I am a fan of Sadhguru. “Inner engineering” is excellent, but so are his videos, interviews, etc. The guy talks a lot of sense.
Karma
I am also interested in karma. Particularly after I read “The Diamond Cutter”. A book about karma management. . Every thought is a seed to your future. Everything is potential.
Karma: A Yogi´s Guide to Crafting Your Destiny
Hence “Karma: A Yogi´s Guide to Crafting Your Destiny”. Every language in the world has the word “Karma”. According to Sadhguru, most people misunderstand the concept. Karma is about becoming the source of one’s own creation. Karma has nothing to do with reward and punishment. Karma simply means we have created the blueprint for our lives. It means we are the makers of our own fate. When we say “This is my karma,” we are actually saying “I am responsible for my life.” You are the source of all your baggage. An Eastern perspective on “extreme ownership“.
Action
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. Literally, the word means action. Action on three levels: body, mind, and energy. The yogic tradition tells us that in addition to the physical body (the annamayakosha), each human being has a mental body (manomayakosha) and an energy body (pranamayakosha). There are subtler bodies as well, known as the etheric body (vignanamayakosha) and the bliss body (anandamayakosha).
Your are not yourself
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.
Past, present, future
Only this moment is inevitable. Human beings experience time in three different dimensions: past, present, and future. Our lives and our languages are structured around this. In actual fact, all that you call your past exists only as memory. Similarly, all that you call future exists only as imagination. And so these are the only two things that you are suffering right now: your memory and your imagination. Stop for a moment and ask yourself, When I am not lost in these mental constructs of memory or imagination, where am I?
The moment
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. Human beings moved from a pristine intelligence to memory that projects itself as intelligence. They journeyed from intelligence to intellect and from consciousness to self-consciousness. What we call knowledge refers to frozen, accumulated memory. They began choosing product over process, destination over journey, karma over yoga, knowledge over knowing. They were so beguiled by the consequences of their actions that they began to see life as a means to an end. The moment you stand apart, you create divisions: between root, stem, and fruit; between past, present, and future. However, this moment is the only doorway both to creation and to the very source of creation. The rest is just hallucination. There is a difference between using the mind and being used by it. It is time to stop being ruled by a hallucination, to stop being tyrannised by a dream. Once you transcend the limitations of your logic, you also transcend the limitations of time and space.
Imprint
Body, mind and energy leave a certain residue or imprint upon you. Your five senses are collecting data from the outside world every moment of your life. Everything that has ever come into contact with you through these five sense organs—whatever you saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched—is there in your memory, influencing your personality. Whether you are conscious of it or not, every cell in your body remembers and acts out of that memory every moment of your life. Life is telling you about your karma 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 behavioural tendencies.
Imprint II
Your body is a heap of food you have ingested over time. Your mind is a heap of impressions and ideas you have imbibed and processed over time. You may not consciously remember what happened twenty-five years ago, but it works on you. What happened twenty-five hundred years ago is still imprinted on your body. What happened twenty-five million years ago is still encrypted in your body. Everything that ever happened on this planet is still remembered by your body, because your body is just a piece of this planet.
Imprint becomes personality
Everything you consider to be yourself is an acquired identity. A cluster of tendencies hardens over time into what you call your personality, or what you claim to be your true nature. It also works in reverse: Your mind shapes how you experience the world around you. In other words, karma is like old software that you have written for yourself unconsciously. And, of course, you’re updating it on a daily basis! Depending on the type of physical, mental, and energetic actions you perform, you write your software. These patterns are unconscious. As time passes, you become a puppet of your accumulated past. Read “Breaking the habit of being yourself”. Karma is not some external system of crime and punishment. It is an internal cycle generated by you.
Your software
Every moment, impressions are flooding in torrents into your system through your five sense organs, and each impression is being recorded. Karma is the glue that makes you stick to this body-mind mechanism. Your software is not the problem. It turns into a problem only if it becomes the ruling factor in your life.
You have become your own jailer
The problem with karmic memory is that it has stuck to you. The rub is that memory is not just a glue. It is also a boundary. It offers you form and definition, but over time, that very form becomes a limitation, and the definition becomes a wall.The tragedy is that you are imprisoned by walls of your own making.You have spun such a cocoon of confinement around yourself that now you cannot fly free. You have become your own jailer.
Body
Karma shapes your body too. This is why yoga works so closely with posture, breath, attitude, and intention. If you cultivate the body in a certain way, it will actually be capable of taking on more of a karmic load. Read “Prometheus Rising” if you are interested in body types. In the modern world, ruled by the intellect, the mind is far more dominant than ever before. The body is no longer the most powerful presence in our lives. Most of us have stopped listening to the body. The body knows. Your body, particularly your heart, are the route to your subconscious and the knowing without knowing.
Karmic library
The unconscious mind is a tremendous library of karmic memory. You are not actively experiencing your energetic or mental, or physical body. You are only facing the music! And you cannot stop it. You are experiencing your karmic impressions and imprints all the time. And you cannot bring these to a halt. If you do not break these patterns, nothing new will ever happen. With a little awareness, every human being can begin to transform habit into choice, compulsion into consciousness. Consciousness is not only a matter of behaviour. It is the nature of existence. Compulsiveness, however, is behavioural. Every moment you wait before you engage in a compulsion, you are aligning yourself with the conscious nature of existence.
Manage your reaction
Vinyana, sanya, and vedana—cognition, recognition, and sensation—are automatic and take place in a split second. However, the fourth part of the mind is related to reaction and is entirely in your conscious control. If a sensation arises, you have a choice whether to react. With equanimity, your entire structure of karma begins to collapse. All it takes is a willingness to experience everything the way it is. It is your responsibility to exercise the choice every moment of your life: either to follow your tendency or to make a conscious decision.
Enjoy life
The aim is to enjoy the process of life, not be trapped by it. Hence the importance of eliminating all manner of unconscious karma. The karmic trap is always in the choosing. Choice is the great human gift; freedom is the great human possibility. Once you understand how the karmic mechanism works, you know the basic difference: between involvement and entanglement.
Unawareness
Your destiny is what you have crafted in unawareness. If you become a hundred per cent conscious, your destiny becomes a conscious creation, meaning you have a choice. Your karma is not in what is happening to you; your karma is in the way you respond to what is happening to you. Suffering is, therefore, a hundred per cent self-manufactured. It is not the physical situation that causes misery. It is the way you react to it. But there is something over which you do have control: how you react to what happens to you.
You have a choice
You are as impaired by karma as one would be by five shots of vodka. Because you are driving under the influence. But life is what you want it to be. The choice is always yours. The volition is always yours. And when narrow self-interest no longer fuels your volition, you have reached the end of karmic production. When you perform the right actions today, a positive future is assured.
It is time
The time has come for human beings to transcend the distorting lens of karma—the lens that makes them confuse the projection for real, their fragmented, memory-driven psychological creation for the incredible majesty of life itself.
It is important
In the yogic traditions, it is only if you touch Chitta—the dimension of intelligence unsullied by even an iota of memory—that you are considered enlightened. Traditionally, in the Indian subcontinent, wisdom was prized over knowledge. In the next couple of decades, the upswing of artificial intelligence will radically change the way we look at the concept of intelligence. Our ideas of education will be fundamentally altered. If you are looking for tools of self-transformation, a memory-based educational system will be of little use. However, it can only inform; it cannot transform. Perception is something a machine will never possess. If we are to distinguish ourselves from machines in any meaningful way and not merely replicate their functions, we need to empower our capacity to perceive.
It is good for your creativity
Most human beings do not realise the tremendous power of creativity they have been endowed with. This is because most of their creations are determined by their compulsiveness, not by their freedom.
Some tips:
- Meditate
- Exercise
- Yoga
- Squat. The extension of the spine has a profound impact on psychological well-being. This is not just an exercise. The spine is not merely a collection of bones. It is the very basis of communication and perception within the human system.
- Simply look. Not for something, but just look—you will see things just as they are.
- Act with awareness or act with total abandon.
- Listen to your body.
- Be equally involved with everything without any distinction. Put away all hierarchies.
- Release expectation
- Focus on the process, not the result.
- If you simply enjoy what you do and work at it wholeheartedly, there is no question of suffering at all.
- Serve. Those who choose to serve will be undeterred because they are not obsessed with the fruit of their action.
- Be grateful
- Every touch imparts a karmic imprint. One of the most sensitive areas of the body is the hands.
- Accept. Whatever you accept becomes a part of you.
- When you see yourself as the source, you are centred. Your energies are now focused within you.
- Once you understand karma as your responsibility, you are free.
- Once you distance yourself from your mind, you are also free.
Chitta
Once you understand that you are a hundred per cent responsible for your life, you will naturally choose to live consciously rather than unconsciously. In the yogic tradition, it is said that once you distance yourself from the compulsions of your intellect, you are in touch with this unclouded consciousness. Chitta. What is Chitta? It is the deepest level of the mind. It is awareness, aliveness, and 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. The divine is the source of creation. Where is this source? Within you.
Restful flow
Even for one moment, if you are in deep embrace with creation, the source of creation is not far. Many sportspersons and artists know this state of immersion, but the frustration is that they are unable to sustain. The paradox is that the basis of activity is in restfulness. Action that is born of restlessness is life-taking, not life-giving.
Break the cycle
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. 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.
Love
Your life has become an expression of love—not love as “I love you” and “you love me,” but as a fundamental part of you. Now your life is one ceaseless flow of karma yoga, an endless outpouring of inner joy. No more is needed.
