According to popular belief, the law of Karma (cause and effect) applies to all the creatures in the universe. But there is a problem with this belief. I will explain it to you in detail now.
The law of Karma is extremely intricate, but it finally comes down to the fact that if you do good actions you will reap good fruits. On the contrary, if you do bad actions, you get bad fruits. For this law to work, the presence of a “doer” is indispensable. This “doer” cannot be the Self or His Power. The Self is absolutely Free and inconceivable, and His Power is a Doer (not a “doer”). His Power is also so Free and inconceivable like Him. Hence the “only” doers to be found here are the “limited individuals” (the ones who believe they are “someone else”, as I have previously taught you).
These limited individuals, by thinking that they are “someone else other than the Self” are fit for enjoying the wretched law of Karma. The limited individuals are the Self but gone crazy. They are atomic souls endowed with an inner psychic organ (intellect, ego and mind). In Sanskrit, the word “ego” is written “I-doer”. Therefore, here you have the “doer” who acts like a link between the limited individual and the law of Karma. Without “ego”, the law of Karma cannot work. The souls are not essentially “doers”… they need “ego” to turn into “doers”. This is why the philosophical systems take considerable pains to teach spiritual aspirants not to consider themselves to be the “doers” of their actions. The usual teaching of merely doing actions without any attachment to their fruits clearly shows my point. There is another way to do actions without ego involved: to do actions while one beholds the Lord. Whatever the method, the final goal is to remove “ego” (the doer) in order for your actions not to bear any fruits in the end. If they bear fruits (good or bad), you are still under the power of the law of Karma. And if you are under its power, your births will continue and continue until you experience all the fruits of your actions and finally achieve spiritual enlightenment. This is elementary spirituality.
But, over the time, a common distortion of that teaching about the law of Karma has occurred. Only the limited individuals endowed with “ego” can be under its sway. The rest of creatures “cannot”. For example, if I teach someone not to consider himself to be the doer of his actions so he can get rid of the law of Karma (and all its wretched progeny of birth, death, pain, pleasure, etc.), this person must have an “ego” first. I cannot teach an egoless creature any spiritual method to remove “ego”, because this creature has none in the first place. For example, neighborhood cats are not the readers. They are not my fans either. I have the cat of my neighbor visiting me now and then… and asking for food too, obviously. Cats are like that, you know. Anyway, I could never hand that cat the web address of my blog for it to get rid of its feline ego.
As I declared in an article of the main website some years ago, I eat meat. I was a vegetarian for eight years in the past, but as I never noticed any improvement in my spiritual performance (in fact, it felt worse), I just quit. Now I am not interested in food at all. And I mean it! I just eat for this physical body to survive and that is it. Somehow, I lost all my interest in flavors. My present act of eating is like that of a car receiving fuel to keep working. I am not on a diet either… well, back to the topic of the meat, if some day in the future that cat steals a steak from me, I am sure that I will not hate it for it or undertake a crusade against the thieving cat and all the cats of the quarter in the name of justice or God, etc. Why? Because my neighbor’s cat has no ego. People always say that “they are animals!” By that, they mean that the animals have no ego. As they are like that, the law of Karma never applies to them! A human being, or a demon (I am not joking) or a higher entity still endowed with ego is under the law of Karma. The rest of creatures who are egoless are under the law of “nature” (not under the law of Karma). I am speaking the truth.
Humankind is not the greatest creation of the Self. NO. There are lower worlds where demons reside. In turn, there are higher worlds where higher entities reside. A very advanced spiritual aspirant, for example, can reach an “almost” liberated state during his lifetime. After that, he does not take a birth here anymore, but goes to a higher world. Having been born in a higher world in a very advanced spiritual state, he is able to finish his task there and get Final Liberation. So, the usual belief that only the world of humans is fit for achieving Final Liberation is not always true, because some very advanced spiritual aspirants can bypass it. I could write volumes dealing with these strange topics since the Yoga universe is plagued with this sort of misunderstandings.
However, why did I take the trouble to show you that only creatures with ego (demons, humans, higher entities) are under the law of Karma? My answer now: ego is nothing but a mass of impressions (forget about the usual definition of ego as “arrogance, vanity, etc.”). Every time you do an action with your mind working, an impression of that action is retained. Good and bad actions done while one’s own mind is working will leave impressions which will bear good and bad fruits. As most people suffer from the “disease” known as “constantly thinking”, all of them are accumulating impressions from their actions. This disease is considered to be “good health” because vast majority of people suffer from it. In this way, the disease is even accepted as a normal state. Still, it is a disease, and I am absolutely sure of it. Now, a spiritual aspirant is taught how to stop his mind through different methods. This action of stopping one’s mind also leaves an impression. Therefore, in a spiritual aspirant there will be impressions of two types: with the mind working and with the mind arrested.
As a spiritual aspirant advances in his trances, the quantity of impressions of arrested mind increases. Later comes a moment when their number is enough and these impressions start to swallow up the ones left by actions performed with the mind working. This is one of the reasons why some bad habits might spontaneously disappear in this aspirant. He starts wondering how that bad habit could disappear “just like that”, in the same way I wondered how my delighting in flavors disappeared naturally several years ago. As that spiritual aspirant keeps advancing in his trances, his mind continues to be arrested for a certain period of time every day. Over the years, the quantity of impressions of arrested mind is so huge that they eat up the ones formed by actions done with the mind working. At this precise moment, his ego (which is now a mass of impressions of arrested mind) is made passive (lit. transferred… this is hard to explain in words) and subsequently spiritual enlightenment takes place. If his physical body is retained, he will need an ego in order to function as a human being in this world, but this ego is burnt in the sense that it has nothing to do with the law of Karma. This is why a liberated one is able to perform any kind of action and never get the respective good or bad fruit.
An enlightened person is only understood by another enlightened person, because that which is higher cannot be understood by what is lower. This is a law too. A liberated spiritual teacher, for example, is able to perform any type of action in order for his disciple to advance. As that teacher is free, he is not subject to law of Karma. This is only done by liberated ones, not by bound ones. If a person in bondage uses this teaching for his own benefit and deludes other people telling that because he is “liberated” he can do whatever actions, he is just accumulating more and more impressions that will bear the corresponding horrible fruits, obviously. As there is no shortage of fools in this world, they can use my teaching keep accumulating bad Karma. When one teaches a lot of people at the same time, this kind of thing is inevitable. For example, when my own Guru explained the experience of enlightenment, he had to keep changing the version frequently because there were some fools saying that they were enlightened and trying to delude people by describing the experience of enlightenment which was not theirs. So, my Guru changed the version and the fools had to change it too. Hilarious games of the Self, no doubt!
On the contrary, I will not change my version. Consequently, the fools can take it and delude other people if they wish. But all that is done with a mind working will bear its respective good or bad fruit sooner or later. Maybe I am not changing it in order for those fools to be caught by the law of Karma… who knows? Anyway, my advice is always not to play with sacred teachings, because this always brings awful Karma. While one might think that nobody is watching, His Power is always patrolling. If someone is foolish enough as to lie about sacred things, he will experience the fruits of such actions in a unpleasant manner. I am also absolutely sure of that. For example, if I see someone worshiping the Self in a strange way… I just leave him alone. One never knows what is happening there. If that person happens to be a real saint, my disturbing him could even bring me bad consequences. If I tell this to ordinary people, they will very likely laugh at my extreme precaution. This is because they have no idea about the law of Karma and the ways of His Power.
As a result, a liberated person (if he retains his physical body) is one with a burnt ego which is not any longer under the law of Karma. He is not completely egoless, because without some kind of ego he could not function as a human being in this world. And if that very person abandons his body at the time of Enlightenment, other things can occur. Anyway, my point is that no human being can become an egoless creature (e.g. the animals) after his death. Why? Because that would amount to losing his ego in the process. If his ego is lost, all the accumulated impressions of his previous actions are also lost. The law of Karma will not allow him to lose his ego or he will not experience the fruits of his actions ever! All in all, to say that a human being or any other creature endowed with an ego is able to become an animal in a future birth is complete nonsense. In turn, an animal could somehow ascend to the human stage if it manages to get a human ego. At present, I don’t know how an animal could do this because it is not able to be “meritorious or deserving” in the human sense due to the absence of ego. Well, as I don’t know it for now, I will leave that as a possibility. Of course, the Self can break all laws at any moment and promote an animal to the stage of human being if He pleases. Or else, He can turn a human being into a mosquito if He wishes to. I have no doubt about His Freedom. Still, He will not break the laws generated by His own Power in most cases.
The limited individuals are living in a colossal reality show then. They may think that they are sometimes “alone”, but His Power is always with them. In this sense, most people are never free from the law of Karma. His Power sees every action through your own eyes; It perceives every action occurring in your mind too, and so on and on. As a result, all the actions a limited being performs in his mind, body or by world are constantly being recorded by His Power. These recordings are the impressions that form his ego. In order to escape from the law of Karma, one must follow the right method as I taught you above, by creating impressions of arrested mind. There is no other way out. Yes, you can choose from different techniques, but the process of Liberation is always the same.
After this post, I suppose that the reader is less ignorant than before. Congratulations! Just kidding, I am just tired of writing. In the next post I will speak about the topic of a spiritual teacher and disciple in order to throw light on that important subject.