Taking Charge Of Your Karma - The Most Empowering Concept Of Humankind
For a long time in my period of studying and practicing meditation, listening to yogis and zen masters, I was always confused about their obsession with karma. I know that in some way it was relavant to me, and I understood it vaguely as my unconscious patterns in my thoughts, emotions and actions, but suddenly while drinking tea, suddenly it all made sense. Today I will talk about how you can transcend and change your life with this newbie understanding of karma. Lets begin.
Karma
Karma is a collection of your unconsicous thoughts, emotions and actions. The easiest way to think about karma is your bad habits. You would like to change your bad habits, but you struggle to do so. Why? Similarly, you have a bunch of these habits which are nested within your unconscious mind that makes you do things on autopilot.
This is why Eastern mystics described enlightenement as becoming totally conscious, or "dissolving your karma." Everything in your life is totally in your control, because you can think what you want, feel what you want and do whatever you want. Very enviable indeed!
For a long time, I disliked this idea because the teachers talk about enlightenement as the solution to karma. First of all, I did not know what enlightenment means, and second is that meditation was the only means and tool I knew how to "dissolve my karma", and even then, I did not know how meditation even works and how it related to the topic!
The only piece I've missed is time. Karma and time have a very deep and interconnected relationship. Information is coded into your mind in such a way where your autopilot happens on a specific time, or a specific condition. Just like an animal, you have a pre-determined set of possible reactions to different circumstances.
The closest word if you still struggle to understand is the word habits. You have millions of them. How you walk, breathe, think and feel is habitual. Like an animal, once your senses perceives condition X, your mind will search your warehouse of karma and react with A thought, B emotion and C action.
Repeatedly, mystics have described thought and emotions are meaningless. I hope you understand why now. Any thought or emotion which are not conscious, is essentially an animalistic reaction you have been programmed by your karma to react in that specific way. This is why thoughts and emotions are to be ignored, because they are not yours in the first place.
Taking Charge Of Your Karma
I think the best practical way to use this concept outside of meditation is to consciously observe what we are doing hour by hour. To prove to you my point, try to remember the exact details of what you did yesterday. The easier you remembered, the more conscious you were.
Breaking free from your karma is only possible with awareness. Meditation works on that, but for many begineers like myself included, we are not walking around like a meditation machine everywhere we go. The only time when we are truly aware is when our eyes are closed in a comfortable enviorement, and even then it can be difficult.
So our next best option outside of meditation is to rewrite the karma with "better karma" so that our preconditioning are changed to healthier reactions when we are not aware. It is to be said by yogis that imprinting of karma happens every 48 days, and if you repeatedly do the same thing over and over again for 48 days, it will groove your karma as one of the "possible reactions." This is called a mandala.
So lets say I sit my ass down for meditation for the first time at 8am. What a horrible experience! Your karma is working overtime to make you do what you usually would do at that time. But if you overpower it and stay disciplined, after 48 days you will notice that it became easier to do that at 8am.
In fact, if you groove more and more mandalas, 8am would instinctually become meditation without needing you to fight yourself over whether you should do it or not. Your karma has been rewritten with something else. Many spiritual masters would say its the same thing, because you're replacing karma with karma, but its not nuanced enough.
By changing your habits and rewriting new karma already in itself requires some degree of awareness. It is really better than nothing. However, you must note that a mandala is only successful when it not broken. It must be done everyday, ideally at the same time for it to be engrooved as new karma.
Breaking Consciously Identified Bad Habits
Lets say you have identified that you would like to quit smoking. The first step is not to make a resolution to quit smoking, its never going to work. The first step is to keep a notepad on you, and write down (while you're smoking) unto why you're smoking in the first place, why your hands reached for the ciggies and gain some awareness over why you did it in the first place.
Second, look at your notebook and see the common triggers over what made you smoke. Is it a specific thought? Emotion? Enviorement? Situation? Then, the next time you reach for your ciggie, remind yourself that you are smoking because of XYZ reason.
Then drafts alternative actions you would like to replace when the trigger appears. It needs to be something realistic in which you can do when that situation arises within you. Then, commit to the 48 day mandala and install that new response as your karma.
For the first mandala you are intervening yourself, of course it will feel like hell! Because your previous karma is conditioning you to smoke that ciggie as a reaction to XYZ. You are simply undoing it by installing a different action. The key is to remain conscious and aware over your new karma.
In fact, if you want to remember back to the days when you started smoking, it actually took you the same amount of effort to start smoking! You installed your karma for smoking a mandala consciously. Then as it got engrooved deeper and deeper, smoking became compulsive.
Breaking Unconscious Cycles Of Faliure
Pehaps it is not as clear cut for you like quitting smoking. Maybe you're poor, your relationships sucks, or you have some health problem but you dont know why these things are happening to you. You would like the situation to be otherwise, but you dont know where to begin.
First of all nothing in this world happens on accident. If you have brought yourself to a specific position in life, it is the doing of your own ignorance. In this situation it is not as clear cut, because you dont know what karma to install as the "successful" or "correct" action that would lead to external success.
And in many instances, nobody knows. People who are successful in their respective domains are simply aware and understand how to respond correctly to different situations that they will encounter. You will have to build up this awareness for yourself, how to do so is out of my paygrade.
In this manner, a specified spiritual process desgined by Guru to raise your awareness is helpful. You cannot overcome this problem because you are not aware of what the problem is, and if there is no sage next to you to deliver the necessary insight into what must be done next, you can only raise the awareness within yourself to the necessary heights to understand and change your own patterns leading to the same results.
Karma Is Not Limited To Doing
Thinking and feeling is also karma. If you compulsively think and feel you will end up with a lot of mental ailments. Note here that certain thoughts and emotions are also a reaction to specific perceptions. You only think or feel in a certain way when something related to that happens in your perception.
Eventually with meditation, with sufficient awareness you can start feeling at ease. Because once the thoughts stop running and the emotions stops spiking up and down, you can sit still and not mess yourself up. Best way I can describe it is a feeling a contentment and fulfilment
A lot of intermediate spiritual meditators want to run away from their home and renounce from the world. I think in a way they are running away from the enviorement where compulsive triggers of thoughts and emotions happen. But they will still happen the moment they return to the enviorement, they have not transcended it by becoming a renounciate.
True consicous thoughts and emotion is when you go into that same enviorement which triggers you to feel great or poorly, and be able to think what you want and feel what you want and not succumb to the programming of the defaut emotion and and thought.
Conclusion
Hopefully my explanation was clear and legible, it has certainly became a very strong and powerful idea for my life. I started tracking how many mandalas I've completed for each positive thing I want to introduce for my life, and actively engage in meditation to raise my awareness so that I can get a hold over my destiny!
In short:
- Be aware and write down what you're actually doing in your day
- See what you would like to change
- Stick with it for 48 days
- Repeat as many 48 days as possible without restarting
- Enjoy the benefits
Cheers,
FriendlyWrenChilling.