The Katha Upanishad asks a fundamental question
that I keep veering back to, so captivating is its power: ‘what is it that
everybody knows but nobody believes?’ The answer it gives: ‘that you are going
to die’. Well, about 3000 years later the question retains its elemental power
but the answer has changed. Now, the answer should be: ‘that you will be judged
for your actions, your karma.’
Every religion, every society exalts the
belief you that you will be judged for your actions. That has been enshrined as
a primary organizing principle for societies since the beginning of civilization. The point being: if you have figured out how
to commit the perfect undetectable crime, you wont really get away with it: god
will nail you for it, so cease and desist. Almost every human being on this planet
understands and believes that, has a sense that there is a scalable price to
pay for bad actions, perhaps even rewards ranging to glory for good ones. Few
in the world actually think that actions will not have consequences. Even
atheists subscribe to a sense of morality – often superstition also, but that’s
another story, one that makes you wonder how many professed atheists are truly
atheist.
Yet hardly any of us behave as though this
applies to us, though we are pretty confident others are going to get hauled over the coals for bad karma, especially those who have harmed us. Schadenfreude is
universally adored. If we truly took to heart that we will be judged for our
own karma, we would give that single belief command over our minds and let it dictate
each and every action - to the extent we can assert such control. But we don’t.
That’s cognitive dissonance of epic proportions.
If karma is all that survives after this
life then karma is all that truly matters, in a spiritual sense. Someone said
the ‘the real never dies, the unreal never existed’. Everything other than
karma will get left behind in the constraining confines of these three
dimensions, only karma will survive death, so in that sense only karma is true
and real and enduring. Which brings us
to the answer to the Katha Upanishad question. Karma is the only real thing, and
is the one thing we know yet shrug off.
That is maya. Maya is the illusion that our
physical selves and the flow of events that constitutes our lives is what is
real, eclipsing our souls and our spiritual existence. As normal unenlightened
humans we are unable to sense our own souls, our true selves. We submerge our consciousness in the flows
and eddies of events while we seek maximum extraction from whatever streams of
life we choose – sensory, material, emotional, intellectual, creative. Some sense the existence of the spirit, of
something beyond the here and now, and seek a spiritual path. Yet the spiritual
path is not illumined, and it is easy to lose our way without guidance. Even
those who gain consciousness of the spiritual as an additional dimension of
life most often fail to link it back to the time bound three dimensions of material
life, and can remain driven in their actions and insensitive to their
karma. Maya is powerful and its
gravitational pull difficult to escape.
Bad karma takes many forms.
In the conscious or unconscious pursuit of karma
there is an almost unavoidable pitfall of behaviour - cruelty. We all fall in, are cruel to one another, and to
other sentient beings. That is the
single biggest negative action staining our karma, draining our karmic balance.
We are cruel to others –other people, other animals, to whoever or whatever we
define tribally as ‘other’. From another class, another caste, another race,
religion, political or belief system, another geography. ‘Other’ can be defined
as narrow or as wide as we choose, all the way to every sentient being other
than self (I and Not I is the world).
We are also perfectly capable of being
cruel to what we accept as our own, yet we just may just feel guilty about that
since societies have done their unswerving best to inculcate that sense of
guilt. But we generally have few qualms about treating the ‘other’ poorly –
societies sanction that, even promote it as a means of defining their own identity
and boundaries. People do that for a
variety of reasons sometimes just because it makes them feel good. A sense of
power, of being superior, of masking hurt and low self worth. The closer the
person we are cruel to, the greater the betrayal of both that person and
ourselves, of our own sense of integrity, and the greater the damage to both. We
cannot hurt others without wounding ourselves both psychically and spiritually.
Then there is lust: for money, for power,
for position, for sensory pleasures. We
will thoughtlessly or coldly or even self righteously do people out of their
rights, appropriate what’s theirs, use people, deceive them to help ourselves
to what we want rather than what we deserve, driven by our egos and greed, by
maya. This is another common form of karmic failure, and in a sense links in
with our attitude to ‘others’. Our sense of the ‘other’ moves in concentric
orbits, from close in to far out, depending on the nature of the action, and
also on how much harm we sense we are causing to the other. We can treat the
same person as ‘own’ or ‘other’ depending on our assessment of self-interest in
that situation.
Indifference is also poor karma. Those of
us who are privileged in some fashion and see the misery around us near and
far, should do something to provide the kind of help which we would welcome were
we in that situation. Not doing bad isn’t enough – we have to seek to do good. How
big a lapse that is depends on how dire the need for help is. Like everything
in nature, karma is nuanced and hierarchical, not black and white. There isn’t
a single point of transition from ‘bad’ to ‘good’, it is an almost endless
scale running from barbaric, psychotic savagery to kindness, compassion,
altruism and beyond…to enlightenment, moksha, nirvana.
Jimmy Carter once confessed that he had committed
adultery in his heart many times, as he had looked at a lot of women with lust.
Do thoughts constitute karma? Thoughts are the seeds of actions, and every
thought would lead to an action unless some other thought or impulse prevents
it. So is it okay to have terrible
thoughts just as long as we can rein them in? At a simple level one could say
yes, I may have had horrific thoughts but I never acted on them, so my actions,
my karma are okey dokey. Yes… but, you
cannot have a mind seething with terrible thoughts and not have any osmosis
from that flow into your basic stance in life, your basic approach and
attitude. Even if such thought doesn’t lead to negative actions it occupies the
mind and crowds out good thought. Bad thoughts and great karma don’t go
together. If we want to improve our karma, we have to improve our thinking with
reflection, contemplation, meditation, mindfulness. What is our intent, and what will be the effect of possible action? We need to
think about that, and think more about others today than we did yesterday.
For most of us, there are only two periods
in life when our karma are truly our own. As children our actions are guided to
a large extent by parents and teachers as we lead supervised lives. Later we
take on a partner, and a lot of actions are joint or influenced. The very first period in our lives when we are
truly free to exercise our own judgment is as young adults, when we have left
home and before we pair with someone - but a lot of that is thoughtless and
immature. The second period which comes to about half the population (of those
who enduringly marry/pair) is when you lose your partner. Then you are truly on
your own, as mature and informed as you will ever be, mostly in the final phase
of life with enough time on your hands to consider your actions. That is a stark call for reflection, to mull
over, re-evaluate your life and make whatever course correction you can. How
and on what basis are we selected for this – is outliving your partner the privilege
of good karma or the punishment of bad karma? Is it an opportunity to build
karma or just the punishing desolation of loneliness?
It isn’t, of course, essential to be single
to review your life and karma. The true
challenge is to think and act as an individual soul even when ensnared by the
myriad ‘nets of stone’ of our relationships. The rush and tumble of existence
is no excuse, just a challenge. There is an imperative in living a life
examined for reviewing our past not just as a series of events, triumphs and
failures, but also as the flow of karmic events. That is a completely different
filter to see things through, its like using a mental scanner that doesn’t see
or show the outlines of life that we normally see but looks only at the inner
workings of our intent and actions, the karma, the ‘real’ and enduring. Seen karmically our lives look unrecognizably
different, our biggest failures could be our greatest achievements and our
greatest achievements karmic fiascos. Overall, our sense of our lives can shift
seismically. A sense of satisfaction at a ‘successful’ life can be shattered,
and a fragmented sense of an unsuccessful life can be knit together,
miraculously repaired. Or a bit of both. The key is: did our karma improve over
time, remain the same, or get worse? Or was there no pattern at all as we lived
lives unconscious of the one thing we all know but don’t believe?
Every religion has its own do’s and don’t’s.
Islam is the most heavily specified, it
has binding rules for everything. ‘Directed’
karma? Is that real karma, or is free will an essential part of karma? Or is
the suspension of free will an act of free will? Orthodox Judaism is also
pretty prescriptive. Hinduism and Buddhism work off the lofty unifying metaphysical
principle that all sentient creatures are connected – which eliminates the
greatest karmic stumbling block, the ‘other’. If you take that message to heart
it is powerful and can impact your mind and behavior in a very profound fashion
– you cannot hurt anyone without hurting yourself. Both religions in their myriad
forms have unfortunately largely abandoned their soaring, transcendent
metaphysics for earth bound dogma and superstition and with a mind numbing imposition
of cant and credo. Christianity at its heart has Jesus’ Sermon of the Mount,
which in its elegant and deceptive simplicity captures the essence of ethics:
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. Beautiful and minimalist. The
countless versions of Christianity though are laden with layers of groaning dystopic
rules that would horrify Jesus. Religion sadly most often leads you away from,
not towards, the spiritual.
So how are we to redeem our lives, our
karma? My own guru reduced it simply to: “Try and always do good for others,
and if you cant, at least do no harm”. Clichéd
and trite? Like something your grandmother might tell you? Fasten your seat
belt. By ‘do good’ he meant never ever even think ill of others - he was known
to get mad at people for finding fault with others: ‘How could you even think that!’ This takes the game way
beyond Christ’s sermon on the mount, which was centered on actions and that too
relative to oneself. This treats thoughts and actions as one, and moves from
the comparative to the absolute plane – is good just what you would accept for
yourself in that situation or is good what is essentially the right thing to
do? First, this brings reality and immediacy to how we define the ‘others’ to
do good to. Those we come into contact with? Everyone in the family – nuclear
or extended? Everyone in the community, in the country? All of
humanity? All sentient beings? What weightage should we
give whom – how much good? Should you treat a neighbour’s child, or a child in
Syria the same as you would your own? Can you - does it make sense? Second, this
takes you right into the realm of thought: should the good be just in action,
or thoughts related to actual or possible action, or should the good extend to
thought even when there is no possible action? Are you allowed to think poorly
of others’ actions and fate that have nothing to do with you, maybe even quietly
enjoy a delicious bit of schadenfreude, while doing good or at least no harm? Nope,
sorry. Even a harmlessly malign thought is wrong, offside. The flow of thoughts
and actions have to be perfectly aligned and impeccably worthy, for true karmic
excellence. Still seem simple? Or more like a camel trying to figure a way
through a needle’s eye?
This is a true karma driven call to action,
and can set up a lifelong journey of ever improving karma. The challenge is to
take this simple sounding maxim as our primary and over-riding call to action,
to understand it profoundly, drive it deep into our hearts, and to surrender to
it such that it drives every action, and progressively colonises even our thoughts.
When you are dealing with others, even in social situations, seek to be aware
of this maxim. Yet, how do we change our behaviour in a comprehensive and
sustainable way? Overcome all the seemingly uncontrollable reflexive patterns
that we have inherited or developed over a lifetime, and which determine our
behaviour, in effect define who we are? That requires a deep, deep dive into
issues of identity and ego, it requires coming to terms with and deriving the
existential wisdom and the liberation that comes from facing up to and
understanding mortality and death, subjects I have reflected on
earlier. The deconstruction of our own identity and ego can help us
look back on our lives without the distorting refraction resulting from all the
damaging experiences of our lives and the lives of our parents, grandparents, going
back generations, and see clearly in our karmic patterns the good, the bad and
the oh-my-goodness. Equally, looking karmically at past situations where
we were hurt, humiliated, cheated will no longer aggravate us if we see that
our own karma was clear, and so any negative feelings are entirely related to
the ego; and the opposite, if we look at successes and see our own karma was a
little dodgy, the smug positive feelings are pure ego too. This can help
deconstruct the ego, the most critical spiritual task.
To think deeply about what we have been
doing and why, what we intend to do and why – that is the challenge of karma.
To own our karma, and see it not as the result of our actions, but as the
driver of our actions.
