Karma

Articolul nu-mi apartine, il pun doar pentru a-l gasi mai usor pana il traduc. via

I am not the author of this article. The text is here awaiting translation. This is its source.






Zece principii pentru administrarea eficienta a karmei


Prolog 1: Conceptul de karma este de origine hindusa iar abordarea acestuia este facila pentru cei din interiorul acestui sistem de credinte. Articolul original ofera o abordare de natura moderna (conform intentiilor autorului) dar pe langa aceasta originea occidentala a acestuia (nascut in California) modeleaza mesajul astfel incat sa fie permeabil pentru cei interesati din afara culturii hinduse. Necesitatea articolului este tocmai atitudinea practicantilor hindusi de a prefera seminariile moderne de autodezvoltare in conditiile in care acestea preiau principii hinduiste, considerate per-se invechite .
Prolog 2: Aceasta este o traducere si o adaptare.

Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami: "Este usor sa studiezi legea karmei si sa o apreciezi din perspectiva filozofica, dar sa o aplici in tot ceea ce ti se intampla, sa-i intelegi mersul pe parcursul activitatii necesita o abilitate ce trebuie trezita"



Principiul unu: renunta la razbunare

Nu deveni instrumentul de plata carmica al altcuiva. De exemplu, daca cineva are un comportament rau fata de tine, ai implusul de a te razbuna si sa ai un comportament negativ fata de aceea persoana. Daca umezi acest impuls vei creea o carma neprevazuta pe care va trebui sa o platesi sau careia sa ii faci fata in viitor. Mai bine sa lasi legea carmei sa isi urmeze cursul fara a interveni prin actiunea ta, ceea ce se va si intampla printr-o persoana cu mai putin autocontrol si care nu intelege aceasta lege a vietii.

Un exemplu clasic: un film western clasic. Cineva impusca si ucide pe fratele eroului in timpul unui jaf, iar restul fimului se centreza pe urmarirea raufacatorului si uciderea acestuia ca act de razbunare. Deci ce se intampla in urmatorul film al seriei? Cu siguranta exista o carma care trebuie platita pentru acea crima din razbunare. Probabil un alt jaf va avea loc si eroul din primul film va fi ucis. Legea bunului simt spune ca e mai bine sa fi lasat pe serif sa urmareasca vinovatul si sa il livreze justitiei. Seriful a depus un juramant si este autorizat sa impuna legea astfel necreind vreo carma negativa prin capturarea raufacatorului, chiar in situatia in care nu are nicio alta varianta decat sa-l ucida.


Gurudeva: " Razbunare este o forta teribila si negativa. Cand ne razbunam pe cineva, creem un depozit de carma negativa care se va intoarce impotriva-ne cu forta maxima cand ne vom astepta mai putin.

Tikural: " Renunta la supararea catre toti cei care te-au suparat, dat ca va creea o gramada de necazuri.



Principiul al doilea: accepta responsabilitatea

Carma se manifesta de obicei prin alti oameni, astfel fiind foarte usor sa ii consideri pe ceilalti ca fiind raspunzatori in totalitate pentru ceea ce ni se intampla. De exemplu, situatia in care esti atacat, doborat si ti se iau toate bunurile. Esti evident foarte suparat pe faptas. Totusi din perspectiva mistica esti responsabil pentru ceea ce ti s-a intamplat. Tu, prin actiunile tale, ai creeat tot ceea ce suporti in prezent. Tu singur esti cauza pierderii tale, hotul a fost doar instrumentul princare ti s-a platit carma.

Desigur, este usor sa aplici principiul cand efectul este unul placut (stii in mod intuitiv ca atunci cand avem parte de lucruri bune le meritam) si nu la fel de usor cand este vorba de lucruri neplacuta, insa in ambele cazuri suntem la fel de responsabili. In defintiv, esti singurul de laudat cand viata ta este plina de succes si tot singurul de accuzat cand viata ti-e plina de dificultati.

Gurudeva: " Atat timp cat externalizezi sursa succesului sau insuccesului tau, perpetuezi un ciclu de carma, buna sau rea. Nu exista o cauza undeva acolo. Actiunile noastre, gandurile si atitudinile sunt cauza. Trebuie sa acceptam si sa ne ducem carma cu bucurie."

Tirukal: " De ce trebuie cei care se bucura cand destinul le aduce bucurie sa se caine cand destinul le aduce necazuri?"

Principiul al treilea: Iarta-l pe cel ce ti-a gresit

Iata exemplul unui adolescent care se intoarce de la scoala. Intr-o zi un grup de baieti il sacaie pentru ca e diferit in vreun fel si il bat. Raspunsul simplu este ca acel adolescent sa fie furios si sa aiba pica contra lor ani in sir. Aceasta este o problema, totusi, pentru ca emotiile negative si decazute de furie ii vor chinui in mod constant subconstientul. Daca nu ii va ierta, va perpetua evenimentul in minte, mult dupa consumarea acestuia.

Gurudeva spunea frecvent povestea in care un om l-a atacat pe Swami Sivananda, lovindu-l cu putere cu un topor in cap in timpul satsang-ului de seara la ashramul sau din Rishikesh. Sustinatorii lui Swami Sivananda s-au revoltat si l-au retinut pe atacator. Swami Sivananda a raspuns cu un sentiment opus. A cerut ca acel om sa nu fie pedepsit si sa fie predat politiei. A doua zi s-a intalnit cu atacatorul sau, i-a cumparat un bilat catre casa, i-a dat cateva carti spirituale si bani. In final Swami i-a spus acelui om: " Iti multumesc pentru ca ai fost instrumentul prin care mi-a fost platita aceasta carma. Acum sunt eliberat de ea." Asta fara a fi furios in vreun fel pe acel om.

Tirukural: " Daca vei raspunde cu bunatate la agresiuni si le vei ierta, cai care ti-au facut rau vor fi pedepsiti prin propria rusine."

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Fourth Principle: Consider the Consequences

Quite often our actions are based upon an emotional reaction to what someone has done or said to us. The consequences of such actions are often not clearly and carefully thought about. For example, someone insults you, so you insult them back. If you did reflect, you would see that the consequence of harming someone else with your words in the present is for you to be harmed again in the future by someone else's words. This behavior creates an endless cycle of being harmed and harming others, which is only stopped by considering the consequences before acting and not harming back. Mahatma Gandhi once said, "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." So, too, instinctive retaliation ultimately makes the whole world angry. The principle of considering the karmic consequences pertains equally to positive actions. The wisest approach is to not simply react to things that happen to us, but to take time to consider the karmic repercussions of all actions before we take them.

The habit of considering the consequences before acting can be developed at an early age when parents and teachers utilize positive discipline methods to help children face the natural and logical consequences of their actions. An insightful letter from Lord Ganesha on consequences in Gurudeva's book Loving Ganesha reminds us: "Keep track of your paces, for your walk makes marks. Each mark is a reward or a stumbling block. Learn to look at the step you have made and the step you have not made yet. This brings you close to Me."

Gurudeva elucidates our fourth principle: "It is our reaction to karmas through lack of understanding that creates most karmas we shall experience at a future time."

Tirukural: "All suffering recoils on the wrongdoer himself. Thus, those desiring not to suffer refrain from causing others pain."

Fifth Principle: Create No Negative Karmas

Now that we have a good grasp of the karmic consequences of various kinds of actions, what is needed next to progress even further in the management of karma is a firm commitment to refrain from actions that create new negative karma. Perhaps we should all take a pledge, such as "I promise henceforth to refrain from all actions that create negative karmas."

This is actually not as difficult as it sounds. How do we know if a specific action will create negative karma or not? Scriptures such as the Tirukural may make mention of it. We can ask a Hindu religious leader his or her opinion. We can ask our parents or elders. And once we get the knack of it, our own conscience will be able to provide the answer most of the time.

Gurudeva advises us: "Wise handling of karma begins with the decision to carry the karma we now have cheerfully, and not add to it. A firm decision to live in such a way as to create no new negative karmas is a sound basis for living a religious life, for following the precepts of dharma and avoiding that which is adharmic."

Tirukural: "What good is a man's knowledge unless it prompts him to prevent the pain of others as if it were his own pain?"

Sixth Principle: Seek Divine Guidance

We don't have to manage our karma totally on our own. Help is available, divine help, in fact. Such help comes from none other than Lord Ganesha, who has the duty of helping sincere devotees manage their karma in the best way possible.

Once, through sincere worship, an individual develops a personal relationship with Ganesha, he naturally drops off any remaining adharmic patterns of behavior and becomes fully established in a dharmic life. Not only does Lord Ganesha help you become established in dharma, but in the best personal dharmic pattern for this life, known as svadharma, your natural occupation and duties to family, friends, relatives, deceased relatives, community, guru and temple.

When we seek His permission and blessings before every undertaking, Ganesha, as the Lord of Obstacles, guides our karmas through creating and removing obstacles from our path, similar to a mother's watching over her young children at play. He also has an extraordinary knack for unweaving complicated situations and making them simple. He can unweave His devotees from their karma, clarifying and purifying their lives. How can we invoke this divine guidance when we encounter karmic difficulties? Simply by chanting His name or a simple mantra, or placing a flower at His feet, visiting His temples for puja, meditating on Him or just visualizing His holy form and inviting Him mentally to help in our time of need. He will respond.

Gurudeva comments on svadharma, "Such a life is the fulfillment of all previous efforts and thus erases the uncomplimentary deeds and adds beneficial ones, so a next birth can be most rewardingly great and useful to the whole of mankind."

Tirukural: "Draw near the Feet of Him who is free of desire and aversion, and live forever free of suffering."

Seventh Principle: Mitigate Past Karma

Once we have stopped acting in ways that create new negative karma, our life will be sublime enough to focus on ridding ourselves of karmas of the past, mitigating them, meaning to make less harsh, painful or severe.

To better understand mitigation, let's make another comparison to the judicial system. A man commits armed robbery and receives a ten- to twenty-year sentence. But due to good behavior in prison, he is paroled after only five years. He has mitigated his sentence, made it less severe, through his good behavior.

Let's now take an example of karma that is mitigated. You are destined to lose a leg in this life because you caused someone to lose his in a past life. If you are living a selfish, low-minded kind of life, the karma would come full force and you would lose your leg. However, if you are a kindly person who regularly helps others, the karma would be mitigated and you might read in the morning paper about someone losing a leg and take on the emotion of that experience as if it had happened to you. Later on when hiking you stumble and your leg is injured, but not severely. The full force of the karma was softened by your kind and helpful actions.

Following Dharma: Living virtuously, in itself, helps modulate the release of karmic seeds, evening out the ebb and flow of karma and minimizing "karmic explosions" that might otherwise occur. Thus negative karmas in one's individual pattern are naturally avoided or mollified and positive karmas accentuated and brought into fruition.

Karma Yoga: Helping others—karma yoga, performing good deeds—and thus acquiring merit which registers as a new and positive karma is one way of alleviating the heaviness of some of our past karma.

Bhakti Yoga: Worship, bhakti yoga, that is intense enough to cause us to receive the grace of the Gods can change the patterns of karma dating back many past lives, clearing and clarifying conditions that were created hundreds of years ago and are but seeds now, waiting to manifest in the future. The key concept here is intensity. Dropping by the temple for fifteen minutes on the way home from work is unlikely to accomplish such a transformation.

Pilgrimage: Pilgrimage is an excellent way to generate an intensity of worship. Over the years, Gurudeva's devotees have pilgrimaged to India, visiting major temples such as Chidambaram, Rameshvaram and Palani Hills. Many have come back transformed. They physically look a little different, behave differently and fit back into life in a more positive way than before. Their karma was changed by the grace of the Gods.

Vows: A vrata, or vow, can also generate an intensity of worship, such as fasting during the day and attending the temple on each of the six days of Skanda Shashthi or the 21 days of Vinayaga Viratam.

Penance: Penance, prayashchitta, is a forth way to mitigate karma. This is like punishing yourself now and getting it over with instead of waiting for your karma to manifest a punishment in the future. A typical form of penance is to perform walking prostrations, such as around a sacred lake or mountain, up a sacred path or around a temple.

Often it is advised to perform penance that is directly related to a misdeed. Let's take the example of a teacher who frequently used corporal punishment to discipline students but now strongly feels hitting children for any reason, even for discipline, is wrong. An appropriate penance would be to print and distribute to teachers literature on alternatives to corporal punishment. This type of penance should only be undertaken after a certain degree of remorse is shown and the urgency is felt by the devotee to rid his mind of the plaguing matter.

Gurudeva said, "When pre-dawn morning pujas, scriptural reading, devotionals to the guru and meditation are performed without fail, the deeper side of ourselves is cultivated, and that in itself softens our karmas and prolongs life."

Tirukural: "Be unremitting in the doing of good deeds; do them with all your might and by every possible means."

Eighth Principle: Accelerate Karma

Why wait twenty more births to achieve spiritual maturity when you could achieve it in two births? That is the idea behind accelerating karma. When we begin meditating and performing regular daily sadhana, preferably at the same time each day, our individual karma is intensified. In our first four or five years of striving on the path we face the karmic patterns that we would never have faced in this life had we not consciously intensified our spiritual practices. Those on the spiritual path resolve much more karma in a lifetime than others. They could be called professional karma managers.

Of course, family duties in the grihastha ashrama don't allow much time for sadhana. Thus, the principle of karma acceleration is best fulfilled in the stage called sannyasa, both by those following the path of the monk and by everyone after age seventy-two. Retirement can be more than playing golf. It is an opportunity to intensify our spiritual practices and thus accelerate our karma.

Gurudeva said, "By this conscious process of purification, of inner striving, of refining and maturing, the karmas come more swiftly, evolution speeds up and things can and usually do get more intense. Don't worry though. That is natural and necessary. That intensity is the way the mind experiences the added cosmic energies that begin to flow through the nervous system."

Tirukural: "Not allowing a day to pass without doing some good is a boulder that will block your passage on the path to rebirth."

Ninth Principle: Resolve Dream Karma

Though some of our dreams are only the result of thoughts occurring in our own mind, other dreams are astral experiences, of being conscious in our astral body and interacting with others in their astral body. These astral plane actions create karma, just as do our physical plane actions. This is the basis of the Hindu ideal that one would not steal or injure even in a dream. Why? Because such transgressions create negative karma that will come back to you. These are real karmas that may eventually manifest on the physical plane. However, this can be avoided if you happen to have further dream experiences in which appropriate actions are taken to dissolve the karma. More commonly, though, we can resolve dream or astral-plane karmas in the same way we would physical-world experiences, by performing penance for them in our waking state, while remembering the high standards of virtue and good conduct that should always be maintained, even during sleep. For instance, if in an emotional dream you injured someone intentionally, you could perform a simple penance the next day to atone, such as fasting one meal.

Gurudeva said, "These kinds of dreams—when a person is in his astral body and can feel what he touches, emote to his experiences, think and talk—are not what is known as the dream state. This is an astral experience, similar to the death experience, but the astral body is still connected to the physical body."

Tirukural: "The highest principle is this: never knowingly harm anyone at any time in any way."

Tenth Principle: Incinerate Karma

In the practice of yoga, we can burn up negative seed karmas without ever having to live through them. What we have to do is find the seed and dissolve it in intense inner light. Let's take the analogy of growing alfalfa spouts. You place the seeds in a jar and keep them moist until they sprout. But if you heat the seeds in a frying pan before putting them into the jar, they will no longer sprout. Similarly, karmas exposed to intense inner light are destroyed.

A meditation adept, having pinpointed an unmanifested karmic seed, can either dissolve it in intense light or inwardly live through the reaction of his past action. If his meditation is successful, he will be able to throw out the vibrating experiences or desires which are consuming the mind. In doing this, in traveling past the world of desire, he breaks the wheel of karma which binds him to the specific reaction which must follow every action. That experience will never have to happen on the physical plane, for its vibrating power has already been absorbed in his nerve system. This incineration of karmic seeds can also happen during sleep.

Gurudeva explains it in this way, "It is the held-back force of sanchita karma that the yogi seeks to burn out with his kundalini flame, to disempower it within the karmic reservoir of anandamaya kosa, the soul body."

Tirukural: "As the intense fire of the furnace refines gold to brilliance, so does the burning suffering of austerity purify the soul to resplendence."

Conclusion

No matter how deep our understanding of karma may be, actually applying our understanding of karma to the events in our daily life can still be a challenge. Why is this? Our humanness gets in the way; our ego is challenged and we react to preserve our self image; our emotions are stirred and we respond impulsively, without intellectual reflection; our attitudes are prejudicial against certain religious or ethnic groups and we feel justified in striking out at them, because they are not "our people."

How can such human weaknesses be overcome? It is by perfecting our character, which Gurudeva defined as "the ability to act with care." This is done through mastering Hinduism's Code of Conduct, the ten yamas, restraints, and the ten niyamas, observances (see HT, October, 1997, pages 32 to 35 or www.hinduismtoday.com/1997/10/1997-10-03.shtml). With a strong character in place, the mastery of karma becomes natural to us. Gurudeva mystically summarizes this process as follows:

"Bhakti brings grace, and the sustaining grace melts and blends the karmas in the heart. In the heart chakra karmas are in a molten state. The throat chakra molds the karmas through sadhana, regular religious practices. The third eye chakra sees the karmas past, present and future as a singular oneness. And the crown chakra absorbs, burns clean, enough of the karmas to open the gate, the door of Brahman, revealing the straight path to merging with Siva."

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