KARMA better explanation

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-30-2005
KARMA better explanation
3
Mon, 12-26-2005 - 11:49pm

thank you again for alerting the need. here is the correction......................Is Attachment Really Love?
SPIRITUAL ATTACHMENT OR KARMA
The spiritual equivalent of attachment is called bandage. Bondage is whatever ties you to. the illusian af separatian; without it, yau wauld automatically see yaurself in unity. The raat of bandage is Karma, which in Sanskrit simply means "action." Any action in creationfrom nature's actions, such as rainfall ar the rotatian af the earth on its axis, to the highly persanal actions of human beings dealing with their complex lives--cornes under the heading af karma.
Karma farms an endless chain af cause and effect, actian and reaction. You cannat fall in lave at first sight-ar fall in laathing without rejoining a karmic dance whose steps began deep in the past. The fact that yau cannot remember this past daes nat wipe aut karmic memory. An example will help here: if 1 fall in lave with you and you spurn me, my langing daesn't just go away. I still feel a karmic bond, despite your rejection, and until yau respond ar I wark through my emotion af unrequited love, karma will bind us tagether. Anyone 1 lave in the future will be filtered through the impression you made upon me; therefore my oId karma blocks the entry of any I fresh flow oflove.
t When.l am tauched by love, karma collected aver every stage of my life is influenced simultaneously. The child's longing to. be : protected, the adolescent's confused longing, the adult's mature de sire---all are stirred. The wounds of not being loved in the past reach r out to be healed, and the heart's tender hopes flow again.
;.. Karma thus has a double effect: it ties us to. aId desires and future ones at the same time. This isn't just a theoretical statement. Millions of people struggle with their karma to. no. avail. A relationship filled ~. with frustration and pain cannot be salved by manipulating your emotions, trying to maintain a show of love an the surface, denying
193

THE PA TH 2-0 LOVE I that you feel trapped, or running away. Attachment, born of karma, I handed out I will follow you no matter how far you go." karma" or == Karma has been mistakenly interpreted as fatalism. If you are punishment fatalistic you believe that no action you take will make a difference. Spirit Karma implies exactly the opposite. It is a critical part of the theory bad karma, of karma that "as you sow, so shall you reap." When Christ delivered ~ Spirit this teaching, he was stating the version of karma that most people in our culture have heard of. Sowing and reaping are metaphors for exists. In at t cause and effect; the teaching is that whatever you put into the universe, the result will be commensurate. If you give away money, , money will return. If you give away love, love will return. The woman, under God's grace, is seen as a place where no debt goes I None ofth r unpaid. Because it stretches over Imany lifetimes, the karmic balance sheet isn't worked out from day to day. It is perfectly possible in the short term, as we all know, to give away money and get nothing in ,return, or to deeply love another and be rejected. How, then, is the concept of karma useful in every day life. roles in life The doctrine of "as you sow, so shall you reap" requires proof that the universe weighs human action and metes out justice. Can this be possible when obviously evil people are rewarded while good often goes unrewarded? I recent!y read about the death of a Chicago mob boss, the capo of a major Mafia family, who died peacefully in his sleep, having escaped prison despite numerous attempts, over five decades, to bring him to justice. Every prosecution against him had resulted in a hung jury or an acquittal; he had prospered since the days of AI Capone and held sway over gambling, liquor, 1 The pIe and prostitution rings well into his eighties while mira.culously suffering no harm at the hands of his rivals. Looking at his life, I would be justified in feeling that a very bad person had gotten away with , any everything. How would the theory of karma justify thinking other- wise? The proof of karma doesn't lie in rewards and punishments 194

Is Attachment Really Love?

handed out by a cosmic judge. When people casually refer to "good karma" or "bad karIna," they are confusing karma w'ith reward and punishment, but the working of karma is lnuch more profound.
Spirit would not be love if there was such a thing as good and bad karma, because they apply only to the condition of separation.
Spirit is not in separation, and neither is God. The divine never punishes, for what would it be punishing but itself? Nothing else exists. In our perception a Mafia capo is a bad lnan; in divine perception he is equal with a saint.
Our karma throws us into the roles of saint and sinner, man and woman, king and peasant, but these roles are telnporary and shifting.
None of them is really us. Spirit uses these roles the way a dramatist uses actors. As convincingly as someone might play Hamlet, we don't believe that he is killed in the fifth act with a poisoned sword.
Separating the role from the reality is more difficult with our own roles in life. But the saint is just the sinner in another guise, and the sinner only has to wait to assume the saint's robes. Why do we play these roles? For experience, for growth, to find our way back to ~ God. Ultinlately, all karma serves only two purposes: either it is a sign of love from spirit or it is a lesson meant in love.
In the Vedic scriptures the word Inost often applied to karma is "unfathonlable." Only if you understood every action in your life, no matter how minute, could you clear away all karmic debts. This isn't a fatalistic statement; it merely points to the real source of freedom, which is within.
The pleasure of any outward attachlnent-to money, power, work, or another person-can change to pain without warning. In spiritual terms pleasure and pain are both binding; the potential for any action to bring about suffering is why the ancient sages first wanted to break free from the whole cycle of karma. Lord Krishna ~ in the Bhagavad- Gita declares that anyone who lives for the outcome

195

THE PATH 10 LOVE
of action is "pitiful," doomed to suffer from the "bonds of birth" I and the "fear born of duality." Karn1a is a wheel, carrying us from I goodness to evil, ignorance to. understanding, pain to bliss, over and:over agaIn.
.In our culture, where the theory of karma is not widely accepted L even in its Christian version, the existence of spiritual balance is ~ rarely grasped. You have to make a bargain with yourself to believe i that mercy, grace, and divine love can be experienced before you.
will perceive them. For anyone on the spiritual path there is tremen dous reward in finding that the promise of eternal joy, peace, knowl edge, and creativity is true. The truth isn't revealed all at once, but a I day doesn't go by that one's faith that love is a real power isn't;reinforced. If you live according to the assumption that there is a I Way, the Way will be opened. This is what Christ meant when he .said, "Ask, and it shall be given you; . . . knock, and the door shall ~ 111 be opened unto you."
Karma can never be simply a system of reward and punishment, since it is the way to love.

Seen in its nost profound depths, the path to love is the same for both saint and sinner, since both must strip away any belief in the roles they are temporarily playing. There is a famous mystical Christian text, The Cloud of Unknowing, which dates from the fourteenth century. Its writer, who remains anonymous, says that loving God J can never be loving anything you can know or even locate. Love in the spiritual sense involves letting go of all that is known:

Let go of this everywhere and this something, in exchange for this nowhere and this nothing. Do not worry if your senses cannot understand this nothing,
196
for this is why I love it the better. . . . Who is it that calls it nothing? Surely it is our outer man and not our inner man. Our inner man calls it All.

This anonymous mystic has touched upon the profound truth that the thinking mind, immersed in "something" and searching "everywhere," cannot reach the divine. God is beyond karmla, and therefore so is spirit,. since God is nothing but spirit on an allembracing scale. The" outer man" perceives .the world very differently from the "inner lnan." If I ask, "Who am I?" one sort of answer involves nothing but externals: I am a man, forty-nine years old, born in India, who has practiced medicine in America, who is married with two children, and so on. These are all karmic qualities, the results of specific events or actions that pertain to me. They give me labels that I can identify with.
Yet in some other, more profound way these qualities, even if you added thousands more to the list, do not define me at all.
Nothing anyone can attach to nle is actually me, not the me defined as inner essence, free will, silent awareness, infinite potential, unbounded spirit. That me, the "inner man," stands outside bondage.
It can be "felt rather than seen," says our medieval mystic, and is best described as a "cloud of unknowing." This cloud is like a luminous glow in the heart, out of which a sense of the divine emanates, yet in no way could the five senses capture it or the rational, linear, cause-and-effect mind know it.

ALLOWING AND CONTROL

If the theory of karma is valid, then nonattachment is the truest expression of love. I realize that this is very abstract. We can, however, restate things in terms of everyday behavior and in the process

197




Edited 12/29/2005 10:51 am ET by irakrause
iVillage Member
Registered: 04-22-2003
Tue, 12-27-2005 - 10:41am

Gee, Ira, that was a tough read!


iVillage Member
Registered: 03-30-2005
Wed, 12-28-2005 - 9:43am
CORRECTED COPY IS NOW ON POST 4 AND ON POST 1 BECAUSE I DID NOT WANT TO LOOSE IT IN THE CORRECTER STATE.please read and let me know again what you think of the report. THANK YOU SORRY ABOUT MY ENGLISH FOR BEING ONE OF THE TOP FIVE STUDENTS AT THE cOLLEDGE OF pHARMACY AT THE uNIVERSITY OF bUFFALO ,THEN A PRIVATE uNIVERSITY LATER A pUBLIC OWNED ONE. aLSO TURNED DOWN OFFER OF PROFESSOR THERE ,MAINLY EDUCATION FOR A LIVING AND MAIN INTEREST IS IN sPIRITUAL BEING more info on my past available as well as present/.The message on Karma came right out of the book which by pasting it and transfering it on the computer to the notebook then to e mail . Your response ,good, will also post the difference in attachment (most marriages) what it means and why it does not work, andgenuine love, and also caring, and detachment. which is very interesting then for you special wil at my cost mail you 11Peter interpetation which will let you know more and the different types of people and also what is ocurring with them and where or what will take place that is in store for many . very ,very valuable information from Ida M. my teacher who passed away in 1948 born in 1884. In China at my expense I help support one who treasures the information and shares with about 4 or 5 others. and saves me the trouble of e mailing each of them . She says she doesnot need the money I also send and wants more and more of the thousands of pages It took me over ten years to collect. Also found a sourace I use to use to reproduce books. and just ordered four more coopies. As I sold the last copy for 115 dollars. Others charge 165 dollars a copy . and then aftewards found a source for 101 dollars. Going back in my records was able to get the book reproduced with shiping each cost about 70 dollars. in the past this book was only made availabe to certain ones. .....on this page do not know how to correct spelling as I do on the email in net zero.


Edited 12/29/2005 10:59 am ET by irakrause
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-30-2005
Thu, 12-29-2005 - 10:41am

do not know how it happened so corrected it again you are precious.may have missed some corrections .let me know what you think og this ,would like to share with you somehow..............................Is Attachment Really Love?
SPIRITUAL ATTACHMENT OR KARMA
The spiritual equivalent of attachment is called bandage. Bondage is whatever ties you to. the illusian af separatian; without it, yau wauld automatically see yaurself in unity. The raat of bandage is Karma, which in Sanskrit simply means "action." Any action in creationfrom nature's actions, such as rainfall ar the rotatian af the earth on its axis, to the highly persanal actions of human beings dealing with their complex lives--cornes under the heading af karma.
Karma farms an endless chain af cause and effect, actian and reaction. You cannat fall in lave at first sight-ar fall in laathing without rejoining a karmic dance whose steps began deep in the past. The fact that yau cannot remember this past daes nat wipe aut karmic memory. An example will help here: if 1 fall in lave with you and you spurn me, my langing daesn't just go away. I still feel a karmic bond, despite your rejection, and until yau respond ar I wark through my emotion af unrequited love, karma will bind us tagether. Anyone 1 lave in the future will be filtered through the impression you made upon me; therefore my oId karma blocks the entry of any I fresh flow oflove.
t When.l am tauched by love, karma collected aver every stage of my life is influenced simultaneously. The child's longing to. be : protected, the adolescent's confused longing, the adult's mature de sire---all are stirred. The wounds of not being loved in the past reach r out to be healed, and the heart's tender hopes flow again.
;.. Karma thus has a double effect: it ties us to. aId desires and future ones at the same time. This isn't just a theoretical statement. Millions of people struggle with their karma to. no. avail. A relationship filled ~. with frustration and pain cannot be salved by manipulating your emotions, trying to maintain a show of love an the surface, denying
193

THE PA TH 2-0 LOVE I that you feel trapped, or running away. Attachment, born of karma, I handed out I will follow you no matter how far you go." karma" or == Karma has been mistakenly interpreted as fatalism. If you are punishment fatalistic you believe that no action you take will make a difference. Spirit Karma implies exactly the opposite. It is a critical part of the theory bad karma, of karma that "as you sow, so shall you reap." When Christ delivered ~ Spirit this teaching, he was stating the version of karma that most people in our culture have heard of. Sowing and reaping are metaphors for exists. In at t cause and effect; the teaching is that whatever you put into the universe, the result will be commensurate. If you give away money, , money will return. If you give away love, love will return. The woman, under God's grace, is seen as a place where no debt goes I None ofth r unpaid. Because it stretches over Imany lifetimes, the karmic balance sheet isn't worked out from day to day. It is perfectly possible in the short term, as we all know, to give away money and get nothing in ,return, or to deeply love another and be rejected. How, then, is the concept of karma useful in every day life. roles in life The doctrine of "as you sow, so shall you reap" requires proof that the universe weighs human action and metes out justice. Can this be possible when obviously evil people are rewarded while good often goes unrewarded? I recent!y read about the death of a Chicago mob boss, the capo of a major Mafia family, who died peacefully in his sleep, having escaped prison despite numerous attempts, over five decades, to bring him to justice. Every prosecution against him had resulted in a hung jury or an acquittal; he had prospered since the days of AI Capone and held sway over gambling, liquor, 1 The pIe and prostitution rings well into his eighties while mira.culously suffering no harm at the hands of his rivals. Looking at his life, I would be justified in feeling that a very bad person had gotten away with , any everything. How would the theory of karma justify thinking other- wise? The proof of karma doesn't lie in rewards and punishments 194

Is Attachment Really Love?

handed out by a cosmic judge. When people casually refer to "good karma" or "bad karIna," they are confusing karma w'ith reward and punishment, but the working of karma is lnuch more profound.
Spirit would not be love if there was such a thing as good and bad karma, because they apply only to the condition of separation.
Spirit is not in separation, and neither is God. The divine never punishes, for what would it be punishing but itself? Nothing else exists. In our perception a Mafia capo is a bad lnan; in divine perception he is equal with a saint.
Our karma throws us into the roles of saint and sinner, man and woman, king and peasant, but these roles are telnporary and shifting.
None of them is really us. Spirit uses these roles the way a dramatist uses actors. As convincingly as someone might play Hamlet, we don't believe that he is killed in the fifth act with a poisoned sword.
Separating the role from the reality is more difficult with our own roles in life. But the saint is just the sinner in another guise, and the sinner only has to wait to assume the saint's robes. Why do we play these roles? For experience, for growth, to find our way back to ~ God. Ultinlately, all karma serves only two purposes: either it is a sign of love from spirit or it is a lesson meant in love.
In the Vedic scriptures the word Inost often applied to karma is "unfathonlable." Only if you understood every action in your life, no matter how minute, could you clear away all karmic debts. This isn't a fatalistic statement; it merely points to the real source of freedom, which is within.
The pleasure of any outward attachlnent-to money, power, work, or another person-can change to pain without warning. In spiritual terms pleasure and pain are both binding; the potential for any action to bring about suffering is why the ancient sages first wanted to break free from the whole cycle of karma. Lord Krishna ~ in the Bhagavad- Gita declares that anyone who lives for the outcome

195

THE PATH 10 LOVE
of action is "pitiful," doomed to suffer from the "bonds of birth" I and the "fear born of duality." Karn1a is a wheel, carrying us from I goodness to evil, ignorance to. understanding, pain to bliss, over and:over agaIn.
.In our culture, where the theory of karma is not widely accepted L even in its Christian version, the existence of spiritual balance is ~ rarely grasped. You have to make a bargain with yourself to believe i that mercy, grace, and divine love can be experienced before you.
will perceive them. For anyone on the spiritual path there is tremen dous reward in finding that the promise of eternal joy, peace, knowl edge, and creativity is true. The truth isn't revealed all at once, but a I day doesn't go by that one's faith that love is a real power isn't;reinforced. If you live according to the assumption that there is a I Way, the Way will be opened. This is what Christ meant when he .said, "Ask, and it shall be given you; . . . knock, and the door shall ~ 111 be opened unto you."
Karma can never be simply a system of reward and punishment, since it is the way to love.

Seen in its nost profound depths, the path to love is the same for both saint and sinner, since both must strip away any belief in the roles they are temporarily playing. There is a famous mystical Christian text, The Cloud of Unknowing, which dates from the fourteenth century. Its writer, who remains anonymous, says that loving God J can never be loving anything you can know or even locate. Love in the spiritual sense involves letting go of all that is known:

Let go of this everywhere and this something, in exchange for this nowhere and this nothing. Do not worry if your senses cannot understand this nothing,
196
for this is why I love it the better. . . . Who is it that calls it nothing? Surely it is our outer man and not our inner man. Our inner man calls it All.

This anonymous mystic has touched upon the profound truth that the thinking mind, immersed in "something" and searching "everywhere," cannot reach the divine. God is beyond karmla, and therefore so is spirit,. since God is nothing but spirit on an allembracing scale. The" outer man" perceives .the world very differently from the "inner lnan." If I ask, "Who am I?" one sort of answer involves nothing but externals: I am a man, forty-nine years old, born in India, who has practiced medicine in America, who is married with two children, and so on. These are all karmic qualities, the results of specific events or actions that pertain to me. They give me labels that I can identify with.
Yet in some other, more profound way these qualities, even if you added thousands more to the list, do not define me at all.
Nothing anyone can attach to nle is actually me, not the me defined as inner essence, free will, silent awareness, infinite potential, unbounded spirit. That me, the "inner man," stands outside bondage.
It can be "felt rather than seen," says our medieval mystic, and is best described as a "cloud of unknowing." This cloud is like a luminous glow in the heart, out of which a sense of the divine emanates, yet in no way could the five senses capture it or the rational, linear, cause-and-effect mind know it.

ALLOWING AND CONTROL

If the theory of karma is valid, then nonattachment is the truest expression of love. I realize that this is very abstract. We can, however, restate things in terms of everyday behavior and in the process

197