Karma:
Your Best Friend or Worst Enemy
This is a basic introduction about the philosophy of
action, potential reaction and the result of action.
Law
of Action and Reaction
According to
the laws of science, every action must have an equal and opposite reaction. In
Tantra, the philosophy is that all actions originate in the mind and may
manifest externally. Therefore, all mental action, whether internal or
external, must have a reaction in this relative world.
Karma
= action
Samskara
= reaction in potentiality
Karmaphala
= result of action
Sam'skara
The reaction to
an action will express itself when the proper environment appears. Until then,
it is stored in the mind as an unexpressed reaction called sam'skara in Sanskrit. A sam'skara is a potential mental reaction. A good action begets a good sam'skara and a bad action, a bad one. Sam'skaras are experienced as quantities
of pleasure or pain in the mind and may not relate exactly to the external
conditions.
Example: A person
steals money from someone but the reaction may not manifest itself as a loss of
money to this person. That person may suffer, instead, a loss of something else
which will correspond to the amount of suffering the person caused by the
original theft.
What is Good and What is
Bad?
Good and bad
need to be evaluated in terms of a goal, and steps to reach that goal. The goal is spiritual realization and welfare
to the universe. Judge virtue and vice
from the welfare angle of vision. Vice is
that which makes the mind narrow and selfish.
Virtue is that which expands the mind; by whose assistance the universe
becomes an integral part of oneself.
Types
of Sam'skaras
There are three
types of sam'skaras:
1)
Imposed - External factors can affect the way we act and think thereby
directly or indirectly imposing reactions on the mind. These are from:
a)
Environment – e.g. living in mountains,
in the city, food habits, etc.
b)
Society and Culture – e.g. facing mandatory military service, racism in a society
where one lives, type of art and music.
c)
Education – e.g. parents and teachers inculcate their own attitudes into students’
minds.
2)
Acquired - Conscious action done in this present lifetime create fresh sam'skaras (reactions in potentiality) in
the mind.
3)
Inborn - Stored deep in the mental plate are those reactions in
potentiality which come from previous lifetimes as part of the process of
evolution of the human mind and are present at the time of birth.
Chains
of Gold and Iron
It is said that
all sam'skaras cause an ‘imbalance’
in the mind which remains there until it is expressed. The personality and
character of a person are determined by the sam'skaras
accumulated by past actions. That is why it is said that good and bad
reactions are like chains of gold and iron respectively, both bring the mind
under bondage and must be exhausted in order to attain liberation. Good and bad, in this sense, are relative
concepts and so whether the feeling of good through pleasurable effects or bad
through painful effects eventuates, both are reactions in the relative
world. Neither pleasure nor pain can
lead to ultimate happiness, as they are relative only.
Cycle
of Life and Death
Until all sam'skaras are exhausted, the unit mind
must take another body after its death in order to express these stored
potential reactions and attain spiritual liberation. This is the process of
reincarnation or transmigration of the soul.
Buddhism believes in rebirth and transmigration of souls. This is why Buddha emphasized that birth as a
human being is precious, and provides the best opportunity for spiritual
development leading to the attainment of nirvana or liberation (being the state
of attainment of perfect peace and bliss).
In the Hopi
North American Indian belief, death does not end a person's presence in the universe,
but marks a transition from one state of being to another or, in other words,
from one form of experience to another, where the mind still needs to express
its reactive potentiality or evolve to greater awareness through a relative
existence. In the Maori tradition of Aotearoa (
Types
of Death
Life implies a
parallelism between the vibrations of the physical (body) and mental (mind)
with the help of the vital energies (pra'n'ah).
When this parallelism is lost, death occurs.
There are two
types of death:
1)
Physical death - due to old age, disease or accident, physical vibration
loses parallelism with mind.
2)
Psychic death - due to great mental shock of extreme pleasure or pain,
or rapid degeneration of mind, the psychic vibration loses parallelism with the
body and results in death.
Thirdly, there
is spiritual liberation - after exhausting / eliminating all potential reactions
and merging one's individual unit mind with the Cosmic Consciousness, one
attains complete liberation from this relative world. This is spiritual liberation. It is not relative.
Rebirth
and Life
Everything in
this universe is a vibration of some sort, whether condensed into matter or of
more subtle vibrations in the mental and supra-mental realms. When mind leaves body, the mental vibration
of the mind is the accumulation of the sam'skaras
left in the mind at the time of death. It then experiences a state of
suspension (i.e. like hibernation) until the Cosmic Operative Force of the
Supreme Consciousness connects it with a newly created body that has just taken
its place in the mother's womb. When the psycho-physical parallelism is
established again, then we say that the mind has reincarnated again.
Beyond
Life and Death
Each human
being must experience his/her own sam'skaras;
no one can escape from them.
Example: A
person finds a monkey paw (a type of good luck charm) and gets three wishes. He
asks for money and gets the payment from the life insurance of his son. He asks
for his son back and gets a corpse at the door. He asks to get rid of the corpse.
It is gone. So he ends up with money and no son. Such is
the cycle of pain and pleasure.
However, in the
practical philosophy of Tantra, the spiritual aspirant can go beyond the relative
experience of pain and pleasure, of life and death, and establish oneself in
the
1)
Ripening of sam'skaras - to
eliminate the accumulated potential reactions in the mind, one must first ripen
them or bring them into the subconscious mind. This is accelerated when mind
detaches itself from the body in the following situations:
a) unconsciousness (i.e.
fainting, coma, etc)
b) death
c) meditation
2)
Eliminating or expressing the sam'skaras
- All our actions are either original,
done by our own will force, or reactive,
done automatically by the expression of our reactions. The best way to express sam'skaras
is through selfless service, because it benefits the doer and the receiver
as well. Also, the reaction, whether positive or negative, will always serve as
a help in one's spiritual progress when experienced during the act of service.
3)
Preventing the formation of new sam'skaras
- original actions must be performed in such a way so that no new reactions are
formed. This is done through the practice of, what in Sanskrit is called, madhuvidya where the doer does not feel
that he or she is doing the act but rather the Supreme Consciousness is acting.
This effort has three aspects:
a) relinquishing the desire
for the fruits of actions;
b) abandoning the vanity of
performance of an action;
c) surrendering completely to
the Supreme Entity and feeling that you are an instrument of the Divine.
Guru
and Sam'skara
The guide of
the Guru also helps the spiritual aspirant or disciple to eliminate all sam'skaras as fast as possible.
Example: The
life of Milarepa. His guru, Marpa, made him construct houses. However, again and again they would be
destroyed by some incident. This was an
expression of having to burn the negative reactions accumulated by Milarepa due
to the suffering caused by his black magic practiced in the past.
The Supreme
Entity alone is the Guru. So, also the
Guru can take away the sam'skaras of
the spiritual aspirant or disciple in special circumstances. Only the Guru
knows when to do this and how it will occur.
Verses from Rumi
The great mystic, Hazrat Jalal-ud-Deen Rumi (1207-1273),
always had a sense of being one with the Creation and described the process of
evolution through reincarnation in his poetry. Take the simple lines from the
famous Masnawi by Rumi:
I died as
mineral and became a plant,
I died as plant
and rose to animal,
I died as
animal and I was man.
Why should I fear?
When was I less
by dying?
Yet once more I
shall die as man,
To soar with
angels blest;
But even from
angelhood
I must pass on
...
In another poem he states:
Die happily and
look forward to receiving a new and better form.
You can, just
as the Sun, only rise in east, when you set in west.
Kahlil Gibran expressed the same conviction:
Brief were my days among
you, and briefer still the words I have spoken. But should my voice fade in
your ears, and my love vanish in your memory, then I will come again, and with
a richer heart and lips more yielding to the spirit will I speak. Yes, I shall
return with the tide, and though death may hide me and the greater silence
enfold me, yet again will I seek your understanding. . . .
A little while, a moment of rest upon the wind, and another woman shall
bear me.
-- The Prophet,
pp. 83-4, 94-5