Skip to main content

What you suffer is your karma

The following is an extract from my new book Coping with Suffering.

Your suffering is your choice to a great extent in Hinduism. Your karma determines what comes your way. Karma is the principle that governs the unfolding of events in your life. Your karma depends on the integrity with which you lived your previous lives. It is not a punishment because unlike in the Abrahamic religions there is no punitive God sitting in any heaven meting out retribution to people. Karma is the unfolding of the moral law that drives the whole universe. As Dr S Radhakrishnan put it, “The working of karma is wholly dispassionate, just, neither cruel nor merciful.” It is not about cruelty or mercy. It is the natural consequence of what you do. If you eat salt, you will drink water. Quite as simple as that.
There is no escape from it because it is part of the eternal law of the universe which is applicable to everything and everybody in the universe without any discrimination. The high and the low, the mighty and the weak, the animate and the inanimate, all are subject to the eternal law one way or another.
God is the eternal law. We may even say that the eternal law is god. Brahman (God) is the infinite reality, the all-encompassing existence. Your ultimate deliverance is a merger of your being into that infinity. For that you need to achieve purity by liberating yourself from your ego. Only the pure self can dissolve into the infinite reality.
The infinite reality pervades everything. Nothing exists outside that. But evil is not a part of that pure reality. Evil belongs to the impure, imperfect material reality. Concepts like good and evil, bliss and suffering, are not applicable to the infinite reality which is beyond all such limited and limiting notions.
Evil and suffering are our creations, in short. Our anger, greed, delusion, etc bring much suffering to ourselves as well as others. Other people, beasts, reptiles and so on can cause suffering to us. There is also a kind of suffering caused by forces beyond us like natural disasters.
There is no material life without some evil and suffering. That is precisely why our ultimate goal is to liberate ourselves from this existence and merge into the infinite reality which is beyond all sensations and feelings, beyond any possibility of suffering.
Krishna of the Bhagavat Gita advises us to live without attachment to anything here on earth if we wish to escape the cycles of birth, death and rebirth, the cycles generated by our karma. Attachment is a desire for things you don’t have and a clinging to things you do have. This attachment is the primary stumbling block to achieving moksha, liberation.  This attachment brings unnecessary suffering to human beings.
You have to rise above the joys and sorrows brought by this attachment. As Krishna tells Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, “You must learn to endure fleeting things – they come and go! When these cannot torment a man, when suffering and joy are equal for him and he has courage, he is fit for immortality.”
It is the nonchalance of the ascetic that Krishna is asking Arjuna to acquire. It is not the listlessness of the weary person. It is not the apathy of the unconcerned. It is an enlightened state of mind which shows you the illusory nature of the things to which you feel unwarranted attachment. It reveals to you how like a moth you are flying into a flame that will scorch your wings when you have the option to fly higher into the pure and blissful light of divinity.
   How do you do that? How do you reach that higher realms and attain eternal deliverance?

 For more, order your copy here.

Comments

  1. Chetan MaheshwariJune 10, 2020 at 6:05 PM

    I completely agree that Karma determines everything, but then there are certain instances in life where I think that this one is attributed to which karma so that we can correct it...is there a way to do so

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJune 10, 2020 at 6:13 PM

      We have to correct whatever is wrong. Karma can't be an excuse for anything. This is just an extract. The chapter continues in the book.

      Delete
    2. parwatisingariJune 11, 2020 at 6:38 AM

      Karma, you can one level say cause effect. that would make it a bland equation. But Karma is more importantly how you judge yourself. How I judge myself depends on a whole gamut of things, like my social, economic, education and religious background. My experiences in life and what meaning I have attached to it.

      Delete
    3. Tomichan MatheikalJune 11, 2020 at 2:04 PM

      If you eat salt, you'll drink water - as they say in Kerala. Cause - effect. But as you say, there's a lot of complexity too.

      Delete
  2. Santwona PatnaikJune 11, 2020 at 3:59 PM

    So beautifully explained! "If you eat salt, you will drink water." ~ I just could not stop myself from reading the full post, after this simple, yet impactful line.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJune 11, 2020 at 4:50 PM

      In fact that salt - water analogy comes in the book from which this post is extracted.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
44 comments
Read more

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The
62 comments
Read more

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so
39 comments
Read more

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let
36 comments
Read more

Octlantis

I was reading an essay on octopuses when friend John walked in. When he is bored of his usual activities – babysitting and gardening – he would come over. Politics was the favourite concern of our conversations. We discussed politics so earnestly that any observer might think that we were running the world through the politicians quite like the gods running it through their devotees. “Octopuses are quite queer creatures,” I said. The essay I was reading had got all my attention. Moreover, I was getting bored of politics which is irredeemable anyway. “They have too many brains and a lot of hearts.” “That’s queer indeed,” John agreed. “Each arm has a mind of its own. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are found in their arms. The arms can taste, touch, feel and act on their own without any input from the brain.” “They are quite like our politicians,” John observed. Everything is linked to politics in John’s mind. I was impressed with his analogy, however. “Perhaps, you’re r
34 comments
Read more