Curated Resources: Karma

NOTE TO THE READER: Karma is a vast topic, with many pages of resources available to us. Shambhavananda talks at length about it in his book Spiritual Practice, and the ShambhavAnanda Yoga Text “Sacred Journey” does a great job of outlining it’s structure. I have also procured a few other resources that can round out your karmic education, but don’t be overwhelmed— stop when you’re full and be sure the resources are informing your practice, not your head.

At some point in this process, please leave a comment about which resource really helped unpack this concept for you.

SPIRITUAL PRACTICE

DISCUSSIONS WITH SRI SHAMBHAVANANDA

Can you talk about the circular breath?

The circular breath is really about developing an awareness of the subtle electrical nervous system that exists within you. The seven major chakras—crown, third eye, throat, heart, navel, sex, and root— are part of this system. As you begin, you are consciously circulating the breath and feeling the chakras as you do so. It is a prelude for

you to work with and open up the chakras. Many students find that the heart chakra is pretty easy to connect to. The navel chakra seems like a cavern in the center of the earth that is far away. As for the
sex chakra, students don’t know what to make of that. They tend to either externalize it, or they totally reject it.

The circular breath, the ability to allow the pranic energy within your breath to flow consciously in a circle, is the beginning of the refine- ment of your karma. At times your experience will be rocky. At times you are going to hit things that will shake your tree, but you have to keep working at it. Remember how when you were learning to ride

a bike you fell off the first ten times, but you did not give up and you eventually found your balance? Well, it’s the same with meditation. Once you find your balance, what you do in the next stage of work is that you use that balance in all the different situations that are a part of your life.

What students normally do is that they try to get out of the situations they got into, or they try to change things externally, so they don’t feel bad. It is much better to learn how to work inside and to get free of the need to react. Manipulating the world outside of you doesn’t solve anything. What does resolve your difficulties is that you can change your state of being through an inner practice and meditative discipline.

After you have been meditating for a few years, you will be able to share part of the process with others through teaching. Then you discover all the things you never thought of. The more I teach, the better I feel because I know less and less and less. Hmmm, how could that be? You go to school to learn more and more and more.

Is it okay for me to circulate energy through my chakras as I meditate?

Yes, try that. See what happens. If you run down the road screaming, I’d say that’s enough. You should stop. We have accumulated all kinds of tensions (physical, mental, emotional and psychic) in our physical bodies, in our nervous systems, and in our subtle bodies. These ten- sions are found in channels called nadis. Circulating energy through the chakras will push negative tensions through the nadis. You may experience it as activity or tingling in a particular spot in or on your body.

The metaphysical side of yoga is very subtle, and it is very real. Many students like to read and fantasize about spirituality, but it’s much better to practice and actually experience what a chakra is. Through practice you should be able to find it, to feel it, and also to be able to open it and to go into it. It doesn’t matter what it looks like. Some- times the process of stabilizing the mind and practicing a meditation will act like psychic Draino by cleaning out a lot of the debris in your psychic system. The inner fire of yoga is the reward.

There was a period of time when it was dead of winter, and I would have my window open on 14th Street. I would be in a tee shirt and I would feel very hot. There were other times when I felt very cold. The temperature shift is related to the three channels in the spine. One is the sun, one is the moon and one is the central channel.

My practice is getting stronger and stronger lately. When I meditate I sometimes feel lots of energy coming into different chakras. I try to stay calm and let it move through. Is that the best thing to do?

That’s good. You don’t have to get in a panic when a lot of energy starts to come into one of your chakras. You should simply take a breath in, then exhale and deeply relax into it. When you feel activ- ity in a particular chakra, relax, soften it, breathe into it, and it will invoke different types of feelings. At this point the strength of your practice kicks in because usually this is more refined energy that comes from another dimension. It will really stir the pot. It will help you remove many obstacles or obscurations that exist in your chakras and in your nervous system. When you are able to facilitate this process, you are making progress.

I really have trouble experiencing astral energy. What can I do to make that happen?

You are totally identifying with what you are seeing and what you
are defining. When I gaze into the world it all evaporates into energy. Meditation is important. I don’t think it is magically going to hap- pen on its own. We look at something and immediately the computer brain kicks in and defines it, accepts it or rejects it, and gives it color, form and shape. The next thing we know we are way down the road.

We can’t make an astral experience happen. We can only surrender into it. The things that we perceive and that we have collectively agreed on as a collective consciousness are made up of different vi- brations or rates of energy. People talk about the concept of astral vi- sion and the ability to see beyond the physical, but we are so attuned to seeing the physical that we don’t know any other way to see.

However, as your mind stabilizes, it doesn’t wander as much and you aren’t busy accepting, rejecting, or defining. Therefore you are able to relax and will start to see the world more energetically. You will see people and places, you see their form, but also you will see a certain kind of vibration or energy about them, and you begin to exist in a more subtle realm.

I don’t talk about metaphysical experience often, because we have so much to take care of in our day-to-day lives. We think to ourselves, “This is who I am and this is my world.” If you actually open up a little bit, those definitions keep changing. The nature of existence in samsara is that the world is always subject to change. When we try to hang on to this thing or not lose that concept, we miss a lot of what’s going on in a more subtle realm. We also miss joy, bliss, and fulfill- ment.

We view our lives through our accumulated experiences, and we define ourselves with this thing or that information. Mystics, yogis or spiritual people from the past lived in a world that was different from the one everyone else lived in. They saw things more clearly than the people around them. This is what a spiritual practice brings us. We should not turn yoga and meditation into a religion. A spiritual life
is not like that; it is not a hard and fast set of rules. There are times when your nervous system and your physical reactions are difficult to control in the way that you would like. When you become fright- ened, your heartbeat speeds up, and your blood pressure goes up. The best thing to do is to become as balanced and open as you can be, even though physical reactions are occurring.

Afterwards, I walked around all day, and, every time my foot hit the ground I noticed, “Oh! There’s the ground!”

So what’s the problem? May we all exist in such states! That’s very good. The subtle body and the physical body are usually locked together. However, when you accumulate enough energy from
your spiritual work, they separate. Then you may feel as if you are slightly out of your body or that you are floating above your body. You are moving into a dimension where the opportunity to elevate your practice is great. The opportunity to step off a cliff also occurs simultaneously. You have to be careful. You have to be sure you are grounded. Nonetheless, this experience is a very positive sign in your sadhana.

Remember, though, you won’t lose the body. It is still there, even if it seems to disappear during your practice. Nothing is required of you except to exist in this state of being, to relax, and to allow yourself to expand. It is okay to use the circular breath, very gently. Don’t try to force, push or expend energy. Just be in that space.

When I experience separating from myself I immediately panic and snap back into my everyday self. It feels like the faucet was turned off.

The only way to solve your issue is to practice. You need to get over that panic. You have to keep approaching that experience until you get comfortable with it. We have such a strong tendency to cling to our definition of self that, when we get beyond the borders of the mundane mind, it freaks us out. You have to learn how to be com- pletely present and very open. That state of separation is a very good place to be. It doesn’t involve your will and your control issues, so significant progress can be made from there.

Can you talk about the separation between the astral and physical body?

The separation has to ascend, and it only comes when you reach a certain volume of energy that is ascending as you circulate it. As it goes up you attach your awareness to it. At first you feel as if your body is expanding and your chakras are expanding. All of a sud- den there is this pop, and then there is another you in energy form. Really, it has much to do with your ability to get out of your head. I used to try to do it, and it never worked. But then I would just take a breath and go.

When this separation takes place, your awareness and your en- ergy field become very expansive. When you are totally locked in your body all you feel is the physical pain and the resistance. That’s why many times I am able to sit for a really long time and my body doesn’t bother me until I come back. It’s a very peaceful state. It isn’t stressful. It doesn’t feel like it requires much effort. It is like a soap bubble.

Sometimes I have a hard time making the transition from sleeping to waking, and I am sort of shaking and vibrating. Do you have any suggestions for me?

You should do a little practice. What I don’t do when I wake up in the mornings is think, “Aaargh, I’ve been working out a lot and boy am I sore.” Instead, I take a full breath and then as I exhale I really try to become more present here. I don’t jerk myself awake and run out of the room because I am late, or I am not going to make it somewhere. I always try to make the transition as consciously as possible. The shakiness and the vibration you experience have to do with separa- tion. You have to come back from where you were and ground here.

At night, sometimes I separate from my body and wake up unrested. Am I doing something wrong?

You are doing something right. Actually astral experiences are sometimes very exhausting. You are burning a certain type of energy and chemicals that can really affect you at first, but after a while it becomes easier to overcome those effects. For the most part we are so identified with our bodies that we seldom experience the perspective of being outside of them. Our consciousness, the energetic or spiri- tual side of our nature, is vast and not limited to the body. However, we are accustomed to being under the control of our physical experi- ences or needs. Thus when the separation occurs, it may be a little scary or even exhausting.

Sometimes in meditation I find a special place where I separate from my normal self.

Yeah, scary isn’t it. Just stay with it. It’s the undiscovered territory. During the process of growing spiritually, I have often found myself opening a door, and I am in a dark room. I don’t know where the walls are, and I can’t find a light switch. I am not even sure where I am. But I do not run around frantically or try to go back where I was. I open up more to the space and then the lights slowly come on.

Often when we reach a new space on our spiritual path, we try to bring along many concepts and habits that we have used in the past to define ourselves or to define our limitations. It is better to sit there and be present and allow the new level to unfold. Our minds and our thoughts have a tremendous hold on us. We are very attached to the accumulated experiences of our lives. Some of those experiences provide us with good information, but many of them are based upon previous tensions from our current and past lives.

To be able to sort all that out--fear, anxiety, anger--we have to learn how to let go. The negative tension is heavy; thus it drops away, and what we are left with is the pure Self. We are not losing anything of value. It may seem that way in the beginning because we have been strongly identified with this image of ourselves that we have created. However, when we go into meditation and are deeply focused inside, we become very present and conscious of each breath and every mo- ment. In this space, baggage that we carry can be dropped away. This process may create anxiety about letting go of the baggage that we are attached to, but if we get rid of the baggage, we also get free from some heavy karma--heavy psychic tensions that bind us. The Inner Self within will soar and expand. We will energetically experience
a lightness and a buoyancy, and will feel deeply nourished. We will partake of a very deep, deep spiritual feeding that will replace that lump of tension that we were carrying around.

I have been feeling very challenged by many issues in my life. How can I deal with this?

I can honestly say my most annoying, biggest challenges usually brought me the most growth. What does that mean? It means I had to work very hard to get above some of the people and things in my life that at the time seemed unjust, uncalled for, and unnecessary. That hard work helped me to jump light years ahead of where I was, whereas when things were going the way I wanted them to, I put less energy into my growth process.

Rudi referred to the challenges of life as fuel--fuel to burn, fuel to heat up this inner purification that takes place when you begin a spiritual practice. He said our tensions create natural resources. We have mountains of fuel inside to use and the way one burns these tensions (this fuel) is through the process of surrender. Surrender means not rejecting, but releasing, our tensions, and this process cre- ates a chemistry. We sometimes experience changes in our psychic systems that feel like heat literally starting to burn up our tensions. We don’t even have to know what they are. We are able to create

such a tremendous flow and heat that we are performing a massive purification. There were times that physically I was so hot in winter weather that I would wear a tee shirt because I was burning up so much stuff from deep inside. The difficult things in our lives hold the greatest potential because they symbolize a big chunk of locked up energy in our bodies and nervous systems. We don’t have to go look- ing for trouble. Trouble usually finds us, but we have to know how to handle it when it shows up.

Can you talk about resistance?

You will recognize resistance in thoughts such as, “I don’t want to
do this or that. I don’t like him or her. I don’t want to give up sugar. No, I want pizza.” We all have many different levels of resistance to just about everything. Many of us have developed strong likes and dislikes. A good yogi, however, neither accepts nor rejects. If you
can imagine living without accepting or rejecting, you will begin to understand the concept of surrender. To be able to surrender you are required to dissolve the mental constructs that you have created. You will then be able to use the energy that was holding on to acceptance and rejection to move your resistance through the chakras, refine it, and turn it into surrender. When you surrender, you are consciously releasing your attachments, definitions, and illusions.

The ability to identity or feel these things and release them creates an inner heat that begins the purification process. That inner heat will move through each of the seven chakras and create the fire of yoga that will purify much of the debris you have within your chakras. The goal is not to suppress your attachment and resistance. It is to devel- op the ability to expand beyond them and to release them.

You have to let go of you. We construct a personality that is a mental and energetic construct defining the world we live in. We have iden- tified and defined who we think we are. The process of growing spiri- tually and evolving as a human being has to do with developing the ability to move beyond our contracted definitions of self. To succeed requires focus and discipline. Pranayama and mantra, for example, are tools that we use to move beyond this container that we live in.They are tools that help us expand. We use them just as we would use a pump to put air in a tire—but we are the tire, not the pump.

It’s important to have as much clarity as you can. Practicing clarity is a very, very good thing. You will be very successful in the world in whatever you do if you can do that. It is good to be successful. The material world isn’t bad. It is the arena that we live in and work out our karma. If we are unconscious and sloppy in our lives, both emotionally and physically, we are wasting a great opportunity to grow and evolve as a spiritual person. We have the opportunity to reach a state of awareness that’s beyond where we normally function. Spirituality is unseen, so I think of it as the unseen truth that exists within us.

We are greatly influenced by many things around us and from inside of us. Gaining clarity and peace of mind allows us to see the truth
of our lives. Meditation is a process of discovering our true nature. It’s been defined in a lot of the scriptures. However, it doesn’t do you much good to know that definition unless you can actually approach it, and that takes some practice.

Lately I have been getting dizzy when I meditate.

Focus on your navel chakra a little more. If you have too much energy, do the circular breath. I got so dizzy once I felt that I was no longer in my body. That was scary when it happened. I wondered “Ooh, who is that?” When you attain a certain level of awareness there is a sense of separation that occurs. It’s very disorienting, espe- cially if you are trying to cling to how you see yourself.

Paying attention is hard for some people. They find paying atten- tion to being where they are difficult because they are running many scenarios through their minds at once. Occasionally I see people who are really more present than ordinary. In airports and traveling around you see people who are very centered. I was working out the other day at a health club and there was an Asian guy who was walk- ing towards the pool. That guy was really present in the moment. He seemed to glide as he walked very consciously. Of course, you also see the ones who are thinking and walking into things.

SPIRITUAL PRACTICE

DISCUSSIONS WITH SRI SHAMBHAVANANDA

Chapter 7: Karma and Samskaras

Kashmir Shaivism teaches that pure consciousness (Shiva) di- vided himself into all sentient beings to go through the process and the joy of discovering his true nature. But in the end, we are all going where we are going. It is just how consciously we take the ride that determines whether it is fun or not.

- S. Shambhavananda

Could you please talk about karma?

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Because we live in a certain state, mentally, physically, and emotionally, we create a particular type of energy. We carry the pattern of that energy with us from our past lives into our present lives. Developing conscious activities, not wasting our energy, and not going into the darker areas of our personalities create the type of karma that will support us in our growth. It will give us the work necessary, as well as the ability to do the work necessary, to release these patterns. They are the accu- mulated experiences and samskaras that are all stored in our bodies, in our chakras, and in our unconscious minds.

Meditation is a remedy for our tensions. It helps us peel away layer after layer of misunderstanding, of pain or rejection, and all the things that limit us as we go through our lives. Meditation is about freeing ourselves from this karma, or these accumulated energy pat- terns and blows that we have taken in our lives. Meditation purifies our accumulated karmas. If we perpetuate illusion, if we perpetuate unconscious behavior, if we are pursuing things for fulfillment exter- nally, we will always suffer the consequences of our tensions.

But, when we find that state of being that all the scriptures, all the yo- gis, and all the great teachers of the world have talked about--when we find that internally--we become supremely free. We are able to love more, be more open, and experience life more fully. It is as if we have found another world. The problems don’t go away. Everything is not peachy keen all the time. We have found the way to be--the way to exist in this world--that is enlightened compared to where we have come from.

When we project anger and negativity or when we are jealous or un- kind, we are creating the circumstances that at some point will return to us. Thus, we see that as we learn how to control our emotions, thoughts, and actions, the scales begin to tip in our favor in that our karmic load will be lightened. On the other hand, if we continually behave badly, even if we don’t mediate, we are not sinners. We are just increasing the load of heaviness in our lives and in our patterns, even though we know it is bad for us. We may feel compelled to con- tinue these negative actions, feeling as if we don’t have an option. But we do! We can always take a breath.

This evening I just started crying a lot during meditation and I couldn’t stop. What was that about and what should I do?

We carry around in our unconscious these things called samskaras. Samskaras are energy patterns created by the blows--emotional, physical, and psychic--that we have taken over the years. They tend to be covered up by our present lives. When we begin to meditate, many of the old patterns come up. We may wonder, “Why has it tak- en so long, why am I feeling this now, and what does it mean?” If you can surrender it, you don’t have to know any of that. When memo- ries come up, they totally erase everything, and all we can feel is that emotional samskara. It is good that that happened, but it is necessary that you have the discipline to work through it. If you indulge in it, self-pity comes up, and students may wail, “Oh my life is not any bet- ter, it is so terrible, why do I bother to meditate?”

Actually, in a way, your experience is a good sign. It means you are ready to penetrate a little deeper into your blocks, obscurations or karma. This type of experience manifests in many different ways over many years of spiritual practice. Often students reach a point where there are some things that they just can’t get past. They may have arrived at that point in lifetime, after lifetime, after lifetime, having stopped growing each time they met that block.

Students sometimes have a mistaken idea about spirituality. They think we all should love dolphins, and that we are floating through fantasyland. But real spiritual work is work. It takes a conscious effort, and when you run up against a wall, it is your wall. It is not my wall. You are the one who has to use your practice, your connec- tion, the sangha, and the shakti to help you break through. As your practice moves forward, you will be able to see this type of samskara coming a long way off, and you will be prepared and move through it pretty quickly. But if you are sort of cruising along you might be surprised when something like this comes up.

What’s the difference between samskaras and samsara.

Samskaras are accumulated psychic tensions. For example, you might experience an emotional or physical blow that has an effect on your nervous system. Someone might really hurt you emotionally, and it hurts inside of you. Those are samskaras. You carry your samskaras around within you, and you filter your life and your experiences through these accumulated tensions. Meditation resolves and re- leases the tensions, not allowing them to define your reality. Samsara is another word for the world that we live in. The nature of samsara

is squabbling and fighting, up, down, and sideways. It is the physical world. So samskaras and samsara are two different things.

I have recently had a number of traumatic experiences in my life, and I am feeling overwhelmed. How can I work with these circumstances?

Mantra would be good. Mantra is a vibration of energy that can release the traumas that life brings to us. We all take a lot of blows in life from many different arenas, and they can build up irrational fears and thoughts in our psychic systems. The pressures they build up inside of us are called samskaras. We often don’t know how to let go of that pressure. We feed it with continued attention to the problem. We feed it with justification. We feed it with self-righteousness and ignorance. Often we aren’t even aware that we are feeding it. As the pressure builds, we behave unconsciously, or in very negative ways, and don’t even realize that’s what we are doing.

In the outer world all solutions are external, and pleasure, peace and happiness are found in some object. The yogic tradition tells us that the opposite is true, that resolving one’s karma and samskaras require inner work and spiritual practice, along with a very strong commit- ment to the process. What is required for inner growth is the ability to sit down and go deeply into your heart to release fear, anxiety, and anger. Inner growth isn’t about rationalizing, analyzing, or sharing your problems with others. Inner growth occurs as you develop the ability to improve yourself.

I am experiencing a great deal of negative karma, and it ties me in knots. I try and try to work with it, but it keeps coming back. I don’t know what I am doing wrong.

You don’t need to think you have done something bad that causes you to attract negativity into your life. We all have karma that we need to work out. Therefore, situations come, tensions arise, and we experience guilt and anxiety. You may think this is your karma, feel that it is bad, and you have to pay the price, but that’s not the way it really is. It is that you have a knot of energy that you need to release to be free of this particular situation, or this particular karma.

We have all suffered from seemingly bad things that have happened to us, and we can’t figure out why. Spiritual work is the remedy for that suffering. Spiritual work is not about blame or guilt. It is about growth and transcendence, moving beyond the patterns that bind us. To have the opportunity at any point in your life to seriously work on those patterns is rare. If you get the chance, then you really should do it because it will only improve everything that you do in the future.
It will give you the inner balance and the inner strength to have a successful and productive life and a creative existence. Many people fall into ruts that their history and family have created. It is difficult to move beyond those ruts. If you truly wish to evolve, you move beyond over and over and over. You don’t lose anything that is real. You only release illusion!

How can I avoid creating karma?

How do you not create karma? By disciplining the mind. You already have karma. You all are here because of your karma. Your genetic makeup is part of your karma. How do you avoid creating more karma? You do not accept or reject things. You live in a state of bal- ance and a state of conscious awareness, and you move gracefully and consciously through life. Generally, you remain happy and do what you do, but consciously.

You are not in some exotic state. We create the circumstances for
our karma by how we allow our minds to function. If we spend hours thinking about how much we dislike someone, we are creating karma. If you are thinking how much you love someone, you are cre- ating karma, because the love you are thinking about is attachment, not love.

It is a wonderful thing to pursue spiritual growth, which all of you are doing in so many different ways. Some of you have very compli- cated lives and others are very simple. You are householders or you are single. You all have various life circumstances. Your life is your karma. It is your puzzle.

The doorway to your freedom, or your realization, is opened by working through your individual karma. That means that you do not allow your habitual patterns and reactions to dominate you. It is okay to have a life. It’s okay to have relationships. It’s okay to raise a family.

It’s okay to start a business. However, if any of these things suck every bit of your energy and become the purpose of your whole life, you are not having a spiritual life. If you have a skill or a trade that you have worked at for a while, or have even invested a lifetime in, you should use it to better yourself and to be a benefit to others. I have a skill and a trade, and so that is what I am doing. But if you only do something for yourself it’s not the same. Instead, you create a lot of smallness and narrowness.

Generally, the greedier you are about what you think you need, the less you end up with. The people who open up to life have a much richer life than everyone who is busy plotting and scheming. When you are working for something bigger than yourself or are support- ing something much bigger than just you, you will grow much more. I think most of you are doing well. You have good lives, families, and jobs. Some of you have situations where you can be in the Ashram. All of this is very good. One is not any better than another. It is how you use these things, what works for you that counts. I feel very fortunate that I have been living in ashrams since I was twenty years old. They have not always been sane. Sometimes they were just plain crazy, but I was able to work out my karma in that arena. I feel very grateful for that, but living in an ashram is not everyone’s karma.

Sometimes I have the sensation that there is a big space in front of me and nothing to hold on to. Then I realize I am holding on to tension. How should I work my way out of this situation?

Jump off the cliff. Isn’t that what Carlos Castaneda did? He was taken to the cliff and told to jump. He did, and he didn’t fall. You have to be able to take that leap, that gesture to the universe that you are will- ing to go beyond yourself. If you aren’t willing to do that, then many things are not available. When you have many strong attachments,

it is hard to make that leap. You are totally correct, our tensions are what bind us to the incarnation that we are living. The first three or four thousand jumps are hard. By the time you do ten thousand you get really good at it.

Babaji, how did beings first have karma?

I have no idea. (laughter)

There are many theories about that, but instead of thinking thoughts like that, I think, how can I deal with the condition that I am in now? I did many things to get here. I acknowledge that. I have certain pat- terns and certain likes and dislikes. Where it all started? Who knows! I would be skeptical if someone told me that they knew. The universe is a very large and mysterious place.

As individuals, we are very focused on our own small space that we occupy in this universe, and we only think about that. We are miss- ing almost everything. So, I don’t know where it all started. Classi- cally, the way Kashmir Shaivism addresses this question is to say that pure consciousness (Shiva) divided himself into all sentient beings to go through the process and the joy of discovering his true nature. You could look it up in a philosophy book. But in the end, we are all going where we are going. It is just how consciously we take the ride that determines whether it is fun or not.

Everyone has unique karma. We each have patterns that we have accumulated, and that we have dealt with throughout our lives. The patterns are based upon our psychic tensions and our definitions of self. These narrow definitions of self are illusions because they are not who we are. We are something much greater and much more expansive than these illusions. Nonetheless, we cling to these accu- mulated experiences and tensions, and they impact the way we act and the way we think. Through meditation we are able to still the thought waves of the mind in order to see them a little more clearly.Those who say, “This is the way it is. This is the way it’s got to be. This is the way I am, and this is the way all of you have to be,” are fighting a hopeless battle. By the time they figure that out it’s often too late to change.

Occasionally I have succeeded in releasing my tensions, but they always come back.

If you have vanquished them once, you can vanquish them again. You don’t take a vacation and think, “Oh, now I am done.” Tensions are always lurking in the background. Just think of how much time you have invested in creating them, how many years of karma you carry with you from both this and past lives. However, once you have learned how to work, then you can apply your new tools. Eventually, the negative chunks of karma will get smaller and smaller and fade away.

I find that practice is a powerful tool. Meditate twice a day, and you will start taking the air out of the balloons of tension that you have accumulated. You will create the energy to see through the illusions that you have clung to.

A big part of my spiritual growth involves my discovering what I
am not. The first 20 years I would think, “Oh, I was really wrong about that.” As I uncovered more and more of my misconceptions, I learned not to pay attention to most of the negative stuff and sams- karas that bubbled up. I looked for a deeper understanding of myself. That improved my ability to function in the world instead of being a victim of clashing egos and energies. I have learned how to be pres- ent in the different aspects of my life. I now watch these things come and go.

Seeking the witness state in your meditation will help you make a transformation in the way you view yourself, your life, and your karma. You repeat a mantra or you do pranayama, and you work at being present. If you succeed in becoming expansive enough, you will feel or visualize a thought arising. If you catch it when it first demands your attention and you don’t give in to it, it will start to dis- sipate. In the witness state you allow the thoughts, feelings, and emo- tions to come and go without identifying with them. It is as if you are emptying a huge warehouse full of junk that you carry around in your unconscious mind. Who knows how long you have hung on or clung to it. The ability to allow these thoughts, feelings, and emotions to come and go without attaching to them will give you a deeper experience of your true self--your true nature.

We identify incorrectly with parts of ourselves that are created and built upon tension and misunderstanding. We become tangled in the definitions that we have created. The experience of the witness state teaches us how to avoid being sucked into our old, old patterns and we learn new ways to be inside. This is how we find out who we really are as opposed to exploring all those products of tension that usually crop up in our minds.

I have been experiencing some serious pain and anger that I can’t quite understand or deal with. I could really use some suggestions.

I think no amount of understanding will resolve it. The more you put your attention and your mind on your karmic tensions, the more you are feeding them. You need to cut off the hooks that your mind wants to put into your pain. Some students want to sit down and contemplate their pain. It is much better to sit down and surrender, to release it and to go beyond it in yourself.

Sometimes when you try to figure out your insanity, it increases, right? Same with your depression or your negativity. You cannot resolve a negative pattern with anger. When you can release it in the heart, then it will be resolved. When you cannot release it you re- main stuck in your samskaras, and are unable to move beyond your negative karma. We often have addictions to certain things, certain ways of thinking, certain expressions, but we have no awareness. We just do it. We are down the road a hundred miles, and we don’t even know it.

Whatever arena you find yourself in, whether you are a student, a wife, a husband, a yogi, that is your arena. That is your context where you can take this practice and apply it. You don’t have to be anywhere specific to do the practice. That is what makes the difference. Many students are totally and completely convinced that the solution to their problems has to do with them changing something externally, only to find out they have created another set of problems. I have seen people move from crisis to crisis, and they don’t seem to get the connection between their actions and the crisis. They just think they have bad luck.

Becoming more conscious means that as these patterns arise we de- velop the ability to be present and to witness them. We don’t pounce on them, and analyze and think about them. It has been said that when you feel these things coming up you can visualize yourself be- ing on a train. Now you are going past the town of desire, now you are going past the town of anger. Instead of getting off the train and visiting, you just keep moving on. The more you engage energetically and emotionally in your old patterns, the deeper their hold on you becomes. Trying to understand these things becomes irrelevant after you have worked through them. My growth has allowed me to let go of a lot of understanding, because the need to understand was the thing that was binding me, and I had no peace.

I am really struggling with my desires for success in the outer world and my desire for inner development. What do you suggest?

We try to hold our world together with our minds and our emotions, and we try to use that to get us through our lives. This tactic works to a degree, but it doesn’t help your inner development as a person. Nor does it help you work through your karma. Eventually you will become more “right” than everybody else because you were success- ful. The worst people to deal with are the people who use their wills to be successful. They have very strong egos. My definition of success is to find happiness and inner freedom, so that no matter what is go- ing on, I can always find that place of peace in myself. That is what is called having a spiritual life. When we have to have things a certain way all the time, or we want to engage in activities that we know deplete us, we are not growing. When you quit allowing your ego to rule your actions, your life doesn’t get dull, boring, and meaningless. Instead, it gets better and richer. You find more depth in the things that are right around you, right in front of you.

I have traveled a lot and now I understand what Muktananda meant when he said, “Oh, yes, rocks and trees everywhere you go.” The world is a beautiful, mysterious place, but the inner life is even more beautiful and more mysterious. You will find it if you place your fo- cus inside. The things that are necessary and that will have a deeper meaning to you come into your life without you having to pursue them. The worst thing is to spend twenty years pursuing something, and when you finally get it, to wonder, “What the hell did I do?” You discover you don’t want this, or it doesn’t taste as sweet as you thought it would.

When you are pursuing a spiritual life, working inside and really growing, your life can become sweet, very simple, and very nourish- ing. You find beauty, harmony, and compassion all around you. It isn’t some grueling, terrible task to grow spiritually. It can be a joyful one. That’s why I love kirtan and chanting so much. You come and chant and leave all the world behind. People enjoy making music to- gether. It frees you inside, loosening up all the tightness of your day. Then you can sit down and meditate with me, and we can really share something that is very alive and very real. But if you come in full of your day and all your problems and are totally in your head, you may be annoyed by all these people chanting and dancing around, think- ing, “What kind of place is this? I want to meditate.”

Here we are being taught how to work with a fairly advanced spiri- tual practice. We are also being taught how to use it in our lives to get beyond the samskaras that hold us back. We are learning how to burn through our negative karmas. Whatever stage of life you are at, beginning, middle, or end, you can really derive deep, deep fulfill- ment from the practice that we do.

I feel that I have been in a trap lately. I am trying to fix a lot of things but instead I am creating new issues.

Over the years I have had many situations occur where I saw the po- tential, and I knew the situation could be something more or greater if only something could change. I used to spend a lot of time and en- ergy trying to fix those things that I thought were wrong, but I have learned that sometimes things are beyond fixing. My idea now is to become as stable and balanced in my own being as I can, even when I am being attacked or misunderstood. Sometimes people just like to fight with you for no good reason. It is a challenge when these deep, deep samskaras arise. Because these things are based upon literally life times of patterns, I usually attempt to take my practice up a notch or two or do more mantra.

Often we cling to things that would best be allowed to move away. But it is difficult to do that when we have put a lot of time and energy into certain things and they don’t work out. My solution is to try to create enough momentum in my own life and practice so that when one thing doesn’t work out, I am open enough for another thing to come along or to find another path to be taken.

When we get frozen in our minds about things being one way or an- other, our samskaras make it impossible for anything to happen. The most surprising thing for me over the years was realizing that what
I was clinging to and how I thought something should be were the biggest obstacles to having something better come along. We cling so desperately to our tensions. It is as if we have a strangle hold on an anchor, and we are sinking to the bottom of the ocean, and we won’t let go. It is not a fun way to be. But, if for a moment or two, you can reach that state where you are totally present, you are not in the past, you are not in the future, your heart is open, and you have a deep sense of gratitude, then everything releases. All you have to do is not grab it again. Grabbing it again is often our biggest problem.

I am experimenting with purifying my diet to become a purerperson. Is that a good thing to help me?

Becoming a religious fanatic about diet or other current fads does not enhance inner growth. It is more effective to sit down and empty your mind of its tensions. It has been written that the mind is the slayer of the soul. The mind can make your world heaven or hell. You can bury yourself under mountains of tension, fear, anxiety, and un- conscious actions. The result is that you will suffer the consequences by adding to your warehouse of samskaras.

It is very productive to spend a little time each day to empty out the accumulation all of the negativity that you might have experienced in your day. Every day you should find a place of balance internally. That place is often referred to as a state of being. It is a state of pure awareness and pure consciousness. Practicing meditation should bring you to a state where you can be totally present in each moment. That means you aren’t in the past; you aren’t in the future; you are totally present. It is an extraordinary experience. When it happens you begin to understand the vastness and the beauty of the universe that we live in.

That view isn’t attained through magic potions or guided drug trips or whatever else they are selling in Boulder these days. It is attained through the inner work that you have to do. No one else can do it for you. Your own steady work will help you experience the incredible clarity of mind that is possible.

I can tell at times that I am sort of making up stuff sometimes to make myself feel okay about things another part of me knows are illusions.

Illusion, the weaver of dreams and fantasies that everyone succumbs to, is an amazing mechanism to observe. However, you have to be able to get outside of the pattern, your pattern, to really experience the meditative discipline of the witness state. The witness state allows you to develop the ability to observe your thoughts and feelings come and go without grabbing on to them. You don’t own them. You attach to them because you feed them. If you don’t feed them but simply witness them by watching them go by, you achieve a state of clarity. When you attain that state in meditation you see things in an expanded and very present way. It is important to practice your meditation, be it mantra or puja, or any of the other techniques that have been developed over centuries to stabilize the mind. Eventually, you will be able to observe that process and then you will begin to dig more deeply into your patterns, your karma, your samskaras. The vision of these things enables you to deeply let go of them and to sur- render them. You will see through the illusions that bind you.

When I was a kid, I experienced odd ticks, and lately I’ve been feeling them coming up in meditation. I feel that I have to let them occur to help the energy move. Should I surrender them, or what?

I think you should feel that urge and bring energy to it. When you are circulating energy, bring a little more of a flow to that urge. And then I think something will open up. It isn’t important where or what. If you feel that urge starting to arise in you, draw energy into it, and you might gain an understanding of what’s going on. We carry in the unconscious these accumulated samskaras, impressions which are psychic tension. Part of the process of spiritual growth is the refining and the dissolution of these samskaras. When you start to dig down into the unconscious, into the psychic system, you will uncover things. Then you can really bring about change, not by ap- plying any kind of force directly with your will, but by drawing this flow of energy that you experience when you meditate into your samskaras. Where the energy flows, as I sometimes joke, it works like psychic Draino. It starts to break up the congestion or the block that exists there. The flow will take care of moving out the psychic tension you are experiencing.

I think I’m starting to realize that this strong pattern of fear is at the root of all of my other patterns.

Well, you have a veritable forest of roots. You have many roots--the roots of your problems. We all do. They are called samskaras. What you need to do is to practice more. The psychological realizations that I’ve had over the years weren’t as valuable as the experiences that

I’ve had in my spiritual practice. Sometimes I realized that I
was an idiot. But I didn’t focus on, “You’re an idiot.” I focused as Shivo’ham—I am Shiva. Seeing one’s patterns is a good start, but you shouldn’t feed them. You should really work at surrendering and releasing them.

SPIRITUAL PRACTICE

DISCUSSIONS WITH SRI SHAMBHAVANANDA

I have lately experienced very weird things in meditation. I have had experiences that are totally unfamiliar to me. Is there something I should do?

You know how people sometimes do fasts and cleansings to get rid of physical toxins? We also have psychic toxins. They are the old patterns, from God knows when that we carry around with us. These patterns are floating around inside of us, and if they find an opportune moment, they will come up. We’ll find ourselves thinking, “Oh, it is time for a cigarette,” even though we don’t smoke. Our job is not to analyze that occurrence, nor to wonder where it came from. We all have this stuff from the past buried in our unconscious minds. If you have a solid practice you can allow this material to arise. It makes you feel weird only because you start engaging it. If you can breathe into it and release it, it is a kind of a purge.

Part of the process of meditation is the purification of the unconscious. All sorts of emotions, including fear and anxiety, may pop up into our consciousness. Much of it is material we have been stuffing for a long time. Much of it we have created from our own experi- ences. It can be a little terrifying, but regular practice over time will help us clear out this old stuff. In the 70’s people were doing various drugs. They would blow their psychic systems open, and they would have freak-outs and strange experiences. What they were doing was blasting open the doors to the unconscious into areas that should be approached with conscious awareness and discipline. That’s why psychedelic drugs are dangerous. Rudi once said it’s like swallowing a stick of dynamite. Certainly you are going to have an experience, but it could really damage you. External solutions to internal problems seldom work.

When we have a thought, whether we are angry or afraid or happy or unhappy, we have to understand that this thought moving through us is not a complete picture of who we are. We have to do enough practice and meditation to get to the witness state. Otherwise, our minds wander all over the place. That is how most people function. We are programmed that way. When we watch television, we see short snippets flashing at us to grab our attention. Madison Avenue knows we can’t focus. Advertisers know all about how to mess with our small minds. An interesting experiment when watching televi- sion is to turn off all the lights in the room as well as the sound on the TV to see what the advertisers are doing to us. They are flashing light at us. We see things moving and jumping all around. They are pulling our attention here and pulling our attention there to keep us engaged. Our minds behave in the same way.

Over time you will gain some experience from doing your practice. You will learn how to work with these things that come up and make you crazy, or with the things that are evoking a negative response
in you. You can be ahead of them. They don’t have a hold on you. You can deal with the situation you are faced with as it is, instead

of bringing history or your tensions and your fears into your reac- tion. Then you are able to take care of the situation in a very simple and conscious way. That is the way a spiritual person should live--in a simple, conscious way. Your life will then be very rich and very fulfilling. No longer will you be dragged through the mud over and over again so that you eventually are worn out and self-medicate to the point of oblivion. That is not a solution. It is just creating more samskaras. You can’t change everything all at once, but meditating everyday has a cumulative effect. You can’t give up doughnuts in one day. You have to break your goal down to a doughnut every other day and then a doughnut once a week and then once a month.

Sacred Journey

A Guide to Meditation in the Shambhava School of Yoga

Compiled by: Swami Kripananda

THE ROOTS OF KARMA

“We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.
Speak or act with an impure mind
And trouble will follow you
As the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart.
We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.
Speak or act with a pure mind
And happiness will follow you as your shadow, unshakable.”

- The Buddha

“The most valuable thing that one can learn is how to meditate, how to have a deep spiritual life and an inner awareness, because it puts you in a position that allows you to confront the tensions, the karma, the habitual patterns of your life and to get above them. Getting above them means that you have found the inner resources, the inner energy, and the inner awareness, that can literally trans- port you to a different level of consciousness. That doesn’t mean that all these difficulties go away and all of a sudden everything is peaches and cream. It means that instead of being caught on the same level and dragged around by your karma, through your prac- tice of meditation you are getting above your ordinary level and the karma can be dissolved. It can be fulfilled.”

- S. Shambhavananda

Chapter 10 ! The Roots of Karma

The philosophy of karma is an important foundation of Shamb- hava meditation practice. The word karma means action. Action refers not only to physical action or movement but also subtle action or thought. The law of karma is the law of cause and ef- fect. Every action has a reaction or consequence and every word or deed starts with a thought. Ultimately we create our karma by our thinking. We create our life, our universe, our reality by how and what we think. And meditation, of course, is the process that best teaches us how to deal with our mind.

There are four primary types of karma: sanchita, prarabdha, kri- yamana and agama. Sanchita means “heaped together” and is the sum of all past actions, both known and unknown, that are stored in the warehouse of the causal body, or unconscious mind. Unknown actions might be those that we’ve performed in past lives. This is why some people say that the ways of karma are un- fathomable. Prarabdha means, “set in motion”. Prarabdha karma represents those actions that have already been set in motion, like an arrow that has been released from the bow, but has not yet hit its target.

Kriyamana means “being made”. Kriyamana karma is what we do at any given moment with our capacity of free will, our abil- ity to take action in the present to change the course of events. Agama means “coming or arriving”. Specifically, agama karma is our ability to envision future actions. Sanchita and prarab- dha karmas represent past actions that have ripened or matured with results that are, in a sense, destined. However, they are only inevitable to the extent that they are not modified by current thoughts and actions. We cannot erase our past, but we needn’t allow our past to manipulate us either. We can alter our future by acting in the present.

Karma and fate are not synonymous. Our lives are always a dy- namic combination of past actions and free will. The intensity of our past karma determines how much effort we will need
to modify our current tendencies and patterns. Yogic tradition states that there are three degrees of intensity of prarabdha karma: dridha, dridha-adridha, and adridha.

Dridha karmas are fixed and are so intense that they are not changeable. They create seemingly “fated” events, both pleasur- able and painful. These are the situations in our life that occur despite all our efforts to avoid them or fail to take place in spite of all efforts to create them. Although these karmas are not changeable, we can, through practice, change our reactions to them. Dridha-Adridha means, “fixed-unfixed”. This is karma that can be changed by applying the effort necessary. This is karma that we can “burn up” through the fire of yoga, through intense spiritual practice. Adridha means, “unfixed”. This is karma that is easily altered.

Degrees of karmic intensity apply to every realm of our exis- tence: health, relationships, work, finances, etc. For instance, unfixed health karmas produce illnesses that will run their course and then disappear on their own without our having to do much about them, unless of course we do something with our conscious will to reinforce them. Fixed-unfixed health karmas produce chronic diseases and illnesses that can be con- trolled with the help of intensive therapies, but will continue
to worsen if not treated. These are substantially more serious. Then there are fixed health karmas which produce diseases that refuse to respond to even the most intensive treatments and therapies. This of course is the most intense degree of karmic intensity in the realm of health.

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Taking responsibility for our karma is what allows us to resolve, transcend, and free ourselves from our karma. Accepting respon- sibility empowers us and takes us out of the role of victim. It starts with the understanding that our emotions, reactions, thoughts, and tendencies are our own. They exist inside of us. No one re- ally makes us angry. All situations that we find ourselves in are

just an expression of what’s stored in our psychic system.

The way that we accept responsibility is by making an effort in our spiritual practice or sadhana. This responsibility begins with the act of setting an intention, thus allowing our energy to flow in a positive direction. In a sense, this is the point when we get clear in ourselves what we really want from life. Do we want to change our negative patterns? Do we really want to grow? If so, then we must constantly remind ourselves again and again and again that our intention is to grow. Rudi called this “the wish to grow”. He said that the wish to grow is the most powerful force in the universe--that it could cut like a laser beam through steel. He said that cultivating and, when necessary, digging for, this wish is an essential part of spiritual work. Cultivating the wish to grow is an example of agama karma. It begins to burn karma.

The other way that we take responsibility for our karma is through action itself—developing the capacity to follow through with our intentions in the moment a particular pattern or ten- dency manifests. This is what separates the “armchair yogi” from the skilled practitioner--the ability to transcend oneself not only on the cushion but also in that very moment when ten- sion arises. All of the practices of the Shambhava school are ul- timately designed for this purpose: to develop the capacity to turn inward and bring conscious energy to the intensity of our mind and emotions before we react habitually or unconsciously. Rudi called this the process of developing an inner mechanism or psychic muscle system. It may require many years of diligent

practice just to remember to do it! This is why we do formal practice on the cushion every day. It’s kind of like weight train- ing. We’re building our spiritual muscles.

The ability to bring consciousness to our actions doesn’t guaran- tee that a particular pattern is going to immediately dissolve. It’s most likely that the emotion or reaction will still be there but we will develop the ability to separate from it rather than identify with it. That’s the difference. To experience fear but not to allow it to control or paralyze us is the beginning of freedom. If we do this over and over again, eventually the pattern will dissolve.

Separation from our thoughts and emotions gives us a more ex- pansive view of a situation. It allows us to see things “as they really are” rather than “as we think they are”. It’s one thing to have a view of a building with our nose pressed right up against the side of the wall. It’s another thing to view the same building from a helicopter hovering above. We will see not only more of the building but also all of the surrounding buildings, shrubbery, pedestrians, traffic, sky, clouds, etc. We see more clearly how ev- erything interacts and how even subtle movements of mind have an effect. We see what our role in the play is. This helps us to determine what action, or inaction, may be most appropriate.

Ultimately, our life circumstances represent our karma. There- fore, the present circumstance of each of our lives is the perfect setting to work out our karma and grow spiritually. In fact, em- bracing and resolving all aspects of our life--relationships, work, family, etc, is the only way that we will grow spiritually. So it is important to open up to our own unique karmic equation, whatever it might be.

PLEASE SEE THE PDF DOCUMENT FOR 2 ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

KonalaniFebruary 12, 202114 Comments