Buku Karma

[Nicodemo Aidara]

Anew perspective on the overused and misunderstood concept of 'karma' that offers the key to happiness and enlightenment, from the internationally bestselling author and world-renowned spiritual master Sadhguru.

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev is a yogi, a mystic, and the founder of Isha, an all-volunteer organization engaged in large-scale humanitarian and environmental projects. He has spoken at the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, Stanford University, Columbia University, Harvard University, Wharton, and many other institutions.

Forget what you think you know about karma - Sadhguru shows us it's not a punishment for bad behaviour, but a vehicle for transformation and empowerment. This book will put you back in charge of your own life.

The karma of your soul is also what determines your personality characteristics, he says. Your temperament, your dispositions, and so on, were created based on what your soul needs to learn in this lifetime, to balance its karma. And, all of your reactions to life experiences will determine whether your soul balances its karma or creates more karmic debt, Zukav says.

Following the advice above, set intentions to nurture those qualities, and try a meditation practice to establish and increase them in yourself and your life. For example, if you find that you are holding grudges, meditate on the intention to cultivate forgiveness in your heart.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

She received some good karma of her own back in October when the Kickstarter page she created to help fund her dream exceeded her goal of $2,500. And that dream is only continuing to grow now that the book has been printed.

Tache said she has sent out more than 50 books to supporters of the Kickstarter campaign, and sold about 20 more through her Etsy store in just over a month. She is now working to get the book into local stores.

The story of Karma the Elephant was one Tache crafted in the mold of the popular The Elf on the Shelf tradition parents use around the Christmas holiday. The elf is typically moved throughout the house and the children are told he is watching them and reporting back to Santa.

Tache liked the idea, but wanted to have something that could be used throughout the year. That is where Karma, a stuffed elephant, comes in. Karma sits around the house, watches over the kids and reports back to parents what he sees. The book itself is a lesson on kindness and compassion.

I had the great joy of spending a recent morning with Sadhguru talking about everything from traveling across America during the pandemic to material wealth, racism, and what we can do to better our lives. For the complete unedited interview, please watch the powerful video below.

Sadhguru: "The word has become part of the English lexicon. Everybody is using it. I hear this word in the movies, in television shows, everywhere. But when I really looked at it, I saw that most people in the West understand karma as some kind of reward and punishment. Somebody has a ledger up in the sky that keeps account of all your sins and virtues and that you will be paid back either positively or negatively. I thought that we should bring a proper perspective to this because karma is the most dynamic way to exist in the sense karma literally means action. So what we mean by saying my life is my karma is we are saying that my life is my making. There is no divine manager up there managing your life. This is fundamentally the Indian ethos. People look up in the sky thinking that guidance will come, but people who claim such guidance have always done terrible and horrendous things on the planet in many different ways."

"I'm not trying to talk for or against anything. All I'm saying is karma is essentially about moving the controls of your life from up in the sky to within yourself, all aspects of life. Right now, your experience of life is 100 percent determined by you in the sense that your experience of life is in the form of your body, your mind, your emotions, and how your energies behave, and your chemistry behaves within you. Another thing is the sociological part of the society, the relationships, the financial structures around us, how they are in themselves. These first four dimensions account for our health and pleasure in the body, our peacefulness and joyfulness in our mind, our love and compassion in our hearts, our blissfulness and our nature and our states of ecstasy within ourselves, which is our life energy. All these four aspects or dimensions of life are 100 percent in our hands. Only the social, financial, national, international situations are not absolutely in our hands. We have a small piece to play as individual people, but there are so many forces. It is a question of skill, commitment, willingness to invest your life. And above all the times in which we exist, what we can do in the world is largely determined by the times, not just by you and me."

"One hundred percent of experience and dimension of life is absolutely in our hands. But unfortunately, most people are letting outside situations to shape their experience of life. Right now, I am peaceful, I am happy, I am joyful and blissful. This must be determined by me. I know in America, race, religion, slavery, all these things have been big issues and still continue to today. When somebody determines how you should live, what you should do, what you should wear, what you should eat, this is considered slavery. But when somebody else can determine whether you are happy or unhappy, this the worst form of slavery."

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