It is always better to live with reality, because otherwise, without fail, reality will come to live with you. —The Aghori Vimalananda
IF TO BE RELIGIOUS, in the truest sense of that much misunderstood word, is to thirst for water from reality’s fountain, then to walk the spiritual path is to turn your compass toward its ever-flowing well. The organized reli gions, which have set up camps downstream from that spring, all provide sketchy maps that trace a single trail to the source. The one map illuminating all the tracks leading spiritwards through the diverse terrains of existence is accessible only through the world’s sole dogma-free spiritual trekking agency: Aghora. Aghora, which literally means “unagitated,” teaches aghoris (its practitioners) to focus and intensify their craving for reality until they learn how to transcend all that galls (the ghora) in life. Then no internal or external stimulus, however ordinarily agitating,’ will be able to interrupt or interfere with their one-pointed guzzling of the nectar of being.
I obtained my orientation toward reality from my mentor, the Aghori Vi malananda, who showed little regard for organized systems of belief:
“I have never believed in religion. Religions are all limited be cause they concentrate only on one aspect of truth. That is why they are always fighting amongst one another, because they all think they are in sole possession of the truth. But I say there is no end to knowledge, so there is no use in trying to confine it to one scripture or one holy book or one experience. This is why I say, when people ask what religion I follow, ‘I don’t believe in Sampra daya (sect), I believe in Sampradaha (incineration). Burn down everything which is getting in the way of your perception of truth.”
(Robert E. Svoboda, Aghora, At the Left Hand of God, Brother hood of Life, Albuquerque, 1986, p.167)
Aghora III: The Law of Karma
Aghoris, who do their damnedest to stand up to reality without having to lean on any reassuring doctrine or creed, strive always to do exactly what must be done at the moment when it becomes necessary. They learn what they need to know in the smashan, the cremation ground, worshipping death that they may die to their restrictions and be reborn into purity of perception. They ac cept with love everything that comes their way, knowing that whatever reality serves up is after all the meal that their karmas have created for them.
The Law of Karma, which is one of the most profound and fiendishly per plexing of reality’s axioms, is the Law of Cause and Effect, the law of “as you Sow, so shall you reap.” The oldest of the Upanishads expresses it this way: “Truly, one becomes good by good action and bad by bad action.” (Briha daranyaka Upanishad III.2.13). This law is better known to most of us as Newton’s Third Law of Motion: For every action there is an equal and oppo site reaction. The mandate of this succinctly complex law regulates the po tentially limitless implications of every small act performed by every actor within the manifested universe, meteor and microorganism alike. Everyone lives within the precincts of the ubiquitous Law of Karma, whether or not they accept its reality. Ignorance of this Law is no defense in the Court of Cause and Effect. As Lord Krishna declared in the Shrimad Bhagavata, “Karma is the guru; nay, it is the Supreme Lord.”
Every physical or mental action you perform and with which you identify yourself as the doer becomes a karma for you and produces a reaction which you will eventually have to experience. Like everyone else, aghori or atheist, you consume at each moment of your life that portion of your karmic grain that has finally matured. Likewise, each of your self-identified actions or reac tions today shapes your future by seeding yet further reactions. Every individ ual being is a karmic slate of coming attractions and repulsions. Though we all physically share the same Earth-space and Earth-time, our individual caus ative schemata create for us individual universes of experience. There are as many universes as there are beings, each locating the environment-war or peace, wealth or penury, misery or ecstasy—that each assortment of karmas requires. Since limitations of time and space prevent everything from happen ing in our world all at once, the Law of Karma schedules its events to occur just in time, every time, in each cosmos large and small. Every interaction between two different universes of experience creates its own karma which duly propa gates its own reaction. The more strongly you identify with your karmas, the more closely your experience will conform to the reaction they promise.
Though very few people ever graduate from quotidian religion to authen tic Aghora, everyone is free to make use of the truths that the world’s aghoris have sucked from reality’s teat. Arguably the most fundamental of these real
Introduction
izations is this: the essence of living with reality is to continually surrender to what is. You have already created your own personal universe with your kar mas and now you must live in it. Everyone who has sown the wind will even tually reap the whirlwind. However, most people try to ride out their karmic storms by barricading themselves inside psychological houses no building however weatherproof can withstand every tornado, earthquake, flood and conflagration. Almost everyone accordingly finds himself or herself existen tially homeless one day or another. Religions make good ideational road houses: you are free to shelter yourself under these roofs for as long as you like—or at least until a tempest blows in and causes that shelter to collapse.
A good aghori recognizes the innate flimsiness of all doctrinal thatch and knows there is no security of any kind to be had in life except the surety that each of us is going to die. Many aghoris forestall future personal derange ment by emigrating to the smashan where they can live their lives with noth ing more substantial above their heads than God’s never-failing umbrella. Vimalananda, who could be one of the most sophisticated of philosophers when the mood struck him, never mistook philosophy for reality. Time and again during the more than eight years that I was with him, the faith he dis played in Nature’s ultimate beneficence brought home to me the value of ca pitulating to what is. Time and again I was wowed when I saw how his submission to reality solved his problems. It was that awe that inspired me to write this book.
The Law of Karma, the unimaginable complexity of which has cowed the greatest of scholars, loses some of its ability to dismay when viewed through the prism of surrender. If having decided to surrender you are willing to keep surrendering, and then you surrender some more, you will simplify your personal choreography to the more managable—if still convoluted—process of resolving how, when, and what to yield. But though this simplification, properly applied, makes karma easier to work through it in no way neutral izes the Law of Karma’s power to mystify and consternate. Nor does it render karma’s logic any more linear, as the Mughal Emperor Akbar discovered in the following possibly apocryphal tale:
WHATEVER GOD DOES IS FOR THE BEST
The Emperor Akbar once developed a chronic non-healing sore on his left pinky finger. It became so severe that his physicians eventually decided the
Aghora III: The Law of Karma.
whole finger would have to be amputated. The idea of losing a part of his body so upset the emperor that he sought a second opinion from his dear friend, confidant and advisor Raja Birbal. Birbal told his liege, “If the doctors say it has to come off, then it has to come off.”
Akbar told Birbal, “Here I am a very religious man, who makes all the proper donations at the proper times, and still God is taking away part of my body? What have I done wrong?”
Birbal replied, “Your majesty, whatever God does is for the best.”
This remark irritated Akbar to no end. He grudgingly agreed to the opera tion, but decided simultaneously to teach Birbal a lesson. His opportunity came some weeks later when the two of them, out hunting with a few retain ers, came across a dry well. Akbar promptly commanded his men to deposit the astonished Birbal into it. When the emperor rode over on his charger and bent over the well’s rim Birbal shouted up at him, “Why are you doing this?" Akbar shouted down to his friend, “Birbal, whatever God does is for the best!” Then, to let Birbal stew for a bit, he rode off alone to a different part of the forest, thinking, “Now we will see what good God can do for him there!" Birbal meanwhile sat in the well, cursing his fate and wondering what was going to happen to him next.
All at once Akbar was surrounded by a band of ruffians. This particular pack of thieves selected only rich people as their victims, first robbing them and then offering them as human sacrifices. The highwaymen accordingly stripped Akbar of all his clothes and jewelry, and the bandit chief told him, “Prepare yourself for death!"
Seeing his end approaching, Akbar began to feel Birbal’s absence severely. For, Birbal had always been able to extract the emperor from otherwise hope less situations. The gangleader meanwhile busily inspected Akbar, as he did all his prospective victims, to make sure that they carried no untoward sign. When he got down to Akbar’s missing pinky he shouted in dismay, “Egad! You are not whole! You are not fit to be offered to my Goddess!” Disap pointed, the thug ordered Akbar to don his clothes and ornaments quickly, and to depart thence.
Being told that he was unfit to be offered hurt Akbar’s feelings and infuri ated his ruler’s ego. He maintained his presence of mind, though, and as he dressed he thought to himself, “Birbal was right: had I not lost my little finger I would have been dead today.” He mounted his horse and rode directly back to the dry well and immediately ordered his waiting men to raise Birbal who now was wondering why the emperor had changed his mind. Akbar began by apologizing to Birbal, and then told him, “I was so upset with you I was actu ally considering leaving you here to die, but did I ever learn my lesson! In
ilce.
10Introduction
truth, everything God does is for best!” The emperor then narrated the whole adventure to his amazed audience.
Suddenly Akbar furrowed his brow and asked his friend, “But now tell me, Birbal, if’whatever God does is for the best, what good came of your being in the well?”
Birbal told him, “Isn’t it obvious, Refuge of the World? If I had not been in the well I would have been captured with you, and after the bandit had re jected you I would have been next in line for sacrifice. And since I am not missing any parts of my body he would have sacrificed me!”
“The Lord is truly marvellous!" repeated Akbar distractedly, stroking his beard in wonder as they rode to the palace.
LESSONS IN SIMPLICITY
Vimalananda made “whatever God does is for the best” the refrain for many of his adventures. For, early in life reality had shown him, as it had shown to Akbar and Birbal, how wise it is to cooperate with the universal flow. Vimalananda rarely tried to force his will on the world; when he did he usually lived to regret it. He openly declared his failings as warnings to others, and openly identified in others similar foibles when he felt that such pinpointing could teach valuable lessons. For, the teaching of lessons was one of his great interests in life. So concerned was he that his listeners not misinterpret his message that he often pared his expressions down to their least common de nominators. He often observed that “unnecessary detail enmeshes people in maya. The mind loves to learn; in fact, the Sanskrit word for mind is manas, that which measures or compares. And the power by which manas measures is maya.” In his opinion, when you try too hard to pin down a thing’s detail all you end up pinning down is its shadow, the illusion that is its maya.
Vimalananda’s penchant for reduction to fundamentals has led some peo ple to complain that he willingly distilled karma’s daunting intricacy into a relatively unsophisticated theory of brute retribution. Though there is of course more to the Law of Karma that the simple formulation, “If you killed Michael last time, Michael will kill you next time," this criticism seems to me to be unjustified. Though Vimalananda did not waste his time debating karma’s theoretical minutiae, he was well acquainted with them and he would speak in karmic technicalities whenever he had an audience who could appreciate them. However, he did expect that most people would mis
Aghora III: The Law of Karma
understand karma’s precepts. I have seen little to suggest he was wrong to do so. The sad truth is that today the poor Law of Karma, which has long been centerstage in India’s theater of thought, has reached its conceptual nadir in the world of post-industrial civilization. We of the late twentieth century have mutated it into a mammoth fad, a causative catchword, a universal ex cuse. Modern people speak glibly of those with whom they “have karma," and of it being “their karma” to get this promotion or buy that new trinket. Our philosophical carpetbaggers have even pressed it into the service of Cali fornian used-car dealer propaganda!
Unfortunately, many Indian thinkers and systems of thought are just as guilty of willfully perverting karma’s basic nature without the excuse of igno rance that our hedonistic Western lotus-eaters might plead. Reality crouches perpetually before you in India, gazing steadfastly into your face, cuffing you purposefully about the head whenever you dare to turn away from it. Indian reality’s very inexorability has given innumerable seers and thinkers no alter native to devoting their lives to the contemplation of its chief cause, the Law of Karma. Indian thinkers began in early antiquity to develop and test sophisti cated hypotheses of karma, inspired by the revelations that India’s rishis (seers) gathered with their inner sight as they performed intense sadhanas (spiritual practices). While certain of these ancient philosophies are still vigorous, others have lost their vitality and have been mummified into systems or fossilized into dogmas by heavy-thinking hair-splitters. Some Indian texts even apply shameless, self-congratulatory sophistry to prove the validity of their com peting versions of the Law of Karma with “one-size-fits-all” explanations.
KARMIC THEORY
The pervasive temptation to oversimplify the Law of Karma rises from the collision of the irresistible force of humanity’s innate need to comprehend cause and effect with the immovable object of karma’s extreme reluctance to divulge itself to humans. Gahana karmano gatih (“karma runs indescribably deep”): The simple Law of Cause and Effect sets into motion such a near-in finity of past, present, and future ramifications for each purposely performed act that it effectively precludes a complete description of the entire karmic slate of even one living being. When it comes to comprehending the sum of the karmas of every living being we can go nowhere at all without the system atizing help of a theoretical model.
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Introduction
There is no lack of competing explanations of causation, for any cogent ex planation of cause and effect, including those of physics, chemistry and biol ogy, can function as a theory of karma. We could even elucidate into a theory of karma some psychological conjecture which details how specific events in the past influence an individual’s present and may shape his or her future. But scientific causation notions are crimped by their materialism, which lim its cause and effect observations to the physical reactions which arise from physical actions. Psychological theories are similarly defective to the extent that they restrict themselves to the limited domain of the psyche. A truly effi cacious model of karma represents a system of causation relevant to all con ceivable states of existence, to anything that can be named.
Karma being so intricate, decent theories of karma are as difficult to objec tively “prove” or “disprove” as is the theory of quantum mechanics. One practical difficulty with testing either theory is that cause and effect is only rarely linear. One cause sometimes produce one effect, but far more com monly a number of cooperating, concomitant causes are needed to produce a single effect. And a distinct cause quickly spirals into a cascade of intercon nected effects. Also, while neither sort of theory is inherently unprovable, neither can be observed by an external observer in the manner approved by scientific materialism. Both karma theory and quantum mechanics refuse to accept that observers can exist independent of the systems they observe. Spir itual science goes so far as to take the observer’s own internal universe and its states as its experimental field. For it is within that field that karma is pro duced and stored.
Fortunately, it is not my task to attempt to prove or disprove anything other than that my mentor, the Aghori Vimalananda, possessed his own unique vision of the Law of Karma which he tried at all times to remain aware of and act in accordance with. Though many of his favorite spiritual processes are preached by certain ‘recognized’ lineages of Aghoris, Vima lananda refused to depominate himself. Instead he shopped the metaphysi cal mall, donning and doffing assumptions until he found one that resonated with his experience, which he would then wear so long as it continued to fit. Over time he tailored for himself the philosophical garment which he wore while I knew him, apparel which was basically Tantric in design. This makes the darshana (philosophical vision) that underlies Tantra is a good vantage from which to survey Vimalananda’s world view.
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Aghora III: The Law of Karma
TANTRA
Among the beliefs that Vimalananda shared with orthodox Tantrics are:
that the One Reality creates, underlies, and weaves together (the word tantra derives from a root meaning “to weave”) the multiplicity of matter; that the Oneness of Reality is clearly perceived only when all the many varieties of personal obstructions have been re moved;
that these obstructions can be removed by manipulating the matter of which they are formed;
that there is no substitute for a personal guru who shows you your path by gifting you a spark of living knowledge. (There
is no Tantra without a guru.) The “matter” from which we and our obstructions are created includes both the dense physical material from which our bodies are built and the thoughts, attitudes and emotions that make up our minds. Tantric practice is karmic engineering within this field of name and form, orchestration of sub stance and action into result. First you direct new causes against previous ef fects to nullify adverse influences on your awareness, then you unleash yet further actions to negate the influence of the nullifying actions.
While all Tantras–Buddhist, Jain, or Veda-inspired (like most “Hindus” Vimalananda hated the word “Hindu”)—play current karmas against pre existing karmas, the various Tantric systems disagree over the question of how cause and effect mutually relate. While the Buddhists, and certain Vedics like the Mimamsakas, assert that cause and effect are separate from one an other, other “Hindu” traditions aver that cause and effect are implicit in one another, even though they do not simultaneously exist in our world. Accord ing to this latter evolutionary interpretation, effect is nothing but cause seen in a different state. A seed causes the effect of tree which produces seed that produces more trees; the totality of tree” is a sum of all its states, all of which are equally real. Vimalananda espoused this second category of karmic the ory, which is known in Sanskrit as Satkaryavada; he expressed the essence of Satkaryavada as, “Cause is effect concealed, and effect is cause revealed.”
Satkaryavada has two variants: the Sankhya school sees occurrences in the world as actual transformations (parinama), while the school of Shankara charya and his version of Advaita Vedanta (there are five major forms of Ad vaita Vedanta) sees worldly activity as nothing more than the appearance of
14
Introduction
transformation (vivarta). Sankhya is the philosophical foundation of much of Ayurveda (Indian medicine) and Jyotish (Indian astrology), and of most Puranas (compendia of spiritual traditions) and Tantras. Vimalananda fol lowed Sankhya in asserting that the world of duality in which karma exists is as real as the condition of absolute nonduality which is the Ultimate Reality of the universe, and that each is implicit in the other: All-in-One, One-in-All.
SANKHYA
Sankhya sees the universe as a continuous evolution from a “Big Bang” event during which a sense of separateness develops within a portion of the Singularity that is the One Reality in unmanifested form. That portion of the One which sees itself as separate is known as Prakriti (“Nature”), and the re mainder, which remembers that All is One, is referred to as Purusha. The Law of Karma comes into effect at the instant Prakriti separates from Purusha, the first act from which all other acts develop; it is an act motivated, it is said, by a spontaneously-arising desire within Purusha to produce individuals who might perceive and know It. Each atom of the cosmos contains within it a fragment of that Singular Consciousness Who desired to experience. Con sciousness continually evolves by projecting itself into physical vehicles. Though it is minimal in “inert” matter and maximal in humans, a smidgen of consciousness and its resulting soupçon of self-awareness appears in even the densest matter. Human activity is valuable in the Sankhya system only to the extent that it makes us more aware of that undifferentiated Conscious ness.
Prakriti forms, limits, and finitizes. After projecting from Oneness She evolves into undifferentiated transcendent intelligence (mahat), which parti tions itself into individual parcels of ahamkara, the force which produces “I ness” in an organism. Ahamkara (literally, the “I-creator”), which gives living beings that sense of individual existence without which no further differenti ation could occur, possesses three gunas, or attributes: sattva (equilibrium), rajas (activity) and tamas (inertia).
Sattva is the internalizing “I,” the subjective consciousness which resides within a being, revealing its environment. From sattva, the innate nature of the thinking mind, develop the ten senses: the five senses of perception hearing, touch, sight, taste and smell—through which we take in from the world, and the five senses of action, though which we put out into the world:
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Aghora III: The Law of Karma
speech (which represents all forms of communication), hands (creative ac tion), feet (locomotion), genitals (reproduction) and anus (elimination).
Sattva is the most conscious of ahamkara’s three qualities. Rajas is the ex ternalizing “I," the active “I” always on the move, searching for something with which to self-identify. Tamas is the objectifying “I," the expression of unconscious individuality which veils consciousness as it evolves into the five objects of the senses: sound, touch, form, taste and odor. These in turn pro duce the Five Great Elements (pancha mahabhutas…Space, Air, Fire, Water and Earth—which are the building blocks for everything that exists in the manifested universe, including the physical bodies of living beings.
The Sankhya philosophy maintains that embodied life is the functioning together as one unit in one place at one time of the Five Great Elements, the ten senses, the thinking mind, ahamkara, and the intellect, all enlivened by the individual soul, which is a reflection within the field of matter of the cos mic Purusha. Of these only the Purusha Itself is wholly and forever outside the field of the Law of Karma. Everything else that exists within the entirety of the aggregate of all possible universes is a form of matter, which makes it subject to action and reaction. Purusha is pure, passive, present conscious ness which no more interacts with the events it perceives than a movie screen interacts with the pictures projected upon it. All forms of action, including all mental functions, are orchestrations of matter within the closed cause and-effect system that is the Prakriti-field. All secondary distinctions (male) female, body/mind, rationality/intuition) are significant only within Prakriti and have not the least effect on Purusha-Consciousness Itself.
Sankhya is in a sense a species of materialist philosophy in that it teaches that even the most inconsiderable thought is as material as the doornail, and that all thinking, however hasty and offhand, is action which must create reac tion. Even awareness itself is a karma-producing activity when your ahamkara, the force which self-identifies, identifies with it. Inaccurate perceptions en courage tighter bondage; proper perception promotes freedom.
As ahamkara solidifies your individual identity it also solidifies your at tachments to your previous karmas and your current actions. All the actions you have performed and with which your ego self-identified act as seeds for karmic reactions, each of which will take its own time to mature and bear fruit. Ahamkara plants its seeds in the ethereal nursery known as the karana sharira (causal body). The karmic seeds which have collected in the causal body lie quiescent until it is time for them to sprout. Once they sprout their course becomes predestined. As they mature they produce fruit which filters down into your sukshma sharira (astral body). Each karma induces your as tral body (which is composed of your conscious, subconscious, and uncon
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Introduction
scious minds) to induce your sthula sharira (physical body) to put yourself into the proper place and time to enjoy the pleasant or unpleasant results of your past actions. In general, then, your physical body reflects the effects of your past actions while your astral body mirrors your present-day existence. Your causal body is your future; it determines how and where you will con tinue your evolution.
FOUR KARMIC CATEGORIES
Although the cause-and-effect relationship is essentially an indivisible whole we can for easier comprehension partition it into four categories: Sanchita, Prarabdha, Kriyamana, and Agama. Sanchita (“heaped together”) Karma is the sum of all past actions, known and unknown, that appear in your causal body nursery; it is Sanchita Karma that prompts some Indians to claim that the ways of karma are unfathomable. “Unknown” actions in clude those performed in past lives. Prarabdha (“set in motion") Karma is that portion of Sanchita Karma which is ready to be experienced by an indi vidual during this lifetime, the fruits which have ripened and are ready to be consumed.
Sanchita and Prarabdha Karmas are in a sense “destined,” or “fated” as the product of past actions that have matured. However, they are truly inevitable only to the extent that they are not modified by Kriyamana (“being made”) Karma or Agami (“coming, arriving”) Karma. Agami Karma is our capacity to envision future actions, while Kriyamana Karma is what we do at any mo ment with our capacity to will and to create. You cannot destroy your past, but neither need you permit your past to manipulate you like a puppet, since you can alter your future by acting in your present. Kriyamana Karma can also include Agami Karma, and Kriyamana Karma and Agami Karma can to gether be termed Vartamana (“current, living”) Karma. Each of these types can be arabdha (“begun, undertaken”) or anarabdha (“not commenced, dormant”). A famous agricultural analogy to this system of karmic classifica tion equates karma with rice. This makes Sanchita Karma the already grown rice that has been harvested and stored in the granary. Prarabdha Karma is the small portion of that stored rice that has been removed from storage, husked, and readied for cooking and eating. Kriyamana Karma is the rice that is now being planted in the field to produce a future crop.
Aghora III: The Law of Karma
THREE KARMIC INTENSITIES
Though some texts use the Sanskrit words karma and daiva (fate) inter changeably, fate and karma are not synonymous. The human condition always arises from the dynamic coalition of fate and free will, not by either on its own. No one is ruled only by fate, as some Indians insist, and no one’s life is wholly malleable by free will, as some New Agers claim. How much Agama and Kriya mana effort you will need to modify your fate will depend on how intense is the Prarabdha Karma in that area of your life and (to a reduced extent) in the lives of all those other beings with whom you share collective karma: your family, extended family, friends, neighbors, fellow countrypersons, nation and planet.
Tradition distinguishes three degrees of intensity in Prarabdha Karma. These may apply to one, many, or all areas of your life: dridha, dridha adridha, and adridha. Dridha (“fixed”) Karmas are so intense they are non changeable. They create those seemingly “fated” events, pleasurable and painful, that either occur despite all our efforts to avoid them or fail to take place despite all our efforts to create them. The good or bad results produced by Dridha-Adridha (“fixed-unfixed”) Karmas can be changed by anyone who is willing to apply the concentrated creative will needed to change them; in the absence of any sustained effort their predicted results will appear. Adridha (“unfixed”) Karmas are so easily altered that you may do more or less what you please (within reason) in these areas of your life.
This current life of yours is fundamentally a swim across the river of your Prarabdha Karma. If your Prarabdha current is dridha, it is likely to over power you and sweep you away, even if you are a strong swimmer. If you and your current are of roughly equal strength, you will face a dridha-adridha sit uation, and will probably make it across your river if you swim like the devil. When the current is weak your karmas are adridha, and you are unlikely to be imperiled even if you swim poorly. Free will operates here as elsewhere with each of your decisions: where and when to enter the river, how fast to set your pace, what stroke to use. Each act of free will adds to your eventual fate. If you use up your free will early on—if you exhaust yourself just before you reach the rapids—you may find that you have nothing remaining at that cru cial moment when you need your reserves to try to “cheat” your fate.
In the world of finance, non-callable investments pay back their principal and fixed-term debt instruments require repayment at term only, not before. Until you invest, your money is as fluid and free as your will, but at the mo ment you invest you lock yourself into a result that has become “fated.” Banks may fail, technologies may innovate, interest rates may skyrocket, markets
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Introduction
may crash, but your eventual payoff or payment is locked in. The result is now effectively destined” unless you can use your free will to do something with these investments or loans during their terms. You will alter your fiscal destiny if you can sell your investments or create derivatives from them, or if you can pay off your higher-interest loan with one bearing a lower rate of in terest. Whether or not you will be able to make such alterations will depend on the inherent value of the investment or debt, prevailing market and gen eral economic conditions, and related factors. How possible or impossible it is for you to make such changes, i.e. how fixed or unfixed your monetary des tiny is, is an expression of the degree of karmic intensity in your life in the pe cuniary sphere.
Similar degrees of karmic intensity apply to every realm of your existence. Adridha health karmas, for instance, produce diseases which run their course and disappear on their own (unless you use your free will to do things to rein force them). Dridha-adridha health karmas may produce chronic illnesses which can usually be controlled with the help of intensive therapies, but will continue to worsen if neglected. Dridha karmas in the health realm tend to pro duce conditions which refuse to respond even to the most heroic treatments.
Probably the most important of the karmic intensity factors is self-aware ness, the force that allows you to self-identify with your actions. The more you are self-aware, the more effectively individual you can be. Humans, who appear to possess more self-awareness than do most other lifeforms, are bet ter able to self-identify with their actions, consciously, intently, and passion ately. This allows us to sow and reap more than other sentient beings can.
REINCARNATION
The karmas that you perform in dizzying number—think of all the things you accomplish in the space of an hour-grow and mature at different rates, making one lifetime insufficient for you to experience all their effects (unless you happen to be immortal). Karmic theory therefore proposes that beings die and are again reborn-reincarnated—to continue working out pending reactions. What transmigrates, of course, is Prakriti and the principles which devolve from Her. Purusha, Who is eternally free, is never bound to or re leased from a body. Purusha’s sole pastime is to silently observe as the mass of karmas that have accumulated in your causal body steers you from life to life, permitting you to re-interact with those who helped you to create the karmic
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Aghora III: The Law of Karma
bed in which you lie. Each time you are ready to be reborn your Prarabdha Karmas forge for you a mind and body and a milieu in which they will live. Your progress in each life is fertilized and watered by the karmic reactions that support you and is interfered with by karmas that act against your inter ests. Finally your terminating karmas catch up with you and kill you. The thought you think at the moment of death a thought which will reflect ei ther the force of the strongest karmas you performed during that lifetime, or your state of mind as you lie dying, or the force of your habits, or whatever reaction has just matured to join your karmic queue-sets you up for your next birth.
Reincarnation is so handy a concept that it has been an integral part of al most all Indian philosophies since ancient times. Implied in the Vedas them selves, its earliest clear formulations appear in the Brihadaranyaka, Chandogya and Svetasvatara Upanishads. By the time of the Bhagavad Gita reincarnation has become one of Indian thought’s central concepts. The sto ries in the Jataka Tales, for example, are Gautama Buddha’s experiences in previous existences which he used to teach his disciples.
Reincarnation was used in Ayurveda to explain incurable diseases, congen ital deficiencies, and other inborn physical, economic and social handicaps. Ayurveda generally tried to put a positive spin on the experience by advising sufferers (advice is a karma) to be of good cheer and use their free will to try to improve their health now in expectation of an improved physique next time around. Ancient India’s hegemonistic priests used this same doctrine of karma as a negative model to try to keep the majority of the common people in subordinate social positions. The priests advised the peasants that their fu ture living conditions would improve if they would avoid rocking the karmic boat in the present, and promised the lower castes a happier future for them selves if they would pay priests to perform purifying rituals on their behalf.
Venal priests and their willingness to sell karmic indulgences were one rea son that Vimalananda hated organized religions. Another reason was their tendency to confuse karma with sin. While sin is a violation of the rules of your society, religion or affinity group, karma is an innate property of the universe. If your religion enjoins you to, say, slaughter an infidel, then failing to do so will be a karma (to refuse to act is also an action) that may be a sin. By doing so you are likely to escape sin and will gain some good karma for living up to your cultural responsibilities, but you will also incur the proba bly bad karma involved in taking a life. The Vedas and Tantras, which teach that black magic is dangerous, unwise and productive of evil karma, also in dicate that you may resort to it when you find yourself in that condition of extremity when it alone may save you or those who depend on you. Your dis
20Introduction
tress will not exempt you from the karma involved, but it will at least ensure that you performed it for a worthy cause.
DHARMA
Evil karma is evil for you because it sets you up today for a fall tomorrow. As one Tamil woman put it, karma means that we are punished not for our ac tions, but by our actions." (quoted in OʻFlaherty, p. 37) A predator in one birth needs to return as prey, to earn both the points of view needed to round out the whole experience. But evil karma did not become sin until the lawgivers made it into sin. Until then it was adharma (“against dharma”), a state which encompasses all acts that impede or pervert the current of your existence. Dharma, which some people mistranslate as “duty," others as “religion," and yet others as “vocation," is really “doing what you are born to do.” “Conform ing to your dharma” means following that path through life and performing those actions that best agree with you as an individual in the context of the en vironment in which you exist. Dharma is the universal law which makes a thing what it is. The dharma of the moon to shine, of volcanoes to erupt, of boats to float, and of hyenas to laugh. Horses run, whinny, and toss their manes because it is their dharma to do so, not because they feel any moral ob ligation in that direction. Adharma is neither “sin” nor “evil”; it is simply a “non-conformity” with the nature of things, a crime against harmony.
Plants, animals, minerals, and the things constructed for them possess un ambiguous dharmas to the extent that they exist independent of human soci ety. Human dharma is more equivocal. It involves aligning the dharma of an individual’s personal Prarabdha Karmas with the consensus dharma con structed by the society into which he or she was hatched. To effectively follow your dharma as a individual human you need to know how much you must conform to the demands of your community. Between the two poles of hu man adharma-an all-consuming sociopathic disregard for human associa tion and a fanatical subsuming of self into group-lies a catwalk of dharma above a swamp of adharmic dissonance. One false step in either direction from this “straight and narrow path” and you plop into adharmic muck, ei ther by violating the tenets of your personal consonance or by transgressing the “rules” of rapport that someone else has set.
Everyone’s road to reality is personalized, for one person’s dharma is an other person’s adharma. Dharma precedes karma. For, actions which con
21
Aghora III: The Law of Karma
form to your dharma are as likely to give you good reactions as actions which disagree with your dharma are likely to yield disgreeable results. Humans are social animals: most people find their paths to dharma within the context of a society. However, there are a few whose dharma it is to live apart. The dharma of such “renunciates” is to be dead to the world. Any“renunciate” who gets involved in politics (some do in India) thus commits a crime against dharma. While it is against almost everyone’s dharma to live in the smashan, Aghoris find it agreeable to do so because it is their dharma to live there. A good aghori is always fanatically intent on trying to act in harmony with his personal dharma.
The concept of natural” dharma prevailed in India until the day the law givers decided to equate dharma with religion. Dharma now shifted from an innate nature–knowable by the introspective–to an external, moralistic, socialized construct maintained by lawgivers. The early lawgivers were prob ably looking to simplify life for their outer-directed flock by creating rules of dharma to follow. For, it is impractical for most individuals to know cause and effect in detail. But these rules deteriorated into dogma, and sin came to be defined as violations of these rules.
The Manu Smriti, a famous Dharmasastra (treatise on dharma in its incar nation as Hindu religious law), speaks of karma but focuses on sin when it assumes rebirth to be necessary to complete the results of many actions. The text, which sees reincarnation as an action’s first and most important karmic consequence, also advises the prompt performance of penance in hope of modifying the results of these sins. It details several sorts of rebirths, expected for specific crimes or states of being, according to five different karmic pay back systems and a number of miscellaneous rules. Thieves are for example reborn as a variety of animals, and those who fail in their specific caste duties descend into the wombs of the hungry ghosts (pretas). Theft from a Brah mana (member of the priestly caste) is punishable by many years in terrible hells, after which the opportunity to take a degraded incarnation will finally arise. The ungrateful wife returns as a jackal (there is no mention of any pun ishment for a husband’s lack of gratitude).
Though many people today are cheerily convinced that once you become human you will always return to earth as a human, most authorities in an cient India concluded with Manu that you may well descend the evolution ary path before you again ascend it. The Buddha Himself offered this discouraging analogy: A blind turtle who lives at the bottom of a vast ocean surfaces only once each century. On the surface of that ocean sits a storm tossed ring of wood. You are as likely to be reborn as a human as the turtle is likely to stick his head precisely through that ring of wood when he rises next.
22
Introduction
KARMA’S MECHANISM
The Dharmasastras are so ardent to present their retaliatory systems that they pay little attention to another pressing question, viz. the technique by which karma is stored and rebirth occurs. Patanjali’s Yoga system teaches that each intentional act creates a karmic residue (karmashaya) which will con form either to dharma or adharma. Each residue has various samskaras (“dispositional traces”) which produce numerous results, including two types of vasanas (“residual impressions”). While one sort of vasana stores the memory of the act, the other produces kleshas (“afflictions”). These usually erroneous conceptions cause people to remain in bondage to their karmas by spurring them to create yet further karmic residues. Even the memory of a partial incarnation can fasten you more firmly to error if you cannot digest the experiences you had therein—which is why Nature ordinarily will not permit you to remember your past lives until you are in no danger of being overwhelmed by them.
When a person dies her jiva (the sum of her unactivated karmic residues and their attached samskaras and vasanas, gathered together within her awareness field) prepares for rebirth. The residues determine jati(the kind of body, e.g. tiger or human), ayus (lifespan), and the varieties of bhoga (plea sure or pain) that that new body will enjoy during its life as each residue ma tures (vipaka) to give its fruit. The nature of our karmic fruit depends substantially on how we use ahamkara to identify with our actions, which de pends in turn on the relative balance of the Three Gunas in our personalities.
Until a human can completely self-identify with the Absolute Purusha, his or her human’s awareness is itself a substance, a form of matter that possesses gunas. This matter interacts with other forms of matter either to bind pure consciousness more firmly to inaccurate perception or to release it somewhat, that it may shine freely forth by prying apart those bindings. When sattva pre dominates a person performs karmas without becoming attached to their re sults. People who act from passion, blinded by desires, evince a predominance of rajas, while tamas predominates in those who act without thinking. Only those whose minds are fixed solely on the Absolute remain untouched by the Three Gunas. In the words of that greatest of Puranas, the Shrimad Bhagav ata, “The shastra (text) that one studies, the water one uses, the people one consorts with, the place where one is habitually found, the time of day that one favors, the karma one performs, the sacrament that one receives, the ob ject of one’s contemplation, the mantra that one is initiated into the kind of purification that one practices—these influence one’s gunas.”
23
Aghora III: The Law of Karma
The images among which we exist are formed when guna pattern gets multiplied by vasana-produced memories and their associated conceptions, erroneous or otherwise. Images can be weak or strong, spiritual or mun dane, altruistic or selfish, creative or destructive, intellectual or emotional, sensual or chaste. Each of us continually spawns thought forms as we attract the thought forms of others, Images of similar nature resonate with and re inforce one another according to the universal law of attraction. Like contin ues increasing like until the force of an image becomes so strong that its pressure on the mind can no longer be withstood. When it projects, the im age’s owner acts out the image in the “real” world. People can be possessed by their own images, by those of their families (fortified by shared genetics), by those that assemble in the psychic atmosphere of an individual’s familial, local, and national environments, or by combinations of all the above. Im ages can become so strong that they propagate themselves from generation to generation; indeed, we see this daily in locales like the Balkans and the Middle East.
Once an image is created it cannot be destroyed; its physical representa tions will disintegrate, its energy can dissipate or bleed away, but its name and form will not pass away until the universe passes away. Though most modern people think of material things as real, even though they can be de stroyed in a matter of moments, it is imagination, memory, and the other creations of the mind that are really real. Everything that has ever been thought, imagined, or done has left its mark on the cosmos, and can be re called to awareness by anyone who knows how to recall it. Previous incarna tions are also subject to recall, although there is no guarantee that what you may recall is what really” happened to you. Your “remembered” incarna tions might equally well be images from your imagination, images from someone else’s imagination, images from the “lives” of archetypal beings, or experiences of an ancestor’s incarnations.
A superb example of the mysterious relationship between self-identifica tion and incarnation appears in the compendium known as the Yoga Va sistha. A certain spiritual aspirant had by dint of meditation so purified his mind that he gained the power to materialize his thoughts. One day when he was tired of meditating he imagined himself to be an illiterate fellow—which he instantly became. This “dream-being,” who felt he had the name of Jivata, wandered about in his dream world until one day he got drunk and slept. While sleeping Jivata dreamt he was a Brahmana, who dreamt he was a king, who dreamt he was an emperor, who dreamt of being an apsaras (celestial dancing damsel), who dreamt of being a deer, who dreamt of being a creeper, who envisioned itself as a bee, who began to drink the nectar from the
24
Introduction
creeper’s own flowers. The bee saw an elephant on which it contemplated, becoming thereby an elephant, which was captured by a king. When the ele phant saw a hive of bees it remembered its past birth and became a bee, which became a creeper, which became a swan. While the seeker was medi tating on the swan, death collected him, and his consciousness entered the swan’s body. When that swan beheld Rudra (the god of death and transfor mation) it thought, “I am Rudra,” and became Rudra, who went to the abode of Rudra, and recognized what had occurred.
Rudra proceeded to where the aspirant’s body lay and revived him, at which point the seeker saw that he was in fact Rudra and remembered all that had happened. When the pair revived Jivata they all three realized that they were in reality one only. When they awakened the Brahmana and the king and the swan, and all the others, they all grasped the truth that they were all the same, and were all Rudra. Then the Rudra, Who knew fully that He was Rudra, sent the rest of them all back to the world to play out their parts in the grand drama of maya until they returned to Him at the end of their appar ently individual existence.
RNANUBANDHANA
One persistent question about reincarnation’s grand design is, “How ex actly does that jiva get into the body of the plant, animal or human through whose womb it will be reborn?” Probably the most ancient explicit explana tion of transmigration from the Vedic period appears as the “five-fire doc trine” (panchagnividya). According to this scheme, the properly propitiated souls of the dead proceed to the sphere of the moon where they eventually become soma (lunar nectar). They then fall to earth as rain, which produces food, which when eaten by humans produces semen, which finally becomes another human being. This scenario is rather hazy, however, on how one’s bad and good actions influence the process and its results and how the jiva locates the right raindrop that will land on the proper plant that will enter the appropriate parent for it. Presumably it has something to do with the univer sal law of attraction.
Vimalananda, who was not concerned about which raindrop you may have boarded on your journey here, did believe that jivas find their parents via the law of attraction. Karmas are not performed in a vacuum; performed action always has an object, however obscure. Energy (shakti) of all kinds
25
Aghora III: The Law of Karma
flows only when it has some destination to flow to, just as electrical energy flows only when a circuit is created. Your action creates a relationship with its object, be it of dense or subtle matter. Even something so seemingly insub stantial as a thought can act as an action’s object. Vimalananda called the re lationship thus created rnanubandhana (“binding karmic debt”). The energy flux that your action initiates creates a debt (rna) that is payable to you if you sent energy to your object, and that you must pay if you extracted something from that object. Every action creates another “tie that binds,” another band that will draw you back toward that object so that you can square up your karmic account when that residue matures.
Blessings and curses bind you to whatever you have blessed or cursed; if they are strong enough they will take on lives of their own, and pursue you. Thought rnanubandhanas, which create obsessions when they draw their creators to them, are equally adhesive. Throughout your life you will be drawn to the people, places and things with whom you have rnanubandha nas, and when you are ready to be reborn you will be drawn “automatically," as it were, to those parents with whom you have some karmic affinity, with whom sufficient rna-bonds have accumulated.
If karmas were numerical quanities that could be added and subtracted, life would become easy and predictable. All you would need to square up a karmic account would be to total the outstanding karmic credits and debits and then pay them off or be paid off accordingly all at once. But this it is not feasible since each significant residue among the astronomical numbers of karmas that we set in motion and then quickly forget about must be settled separately. The fate that is built into your rnanubandhanas will continue to draw you into those situations in which your karmic residues can work them selves out, and you will still be able to use your free will to try to alter or ne gate the vasanas that they create. These transactions will continue indefinitely, birth after birth, until you exhaust your casual body’s stock of karmic residues.
KARMIC TRANSFERS
While there seems to be no theoretical limit to an individual’s capacity to self-identify with new substances, actions, and situations, the question of transferring the karmic residues of already self-identified action from one being to another is a little muddier. Some texts refuse to accept that one per
Introduction
son might experience the results of another person’s actions, while other texts insist that this must be so. Vimalananda’s position was that both situa tions can occur. Since no one can become so subsumed into communal real ity that all individuality is irrevocably lost, no one in our world becomes wholly independent until he or she is freed of all need to consume all nour ishment from the environment. What makes it impossible to completely dis sect an individual’s karma from that of his or her community is the fact that each person exists in a fluid continuum between two opposing poles:
community benefit - individual benefit transactional life — philosophical life
this world — other world householder — renouncer
creation - dissolution pravritti — nivritti
dharma — moksha The Vedas placed great weight on genetics and community; they assumed outright that the members of a family or clan share with one another both their individually-performed karmas and those performed in concert. Some later texts, however, taught that an individual’s karma is separate and un sharable; they therefore prohibit karmic transfer: “A man reaps that at that age, whether infancy, youth or old age, at which he had sowed it in his previ ous birth…. A man gets in life what he is fated to get, and even a god cannot make it otherwise.” (Garuda Purana, p. 68).
Early Buddhism took an individualist approach: “Each being must be an is land unto himself, working out his own salvation…. Meritorious action well laid up is a treasure ‘not shared with others.”” (McDermott, p. 190). Mahayana Buddhism, though, returns to a community-based view of karma with its Bo dhisattva ideal. A Bodhisattva resolves to take on the burden of all suffering and to offer his store of merit to others. Those who have the ability naturally pro duce and donate good karma; those who need it receive and enjoy it. Later Hindu traditions, particularly those of the bhakti (devotion) sects, also swung back from rugged karmic individualism towards shared karmic experience.
Renouncers and householders both have their place in the world. Re nouncers cannot exist without householders to feed, clothe and shelter them. However, a culture becomes totally and unattractively materialistic if it is composed wholly of householders. Back and forth, to and fro, Indian philos ophers have argued the advantages and disadvantages of sharing your karma with others. Living in a community requires attention to its dharma as well as your own; it requires interactions with other community members in which you will be exposed to the karmic residues of others, and vice versa.
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Aghora III: The Law of Karma
Food and sex are two salient ways through which karma can be shared. The Manu Smriti (6.58) mentions that even a jivanmukta (someone who has been liberated while still alive from the need for rebirth) can become “bound with the fetters of the samsara (the universe of manifested existence)" by ac cepting food from the wrong hand. A wife’s sexual loyalty is said to be inte gral to her husband’s karma. But while a chaste wife can compensate for her husband’s sins, a man can also be destroyed by his wife’s concupiscence.
Consanguineous ties are of immense significance. One rule of thumb in Jyotish states that from birth until age seven a child mainly experiences the results of her mother’s karmas, and from age seven to fourteen, her father’s karmas. Only after age fourteen (and puberty) does she come into her own, karmically. Transfer of merit within families appears in many Vedic rituals, including the pinda offering, which is made to appease potentially angry or harmful ancestors. Karmas can also be resssigned in the opposite direction; the Kausitaki Upanishad (II.15) describes how a son inherits his dying fa ther’s karma.
PRAVRITTI AND NIVRITTI
VI
All these swaps promote pravritti (further development of worldly entan glements and future reincarnation) if the exchangers identify themselves with their exchanges. Minimizing swaps and/or failing to identify with them promotes nivritti (withdrawal from the world of action). Vimalananda pre ferred nivritti, but not at the expense of neglecting to pay off any residual rnanubandhanas. Though there is a general perception that Indians as a peo ple are otherworldly (this slant is noisily preached now in certain Indian spir itual circles), it was not always thus. The disdain for the world of matter, regularly preached by followers of Shankaracharya’s impersonal Vedanta, is even today less predominant a world view among Indians than is belief in the efficacy of worshipping a loving, personal god who can help us both in the here and now and in the hereafter.
Pravritti and nivritti both date from the Vedas, which advise the perfor mance of all manner of sacrifices for the achievement of all manner of spe cific ends both in this world and the next. For many centuries, however, most of those who sought to follow the path toward nivritti which culminates in moksha (cessation of the necessity for rebirth) have tried to isolate themselves from mundane community and the karmic transactions community inevita
28
Introduction
bly arouses. By renouncing the world such people become sannyasins. Sann vas literally means “coma," so a sannyasin is (or should be) literally “comatose” to the world. Sannyasins try to minimize the actions of their many bodily and mental functions as they retreat from their worldly obliga tions. Until they become enlightened, however, the “spiritually comatose” re tain their individual causal bodies and karmic slates. Moreover, they continue to share karmas with their fellow sect members, to the extent that they imbibe ascetic power and spiritual energy (tapas and tejas) from their gurus and enjoy the aid and comfort of their fellow disciples.
Clear-thinking people may be disheartened and disgusted by the implica tions of the karmas we perform for self-preservation, including our dogged rape of Nature. These karmas stretch from the destruction of the wilderness to the swindling of our domesticated plants and animals to work for us for slave wages under savage conditions. We breed and propagate these species only to gobble them down with very little benefit to them or to the Nature Who is their Mother. These karmas teach us humans in turn to gull one another: “Fraud was at the basis of our present-day agricultural and stock-farming in dustries. Among humans exchange took the form of mutual deceit–the start of which was buying and selling. Therefore, the basis of trade is fraud, trickery and deceit. … There is no profit without a type of fraud. A totally fair ex change leaves you with a profit of zero.” (Engler and Hayashi, p. 124-5)
Running away from a duplicitous human society is however rarely an ef fective strategy. The demoralized usually act dispiritedly, and usually collect dispirited results. The renunciation that is of value happens automatically, whenever the karmas that detain you in your world have become depleted. As Vimalananda iterated and reiterated, “If you have to think about renounc ing the world you are not ready to do so. When your interest in worldly activ ities drops away by itself you will automatically move onto the path of nivritti, and only then will you be successful in following that path. Until then there will be no end to karma in this lifetime.”
HUMAN SACRIFICE
Diligent research into the nature of cause and effect permitted the seers of the Vedas, who well understood the necessity of action in life, to evolve meth ods through which they could achieve specific ends through the willful per formance of specific karmas. These methods, called yaga or yajna in Sanskrit
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Aghora III: The Law of Karma
and referred to in English as “sacrifices," feed and satisfy deities and other ethereal beings with prana (life force) transported to them via the fragrance of the smoke from the burnt offerings of consecrated plants or animals. Sac rifice is a prominent feature in many ancient religions, including Judaism, and continue to be performed in India today (all but a few of these are how ever highly simplified versions overseen by priests who no longer understand what they are doing). Sincere sacrificers avoid fraud by ensuring that the be ings they sacrifice receive some benefits as well. When a Vedic ritual is prop erly performed, the evil karma that Vedic sacrificer incurs by killing his victims is negated by the good karma for all that the ritual engenders.
While goats, horses, bulls, alcoholic beverages, and the juice of the soma plant have all been used in Vedic sacrificial ritual, the archetypal victim is a human. At the beginning of its explanation of the Agnichayana sacrifice, for example, the Vedic text known as the Shatapatha Brahmana states clearly that a human is the best sacrifice of all. Another text provides a mantra to be used when you accept a severed human head. No one knows how often hu mans were offered in Vedic sacrificial rituals—or whether they ever were but there is little doubt that human sacrifice did occur in ancient India. We find evidence in works like the Mahabharata, which relates the story of King Somaka, who was so worried that his only son might die that he had the boy sacrificed in order that all one hundred of his wives might conceive. The Ja taka Tale called “The Folly of Garrulity” describes a human sacrifice per formed to protect a city gate. In the Simhasana Dvatrimshati (“Thirty-Two Tales of the Lion Throne") the semi-mythical King Vikramaditya barely es capes becoming a victim himself. In historical times the Thugs made human sacrifice their religion and isolated cases continue to come to light in India even now.
SELF-SACRIFICE
Though Vedic sacrificers have not used human victims for many centuries, sacrificial symbolism continues to pervade much of Hindu ritual. The coco nut, for example, is a particularly auspicious fruit because it so well repre sents the human head, with its three eyes in a hard skull-like shell which contains a brain-like flesh and a quantity of liquid that represents the blood, hormones, cerebro-spinal fluid and other “juices” contained in a human head. Today’s people offer coconuts in lieu of severed heads on occasionsIntroduction
such as the full moon during August, when the citizens of Bombay go down to the sea with their coconuts to attempt to appease the rain gods and calm the monsoon’s frenzy.
The head has long been regarded in India as the most important part of the body. In it concentrates the power that is the excellence of existence, the essence of the universe. The head is the seat of the personality and therefore karma; before the body can act to perform the karma the head must direct it to act. It is by the head that we know the body. The essence of a sacrifice is in its “head,” the means by which the karma of recreating harmony in both the internal and external universes is performed. The more symbolic our sacri fice becomes, the less karma we need to perform; we can take the head, the chief, essential, important element, and leave the rest. To emphasize the lit eral in sacrifice is to maximize its karma, which limits its potential benefits. Some modern people are beginning to suggest that it is generally appropriate to worship God or the Goddess with sex, alcohol, and meat, and that blood sacrifices should be performed because they are effective means of achieving our desires. Though such rituals can indeed be effective they are rarely skill ful means since for they are karmically expensive and commonly lead to in toxication and addiction instead of worship. The astral aura they generate is also likely to strengthen the will of people like the pedophiles and pushers who are already greedily consuming the flesh of the throwaway children whom they“sacrifice.”
It is true that Aghoris worship with sex, alcohol, meat, and sometimes hu man sacrifice, but solely for the purpose of working off their leftover rnanubandhanas, not for creating new ones. They do so with full awareness of what can happen to them if they fall into self-identifications with these ac tions. While the Law of Karma may be temporarily transcended it can no more be nullified than the law of gravity can be negated. An airplane contin ues to fly in violation of gravity for only so long as its engines continue to whir. Aghoris who complete their flights successfully can get from place to place very quickly and get much of their rnanubandhana work done, but if their engines should stop in mid-air down they will drop. If they do crash they know they have themselves alone to blame.
Aghoris prefer to offer their own blood in sacrifice; they ask themselves, “If my Beloved requires prana, why should it not be mine?” In this they follow the lead of the Veda’s themselves. One of the world’s handful of remaining Vedacharyas is Agnihotram Ramanujan Tatacharya whose mastery of Vedic ritual and text is truly dazzling. When last we met he reported to me that there is a passage in the Taittiriya Samhita of the Yajur Veda which states that originally all sacrifice was of the sacrificer’s own flesh. These first sacrificers
Aghora III: The Law of Karma
did not expect other animals or humans to contribute on their behalf; only after they lost their own grit did they begin to settle for substitutes. A good Aghori even today accepts no substitutes.
Blood’s chief task is the transport of prana, and the offering of blood to a deity is fundamentally the offering of that being’s prana. Vimalananda, who always valued refinement over crudity, generally preferred to use sacrificial techniques that were subtler, and less messy, than the literal spilling of gore. This is the sort of penance the Tantras intend when they speak of antaryaga (“internal sacrificial rites”). The Kaushitaki Upanishad provides an example of antaryaga in its description of“inner agnihotra.” Agnihotra usually refers to worship of an external sacred fire, but the inner agnihotra involves the of fering of breath (another transporter of prana) as an oblation in speech when you speak, and the offering of speech as an oblation in breath when you fall silent. In this way you can offer oblations continually as long as you continue to breathe, using your body as your sacrificial altar and your life itself as your sacrifice.
A good aghori masters the art of self-sacrifice. Good aghoris fiercely love to consummate that action within themselves and refuse to forgo it even for a moment. Instead they take the smashan with them wherever they go, even to the racecourse, that their oblations need never be interrupted. What is our world, after all, but one big smashan in which each of us is already burning? For a sincere Aghori life in the “internal smashan” is no metaphor; sincere Aghoris make the smashan real for them. This is a subjective, internal reality, a reality that is more real to them than is the maya outside themselves. Agho ris know that all that is not pure, unalloyed Consciousness is filth. Because they do not discriminate between one variety of filth and another, they liter ally come to see no reason to discriminate between feces and fruit! Instead they ignore everything except their own pertinacity to bring themselves again and again to the melting point, willingly consuming their own filth when need be, the dung becoming ambrosial when it is transmuted in the furnaces of their longing.
Emotional muck, which is usually worse than the physical variety, deserves thorough immolation. The nineteenth verse of the Karpuradi Stotra, a hymn to Kali, states that the Goddess delights in receiving in sacrifice the flesh of goat, buffalo, cat, sheep, camel and man. Though the greedy for meat use this and similar textual references to sanction animal slaughter, what an aspirant really needs to sacrifice is his lust (the goat), anger (buffalo), greed (cat), stu pefaction due to delusion (sheep), envy (camel), and pride and infatuation with worldly things (man). These thick cords that yoked us to the world must be severed if we are to become truly independent (sva-tantra). Until these
Introduction
limitations are sacrificed the seeker is himself no better than an animal which is why the Tantras call such people pashus (animals).
OFF WITH YOUR HEAD!
You can butcher all your emotional attachments in one fell swoop if you are willing to part with your head, which will be for you more of a cesspit of toxins than a reservoir of excellent essence so long as it is polluted with your personal limitations. Severing your head can help you cast off your attach ment to your individual, finite self, for at the moment you perform the karma of this surrender you sacrifice a bit of your imagined control over your life and offer some of your prana to the divine. This allows divinity access into you; “sacrifice," after all, literally means “to make sacred.” The Maha rashtrian poet-saint Tukaram said it right:
If we want to enjoy God, we should lop off our head from our body and hold it in our hands. When the body has been sacrificed to god, says Tuka, all worship has been accomplished.
(Tukaaraama Gaathaa 3414, 3171) Tukaram speaks here of dissevering one’s awareness (the head) from all dis tortions provoked by any kind of physical, mental, or other material limita tions (the body). Though the ideal head offering would extinguish all limitations at once, for most of us a single donation will not suffice. Most of us are so attached to our self-definitions that we need to chop off and offer our heads daily, internally. The force of self-identification is called ahamkara so long as it self-identifies with the actions of the body and mind into which it was born, a self-identification which monopolizes a great deal of energy. When ahamkara begins to release its self-identification with the limited, temporary personality that portion of energy which is freed is called Kundalini. The only difference between ahamkara and Kundalini is the object with which they self identify. Until Kundalini is completely awakened ahamkara will continue to act in large part as if it were the self, and whatever you do will continue to be motivated by your own self-importance and attachment to your sense of dif ference from the rest of the world. As you chop your awareness and prana free of ahamkara’s grasp, you free them to identify with something new.
When you act you make use of your free will; to react is to conform to your “fated” karmas. If you really want to transform yourself you will have to take
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Aghora III: The Law of Karma
charge of your reactions and learn how, when, and where to act. Free will is the ability to choose to remember that we sent our trains of karma in motion and that we can by dint of repeated action eventually change the direction of that train. Your current karmas can be negated at any moment, but only if your present force of intention is equal to the force you used to create those karmas. The key to creating and solidifying new samskaras that will negate your old ones is to repeat your new actions so often and so intently that noth ing can stand in their way.
If anything that you do in total selflessness tends to move you in the direc tion of nivritti, every karma you perform with a desire for a result is likely to lead you further into pravritti. There is no real advantage in renouncing par ticipation in the world to which you belong until you are ready to give up self-identifying with your actions. Until ahamkara has been transformed into Kundalini you will just continue creating new rnanubandhanas wher ever you go. Even the desire to make karmic amends may be fraught with peril, for fighting against your residues tends to create yet more residues, and a conscious effort to repay all your rnas may make you run amok. If you find the thought of rebirth distasteful you will do well to learn how to act appro priately, according to your dharma, in a state of karmasamya (“active bal ance”) and refuse to self-identify with the performance of your duties. By reflecting on the transitory nature of existence, you can live in your family and society unfettered, like a chance guest, and forsake your attraction to the sense objects that make up your world. All bondage disappears as soon as you relinquish the idea of “me” and “mine” in all things: “Realize, then, that smell and taste have to be given up! They are nothing but a steady flow of craving and desires! How, thus liberated, could you ever think of the fishmonger’s shop as stinking?” (Kohn, p. 241)
TYAGA
All Vedic rituals contain three basic elements: dravya, the material that is offered; devata, the deity to whom it is offered; and tyaga, the renunciation of the fruits of the ritual in favor of the deity. Tyaga is the essence of sacrifice in Vimalananda’s formula,“the marma (core or nucleus) of dharma is tyaga." In the Bhagavad Gita Krishna describes tyaga, which He defines as the re nouncing of the fruits of all one’s activity, as life’s ultimate goal. He advises Arjuna to waive his attachment to all potential results of every karma and to
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Introduction
focus on Him and Him only: “Abandon all other duties, and come to me alone for refuge. Be not sorrowful, for I shall give you liberation from all sins." (Bhagavad Gita XVIII.66) Though there is no escape from karma in this world, you can free yourself from all other karmas by assigning the fruits of all your actions to Him. When you dedicate your actions to the Lord they produce well-being in all fields of activity, just as watering the roots of a tree nourishes each of its branches. Your offering creates the rna that gives Him the power to help you, to grant you His grace in return. In Vimalananda’s words, “A fair exchange is no robbery."
Daily sacrifice of your self-importance provides daily sustenance to your deity, who after “laundering”it of your vasanas returns it to you with interest. Your sole ritual becomes a quest to see and worship Him in all beings in all places (including the race track, if your karmas take you there), with every exertion of body, mind and speech. Jesus would have you follow the same path. He made Himself the Passover lamb, the sacrificial “first fruits” of the harvest, that whoever opened themselves to Him might escape the burden of their karmas. When you contract to surrender your all to Jesus, or Krishna, or another deity, or your guru, you are in danger only if you fail to perfect your gift. A single unsurrendered karma in the causal flowerbed is sufficient to seed a new forest of karmas and another string of rebirths. This hazard is easily surmounted if you are willing to extend to your devotion that commit ment that Zen Buddhist abbot Harada Sekkei Roshi advocates when he ad vises his student to “crave dharma like a fish that is out of water, and work as you would if your hair were on fire.” (Roshi, p. 77)
This was the sort of commitment that the gopis (milkmaids) of Vrindavana showed to Lord Krishna. Krishna said of them, “They want Me with all the force of their minds; they look on Me as the life of their life; for My sake they have abjured all the ties of the flesh. And I cherish and sustain those who sac rifice for Me all the joys of this world and the next, and the Dharma of which they are the fruit.” (Shrimad Bhagavata X:46:3) In time, when the intensity and repetition of the gopis’ whole-hearted devotion to Krishna had com pletely destroyed their vasanas, they attained Krishna, and freedom.
Krishna similarly saved King Parikshit. The Shrimad Bhagavata is the story of how Parikshit extricates himself from the constraints of his vasanas and samskaras. His intensity is stimulated by the curse that he would die within seven days; the repetition is provided by the story. The first half of the book uses genealogies and lineages to awaken and release Parikshit’s Kundalini from its ancestral, archetypal, and transmigrational memories; the second half provides new objects for his Kundalini to attach herself to, in the form of Vishnu’s avataras (divine incarnations). By Book Ten, which tells the tales of
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Lord Krishna’s transcendent pastimes, Parikshit is ready to listen, and to sur render.
Whoever constantly contemplates Krishna merges completely with Him. But though He is Perfection Personified (Purnatmaka Purushottama), Krishna is but one of the countless deity-images to whom one can surrender. Vimalananda liked to speak of submission to Krishna when he spoke of sur render because of his love for Krishna and for the Shrimad Bhagavata. Tantric sadhanas can also lead to union with one’s deity, but Tantric texts rarely emphasize bhakti (Vimalananda claimed that this is because by and large they were written by ambitious, unperfected disciples). While the texts of Tantra tend to concern themselves with karmic transactions and the achievement of results, texts on Krishna, in particular the Shrimad Bhagav ata, pursue the goal of unbounded bhakti. Those who can bring their karmas to equilibrium (karmasamya) on their own should do so; those who cannot should permit Krishna, or Shiva, or Ma, or another Beloved to do it for them.
Vimalananda, who was always rebelling against something or other, loved both the Tantras and the bhakti movement for their refusal to kowtow to pet rified social conventions. While the Tantras use heterodoxy as a means to their end of extracting themselves from society’s conditioning, devotees of Krishna simply have no time to think of orthodoxy:“To dedicate an action to Me is to purify it. What is right may in certain circumstances be wrong; what is wrong may…become right. The rules that declare what is right and what is wrong thus show only that the distinction is based on no intrinsic differ ence… . Whatever a man gives up, that he is freed from. The observance of this law puts an end to sorrow, fear, and delusion and delivers men from bondage.” (Shrimad Bhagavata XI:21:14-18)
VIMALANANDA
To Vimalananda, who yearned above all else to be free from every form of bondage, the worst sort of thralldom was entanglement in the ossified ideo logical pabulum of calculated spirituality. Brahmanical Hinduism has throughout its history sought to control potential troublemakers by defining them into harmlessness. All too often this drive has led Indian culture to ex propriate its saints. After a saint is safely dead and seemingly gone his well meaning devotees usurp his reputation and readjust his image and message to fit their understanding of what he was trying to teach. Most of Ramakrishna
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Introduction
Paramahamsa’s disciples followed this game plan when they confiscated his memory and tailored it to suit Victorian Bengali culture, emphasizing the Ve
dantic aspects of his teachings while downplaying its Tantrism.
Vimalananda, who loved his freedom, worked hard not to be appropriated either by neo-puritans or neo-epicureans. While he sometimes actively sought to outrage, his normal daily life was usually outrage enough. I am sure that this book will give the people in the West who have already accused him of practicing black magic (Beware the Dark Side!) new ammunition with which to attack his memory (Horse races! Gambling! We are shocked, shocked!).
But what else should we expect from those prigs and bluenoses who are af ter all simply reacting, conforming to their karmas? What can someone who is bedevilled by concern for external purity and piety understand of someone to whom the external is merely a detail? “He who lies down on the ground cannot fall," says the Shrimad Bhagavata (XI:21:17), and there is no ground further down than that of the smashan. Every act that Vimalananda per formed was a calculated excuse, a ploy to maneuver himself into a position from which he could square up some rnanubandhana or other. Inspired per haps by the example of Lord Krishna, Who certain bhakti texts describe as a “sweet thug” because He would dupe people into doing what their karmic debts required them to do. Vimalananda never failed to stoop to crookery when he required it to take care of a rna. He thus fit right in at the racecourse, where everyone is crafty. You cannot speak your mind candidly to all and sundry at the racecourse and hope to win any races. This makes you crooked—but it need not make you a cheat.
Life at the races is an apt allegory for life in general. On the track or in the home or office, the best way to deal with the karmic reactions that have come due is by kala (stratagem, finesse), not bala (brute force). Never to try to force the issue, but negotiate patiently as you slip and slide your way toward extrication. Vimalananda, who characteristically preferred tact to coercion as he navigated the ship of his life through the sea of his world, illustrated this point on one occasion with the following story:
There was once a man who owned an old pair of sandals which had been patched so many times that they had no spot left un patched. The man then decided that it was time to get rid of these sandals, so the next time he went to the temple for worship he re moved them and left them outside. When he came out he deliber ately neglected to pick them up, thinking that some poor person would come along and take them. But some busybody ran after him, handed them to him, and said, “You’ve forgotten your san dals! Don’t you have any better sense?”
Aghora III: The Law of Karma
The man walked back home, where he concluded that the best way to get rid of the sandals was simply to throw them away and let anyone pick them up. So he went directly to his window and threw them out, but they happened to land on a small child who was passing at that moment beneath his window. The child and its mother screamed so loudly that a crowd gathered. When they heard what had happened the crowd abused the man for injuring such a dear, helpless child, and the child’s mother beat the man soundly with his own sandals.
Once the commotion had died down the man sat to think the situation over. He reflected to himself, “All I wanted to do was to get rid of these old sandals, and as a result I get both insults and a good beating. What can I do now?”
Suddenly the sandals started to talk. They said, “Why are you causing such a fuss? All right, I know that I have been resoled so many times that nothing but patches remain. But all you have to do is remove all the patches and attach some good leather, and then attach a new sole, and I’ll be just as good as new.” And that is what the man did.
A WORLD OF STORIES
Vimalananda, who patched and resoled his personality whenever he wished to become “good as new," made his whole life into a teaching tale. Rarely would he hesitate to hyperbolize to drive a point home; he did, after all, sometimes describe himself as Bandal-e-aftaab (“the sun among exagger ators”). His overstated displeasure with figures like Adi Shankaracharya and Mahatma Gandhi does not imply a lack of appreciation for their real achieve ments. It suggests instead an acute awareness of their imperfections, en hanced that I might not mistake the lessons they carried. He sometimes exceeded his own limits for similar purposes, and as you read his excuses for such questionable behavior remember the many ways in which we each use self-justification to our advantage. The human brain has been compared to an attorney who will argue whatever side of a case it has been hired to argue regardless of its merits. Once Vimalananda had divined a course of action it was child’s play for him to construct a rationale for it.
Though he never succeeded in winning me over to certain of his more out
38
Introduction
landish positions, I was always at least willing to consider being convinced by Vimalananda’s arguments. Doing so facilitated free communication in the same way that rambunctiousness on my part would have obstructed it, and most of the time Vimalananda’s conclusions were themselves self-evident to me. But perhaps the main reason that I would sometimes accept the possibil ity of truth in an assertion so wild that coming from anyone else I would have instantly discounted it was his transparent sincerity. In Aghora, lack of heart is very dangerous, and Vimalananda was a child at heart until his dying day. His love for everyone around him was so genuine and childlike that many people took mean advantage of him, which eventually made him wary enough of hu mans that a certain external trickiness came to seem to him prudent.
What seems to me prudent is to accept his stories for what they are and al low the heart to extract from them their vital essence. A good tale is such a useful tool because even if it suggests nothing to you when you first hear it, it can mature within your consciousness into a form that in due time may be gin to communicate with you. Like many other teachers of traditional Indian wisdom, Vimalananda preferred to teach in stories, some of which speak to the deepest levels of human awareness. There were times when Vimalananda would be trying to explain to me something exceptionally esoteric—like the relationship between the causal body, the chromosome pattern and the Jnanendriya-Karmendriya Nyaya (“the Law of the Sense Organs of Cognition and Those of Action”), and how the Jnanendriya-Karmendriya Nyaya con trols fertilization and impregnation—that everything would begin to go far over my head. Then he would suddenly shift his discourse into a story in stead. Though at the time he delivered it the story often seemed to have little connection with the topic at hand, the truth of their connectedness would indeed gradually begin to arise within me as it all sank in.
Even with time, of course, some myth-packed narratives never reveal themselves fully, even when they seem most nailed-down. When you read in Chapter One the story of.Prithviraj Chauhan, for instance, please remember that there was a time when it was common practice in India at the start of a construction project to drive a nail or stake into the head of Shesha Naga, the gargantuan serpent who supports the world. The structure’s cornerstone would be laid above the snake’s head, thus placing it at the exact center of the world. Mircea Eliade has traced this tradition to the “primordial gesture” of Indra when he “struck the Snake in his lair” (Rig Veda IV:17:9), when his lightning bolt“cut off its head” (Rig Veda I:52:10). To transfix or behead the snake is to pass from the virtual and amorphous to the formed and orga nized, to concretize a potential karma’s causation stream in time and space. Properly fastened karmas churn out well-tempered, benefic effects.
Aghora III: The Law of Karma
Shesha means in Sanskrit “that which remains," not in the sense of some one’s leavings but rather a background or setting, a matrix which so comple ments an item that without it that item would be incomplete. When you dig a well on your property, you may value the well for its water, but the condition of the ground that forms the remainder of your property will govern how valuable that well will be to you. Your well draws its water from your prop erty’s shesha; change those surroundings and you change the well. Like a wisely-dug well, a story whose stake stretches down into Shesha Naga’s head taps into its own shesha, the inexhaustible waters of living myth which will continue to stream into it so long as that stake remains in place.
Vimalananda rarely met a story he didn’t like, and he freely adapted many of them for his purposes. In this he was but following tradition, for recycling legend is an ancient and respected practice in India. In Vimalananda’s world no story was a good one unless it possessed at least seven layers of meaning, and he would tinker with his stories until they did. You can if you like com pare Vimalananda’s version of the story of Sudama with that of the Shrimad Bhagavata (Book X, Chapters 80 & 81), and find in the Sanskrit text known as the Panchatantra versions of at least two tales that Vimalananda ascribed to Akbar-Birbal (that of the unlucky one-eyed washerman and that of the man who claims to be able to go to heaven by getting his “old” body burned). Vimalananda, who had done an M.A. in Mughal history, was particularly fond of tales of Akbar and Birbal, many of which continue to be told for fun and profit all over North India. He added some of the better-known of these to his repertoire, and possessed others that seemed to be known only to him. These may have been gleaned from some obscure oral tradition, or he may have deliberately created them as teaching tools; if so, he would not have been the first to do so.
This book, which I crafted with the same sort of heedfulness that we used to craft our winners at the track, is an episode in the personal saga of the Ag hori Vimalananda. This introduction represents a slice of the book’s shesha. As you turn now to the narrative, please release any need you might have to perfectly understand the literal meanings of its words and sometimes eccen tric reasoning. Open yourself, rather, to the words. Let them course through you in their own way and they will surely deliver to you their message.
40REFERENCES
Dutt, Manmatha ed. The Garuda Purana. Calcutta: Society for the Resusci
tation of Indian Literature, 1908, in The Pocket World Bible, ed. Robert O.
Ballou, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd. 1948. Engler, Robert and Hayashi, Yuriko The Way of No Thinking: The Prophecies
of Japan’s Kunihiro Yamate. Tulsa: Council Oak Books, 1995. Kohn, Livia ed. The Taoist Experience: An Anthology. Albany: SUNY Press, 1993. McDermott, James P. “Karma and Rebirth in Early Buddhism,” in Karma
and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions, ed. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, 1983. O’Flaherty, Wendy Doniger “Karma and Rebirth in the Vedas and Puranas,"
in Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions, ed. Wendy Doniger
O’Flaherty. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, 1983. Svoboda, Robert E. Aghora, At the Left Hand of God. Albuquerque: Brother
hood of Life, 1986. Everyday Mind: Dharma Talks by Harada Sekkei Roshi. Bangalore: Buddha
Vachana Trust, 1991.
NOTE
Aside from known historical figures like Akbar, General Sleeman and Seth Sagal Shah and known mythological figures like Smashan Tara and Gorakh Nath, the following actual people appear within under their own names: Robby (the author), Roshni, Ranu, Faram, Chotu, Vaidya B. P. Nanal, Dr. Vasant Lad, Dr. Shantilal Mehta, Dr. Gomes, Dr. Durandar, R. D. Shah, Din kar, Damle, Chabbu Ranbuke, Begum Akhtar, Chandramohan, Taat Maha raj, Sevadasji & Chunilal, Balam Bhat, Madhavbaba Patil, Shankargiriji Maharaj, Hambir Baba, Baba Chandal Das, K. Narayana Baba, Dada Maha raj, Das Bapa, Chaitanyananda, George McGrath, Sir Lester Piggott, Mr. Wil liams, Sir Cusrow N. Wadia, Admiral Eric Shipton, the Chief of Jat, and the Maharajas of Bikaner, Gwalior and Mudhol. “Lizoo" was really the dog’s nickname (her registered name was Lady Elizabeth), and “Prof. Joker the Guru” really was that tipster’s nickname. Black Dog really is a blend of pre mium Scotch, and Kersasp Kolah really does produce a savory Spicy Carrot
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Aghora III: The Law of Karma
Pickle. The horses Potoo000000, Waxy, Eclipse, Kincsem and Mount Everest actually raced under those monikers. Everyone else, horse and human alike, has had his or her name changed, to protect the innocent, the guilty, and those who aren’t sure. Stoney’s photo on Vimalananda’s wall showed her winning a race other than the Mother Lode Cup. Although Colonel Pratap Singh of Jodhpur was a real person, the Big Race that Redstone won was named for another nobleman.
Every event in which I am involved that I recount in this book actually oc curred—insofar as things actually occur’ here in the physical universe.
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