Karma Yoga: Karma Yoga - Lesson III (of XI )

By Bhikshu

Karma Yoga: Lesson III

The Hindu-Yogi Philosophy is nothing if it does not answer all the canons of fair criticism. This has been assured by the method of instruction called the Samwada or the dialogue, wherein the student can raise all kinds of objection before he submit to the utter obedience necessary in the earlier stages of Yoga. The "dialogue" it may be mentioned by the way, is the most ancient form of religious instruction to be found as in the Gilgamesh Epic of the Babylonians, in the Teutonic myths, in the chronicles of Zoroaster, as well as in the Vedas. And the dialogue is the result of the querying habit of man, a query that is naught but the crown of all gifts that has come down to man. This more or less developed power of gathering one's activities together, and unifying them in a conscious self that can look at itself in a mirror and see itself objectively, is given to everyone. This is the vivid, controlling attention-shifting selfconsciousness, the psychical side of cerebral integration, the tribunal before which the promptings of the primary conscious and repressed unconscious must come up for judgment.

It is quite right therefore for everyone to ask himself "What is this Karma or Act?" Where does it begin? Where does it end? Action and Reaction, you say, are equal and opposite; where then can action be avoided or rather can any act be done which does not provoke reaction? What are the factors of the act? Is there no difference between the consciously performed and the unconsciously performed Act or omission? If so, what? Is there not such a thing as the agent or instrument, the vehicle or the cause of the Act, itself the cause of the Actor? And who pray is the Actor? Is man the actor? If, as they say, the reaction is equal and opposite to the action, who is the enjoyer of the action? Does man live long enough to enjoy the reaction of all his acts? Yes, these and other questions, a very long chain of them are and have from time immemorial been asked by querying minds as to the "Act," and the Scriptures of all nations are full of answers, complete or incomplete, thereto.

A complete answer is to be found in the dialogue, Bhagavad Gita. For the purposes of these lessons only the acts of the conscious person are taken for analysis and the Gita says that every act is prompted by knowledge, Jnana, made up of the thing known, Jneyam, and the Knower, Parijnata. And the Act may be said to include the instrument Karana, the Act, Karma and the actor Karta. And going further, the Gita says that in the utmost analysis, for the fulfillment of any act, five factors are required so say the most ancient thinkers too. These five are: ( I ) The sphere governed by or governing the Act, the limit of pervasion of the act and ipso facto, of its consequences, the Adhishtanta (2) The enjoyer of the act, Akarta, he who is affected by the utmost consequences of the Act, Bhokta, quite irrespectively of the Act or Actor (3) Various kinds of modes of the Act, the ways in which the Act takes effect, is performed, or exhibits itself, cheshta (4) Various kinds of the instruments or agents of the Act, the intermediaries or restrictions between the Actor and the Act, Karana they are called, and (5) Daiva, God, if you please, the unseen factor, the marginal error, the uncounted host, the catalyst or decatalyst, time, etc. in so many forms does it appear.

For every Act, continues the Gita, whether it is performed by the body, by the tongue (as speech or utterance) by the mind (as thought), these remain five factors, the five Actors. The sages commenting on this text tell us that the limit of pervasion of the Act, its sphere, is the body itself, the body alone, and by the body is meant the entire "kingdom" subject to each individual, his passions, desires hopes, longings, possessions, etc., all that he identifies himself with. This is his sphere of action, rather the sphere of the Reaction that follows the Act inevitably. This is quite in accord with the discoveries of modern Relativity which tell us that force is a mathematical fiction, that nothing one can do can affect really any other but himself, that no two particles of matter ever come into contact, that when they get too close to each other they both move off. The Actor is not at all an Integrity but a multiplicity; this is the fundamental doctrine of the Yogi Philosophy. From time out of mind they have been inculcating this precept that the Ego is not the "I," that the "I" is but a puny figment of the waking memory, quite powerless to effect the tremendous result called the body and known as the universe. They have uttered it in the Vedas, heard it from the Puranas and learnt it from the Gita. How foolish then those men of incomplete insight who not caring to think deeply or at all, state that oneself alone is the actor.

Let me quote the definition of the consciousness of the self given by James in his Psychology text book: "The consciousness of self involves a stream of thought each part of which as "I" can remember those that went before and know the things that they knew, and (2) could emphasize and care permanently for certain ones among these as "me" and appropriate to these the rest. The nucleus of the "me" is always the bodily existence felt to be present at the time. Whatever remembered past feelings resemble this present feeling are deemed to belong to the same "me" with it. Whatever other things are perceived to be associated with this feeling are deemed to be part of the "me's" experience and of them certain ones which fluctuate more or less are reckoned to be themselves constituent of the "me" in a larger sense such are the clothes, material possessions, the friends, honors, esteem which the person receives or may receive. This "me" is of course an empirical aggregate of things objectively known. The "I" which knows them cannot itself be an aggregate neither for psychological purposes need it be considered to be an unchanging metaphysical entity like the spirit or a principle like the Ego viewed as out of time. It is a thought at every moment different from that of the last moment but appropriative of the latter together with all that the latter called its own."

All the experiential facts find room in the above description of the "I" unencumbered with any hypothesis other than passing states of mind. It shows that the "I" is not an unity nor an integrity but a multiplicity, and a multiplicity it is, incalculable, both of the human form, a body built up of billions of living entities, an impermanent aggregation of living cells, and of the human soul itself, composite of quintillions of souls each and all non- finite compounds of fragments of anterior lives, a congeries diseased, teeming with many purposes and places and yet in whom there is no power to persist.

How are actions, Karma, caused, then? Says the Hindu Yogi: "Action (Karma) is a constant function in the universe the lives in nature, man's or world's nature always effect Karma, as in ideomotor action called by us avashah karma, irrespective of an attention or attentive being, in the Act caused." In the language of Einstein and the Relativists, events are continually happening; matter is a succession of events; the succession of events, rather, was called matter in so far as matter was a logical construction that could be made from a series of events, grouped together in virtue of their semblance and continuity. Not only that, according to Bertrand Russel (A. B. C. of Relativity, p. 122): "Every bit of matter, little or small, is at the top of its own hill in the spacetime continuum; the hill is what we know about; the bit of matter is assumed for convenience." Again says he on p. 222 thereof: "It is true that there are still electrons and protons that persist but these are to be conceived as strings of connected events like the notes of a song."

The world before us is then a world not of things in motion but a world of events, wherefrom we judge whether what comes before our vision is a Behaviour (Guna) or whether it is only a representation to ourselves of our own Thought (Karma). And first of all we have to remember that every Act, every Thought is symbolic and not real. "When we say, 'we see a table,' we use a highly abbreviated form of expression," says Russell, p. 214 of the book above quoted, "concealing complicated and difficult inferences the validity of which will be open to question," (in a world of relativity because no two points of view are the same). As says Max Nordau: "In every act of consciousness man perceives a symbol of the object and never object itself." First of all in the subject, i. e. in the field of perception of the subject, the Adhistana, the whole universe is mirrored and digested, by the subject, who is hence called Akarta, a Gita term for enjoyer. In this perception which is a vibration, motion or force, and which after all is not distinguishable from matter, there is an effect, Cheshta, on the perceiver; and the effect is both simple, and compound, direct, and indirect, i. e. via an instrument or agent, a Karana. In fact all the forces in the universe known and unknown (destiny or Daiva) are, in every act of perception, acting on the subject.

So too in every Act (Karma). All the forces in the subject together with all the forces in the universe are acting on every Instant (event)! Every event is generated not out of some proceeding event (Actor or Cause), but out of a whole situation or complex of events, no one of which could be regarded as the cause of any event, says "Relativity"; this being a translation into modern English of the teaching in the Bhagavad Gita (XVIII, 16). It would be idle to argue herefrom a sole Actor, an Unity; and it would be more correct to argue that it was a Multiplicity that was the Actor in every Act. As a great Brother says, "the cry of I am I is most especially of that which, above all, is not the 'I'."

This is specifically seen in the old adage, "Nature will out," no hetero- suggestion is ever successful says the physician Coue, "if it is opposed to the conscious tastes and desires of the subject"; nature is oftentimes found to constrain a man to act; ideas that occupy obsessingly the threshold of consciousness are bound to issue in action, the self playing consciously no part in such Acts; this is a truism made in group psychology. The will of the many, in man has no consideration for any but its own purpose; this has to be understood by the Karma Yogi. For while man is working day and night at some trival detail of his affairs, a giant force, the "Purpose of the many in him," Destiny you may call it, the nature of space-time in his neighbourhood as the Relativists term it, may be advancing pede claudo to overtake him.

You may say that this the Reaction of the Action inaugurated by man himself at some time previous; nay, it is not that alone; what reacts so far as there is reaction is only that conscious act of man's surface consciousness that may have acted, and we can see that there is no proportion therein. The reaction though equal and opposite to the Action is still too trifling a part of the future; as Destiny, Daiva it is only one of the factors of the Act in the future. The freewill of man, such as it is, remains always unimpaired.

The moral that the Jains drew from all this teaching was that it was well to avoid sinful act, for after "a man has done manifold actions that injured many lives, his pleasure-seeking relations took up all his wealth while the doer suffered in Hell for his sins." The people of the Vedic times drew the moral that the past was not to be regretted but to be recognised by the neophyte Karma Yogi as the work of Kama, heedless thought, and of Manyu, anger, by the mantra "Kamo Akarshid Manyur Akarshid" ( Kama caused it; Manyu caused it). Anyway the past was not to be regretted at all.

It can therefore be seen that the Law of the equality of Action and reaction on the mental plane, has not such value to the Karma Yogi, he recognises that every Act is the act or function of the Many; that a Unity can never be the sole actor; that every action is not caused but truly effect. The Karma Yogi has to recognise that things cannot have happened otherwise than as they have; this is the teaching of the word "Tatha" the submission to kismet that characterised Prince Sidharta the Buddha and many others after Him. Further he is to recognise that this Karmic ledger of each one is a peculiar record the balance of which is struck only after death; he does not know at any date what is owed him nor to whom all he owes debts; it is all a mess but so it is. It leaves him only one conclusion, that nothing can excuse his inaction in any event, that nothing can exonerate him, that his Free-will that is the Free-will of the many in him has always power to prevail and overpower, and that this power is exercisable by himself, i. e. by the King in him. The will and judgment are always the result of autocratic and never of democratic decisions, is a fact recognised in group psychology, and this constitutes the base of man's Free- will. It is a unification of many wills rather than a single will full cell in man.

Such ideas as that the Law of Karma is a blind Law, a stern justice that takes no note of men's motives, or of God's mercy, have to be given up as worthless teaching unfit for and inapplicable to the Karma Yogi of all men. Behind all the apparent suffering and pain and malice of the world the Karma Yogi especially if he be the sufferer sees transcendent beauty, thrilling energy, enduring love, and the utter radiance that enchants. And, most especially the Karma Yogi cannot be a Fatalist.

For purposes of this lesson it is enough to recognise that though thou doest as thou wilt, what is done is not done by thee but by many milliards of cells that are of thy make-up. Remember that every act is to be of many milliard cells not of that fiction called the I or Ego.

The Mantra shall be herein, as follows:-

"I shall act, yet not I, but the many that live in, that are of Me, for them shall I act so that they may find their longing and fulfillment. I shall DO IT that they may live their life which elsewise they could not."

This articles is from a series in eleven lesson in Karma Yoga, From "The Yoga Philosophy of Thought Use" and "The Yogin Doctrine of Work"

ÒThe kingdom of Thought is truly yours; you can select values, reject vanities, eliminate dross, live as the uncrowned and crowned Emperors have lived in the utmost independance, ordering for yourself Happiness, distributing the flowing surpluses thereof to all around you.Ó

Chicago, U.S.A., Yogi Publication Society, 1928

See - Yoga Lessons - for the other Yoga Lessons I - XI