If we are able to truly manage our mind with the understanding that it is our mind that connects thoughts to form shafts of pain and pleasure and if we stay unclutched, we can stay in what Buddha calls mindfulness. We can stay in awareness and in the present moment. It is our thought process that constantly takes us from past to future and back again and does not allow us to rest in the present moment.
Understand this clearly, when we are in the present moment we can stay out of trouble without fear and desire. We can act without fear and desire. You may ask how? How can I be motivated to do something if I do not desire it? There is no need for motivation. Do you think that it is motivation that makes you breathe or digest your food? It is the intelligence of the energy that is within and without us that makes it possible for us to live and grow. We live not because of us but in spite of us.
When we act without attachment, there is no consequence to our actions, there is no karma arising from our actions.
There is a very beautiful verse in the Isavasya Upanishad:
Om poornamadah poornamidam Poornaat poornamudachyate Poornasya poornamaadaaya Poornamevaavashishyate
From the Whole came the Whole. If you remove the Whole from the Whole, only the Whole remains. By very nature we seek the Wholeness. By very nature we seek fulfillment in anything we do.
Whether it is eating, drinking, jumping, reading, talking, sleeping, or meditating, in any activity that we engage, our being yearns to completely experience the activity and be fully involved in it. Are we fully conscious of every action we engage in? Are we aware every moment of our lives?
A small story:
A man was travelling by cab to the airport. The cab driver was driving very fast even around corners and sharp turns. The passenger was getting terrified with his driving.
Finally, the cab driver seeing the terrified passenger, said, ‘Why don’t you do what I do when I take turns? Just shut your eyes!’
When you are not completely aware and involved in the action you are engaged in, your being remains unfulfilled in that experience. The unfulfilled experience remains inside you and keeps pulling you to do the action again with intensity to fulfill it. This is karma.
Karma is the collection of unfulfilled experiences that stay in us and constantly pull us to fulfill them.
Anything that we do and experience intensely and deeply will always leave our system. It will liberate us. Any experience that we did not go through completely, through which we did not have complete fulfillment, that did not get our full energy, attention and awareness, remains inside us as karma.
Even though we carry some karma, basically we are complete fulfillment, Wholeness. So any karma that has not been fulfilled cannot rest inside us for too long. It will try its best to fulfill itself. It will drive us again and again to go through the same activity so that it can be fulfilled. Any desire, any experience, which has not become complete in our system, will remain as karma and push us again and again to make us go through the same experience until it is fulfilled.
We think, speak and do things without clarity, without fulfillment and with deep ignorance. All these thoughts, words and actions collectively contribute towards our karmic baggage because none of them gives rise to fulfillment in us. When they do not give rise to fulfillment our karma pushes us to somehow fulfill them. Our own thoughts, words and deeds become our karma and drive us to reach fulfillment in some way.
source: Living Enlightenment
source: Living Enlightenment
KAILASA's Words of Eternal Bliss, Nithyananda! 