Karma by Sadhguru
Karma by Sadhguru
Three Point Summary | Notes on big ideas from intriguing books
Sadhguru is a yogi and a mystic, an author and a poet.
Ultimately, life is neither suffering nor bliss. It is what you want it to be. Life has no inherent quality whatsoever. The choice is always yours.
—Sadhguru
I.
Demystifying Karma
What is karma? Literally, the word means action.
Unfortunately, most people have understood action in terms of good and bad deeds. They see karma as a balance sheet of merits and demerits, virtues and sins. A life audit of sorts.
To others, it is a ledger maintained by some divine chartered accountant who assigns some people to celestial bliss and consigns others to a nether world or into the maw of some recycling machine that spews them back into this world to suffer some more.
This is not merely false and absurd. It is tragic.
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.”
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.
Awareness of Thought Patterns & Habits
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.
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 karmic mechanism is ceaseless. Every mental fluctuation in you creates a chemical reaction, which then proceeds to provoke a physical sensation. This sensation, in turn, reinforces the chemical reaction, which then strengthens the mental fluctuation. Over time, your very chemistry is determined by a series of unconscious reactions to sensory and mental stimuli.
So karma is not some external system of crime and punishment. It is an internal cycle generated by you. These patterns are not oppressing you from without, but from within. Externally, it may be a new day. You may have a new job, a new home, a new life partner, a new baby. You may even be in a new country. But, internally, you are experiencing the same cycles—the same internal oscillations, the same behavioral shifts, the same mental reactions, the same psychological tendencies.
It is time to demolish some myths right away. What you call fate is just a life situation you have created for yourself unconsciously. Your destiny is what you have crafted in unawareness. If you become a hundred percent conscious, your destiny becomes a conscious creation. If you remain unconscious, you fall back on words like fate and providence to describe your predicament. It is as simple as that.
For every action that we perform there is a consequence. Whether the consequence bears fruit today or tomorrow or ten years later is irrelevant. The point is that it always bears fruit one way or another. So, some deeds you performed unconsciously many years ago may have their consequences today. You may choose to call it fate. But you could just as well call it your karma, your responsibility.
II.
The Buddha & Desires
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.
Many believe the Buddha preached that life is suffering, or dukkha, and conclude that his is therefore a dismal outlook of defeatism. What they overlook is that the Buddha spent his life trying to teach people meditation because he saw that humanity can transcend suffering. If he believed that suffering was all, he would have advised us to commit suicide! He saw that bliss—ananda—was a very real possibility. His life mission was to remind us of it.
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.
Once you are in touch with the foundation of intelligence that underlies all of creation, you realize that you are not separate from anyone or anything else. You are inseparably linked to the rest of this universe. Your body already knows that it is part of a great molecular dance of the cosmos. It knows that it will not survive for a moment without transacting with air, water, sunlight, and earth.
III.
There Is Only Now
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.
There is nothing wrong with using the faculties of memory and imagination. They are essential for our survival. We learn from our history and we certainly need to plan for our future.
But 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 tyrannized by a dream.