi” is a description of my inner condition, not my activity.

When you live like this, who you are always communicates itself in its own subtle way to people. The fragrance of who you are always gets conveyed. People sense that I am operating from this place of inner freedom even if they don’t understand how it works. Very young people come up to me and treat me like their contemporary, or even their close friend. They call me Sadhguru, but it is not a term of distant reverence; it is one of familiarity, of affection.

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However profound it is, all that comes from memory spells karmic bondage. I do not come from a place of karma, so I do not breed karma. It is as simple as that. What I say comes from inner experience, from a state of knowing, not from previously acquired knowledge. This is chitta, content-less intelligence.

The one thing that human beings simultaneously suffer and cherish is memory. You try to acquire and freeze memory in order to acquire an identity; you are trying, therefore, to do in order to be. But neither your identity nor your memory is essentially about you.

Think about it.

When you are sitting in a café, drinking your cappuccino, you can enjoy only your four dollars’ worth of coffee. Whether you have ten billion dollars in the bank is irrelevant. The money exists only in your memory. To carry money around in your memory means you are a creature of the past. If you base your future on your past, you are as good as dead!

And this is why faces around us are becoming so grave. The grave is, after all, the abode of the past! And that is karma, too: a habitat of the past. Your Actionable Karma in the Future ensures that your future is exactly like your past. When nothing new happens to you, it is time to Rest in Peace!

Chapter Five: How Did It All Begin?

SUTRA #5

Pure intelligence creates memory out of itself; the rest of creation projects memory as intelligence.

Authentic Intelligence Versus Artificial Intelligence

The human being is an organic machine, but a machine nonetheless. If we are to distinguish ourselves from other machines in any meaningful way, and not merely replicate their functions, we need to empower our capacity to perceive. For this, we need to reclaim our access to that unfettered unprejudiced intelligence—which in Sanskrit is called chitta—that is the basis of our lives.

What is chitta? It is the deepest level of the mind. It is awareness, aliveness, a profound intelligence that lies beyond intellect, beyond memory, beyond judgment, beyond karma, beyond all divisions. It is the intelligence of existence itself, the living mind of the cosmos. In the yogic tradition, it is said that once you distance yourself from the compulsions of your karmic software, as well as the identifications of your intellect, you are in touch with this unclouded consciousness. And only when we access chitta is self-transformation possible.

This is why, as a guru, I never bless people with the wish that their dreams should come true. Since dreams are simply based on memory, you can dream only of a more magnified and more improved version of what you already know! If your dreams come true, there is nothing terribly special about that. My wish is that your dreams should be shattered. Only then will something larger than memory manifest in your life.

May something you could never dream of happen to you.

Part Two

Chapter Six: Karma Yoga

SUTRA #6

In losing awareness of self is the trap of karma. The hunter becomes the hunted, the architect becomes the bonded laborer, the creator becomes creation. A spider trapped in a web of its own making is a tragedy.

Karma Yoga

All three men were doing the same work. For the first man, his work was simply cutting stone. For the second, his work was simply a means to eke out a livelihood. For the third, his work was an opportunity to create something beautiful that he cared for deeply. The how is the pivotal issue.

Every single act in your life can be like this. It is not the content of your life that matters. It is the context of your life that does. So becoming a karma yogi does not mean you have to give up whatever you are doing right now. It means you do it with wholehearted involvement and, in the process, help create a more joyful world wherever you go.

The problem with today’s world is that we have created rigid ideas of right and wrong. When our minds are so full of hierarchy, it is impossible to be wholeheartedly involved in any action.

When my daughter was twelve years of age, she came to me, a little troubled. I gave her just one guidance: “Never look up to anyone; never look down on anyone.” If people practiced this simple sadhana, they would see everything just the way it is. If you look up to someone, you will exaggerate their positive qualities; if you look down on someone, you will exaggerate their negative qualities. But if you simply look—not for something, but just look—you will see things just as they are. Now your ability to navigate your way through life is greatly enhanced.

Approaches to Karma Yoga: Awareness and Abandon

Awareness is a far deeper dimension. It is not something you do. It is not an action. It is a state of being. It is the way you are. Awareness is inclusiveness, a way of embracing this entire existence. You can set the right conditions for it to happen, but you cannot do it. If you bring the physical, mental, and energy bodies into alignment, there will be room for awareness to blossom. Once that blossoming becomes experiential for you, you explode into the oneness of existence. This is yoga, the ultimate union.

What about abandon? What does it mean?

It means that your involvement has become so intense that you are willing to abandon yourself. Most people think the word refers to abandoning someone or something! But this is about abandoning yourself. You are willing to just give up everything that you consider to be yourself.

Now, abandon can certainly happen by simply sitting still, but it is not easy. It takes great awareness to do this in a state of inaction. On the other hand, in intense states of activity—when you are running, dancing, or playing a game—you can give yourself up with total abandon. In such moments, there is a disconnect between your past and you. When you are completely lost or immersed in any activity, the influence of your past karma is no longer upon you. Many sportspersons and artists know this state of immersion, but the frustration is that they are unable to sustain it. Immersive activity can give you a taste of freedom, but it cannot last. Yoga is the science of sustaining that experience.

Renouncing the Fruit of One’s Actions

The basis of karma yoga is to be involved in the process, not the product. Whether you approach your karma through awareness or abandon, the point is to immerse oneself in the journey and not be anxious about the destination.

Start by looking at a practical example. Let us say someone is an accountant. The fact that they go to an office and count numbers does not in itself entangle them. But other reasons might impel them to work: the prestige of working in a particular firm, the financial benefits, the lifestyle it affords them, the social access it allows them. So gradually they might find they are no longer going to work because they love to count numbers, but because of the fruit of their actions. Of course, everyone deserves to be paid, to eat well, and to live well. But the question is this: If all those benefits were not there, would we still work with the same intensity and involvement?

You do not need to be a scriptural scholar to understand this. Just observe yourself. You will see that whenever you perform an action without expectation, your experience of life will be qualitatively different from the times when you perform it with expectation. A good example is to consider the times when you have played a game that you enjoyed. You plunged yourself into the game with passion and involvement, and of course you played to win, but you were not devastated if you lost. It is because you enjoyed the process that you were willing to play again. If you are very happy playing the game, the result does not really matter. If you are able to carry this awareness into every aspect of your life, your experience of life will be drastically altered. Above all, a game is won only when you play it well, not because you desire to win.

Since it is not easy for everyone to cultivate enough awareness to drop the fruit of their action, every culture in the world has emphasized the importance of love. When you have a deep sense of love toward somebody, it becomes much easier to drop the consequence of your action.

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Karma yoga reminds us that action is never a problem. It is the expectation of the fruit of the action that causes suffering. If you simply enjoy what you do and work at it wholeheartedly, there is no question of suffering at all. You would work joyfully, and your ability to work would be hugely enhanced.

Only a human being who is utterly blissful would be able to recommend renouncing the fruit of one’s actions. When you are trying to attain happiness by hoping for a certain result from your activity, outside situations will determine whether you are joyful or miserable. This is why I am not impressed by those who endlessly quote the words of Krishna or Jesus or parrot Rama or the Buddha. Repeating a scriptural truth without an inner experience of it is a futile exercise. It will not transform your life in any way.

But a simple reversal of approach to your life can make all the difference. If you saw your life as an expression of your happiness, rather than as a pursuit of it, you would find you have made a significant paradigm shift. You would effortlessly immerse yourself in whatever you are doing, without any expectation, for the pure joy of the activity.

To Rule or to Serve?

This kind of action is possible for everyone. But before you arrive at this state, some fired-up action is required. People who have never been on fire will never know the coolness of water. People who have just lived their lives in a lukewarm, half-hearted, sedate manner can never reach a point of transformation. Those who have never known intense action will never be able to move into inaction. Their inaction will simply be lethargy, apathy.

Only the person who is capable of being immersed in work knows the true meaning of rest. This is why at the Isha Centers, as I have said before, you will find many residents engaged in unstinting nonstop work. They are not working at something they enjoy or dislike; they are not working to achieve something; it is simply single-minded, choiceless activity. They are doing it because it is needed, that’s all.

You will see after rigorous, immersive work that there is suddenly no intention left in you to do anything. Now the real spiritual process unfolds. Only if you have known intense action will you know the bliss of inaction. Once your energies get to a boiling point, it is very easy to transform them and make your life happen in the most harmonious way possible. That is the whole purpose of karma yoga.

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Now, wherever you put such a man—heaven or hell—his action will remain the same. When you are like this, you are released from the vagaries of the external situation, from the cycles of karma. Merely closing your eyes won’t achieve this. Merely running away and sitting in the mountains won’t achieve this. The moment you open your eyes, the moment you return to the marketplace, reality will come and catch up with you. Karma has to be worked out, but engaging with action with great involvement and intensity, without caring a hoot for it, is the most effective way to work your karma out.

Chapter Seven: Karma Yoga and the Physical Body

SUTRA #7

If you take more karmic load now, when you are well and capable, later you will walk “hands-free”!

“Embodying” Karma

Start with a simple example. You can usually tell if a person is happy or despondent if you look at their face. If you become more observant, you will find that when disturbed, people actually sit or stand differently. Over time, these postures turn habitual and harden into vasanas, or tendencies.

Now, the mind does different things on different days. One day it is joyful; the next day, it is depressed; the third day, it is stressed. In the process, it is not merely distorting your vision of reality; it is distorting your body as well.

Think of all the unexpected things that happen on a daily basis that are not in your control. If every little psychological event were to reshape you, you can imagine what a complete distortion you would have become in a few years! The distortion will happen dramatically on an energy level, but it will take time to manifest physiologically.

Karma Yoga and Asanas

After that, life becomes much simpler. In any case, the life process itself burns up karma. Simply living and breathing destroys large volumes of it. So after this initial period of fired-up activity, things become easier, as long as people learn not to pick up a new load. In short, at the start, you pick up the heaviest load, but like the food bundle, you know it will go away! On the way, of course, you just make sure you don’t go picking up garbage. The aim is to burn up your allotment, and then enjoy the delights of traveling light.

Common Karmic Frictions

SADHANA
As we have seen earlier, karma builds itself on three fundamental levels: mental fluctuations, chemical reactions, and sensations. The sensory body is the outermost manifestation of the unconscious mind. The unconscious mind is ruled by an enormous library of karmic memory. This karmic memory keeps manifesting all the time without your permission. Since it is an unconscious manifestation, it makes you look like one big mess. But once you make it conscious, it could be very useful information.

Of the 114 chakras (energy centers) in the human system, the karmic substance concentrates itself around some specific ones. These are related to certain joints and nodes in the body. Chemical deposits build up here over time.

You may have tried mentally to alter certain simple habits, but you find that within a couple of days, you fall back into them. It is not easy to come out of karmic limitations without simultaneously addressing them on the chemical and physiological levels.

Karma and the Elements

Bhuta shuddhi is actually the most fundamental level at which we can cleanse karma. People can decide to cleanse the mind one morning by trying to alter their attitudes, but by the afternoon they lapse back into old grooves of thinking. This is why yoga does not work solely with psychology. It is a known fact that the human mind is notoriously unstable and given to oscillation. Yoga places greater faith in the physical.

However, bhuta shuddhi is a way of addressing the very root of your karma—the patterns and predispositions that determine the person you think you are. If you prune the tree, it will sprout back with a vengeance. But if you dig out the root, it will be gone. So bhuta shuddhi is about radical transformation, not superficial change. It is about voluntarily relinquishing your compulsive hold on everything you have created—good, bad, ugly—so that the very source of creation can shine within you.

SADHANA
The physical world is a product of polarities: masculine and feminine, yin and yang, ida and pingala, Shiva and Shakti, right brain and left brain. The longing to find the union of polarities finds expression through ambition, conquest, love, sex, and yoga.

Spirituality and Fast-Forward Karma

If you become meditative and still carry negativity, your negative karmas become a thousand times more powerful because you have become that much more sensitive and receptive. Suppose you cultivate the soil and enrich it with manure. The crops will grow well, but the same manure will also enable weeds to grow. Similarly, when you cultivate a meditative state and allow negative emotions to flourish, inner suffering increases dramatically. It is important to be extra cautious about weeding when you are in such a state. Otherwise you will be left with a forest of weeds and no crop!

The reason those on the spiritual path have a daily practice is just this: to ensure that karmic stagnation does not happen. You may already have noticed that if you have a daily practice and you stop it for six months, many recurrent issues—physical, psychological, and social—that have not bothered you for a while start returning. This is how the karmic cycle works. You may have believed you were transformed, but you will suddenly find all kinds of compulsive behaviors returning with a vengeance. Only practice, or sadhana, helps break the cyclical movement of life.

Chapter Eight: Karma Yoga and the Mental Body

SUTRA #8

If you experience this moment just once, you will never be able to fall out of it.

Plunging into the Present

In actual fact, all that you call your past exists only as memory. Do you see this? All the life events that have shaped you; all the work you have ever done; all the money in your bank balance; all the vacations you have been on; all the conversations and arguments you have had; all the relationships of love and hatred and indifference; all the friendships and enmities you have nurtured; all the books you have read and movies you have seen; all the scriptures you have read—all this exists only in your memory.

Similarly, all that you call future exists only as imagination. All that you long for and dread—your dream house; your perfect mate; your baby; your promotion; your pay hike; your beach home; the accolades you believe you deserve; all the horrific illnesses you could contract; all the terrible accidents that could befall all those you love; all the gruesome ways in which you could lose your money, your property, your family, your life; all the apocalyptic ways in which this planet could meet its end—all this exists only in your imagination.

And so these are the only two things that you are suffering right now: your memory and your imagination. Nothing more. Both memory and imagination exist only in your mind. They are aspects of your psychological reality; they have nothing to do with the existential reality.

Stop for a moment and ask yourself, When I am not lost in these mental constructs of memory or imagination, where am I?

There can be only one answer to that: the present.

The present is not a creed, a matter of faith. It is a reality. You don’t have to try to be in the moment. The present isn’t an idea. And the fact is, you don’t have to try to be in it. You are in the moment. There is nowhere else to be. Existentially, this is the only truth. It is just that you are not available to it.

Does this mean that you should abandon your memory and imagination?

Certainly not. In any case, we do not wish to destroy karma, because it is the glue that makes our physical and psychological reality possible. However, we do wish to transcend it when we choose. This means seeing one simple fact: your individuality is entirely made up. It is your creation.

Your karma enables you to gather a certain amount of life. What you call “myself” is simply the name you give to the volume of life that you have captured. But if we wipe out all psychological imprints, you as a person will not exist. You will exist as pure life. Existentially, you are life in its essence. In that essential, unmanifest state, you are completely devoid of time and you are completely devoid of karma. You are deathless, indestructible, eternal.

So what is left when the myth of individuality is shattered?

You simply reach the end of cyclical time.

This moment contains an infinite number of possibilities. You can destroy your entire psychological structure and create a new one at this very moment. Or you can stop creating entirely and exist as pure, formless life. This means you have chosen freedom over form, timelessness over temporality, the present moment over cyclical time.

Think about it. Your understanding of time is essentially cyclical. The planet spins once; you call it a day. The moon revolves around the planet; you say it is a month. The planet goes around the sun; you proclaim that it is a year. Everything that is physical is cyclical. In the East, the world of cycles is called samsara. When we talk of transcending karma, we are essentially thinking of how to transcend the cycles of samsara.

Once you break the cycle, there is no “you” and “me” anymore. For individuality exists only in time and space. Once we cross the boundaries of time and space, of memory and imagination, there is no “us” and “them.” There is no “here” and “there.” There is no “yesterday” and “tomorrow.” There is only this moment, and this moment is eternity.

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The mind can create a cosmos of its own, but everything in it is a projection of your own making. You have begun to believe that each projection is a creation in its own right. It is not.

You have a sense of time and space only because you are looking at everything through the prism of your Accumulated Karma. But if you go beyond your thought, your emotion, and your body and experience this moment just once, you will never be able to fall out of it.

The Complexity of Conditioning

What prevents human beings from discovering the profoundly transformative potential of the present moment?

The answer is simple: a vagrant mind.

The human mind is an infinitely complex mechanism. If you seek to liberate yourself from karma, it is important to have some understanding of how this elaborate mechanism functions. This highly intricate machinery is necessary for our physical survival. It can, however, often become a barrier to our longing for freedom.

As we have seen, you may endlessly discuss freedom, but there is no such thing as freedom when the very way you think, feel, and perceive life is conditioned by your past experience. From the day you were born, your parents, your family, your culture, your religion, your education, your social context have worked upon you, determining who you are right now. So your mind is very deeply conditioned by your past.

This conditioning is what we call karma. Your entire volume of past action, performed knowingly or unknowingly, has shaped who you are today. This has such a viselike grip on you that there is no question of free will. The very way you see the world is determined by your karmic lens. Let us look at the mental mechanism that creates your karma.

Chapter Nine: Karma Yoga and the Energy Body

SUTRA #9

It is not about performing miracles. It is about recognizing the miracle of life that you are.

Karma and the Alignment of Bodies

Try as we might, neither love nor the spiritual process can ever be made utilitarian. They are simply part of the beauty of life. The moment you try to harness love or spirituality, you find your arms are empty. The moment you try to concretize them, you end up with a marriage or a religion. You may acquire many other things—a home, a family, a god, a heaven—but you lose the very exuberance of life. When you try to institutionalize an inner experience, all you are left with is an institution!

So once your energies begin to rise, you will find your life suddenly seems more eventful than before, internally and externally. The important thing is not to hesitate, but to keep the practice going full throttle. The yogic kriyas are structured in such a way that they will never cause you any harm.

Samadhi: Reaching the Summit

Essentially, the fact that your energies become very fluid. Now you can take your life from one dimension to another with ease. It is like the earthen pot that I mentioned earlier: it becomes rigid once the clay is burned. Karma is similar. It is so deeply imprinted on the physiological, psychological, and energetic levels that it keeps manifesting itself in a million different ways. It has backup systems everywhere. So if you want to unburn the earthen pot and make it a malleable ball of clay again, you have to do some intense energy work.

During the Dhyanalinga consecration, we had people whose physical contact was so minimal that it was almost like having pure clay again. Now the options are many: you can make ten pots into one big pot, or you can make twenty-five pots out of them! So when energies are so malleable and fluid that they are no longer stuck to one particular form, it allows for several transformational and creative possibilities.

Systems of Energy Healing

Energy healing systems have grown very popular in the world today. My own take on them is unambiguous. While the intention to help others is a laudable one, it is juvenile to think that you can heal someone else because you have learned to harness a little energy in your hands.

What most people do not realize is that when you heal, you are only appeasing the karmic effect. You do not have the capability to take away the cause. If you merely remove the effect, the cause will take effect in some other way.

Let us say someone has asthma. That is their karma. As a healer, you lay your hands on them. You may be successful in removing the asthma. Now the asthma is gone, but the cause is not gone. It may manifest itself in some other way. It could become an accident or a heart attack. So do not ever seek to remove the effect. The effect is only an indicator of a problem; by merely erasing it, you are only enabling the seeds of the problem to manifest in some other way.

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Also, what you might see as mere pain in someone else is also sometimes fuel to help them grow. It is unfortunate that many people lead frivolous and superficial lives until their lives are touched by pain. Do not think you are always helping them by alleviating it. Instead, help them go beyond it.

The ultimate guidance you can offer is to help someone transcend their suffering. This is what the great sages and mystics down the ages have done. They remind the world that there is a way out of suffering. Even if there is pain, there need be no suffering. The ability to see this difference is the supreme human attainment.

It may seem cruel, but it is actually the best thing that you can do for another. Why? Because you are offering them not temporary relief, but a permanent solution.

Part Three

Karma Conversations

SUTRA #10

As far as the laws of existence are concerned, there is no good and bad, no crime and punishment. It is just that for every action, there is a consequence.

SUTRA #11

When there is no imprint of karma in conscious experience, every action and experience becomes liberating.

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Let us not talk about those things that are not in your realm of experience. Otherwise, your entire life could pass in self-deception. These deceptions could make you a popular conversationalist at a dinner party. They may carry you across one evening, but they won’t carry you across life and death!

If I tell you about your past lives, I am merely giving you a story, a belief, not an experience. A belief system will not offer you growth; it offers you only solace or entertainment. If I tell you that God will look after you, it will offer you only solace. Solace is like a tranquilizer; it means you are only getting deeper into entanglement. It will not liberate you.

Right now, you are not able to handle the memory of this very lifetime. You still suffer what happened to you ten years ago! When you are in this condition, if you remember what happened to you ten lifetimes ago, it will drive you nuts! So there is no point speculating about earlier lifetimes. At the same time, don’t dismiss the idea either. You can simply acknowledge that you don’t know.

For now, you could simply see whatever you call “past life” as unconscious layers of memory in the mind. If you meditate and attain heightened levels of awareness, these unconscious layers of the mind that are ruling you from within could be broken down, dissolved.

Gautama the Buddha described his lifetimes in great detail—including all his animal lives, right down to the state of a single-celled organism. His description parallels Darwin’s theory of evolution in many ways. Now, you could see this as a journey into the deepest layers of the unconscious mind. Gautama could access all this within his consciousness, without the help of a microscope, simply because he turned inward. Countless yogis have done this.

On the level of information, it will not help you to know anything about your past lives. But on a deeper energy level, undergoing previous experiences can help. What looking into the past can do is to help you arrive at a deeper understanding of what makes up the person you call “myself.”

There are layers and layers of memory in the unconscious. Karma Samyama, an advanced spiritual program we do at Isha, is a meditation that brings layers of the unconscious mind to the surface to dissolve them. Anything that is karmic dissolves only when the discerning mind is in function. If you just leave it unexamined, it hardens into a tendency. These tendencies are working upon you all the time.

I know today there is a big psychological circus going on in the form of past-life regressions. Much of this is pure hallucination. You need to understand that this mind is an incredible instrument. It can deceive you in many subtle ways. Suppose you realized your neighbor’s dog was your husband in your previous life, how would it help you? Whether you now go and kiss him or throw stones at him doesn’t matter. Both are dangerous! (If you throw stones at him, you will get into trouble with the neighbor. If you kiss him, you will get in trouble with the dog!)

But on a different plane, if you can bring this memory into your experience, then it becomes a way of liberating yourself. In Samyama, no suggestions are given to you; no guidance is given to you. But the process allows layers and layers of the past to surface and work themselves out by moving you to a certain level of intense awareness. You are now free of several impulses and tendencies.

The other advantage of a process like this is that it can break some of your illusions. Right now, you consider your life to be your home, your spouse, your children, your work. But suppose you looked more deeply and saw that you had gone through many lifetimes, many spouses, dozens of children, enacted the same old charades—the same anger, the same jealousy, the same hatred, the same ambitions, the same foolishness—and died frustrated each time. Once you have a clear vision of this, your present illusions can be dismantled very easily. Any amount of teaching cannot accomplish this. Just looking into the past can make you feel absolutely stupid. The more you have seen something, the less fascinating it becomes. If you see that you have enacted the same patterns again and again, they become less compelling.

If you look back on dozens of lives, you will have no urge to go through the same nonsense again and again. Once you know that the mortal way is just a repetition, you will seek another way—the eternal way. No one really wants to keep repeating the same rigmarole time and again. Few are that foolish; most people are just forgetful.

The problem is that when you undergo experiences unconsciously, you do not learn from them. It does not matter how many times it happens: if you keep forgetting, you will repeat the same actions. If it is a conscious experience, however, it will always transform you. In Samyama, you do not work out your karma on the level of memory, but on the level of conscious energy experience.

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Experience is like this. In experiencing consciously, there is no imprint of karma. Every experience and action becomes liberating. Once you have tasted something consciously, there is no need to keep revisiting it. That aspect of karma is finished.

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Now, we cannot generalize on these matters. This does not mean that happy conditions will produce only a happy child. A mango can attract a fly. But the same fly is also attracted to a lump of shit. Karmic attraction can work in different ways. Sometimes a disturbed state of mind may attract a beautiful being because one type of personality might be drawn to its opposite. So don’t start judging the kind of person you are based on your children. A child may be wonderful in spite of you!

But, essentially, tendencies drive a child to a particular womb. And because the child comes to you in such a tender state, you have the capability to influence them to a great extent. You can enhance either their pleasantness or their unpleasantness.

You don’t have total control, of course. Nobody has complete control over another. With children, the less you try to influence them, the more they are influenced by you. The more you try to influence them, the less successful you will be.

Now, it is because of karma that even an unborn child has a certain nascent personality. If you ask women who have had more than two or three children, they will tell you that every child did not behave in the same way in the womb. The basis or the seed of the personality is already present. This is what we refer to as karma. The karmic body is already present in its entirety in the prenatal stage. By the time the child is born, it has as much of a karmic body as you have. It is only that the physical body has not yet filled out.

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SUTRA #12

You cannot own life; you can only live it.

Karma is not some kind of punishment. It is just information. How you carry your information will determine whether it becomes burdensome, restrictive, painful, joyful, or liberating. It all depends on how you carry it. Nowadays, your phone alone doesn’t carry all your memory; an entire cloud follows you around everywhere. If you learn to carry your karma like this, it’s good. If your karma follows you but doesn’t sit on your head, what does it matter? You aren’t burdened, so the bigger the cloud, the better. Having more gigabytes is always better, isn’t it?

Now, how do you not gather karma? As we’ve seen, the simplest thing you can do is to make your involvement absolute, not selective. The air that you breathe, the sound you hear, the ground you sit on—be absolutely involved with all of it. Unbridled involvement is the nature of life itself. The tree standing here is involved with everything—the earth, the water, the breeze, the sky, everything. Life will blossom only if involvement is total. Once you discriminate, karma multiplies big-time.

This is what every human being should aspire to: discrimination only on the level of action, not involvement. Action is necessarily limited. It involves a certain expenditure of energy, time, competence, and other factors. Discretion is necessary only on the level of action; otherwise, you will waste yourself. But involvement is an internal state, and it needs to be all-inclusive.

Ideas based on selectivity—“this is my house,” “this is my work,” “this is my country”—are relevant only on the level of external behavior and action. It is a fact that you cannot physically give birth to all the people on this planet. But, internally, you can be as involved as you would be with your own children. You may not be able to feed or educate every child, but you can still be involved wholeheartedly with all of creation. The moment you try to curtail and concretize this natural movement of life that is constantly trying to evolve and burst forth, you turn into a monument!

Life cannot be owned. The need to own life is responsible for much suffering on this planet. Let’s say you meet someone and say “I love you.” It feels really nice for three days. Then you think you must capture this love. Well, you ended up with a marriage! Nothing wrong with that. But the beauty of an experience cannot be captured; it cannot be institutionalized. This is the fundamental reason karma has become a problem. It is because you’re trying to capture life. You cannot own life; you can only live it.

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SUTRA #13

Right now, you are like a bubble that says “The air that I hold in my lungs is my air.” You still have to exhale!

SUTRA #14

In maintaining distance from your thought and emotion, you can become available to the grace of the greatest beings of the past.

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So don’t think of quantities. Once your consciousness rises beyond this sense of separateness, where are the quantities? There are none. There is only one. And it is not even entirely correct to say there is one. When ten does not exist, one does not exist either. Since language is itself rooted in duality, we cannot escape the quantifying process. But the truth is that there is no “one” and no “two.” This cannot be understood. It can only be experienced.

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SUTRA #15

You have the choice and ability to be any way you want in a given moment. That is the freedom and the curse. Most human beings are suffering their freedom.

SUTRA #16

Every human being is in the process of becoming divine….Collaborating with Nature’s plan is all you need to do.

Every human being is in the process of becoming divine. Every human being is in the process of awakening to their own divinity. Whether this happens today, tomorrow, ten years or ten thousand years later, is always open to question. But once you see that life is moving toward its ultimate nature of its own accord, you also put your energies into it and go faster. That is, you turn consciously spiritual. Collaborating with Nature’s plan is all you need to do.

Existence is not in a hurry. But if you are, you could join hands with existence and reach your goal much more quickly. But if you’re enjoying fooling around here, go right ahead. Existence is eternal, so you have all of eternity before you! There is no hurry. The choice is yours.

Every spiritual process is about transforming the animal nature within you. As you move toward a divine possibility, you must take care of your animal nature with the right kind of awareness and inner work. Merely pretending to be moral won’t do. Many human beings who project themselves as very principled and upright find themselves consumed by their animal impulses—whether lust or greed—later in their lives. They completely lose their grip over themselves in their later years. So dissolving the animal nature is the aim of a daily spiritual process.

Epilogue: Karma and the Courtesan’s Jewelry

SUTRA #17

Those who long to leave a footprint shall never fly.

Where does this single pin lie?

In eliminating a single question from your life: What about me?

If you are able to completely eliminate this question, you have annihilated the enormous sense of self-significance that most human beings live with. Now you can dismantle the elaborate karmic chains in one swift single stroke. You emerge from the debris of your karma a liberated being.

It is because most people cannot eradicate this question that a guru was considered necessary. A guru’s role has always been this: to step in to pull the pin for you when the time is right.

“So, Sadhguru, when are you going to pull my pin?” I can already envisage that question coming at me from several quarters! So let me add a caveat right away. If you ask this question, it means you are not ready yet to have your pin pulled. If you are in a state where you think your karma is a burden that must be eliminated, you are not yet ready for liberation. Only when you learn to transform every memory—conscious/unconscious, pleasant/unpleasant, beautiful/horrendous—into joy and well-being are you ready.

If you ask for the pin to be pulled when you are not ready, it is not liberation; it is escapism. There is a difference between walking out of the body and committing suicide. Suicide means you want to escape a difficult situation. Walking out of something means your term is over and you are stepping out joyfully. If you escape from prison, you will be on the run for the rest of your life. But if you are freed from prison because your term is up, you are a free man. That is the difference. And it is a big one.

In ancient times, people set sail for distant lands that they imagined were at the other end of the earth. It is only later that they realized the earth was round and that they were only going round in circles.

Traveling the globe can be wonderfully exciting. But at a certain point, one tires of going round in circles. The scenery changes, the weather alters, but there is something deep within a human being that dislikes going in circles. This innate dislike is bound to surface at some time.

The aim of this book is to remind you that there is a way out of circles of repetitiveness. There are many ways to walk the path of karma yoga—to become a spiritual practitioner capable of walking out of circles into an eternal and imperishable nowness. Some circles can be instantly erased. Some need some more work. Others need some extra outside help. But it is important to do all that you can. The guru—whether in a physical form or not—finally steps in to do whatever remains to be done.

The reason why human beings keep generating karma is that they want to leave a footprint. They are seeking some continuation of their individual identity. Whether it is in terms of personal achievements, relationships, bearing children, or engaging in social causes, they want desperately to leave a dent on existence, attain immortality, live on for posterity.

But those who long to leave a footprint shall never fly.

The longing to fly is deeply human. The thirst for freedom is not something that the sages invented. It is something far more primal: the longing of life for itself.

But in order to fly you need to be willing to drop all investments. You need to reach the point where you are no longer interested in saving yourself. You no longer want to take incremental steps toward your liberation. You realize that if you take incremental steps to infinity, you become endless installments and never get there. When you see your limited identity for what it really is—a hollow bundle of thoughts, likes, dislikes, and prejudices—you are ready to abandon it.

With abandon, all the shackles fall away. The final pin is unlocked. Once you take wing, webs and chains and labyrinths have no hold upon you. The roughness of the terrain, the bumpiness of the ride, is inconsequential. Suddenly you are no longer navigating your way through the din and the confusion of crazy road traffic. You are a being of the skies. You now plunge into a place that you always inhabited but were too distracted to notice. You fall headlong into this moment—this moment in all its radiance and power, majesty and profundity.

Do not think of karma in terms of lifetimes. Think of it in terms of just this Living Moment.