You suffer countless losses, diseases, heartbreaks in life and feel sorry for yourself. And here, oscillates the pendulum–good, bad, right, and wrong. One moment you like yourself, the other, you do not. Duality has its day. Delusion has its way! What is the first question that comes to your mind? “Why me? What did I do to deserve this?” The answer to this lies in understanding the concept of samskars.
Every action and thought that crosses your mind leaves an imprint on your destiny, it gets stored in the karmashaya, an ethereal hard disk so to say, to be fructified at a later point in this life or future lives. This stored data is called samskars. These samskars fructify, deciding the course of your life because in attaching emotions to your actions you gain a sense of ownership towards these actions. When your destiny is paired with the data stored in your ethereal hard disk, those stored samskars, fructify in congruence with the rays of the planets. So, if at a particular time your destiny is meant to provide you with wealth, good looks, luxury, and good times – the stored samskars that match your destiny at the time will fructify. On the other hand, if physical pain, loss in business, difficult days, are a part of your destiny at a particular time, then the karmas matching this negative period will come to fore and fructify. And what you receive in the fructification of these past karmas, you take ownership of and begin the cycle all over again, reloading your karmic matrix instead of exhausting it.
You have thoughts all day, everyday. You think about your thoughts, about why you have these thoughts, feel good about some and chastise yourself for some. Of course you do, they’re your thoughts, right? Wrong! They’re thoughts that you receive, which come and go through your mind. Our minds should be open vessels allowing these thoughts to enter and leave, watching them from a distance, in third person perspective. Instead we put a lid on the vessel as soon as a thought comes floating in, paint it in emotion and make it ours. It then adds to our karma, positive or negative depending on the thought. And before you know it, one thought links to another and you gain ownership of a long chain of thoughts.
The positive samskars will be converted in the future into Bhog (pleasure and riches). The negative samskars into Rog (debt, disease, and misfortune), while divine deeds will get converted into Yog (spiritual evolution). One can extend this point to the fate of countries as a whole too. Countries can be divided into those that offer lesser comforts and luxuries called TapoBhoomi, where people exhaust more of their negative karmas and also practice penance and austerity. And other countries that fulfil the Rajasic experience called RajoBhoomi, are where people enjoy and exhaust their positive karmas, by getting consumed by luxury, comfort and wealth.
Spiritually evolved people know how to re-balance their karmas and negate samskars through the practice of recitation of advanced mantras and performing a lot of seva, thereby tilting the balance in favour of perceived positivity.
When your thoughts, which are not really your own, lead you to perform actions you consider worthy of pride, you take ownership of these actions and add to your samskars. It could be something as simple as helping an elderly cross a road to something as large as donating a large sum of money to charity. You feel good about yourself and add to your positive karma.
When positive samskars fructify, rewarding you with good days, prosperity, health, you tend to spend it by indulging in your whims and fancies. Some become vain, some abuse this reward and eventually end up with a massive karmic negative tilt. It is important to realize that while it is your past actions that have earned you such luxuries, it is your destiny that has led to their fructification. You as an individual, in your present physical form, play no role in it. Credit for the good deeds or blame for the bad, neither is yours to take. These rewards are automatically fructified to neutralize your karmic balance sheet thereby leading to automatic exhaustion and redemption of stored samskars. Knowledge or gyan helps people to re-examine the above principles and use them for personal evolution.
There are essentially 3 types of people who understand this Karmic Connection:
- The astute understand this subject and work towards improving the positives in their karmic account. They strive to perform more acts of seva (service) and work on reducing their desires, thereby earning more and spending less of their positive karmas.
- The more astute practice tapasya, including voluntary suffering, in addition to performing acts of seva. Examples of tapasya include fasting, long hours of meditation and spiritual sadhana.
- The most astute understand the only way to transcend karma is to not take ownership of their actions, positive and negative, thereby exhausting all kinds of samskars and karmas and eventually freeing themselves from the shackles of their Karmic Connections.
It takes a certain level of spiritual evolution to be accomplished in not-taking-ownership, and this is the ultimate goal. May this dawn upon you and may you succeed in your endeavour.
Karma Sutra- Cracking the Karmic Code
The greatest asset of India is neither the Taj Mahal nor the buzzing metropolis of Mumbai. For tens of thousands of years, India’s greatest asset has been its philosophy and spiritualism. Tourists or even people who live here hardly take advantage of this wealth and benefit from it.
Karma Sutra is the Indian doctrine of karma. It explains the cause and effect of destiny and decodes the karmic laws that govern us. By mapping our karmic assets and liabilities, we can outline our karmic balance sheet and determine how to enhance its P&L.
In the final analysis, Karma Sutra is a tool that may help you carve a better future in this lifetime and earn the karmic wealth that will command your ethereal status after death.
Born and brought up in Mumbai, Hingori works in the service industry and is a teacher of spiritualism who started 35 years ago as a student of Gurudev. His books chronicle his personal journey of transformation and are full of real-life experiences and spiritual insights. The Hingori Sutras are a series of easy-to-read books that collectively distil the spiritual wisdom of the ancient Indian siddh gurus.