Karmakaze
Sunday, July 24th, 2005Tantriks like to talk about “burning up karma.” All sadhana burns up karma, but your average Tantrik wants to light a bonfire rather than a nice, sandalwood-scented candle. We know that all beings will eventually be liberated. Once you get to the part of the cosmic cycle in which you are actually an individuated, fleshly, manifest being, there’s only one way to go. In fact, being generally less dense than slugs or rocks, we’re all headed in the right direction. It’s just that some of us want to get there faster.
Being a heroic type, I once asked my teacher, “So, how exactly does one burn up karma?” I meant faster, and I wanted methods. Of course, there’s hard sadhana. Sit naked on a black rock in the desert, chant a few crore repetitions of a mantra, and, out of pure compassion for all beings, let vultures peck at you unimpeded. That’ll burn some karma. Note: a crore is ten million.
Believe it or not, though, this is not the fiercest way. The fiercest way is to do whatever the bleep you want and bear the consequences with total equanimity. As a naked sadhu says in Robert Svoboda’s first Aghori book: “I spit on your karma!”
This doesn’t mean do whatever the bleep you want in an unconscious, numbed out state and then whine when things don’t go so well. It means maintain impeccable detachment even as your world comes crashing down. No hope. No fear. No shame. No blame. No faking it! Become so at ease with any outcome, you slide between the karmic superstrings and watch them go pfhhht as you pass by.
I don’t mind telling you: I am not operating at this level. Surprise, surprise.
But I have been thinking a lot about karma, and I recently got some good teachings on the subject that I’d like to pass along to you.
Our first conscious encounter with karma is noticing the things we always do, our habits. We experience karmic patterns in our conduct. We might think about how those patterns manifest in our family, maybe even for multiple generations. At some point, we go to an astrologer who gets us to think on a somewhat larger scale about the patterns that show up in our lives. Time, stars, and planets enter the scene. But we are still indulging in the explanatory power of karma. In other words, karma becomes another way to tell The Story of Me.
Later, we might come to understand that the patterns that give our lives and our bodies a semi-predictable shape really don’t belong to us: they start in infinity, end in infinity, and touch everything along the way. The whole idea of karma as a collection of limited, personal knots we can work on and straighten out in the privacy of our own psyches blows up. Then comes the part when we forget the story and actually feel the force of karma compelling us through space and time. It’s like being pushed from behind by an unseen hand. This expansion of our View is overwhelming, but good medicine. Karma is burning.
Those of you who are thinking: “Oh good, Karma’s not personal. I’m off the hook,” can put the brakes on that little bit of escapism right now. The truth is: you are nothing but karma organized by freedom. Isn’t that weird? Unfreedom organized by freedom: That’s the manifest world. And you are responsible.
Let me try to explain. The only thing holding us together is karma. We are nothing but patterns of tension. Some of the tension feels yucky, some of it feels grand. But that’s beside the point. Karma is just a word that describes how the manifest world works, how it comes to be, its laws. Freedom chooses limiting patterns of manifestation (karma) so it can play the game of rediscovering freedom. And that’s human life in a nutshell.
We’re all about rediscovering freedom. And how do we do that? Kind of like accident victims in rehab with the masters and mahasiddhas playing the roles of physiotherapists. They help us learn to reuse our arms and legs. They give us crutches such as mantras and kriyas. We supply the effort and courage. We take our first baby steps, and everyone cheers. Think how much fun it is to rediscover freedom!
The unfreedom we experience now is nothing but the result of freedom. The freedom we exercise now contributes to either the hardening or unraveling of unfreedoms. Karma doesn’t begin and end with you, but you are responsible for your contribution to the karmic situation of everyone, starting with you.
There’s also the question of misery and time. How miserable do you want to be? How long do you want to take to relax into freedom? And what do you want your experience to be next time around? (I hear from my sources there’s a shortage of slugs in the slug realm.)
Of course, everything I’ve just said is based on a relative View: the View of cause and effect and linear time. This View is very partial. Any View that only describes dualistic experience and leaves out nonduality is partial. If you want to take the fiercest way, discount everything I’ve said and establish yourself in the Absolute.
You’ve got five minutes.
Luckily for me, before I tried this, the teaching I received laid out the options.
If you take the fierce way, and you are not fully prepared, you’ll end up entangling yourself in karmic tension even worse than before.
You might just break through to freedom. A sharp jab to the left, some good timing. You just might make it. Yeah!
Or, you might try too hard, jab too late, or just get hit by the recoil effect of your own fierce effort. Okay, so you live, but you ain’t any freer than before. And now you’ve got medical bills, too.
So, for those of us who aren’t yet exactly ready for the karmakaze express, the advice is clear.
Get help from good guides. Turn your limited resources to advantage through self-discipline. Eliminate karmic extravagance. Surrender your tensions through sadhana. Exercise your out-of-shape freedom muscles and choose differently now, in the present. Allow karma to resolve naturally. (But still a little bit faster!)
Boring and hard, I know. But the fierce karma-burning option offers only a one-in-three shot at success, and I’m not interested in playing Karmic roulette.
OM Shanti,
Shambhavi
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