Karma and Freedom

Liberation does not mean renunciation of action or karma. A liberated man continues to act on the physical, mental, intellectual, emotional and sensory planes. He may plough the land or perform any kind of work because it is not the actions which bind a man, it is the ego. When ego is involved in your actions, karma becomes your property and you have to accept the responsibility for it. 

– Swami Satyananda Saraswati

We tend to think of destiny as something which happens to us from the outside.  Truth is we truly create our destiny.  It is a matter of choice, wisdom and compassion.  We create our experience from the inside out.  When we are not conscious we are bound to the cycles of samsara.  When we begin to awaken we are truly capable of choice and free-will.  We are able to enter that narrow space between stimulus and response,

The external world is nothing more than a display of our unconscious nature.  Our external experiences shift as we become more aware of these internal processes.  As Michael Bernard Beckwith writes, “Once we have become conscious of the patterns we have formed, we can revisit them and make new choices where we feel necessary, or as a practice to keep ourselves flexible, or simply to consciously exercise our power of choice.”  This is the essence of freedom.

Unconscious repetition is the essence of karma.  It is a natural tendency to live our lives on “automatic pilot.”  According to biologist Rupert Sheldrake life itself is based on accumulated habit patterns.  Obviously, this is not a completely bad thing.  Conscious evolution however demands that we reflect on our patterns consciously.  We are free to the extent that we can become aware of our unconscious patterns, referred to as samskaras in yoga terminology. 

According to Yoga philosophy as outlined in the Yoga Sutras our primary enslavement is based in avidya: ignorance of our true spiritual nature.  Because of ignorance we buy into this idea that we are separate ego-beings.  We are individual expressions of the universal mind but we are never separate.  Ignorance is the source of all of our illusory karma.  Once we are able to glimpse that we are beings of formless consciousness things begin to change.  We begin to evolve on an inner (and consequently) outer level.

Truly enlightened teachings transcend our relative notions of right and wrong, good and bad.  As the Ashtavakra Gita states, “Righteousness and unrighteousness, pleasure and pain are purely of the mind and are no concern of yours. You are neither the doer nor the reaper of the consequences, so you are always free.”  When we step out of the ego drama of our lives we realize our selves to be Transcendent Being.  From an ego standpoint we like to pose as judges of both ourselves and others.  Awakened Mind tells us that we are all, each and every one of us, expressions of the Divine.