Yoga Psychology: Karma, Samskara, and Liberation

Transcript

Nam mascar welcome back to Tantra thoughts today's video is called yoga psychology Karma samcara and Liberation now before we start the video I want to invite you to do a brief meditation exercise so please close your eyes and begin repeating the Mantra Baba Nam kavalam silently to yourself in your inhalation say Baba nam in your exhalation calam it means love is all there is so go ahead and practice breathing in Baba Nam breathing out calam and I'll let you try this for a few moments now let's take a moment to deconstruct what was just happening there so you were doing two things you were repeating babanam kevalam but as you were repeating babanam kevalam did you notice that you were also aware of yourself repeating babanam Calum so you were doing something and at the same time you were observing yourself do that activity apparently this is what is happening all the time all the time you are doing things but while you are doing things in your day-to-day life you can also observe yourself do these things so it feels almost like there's two of you in there there is the doer and there is the observer in Tantra we would say the doer is the operative princi principle and the Observer is the cognitive principle and it is important to understand this distinction before we go any further and what this distinction implies is that you are not just your mind or your thoughts that would be the operative principle you are also the Observer and that would make you the cognitive principle so you are not just your thought your thoughts and you are not just your mind you are also just Consciousness there are two terms we need to define the first is karma most people think of karma as the law of cause and effect that you reap what you sow however the word Karma literally means action in Sanskrit so it's not the whole cause and effect sequence it is just the cause of the effect so now think of all of the actions that you've ever done in your life and think of all of the reactions to those actions so for example you know think of as a kid all of the times that you might have been yelled at all of the times that um your mother might have gotten upset with you over something small kids in school picking on you all of those actions that have occurred in your life they have a reaction and those reactions get stored in your mind as mental Impressions so for example let's say one day you're at the movies with your partner and you're trying to decide what movie to watch and suddenly out of the blue you start thinking about an ex partner that cheated on you by taking somebody else to the movies 10 years ago and you're like whoa how come this is coming back into my mind now after 10 years I thought I was over that but but apparently the mental impression is still there and it comes out mysteriously sometimes at random times so these mental impressions are called samsaras in Sanskrit the samsaras are the stored Impressions that are left in your unconscious mind so then you know finally you and your partner decide on a movie that you're going to watch but then you hear yourself saying uh you know what honey actually I don't feel like going to the movies let's just get a movie from the red box and watch it at home so what has happened is that the samsara is there and that the samsara is now running your life it is making you do things um it is still it basically still has power over you now what I'm starting to describe might sound like a conversation that you might have with your therapist you walk into your therapist's office and you say I'm having all of these trust issues can you please help me and they'll say okay well why don't you start by telling me when you first started noticing these issues and now why don't you tell me a little bit about your parents what was their relationship like so what the psychologist is doing is trying to dig into your mind to find the initial action that created this issue that you're having so they're looking for the karma that created the samsara so as I said before the accumulation of these samsaras starts to dictate your life Swami vivanda one said that we are whatever we have done or thought in the past and in the future we will be whatever we are thinking or doing now in Tantra we believe that the Samaras they don't even just go away once you die once once you die the some scars in your mind they still need to get expressed so they find another body in order to express themselves another medium for expression so if in this lifetime you were doing meditation all of the time then in your next life you will want to find parents that also do meditation or you will want to find uh the proper body that will get to meditation in the fastest way possible if in this lifetime you were an alcoholic then in your next life you're going to be looking for the fastest way to get your next drink so what happens then in reincarnation in Tantra according to Tantra is that the soul doesn't reincarnate because the soul is just the witnessing entity what reincarnates are your samsaras via your mind your mind is the one that has all of these thoughts all of these samsaras it wants to go it wants to find another medium of expression in order to express those sscar so at the end of your life if your whole life you have been thinking about wanting to be famous then in the very moment that you die you are likely to still be thinking about wanting to get famous you probably are not going to be thinking about God so let's stop and reflect reflect on a couple of points number one you don't want to have your samsaras dictating your life and number two you don't want to die having accumulated so much samcara that then you have to come back into this planet and go through Junior High School all over again so I want to end this video by giving you a couple of tips on how you can burn some Scara as we say in Tandra number one is to practice meditation so let's think about what's happening when you meditate when you meditate you are saying a mantra so in other words doing something with your mind but as you say this Mantra you are observing yourself say the Mantra so in meditation what starts to happen is that you begin to see the distinction between your mind and your soul because the Mantra is the tool to get you to Consciousness it's the tool to get you to the observer in you and the more you practice separating yourself from your mind and your thoughts and more identifying with your soul or your Consciousness then the the less that you will identify with your samsaras and that's what you want to do in life you don't want to identify with those attachments those thoughts or those Samaras you want to identify with your soul with the Observer with Consciousness number two practice Madu viida I just recently released a video called mindfulness versus Tantra Madu viia so there's more details there about this concept but what Madu viida means is learning to see everything in your life all of the people and everything that you do as not actions done by you but actions done by Supreme Consciousness and seeing people as Supreme Consciousness so what happens then is that as you go through your life doing actions believing that they are actually being done by in God's mind rather than with your mind then you can surrender the reactions to those actions because they're not yours you're just an instrument for God or Supreme Consciousness therefore it is the actions of God God or Supreme Consciousness not yours anymore that will help you to surrender the vanity of your actions and the attachment to the results of your actions thus removing you more from your samsaras now there's a great Mantra that you can say before doing actions that allows you to do this that's called Guru Mantra and the anandam Marga meditation teachers prescribe this Mantra so send me a message and I will try to contact you with one of these teachers so you can get this Mantra that allows you to prevent some scaras I want to end this video with one last thought from my Guru Shri Shri anandam morti he used to say that the only difference between individuals are just their respective SSC scaras notice that some people in this world are more peaceful and calm While others are more uh active and ambitious uh some people are more artistic other people are more honest some are dishonest if you removed all of those Tendencies then we would all be the same so it goes to show that the only difference between us are our Sams scaras and just like if you removed the Mind from yourself if you got rid of your mind then all that would be left is your Consciousness so therefore um we are basically the accumulation of our samsaras and a person is the composite of all of their samsaras in order to become the soul which is God then we have to eliminate our some scaras we have to basically withdraw from our mind to be just consciousness namaskar and stay tuned till the next 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