Eknath Easwaran
How does karma play out in our own lives? And what, if anything, can we do about it? There are three types of karma and we can begin to shape our lives if we learn about them.
There is this law of karma which states unequivocally that any suffering we cause to other people must come back to us. It is an inescapable consequence of the fact that all of us are one. That is why it grieves me so deeply to see anybody treating another person harshly; it’s like hitting yourself with your own hand.
In the traditional classification, there are three types of karma. The first may be called ‘cash’ karma, because it is all over with immediately. John hits Joe, and Jim hits John; there is no suspense, and John’s karma comes to a fast end.
The second kind is more painful; it is the consequences we reap from past actions. ‘Others fear what will happen tomorrow,’ says the Sufi mystic Ansari of Herat; ‘I fear what happened yesterday.’
The Compassionate Buddha describes this kind of karma as an arrow we have already shot: it is on its way, and the best we can do is accept the suffering that comes from it and learn from that suffering not to shoot that arrow again.
The third type of karma is that which we are about to create right now, in the immediate present. This is karma over which we have some control. If we can’t do anything about the arrows we have shot in the past, we can at least refrain from shooting more arrows in the future.
Often we find ourselves in a situation where our passions have been roused, our anger is ready to burst, and all we can think of is retaliation. The arrow rests on the bowstring and the bow is drawn, ready to shoot. But, says the Buddha, we do not need to let the arrow go; the choice is up to us. That is the time to repeat the mantram, relax our hold, and put the arrow safely away.
Here it is that the Hindu mystics make a really daring proposal. We do not need to let ourselves be buffeted towards the Lord by our own karma over millions and millions of years; we can take our evolution into our own hands.
That is precisely what meditation is for, and great mystics like Sri Ramakrishna or St. Catherine of Siena are really pioneers in consciousness who have gone millions of years beyond us in human evolution.
Patanjali, the great teacher of Raja Yoga in ancient India, tells us that any of us can make this great leap; the capacity is within us all.
We are all born with enough vital energy for the journey, and a little extra to play around with while we get used to the car. The choice is ours what we do with this energy.
Some of my friends tell me that in their earlier days, they used to leave their house in Berkeley early Monday morning fully intending to drive straight to New York City.
They would stop at the grocery store for some orange juice, then go to a friend’s house and listen to a record or two, then remember to get some incense on Telegraph Avenue, and by the time it was nightfall they would still not have got out of town.
But there are some people – St. Francis of Assisi, Mahatma Gandhi – who want so badly to get where they are going that they don’t spend any time on side trips.
They put all their energy into the practice of the spiritual life and do everything they can to learn not to repeat the mistakes that all of us make. Every one of us can choose to do this, and the harder we try, the farther we will go.
Eknath Easwaran
