Karma for dummies!

The knowledge of many lifetimes are captured here in this brilliant explanation of Karma by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, many may say that they don't believe in Karma, well one may not believe in the law of Gravity, so would it  stop one from stepping into the path of a falling piano?

Karma is a complicated subject, but it does make sense in a grand scale of creation, there is a underlying reason for everything, and yes, including you reading my post right now!

I picked up some gems from his video and paraphrased it according to my own understanding:

Karma is action, that results from the impressions of the mind, the action it has produced, and the new impressions it is going to produce in the mind in the future which will cause further actions.  Karma is latent impressions in the consciousness, which propels you to do an action, the present action in turn creates impressions in the consciousness, which propels you to do further actions.

The impression of action, the action and its impact is all called karma, the whole universe is full of impressions.  The skill is to live in karma but yet not affected by it, this is what is yoga, In the Bhagawan Gita Lord Krishna says "one who sees action in inaction, and inaction in action" is the most intelligent man.  I take this as acting without attachment or ego.

To get rid of Karma, we have to get rid of these deep mental impressions.  There are negative impressions which cause us suffering, we need to get rid of these, then there are positive impressions which gives us peace and joy these are ones we need to keep.

The way to get rid of negative impressions is by relaxing, pranayama, meditation or positive action. Positive impressions are like soap which washes away negative impressions, however attachment to positive impressions also turns them negative. The second step, to be free of attachment to positive impressions as well. Nirvana is when you are not attached to anything positive or negative.

Freedom does not mean stopping action, but doing it guided by your inner light and being a witness to the actions. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar compares a child's response to a vaccination shot as to an adult, in the former life is much more miserable, because one does not understand that the shot is good for oneself.

Also interesting is the mention of stored karma, present karma and future karma.  Stored karma can be erased, future karma can be modified, however present karma is like a arrow leaving the bow, it is in mid flight it cannot be changed, only your attitude towards it can be changed.

I hope you take the time to watch the video, a master is one who can explain the most complex of things simply. We are blessed to have someone like him alive today...

Peace,

Kirpal

Wherever you go there you are!

Picture "The Golden Path II" kindly provided by h.koppdelaney

I am up to the chapter "Wherever you go there you are" in the book with the same name by Jon Kabat-Zinn. I love this book, as he talks about mindfulness, meditation, karma in plain simple English, no need to de-crypt scriptures or poems, just straight up, sort of like a spiritual espresso, except it wakes your soul up!

One of the things about mindfulness and meditation is that it is pretty much opposite to our normal patterns of thinking:
- Instead of doing , there is non-doing
- Instead of thinking, there is emphasis on not thinking, just paying full attention without judgement
- Instead of thinking time, you let go of time, focus on the present, time loses all meaning
- Instead of changing outside, you change inside

You work on yourself, you listen, you pay attention. There is no point running away from anything, it just follows you, until you address your own mental conditions.  Real change only comes when you change your mentality.  This the mirror effect! you look to the world, and over time the world reflects back yourself, crystallizing material things around your thought patterns everywhere you go.

Real change only comes once you change your mentality.

Einstein said something like "Problems cannot be solved at the same level of thinking that created them"

The following is the extract from the chapter which emphasizes the importance of acceptance, facing the current challenges whatever it is, softening to it, learning from it ...

"If this job is no good, change jobs, If this wife is no good, change wives. If this town is no good, change towns ... The underlying thinking is that the reasons for these troubles is outside of you - in the location, in others, in circumstances ...This way of thinking and seeing is an all-too-prevalent trap.  There is no successful escaping from yourself in the long run, only transformation ... There can be no resolution leading to growth until the present situation is faced completely and you have opened to it with mindfulness, allowing the roughness of the situation itself to sand down your own rough edges.  In other words, you must be willing to let life itself become our teacher"  Jon Kabat-Zinn

There can be no resolution leading to growth until the present situation is faced completely and you have opened to it with mindfulness, allowing the roughness of the situation itself to sand down your own rough edges. Jon Kabat-Zinn

No-one can run from oneself, no-one can change oneself except oneself
No-one cannot change one's circumstances unless one changes one's thinking
No-one can change one's thinking until one stops thinking temporarily, allowing deeper contemplation (non-thinking) to guide the response and establish more thoughtful patterns of thinking....

No-one can change one's thinking until one stops thinking temporarily, allowing deeper contemplation (non-thinking) to guide the response and establish more thoughtful patterns of thinking....

Peace,

Kirpal

Zombies, Mindfulness & Karma

Picture "The Colors of the Soul" kindly provided by h.koppdelaney

We live in a world of the half dead, I say that because we aren't really living, we are existing, we aren't really thinking, we are caught up in the hurt of yesterday, and a fantasy dream about tomorrow. We are simply reacting and playing a script in auto-pilot that we have created for ourselves or one that has been created for us.

Today we will explore where this script is coming from, we will look at mindfulness as a technique which will allow you to undo this script and write a new script, one that will take you to the destination where you want to be, a destination of a less stressful life, richer relationships and better natural results!

Where is this script coming from?
We write this script everyday, consciously or unconsciously.

We are bombarded by advertising, social pressure, useless entertainment, less then perfect role models, with little time for solitude and self reflection.

It seems we are living everyone else's idea of what life should be except our own!

The script is your deep mental impressions or Sanskaras in Sanskrit.

Where does these deep mental impressions or Sanskaras come from?
These come from intent and action from the past and the present or karma, this life and many lives before.

The problem is that new scripts are being written by the momentum of previous negative scripts.

 

Albert Einstein once said “problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them”.

Imagine if you see things as they are, being able to truly listen, even if it is temporary, imagine if you could suspend yourself  long enough to reflect on it to determine the right response.  This technique is called mindfulness.

What is mindfulness?
As its simplest level, mindfulness is a matter of looking things as they are suspending judgment and thinking of any kind, be it temporary, however with all the attention and compassion we can give to it.

It involves non-doing, something that may be strange to the western world, how can the mind not being doing anything, truth is the mind needs an anchor to be focused on, doing one thing, and then the mind disappears into that one thing, thinking disappears, time disappears.

It requires you to be totally devoted to what you are doing there and then, focused totally on the activity at hand.  It could be a meeting at work, doing a toastmaster evaluation, doing homework with your kids. Use what you are doing to anchor yourself in the here and now, delaying self gratification, until the impulse to act is brought under control, and can be directed for a purpose.  Acting with purpose, builds new useful habits, a new useful script, it does not matter how small or big the act. A little positive change every day, builds a big positive change over time.

It can also reduce stress gently and naturally, and is the basis of a formal method used successfully for that purpose called MBSR.  Stress is the number one killer according the American Medical Association, causing at least 80% of all disease.

It asks for us to be present here and now, not in the past or the future but the now.  There is an ancient Chinese proverb that says “If you want to know your past – look into your present conditions. If you want to know your future – look into your present actions.”   There is another biblical reference that says the same thing "As you sow so shall you reap".  The results of tomorrow will depend on the quality of your choices today plain and simple.

Imagine if you could write a new script that reflected who you really want to be:
Would it not help you become a better human being? 
Would it not benefit those around you? 
Would it not benefit your community, and maybe even the planet?

We talked about why we are in Zombie mode, its because of our deep mental impressions or script that are created every day.

We need to be able to rewrite our script so that it takes us to where we want to be, a more happier, peaceful and rewarding life.

We can use mindfulness as a tool to interrupt ourselves just long enough to establish a new script that will let us focus on the present, establish deeper relationships and make the most of the opportunities of learning that come every day of our life.

It all starts by being mindfully present today, now :)

“And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.” Abraham Lincoln

Peace,

Kirpal

 

For further reading on mindfulness I highly recommend Jon Kabat-Zinn's book "Wherever you go there you are" which discusses mindfulness in a great amount of detail.

The washerman cleaning the garment

Picture "Buddha heartfully stoned" kindly provided by h.koppdelaney

The garment cries to the washerman "Why do you beat me?"

The washerman says "I am not beating you, I am only trying to clean you"

So it is with us...

The garment is the mind, the washerman our current situation or Karma

Every moment in life is a teacher

It teaches us lessons that we need to learn

The biggest lessons are not insolvable puzzles

But basic lessons of being a decent human being

Lessons of humility

Lessons of compassion

Lessons of letting go

Lessons of acceptance
Don't learn this, you already know this intrinsically, unlearn the opposite!

Peace,

Kirpal

The mills of karma

Picture "Om mani padme hum" kindly provided by h.koppdelaney under CC

The mills of karma grinds slowly but very fine

Actions leave subtle imprints that stay forever

In the mind seeds or sanskaras are planted

How can one expected fruit when seeds of weeds are sown?

Actions of love and compassion grows into fruits of peace

Actions of the vices bring nothing but suffering

Protect yourself from yourself by planting the right seeds

Peace,

Kirpal

Habits, Destiny & Free Will and the Game of Chess...

Photo kindly provided by Mukumbura under Creative Commons

Its been a stressful week due for various reasons.  I ponder on the stress, and how I am handling it, no doubt I am short fused, the only thing that is keeping me in check is Qi Gong, and Meditation.  Difficult times demand more meditation to deal with it.  Meditation works like magic, somehow it seems to give one the strength to go through life, as well as "smoothing things around the edges".

So how is 1. Habits, 2. Destiny & 3. Free Will & 4. Chess Related? 1, 2, 3 is all animated by the Law of Karma, and it is played out like 4.

A layman's explanation to Karma is provided by one book I read "How to Know God". It says that as a wave approaches the shore it hits the bottom of the ocean flow, and that causes a wave to take place, the cause of the wave is the shape of the bottom of the shore.

In the same way, the life force inside us the Chinese say is Qi made out of Earth (Jing), and Heaven (Shen), this has to take form around something.  That something is our Sankaras, these are sort of like Habits and Desires combined accumulated over many life times.  The more pure these Sankaras are the higher the physical form acquired, ranging from the microscopic creatures to humans, to Angels.

Buddha once said to something along the lines of "To know your past, you only need to look at your present conditions, to know your future, you only need to look at your present actions".  The law of Karma is precise and just.  It governs all that is around you, the circumstances you find yourself in, and all that you interact with.  These mental sankaras play out over a lifetime and also manifest themselves physically in your body directly and indirectly.

Any neurologist will tell you it is very difficult to change neural pathways in the brain, however what can be done is formation of new pathways. Same with Karma, we cannot change our past karma (the circumstances and limitations we find ourselves in), but we can plant new positive Sankaras by creating positive actions (Karma) and do meditation (moving and non moving) to counteract the bad effect of past Karma.

This has global repercussions as well as personal ones.  As more and more people become purer, the global consciousness becomes purer, automatically creating order, peace, harmony and balance for all things around us.  One person meditating, creates a resonance of peace, love and order which influences everything around her.  Studies has shown 1% of people meditating in a city brought entire crime rate down.

We do not need to become pure, that we already are potentially, we need to stop impure things getting into us, and let the purity shine outwards.  These impure things are negative images, sounds, company, intoxicants and impure food.   We need to meditate so we can be more sensitive to the inner intelligence just waiting to flow out benefiting all around us.

In Information Technology, there is a programming cliche "Garbage In Garbage Out", this is true for our spiritual progress as well.  The more senseless, mindless stuff we put into our senses, the more suffering will come out the other end automatically.   If we want happiness, that does not lie in self-gratification and selfishness, although it seems that way in the short run.  True happiness lies in connecting and acting in harmony to what we truly are "Spiritual Beings".

To finish, all this actions we take form Sankaras which is a combination of desire and habit, which stays with us to determine our future, one can say they are the only things we can take with us when we die.

These Sankaras in our lives present themselves like a game of chess, where the circumstances are already pre-determined, however there is limited free choice in making the next move, so that we can advantage from it.  The next moves are in the present for us to continuously move towards wholeness, truth and realization of the latent divine potential in us.

Wishing you the presence of mind to make the right moves consistent with universal moral values and spiritual progress,

Kirpal


This work by Kirpal Chauhan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Get a hold of your mind!

Picture kindly provided by http://www.flickr.com/photos/flyingsinger/

It a sad state of affairs, a warming planet, unequal distribution of wealth, poverty not only in third world countries but also in developed countries, unemployment, unaffordable health care. I sit here and pondering why so many problems...how to fix them.

If we look at the law of Karma, this explains, when you plant the seed of chilli, you will only get chillies, plant the seed of a mango tree and you will get mangos.

See whatever is happening, has a cause, and the cause has been planted, which is giving natural fruits of that cause. If the cause has been greed, ignorance, and abuse of integrity, what else do you expect, but suffering?

Naturally all mental intentions and even the lack of intention will give a corresponding natural result, ignorance will give unexpected unplanned results seldom positive, sloth will give you bad health, gambling will leave you broke, bad eating habits will make you overweight.

So what is the solution?

The solution is a mindset change, a change back to basic human values which we have long forgotten.

We have to plant righteous seeds of thoughts, one of self respect, self control, humility, integrity, and compassion, basically connecting back to ourselves. Everything starts with oneself.

This is not so easy as it sounds, one cannot change values easily, negative thoughts take "form" and embed themselves in our physical bodies, they crystalise, the human body renews every cell in 7 years, however these renewal take form around energy patterns "pre-set", just like jelly in a cup.

The key is to work at all angles, start at both the mental affirmations, as well as the physical level with yoga, qi gong, pranayama. Qi Gong is quite unique, in they way it combines both pranayama and fluid movements, and is very powerful and clearing out energy blockages due to negative thoughts.

Water and fertilize these positive seeds with the "sangat", the company of others in pursuit of the positive path. These communities are what it is all about, support each other, build a wave of momentum, be it your church, your toastmaster group, your work, your friends, your facebook page.

"Beautiful thoughts beget beautiful things" Cover yourself with beautiful images, beautiful sounds, and beautiful thoughts.

Let negative thoughts arise, and let them go just as easily as they arise, let them find their boundaries, and let it go, just let it go. If you realize that these negative thoughts are the cause of ill health, you would drop them like hot potatoes! There was a qoute in the bible I vaguely remember, it said something like "let the weeds grow until you can tell they are weeds and not your plants, and you can the pull them out safely and easily".

A great way to expel negativity is through pranayama, I like the Qi Gong method myself, where negative chi & thoughts can be expelled through visualization releasing through the palms of the hand. The kapalbhati pranayama made popular by yogi Ramdev is another good one to use.

I am inspired though, there are many beautiful people out there with beautiful thoughts and it is evident in the way they communicate, find them, befriend them, and change along with them.

The key to turning the planet around is yourself and the "sangat"

Wishing you Peace, Love, Compassion & Humility

Kirpal


This work by Kirpal Chauhan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License