{"product_id":"aghora-iii-the-law-of-karma-0914732374","title":"Aghora III: The Law of Karma","description":"\u003cul\u003e\u003c\/ul\u003e\n                                    \u003cdiv\u003e \u003chr\u003e\n                                             \u003ch2\u003eFrom the Publisher\u003c\/h2\u003e   \u003cdiv\u003e\n                       \n\n                               \u003cdiv\u003e\n        \n      \n\n                    \u003cdiv\u003e\n                  \u003cdiv\u003e\n    \u003cdiv\u003e\n        \u003cdiv\u003e\n                                                  \u003cimg alt=\"21\" src=\"https:\/\/images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com\/images\/G\/01\/x-locale\/common\/grey-pixel.gif\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"21\" src=\"https:\/\/m.media-amazon.com\/images\/S\/aplus-media\/sota\/7a11c9c0-c33f-4cb3-99eb-6dd155bad103.__CR0,0,300,300_PT0_SX300_V1___.jpg\"\u003e  \u003c\/div\u003e\n\n        \u003cdiv\u003e\n                                                   \u003ch3\u003e Conversation with Svoboda \u003c\/h3\u003e                                      \u003cp\u003e \u003cspan\u003eINTRODUCTION\u003c\/span\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e     \u003cp\u003e \u003cspan\u003eIt is always better to live with reality, because otherwise, without fail, reality will come to\u003c\/span\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e     \u003cp\u003e \u003cspan\u003elive with you. \u003c\/span\u003e—The Aghori Vimalananda \u003c\/p\u003e     \u003cp\u003e IF TO BE RELIGIOUS, in the truest sense of that much misunderstood word, is to thirst for water from reality’s fountain, then to walk the spiritual path is to turn your compass toward its ever-flowing well. The organized religions, which have set up camps downstream from that spring, all provide sketchy maps that trace a single trail to the source. The one map illuminating all the tracks leading spiritwards through the diverse terrains of existence is accessible only through the world’s sole dogma-free spiritual trekking agency: \u003cspan\u003eAghora\u003c\/span\u003e. Aghora, which literally means ‘unagitated,’ teaches \u003cspan\u003eaghoris \u003c\/span\u003e(its practitioners) to focus and intensify their craving for reality until they learn how to transcend all that galls (the \u003cspan\u003eghora\u003c\/span\u003e) in life. \u003c\/p\u003e    \u003c\/div\u003e\n    \u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n    \u003c\/div\u003e\n\n         \u003cdiv\u003e\n                  \u003cdiv\u003e\n    \u003cdiv\u003e\n        \u003cdiv\u003e\n                                                  \u003cimg alt=\"342\" src=\"https:\/\/images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com\/images\/G\/01\/x-locale\/common\/grey-pixel.gif\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"342\" src=\"https:\/\/m.media-amazon.com\/images\/S\/aplus-media\/sota\/ab704ed8-e2cc-4027-a19f-53133e8a7996.__CR0,0,300,300_PT0_SX300_V1___.jpg\"\u003e  \u003c\/div\u003e\n\n        \u003cdiv\u003e\n                                                                                 \u003cp\u003e Then no internal or external stimulus, however ordinarily ‘agitating,’ will be able to interrupt or interfere with their one-pointed guzzling of the nectar of being.I obtained my orientation toward reality from my mentor, the Aghori Vimalananda, who showed little regard for organized systems of belief: \u003c\/p\u003e     \u003cp\u003e ‘I have never believed in religion. Religions are all limited because they concentrate only on one aspect of truth. That is why they are always fighting amongst one another, because they all think they are in sole possession of the truth. But I say there is no end to knowledge, so there is no use in trying to confine it to one scripture or one holy book or one experience. This is why I say, when people ask what religion I follow, ‘I don’t believe in Sampradaya (sect), I believe in Sampradaha (incineration).’ Burn down everything which is getting in the way of your perception of truth.’ \u003c\/p\u003e     \u003cp\u003e (Robert E. Svoboda, \u003cspan\u003eAghora\u003c\/span\u003e, \u003cspan\u003eAt the Left Hand of God\u003c\/span\u003e, Brotherhood of Life, Albuquerque, 1986, p. 167). \u003c\/p\u003e    \u003c\/div\u003e\n    \u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n    \u003c\/div\u003e\n\n         \u003cdiv\u003e\n                  \u003cdiv\u003e\n    \u003cdiv\u003e\n        \u003cdiv\u003e\n                                                  \u003cimg alt=\"45\" src=\"https:\/\/images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com\/images\/G\/01\/x-locale\/common\/grey-pixel.gif\"\u003e\u003cimg alt=\"45\" src=\"https:\/\/m.media-amazon.com\/images\/S\/aplus-media\/sota\/692909a6-3633-4aa4-80d9-990cefbcf47f.__CR0,0,300,300_PT0_SX300_V1___.jpg\"\u003e  \u003c\/div\u003e\n\n        \u003cdiv\u003e\n                                                                                 \u003cp\u003e Aghoris, who do their damnedest to stand up to reality without having to lean on any reassuring doctrine or creed, strive always to do exactly what must be done at the moment when it becomes necessary. They learn what they need to know in the \u003cspan\u003esmashan\u003c\/span\u003e, the cremation ground, worshipping death that they may die to their restrictions and be reborn into purity of perception. They accept with love everything that comes their way, knowing that whatever reality serves up is after all the meal that their karmas have created for them. \u003c\/p\u003e     \u003cp\u003e The Law of Karma, which is one of the most profound and fiendishly perplexing of reality’s axioms, is the Law of Cause and Effect, the law of ‘as you sow, so shall you reap.’ The oldest of the Upanishads expresses it this way: ‘Truly,’ one becomes good by good action and bad by bad action.’ (\u003cspan\u003eBrihadaranyaka\u003c\/span\u003e \u003cspan\u003eUpanishad\u003c\/span\u003e III.2.13). This law is better known to most of us as Newton’s Third Law of Motion: \u003c\/p\u003e    \u003c\/div\u003e\n    \u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n    \u003c\/div\u003e\n\n         \u003cdiv\u003e\n                  \u003cdiv\u003e \u003cdiv\u003e                                   \u003cp\u003e For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The mandate of this succinctly complex law regulates the potentially limitless implications of every small act performed by every actor within the manifested universe, meteor and microorganism alike. Everyone lives within the precincts of the ubiquitous Law of Karma, whether or not they accept its reality. Ignorance of this Law is no defense in the Court of Cause and Effect. As Lord Krishna declared in the \u003cspan\u003eShrimad Bhagavata\u003c\/span\u003e, ‘Karma is the guru; nay, it is the Supreme Lord.’ \u003c\/p\u003e     \u003cp\u003e Every physical or mental action you perform and with which you identify yourself as the doer becomes a karma for you and produces a reaction which you will eventually have to experience. Like everyone else, aghori or atheist, you consume at each moment of your life that portion of your karmic grain that has finally matured. Likewise, each of your self-identified actions or reactions today shapes your future by seeding yet further reactions. Every individual being is a karmic slate of coming attractions and repulsions. Though we all physically share the same Earth-space and Earth-time, our individual causative schemata create for us individual universes of experience. There are as many universes as there are beings, each locating the environment—war or peace, wealth or penury, misery or ecstasy—that each assortment of karmas requires. Since limitations of time and space prevent everything from happening in our world all at once, the Law of Karma schedules its events to occur just in time, every time, in each cosmos large and small. Every interaction between two different universes of experience creates its own karma which duly propagates its own reaction. The more strongly you identify with your karmas, the more closely your experience will conform to the reaction they promise. \u003c\/p\u003e     \u003cp\u003e Though very few people ever graduate from quotidian religion to authentic Agora, everyone is free to make use of the truths that the world’s aghoris have sucked from reality’s teat. Arguably the most fundamental of these realizations is this: the essence of living with reality is to continually surrender to what is. You have already created your own personal universe with your karmas and now you must live in it. Everyone who has sown the wind will eventually reap the whirlwind. However, most people try to ride out their karmic storms by barricading themselves inside psychological houses no building however weatherproof can withstand every tornado, earthquake, flood and conflagration. Almost everyone accordingly finds himself or herself existentially homeless one day or another. Religions make good ideational road-houses: you are free to shelter yourself under these roots for as long as you like—or at least until a tempest blows in and causes that shelter to collapse. \u003c\/p\u003e     \u003cp\u003e A good aghori recognizes the innate flimsiness of all doctrinal thatch and knows there is no security of any kind to be had in life except the surety that each of us is going to die. Many aghoris forestall future personal derangement by emigrating to the \u003cspan\u003esmashan \u003c\/span\u003ewhere they can live their lives with nothing more substantial above their heads than God’s never-failing umbrella. Vimalananda, who could be one of the most sophisticated of philosophers when the mood struck him, never mistook philosophy for reality. Time and again during the more than eight years that I was with him, the faith he displayed in Nature’s ultimate beneficence brought home to me the value of capitulating to what is. Time and again I was wowed when I saw how his submission to reality solved his problems. It was that awe that inspired me to write this book. \u003c\/p\u003e     \u003cp\u003e The Law of Karma, the unimaginable complexity of which has cowed the greatest of scholars, loses some of its ability to dismay when viewed through the prism of surrender. If having decided to surrender you are willing to keep surrendering, and then you surrender some more, you will simplify your personal choreography to the more manageable—if still convoluted—process of resolving how, when, and what to yield. But though this simplification, properly applied, makes karma easier to work through it in no way neutralizes the Law of Karma’s power to mystify and consternate. Nor does it render karma’s logic any more linear, as the Mughal Emperor Akbar discovered in the following, possibly apocryphal tale: \u003c\/p\u003e     \u003cp\u003e \u003cspan\u003eWHATEVER GOD DOES IS FOR THE BEST\u003c\/span\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e     \u003cp\u003e The Emperor Akbar once developed a chronic non-healing sore on his left pinky finger. It became so severe that his physicians eventually decided the whole finger would have to be amputated. The idea of losing a part of his body so upset the emperor that he sought a second opinion from his dear friend, confidant and advisor Raja Birbal. Birbal told his liege, ‘If the doctors say it has to come off, then it has to come off.’ Akbar told Birbal, \u003c\/p\u003e    \u003c\/div\u003e \u003c\/div\u003e    \u003c\/div\u003e\n\n         \u003cdiv\u003e\n                  \u003cdiv\u003e \u003cdiv\u003e                                   \u003cp\u003e ‘Here I am a very religious man, who makes all due proper donations at the proper times, and still God is taking away part of my body? What have I done wrong?’ \u003c\/p\u003e     \u003cp\u003e Birbal replied, ‘Your majesty, whatever God does is for the best.’ \u003c\/p\u003e     \u003cp\u003e This remark irritated Akbar to no end. He grudgingly agreed to the operation, but decided simultaneously to teach Birbal a lesson. His opportunity came some weeks later when the two of them, out hunting with a few retainers, came across \u003c\/p\u003e     \u003cp\u003e a dry well. Akbar promptly commanded his men to deposit the astonished Birbal into it. When the emperor rode over on his charger and bent over the well’s rim Birbal shouted up at him, ‘Why are you doing this?’ Akbar shouted down to his friend, ‘Birbal, whatever God does is for the best!’ Then, to let Birbal stew for a bit, he rode off alone to a different part of the forest, thinking, ‘Now we will see what good God can do for him there!’ Birbal meanwhile sat in the well, cursing his fate and wondering what is going to happen to him next. \u003c\/p\u003e     \u003cp\u003e All at once Akbar was surrounded by a band of ruffians. This particular pack of thieves selected only rich people as their victims, first robbing them and then offering them as human sacrifices. The highwaymen accordingly stripped Akbar of all his clothes and jewelry, and the bandit chief told him, ‘Prepare yourself for death!’ \u003c\/p\u003e     \u003cp\u003e Seeing his end approaching, Akbar began to feel Birbal’s absence severely. For, Birbal had always been able to extract the emperor from otherwise hopeless situations. The gang leader meanwhile busily inspected Akbar, as he did all his prospective victims, to make sure that they carried no untoward sign. When he got down to Akbar’s missing pinky he shouted in dismay, ‘Egad! You are not whole! You are not fit to be offered to my Goddess!’ Disappointed, the thug ordered Akbar to don his clothes and ornaments quickly, and to depart thence. \u003c\/p\u003e     \u003cp\u003e Being told that he was unfit to be offered hurt Akbar’s feelings and infuriated his ruler’s ego. He maintained his presence of mind, though, and as he dressed he thought to himself, ‘Birbal was right: had I not lost my little finger I would have been dead today.’ He mounted his horse and rode directly back to the dry well and immediately ordered his waiting men to raise Birbal who now was wondering why the emperor had changed his mind. Akbar began by apologizing to Birbal, and then told him, ‘I was so upset with you I was actually considering leaving you here to die, but did I ever learn my lesson! In truth, everything God does is for best!’ The emperor then narrated the whole adventure to his amazed audience. Suddenly Akbar furrowed his brow and asked his friend, ‘But now tell me, Birbal, if ‘whatever God does is for the best,’ what good came of your being in the well?’Birbal told him, ‘Isn’t it obvious, Refuge of the World? If I had not been in the well I would have been captured with you, and after the bandit had rejected you I would have been next in line for sacrifice. And since I am not missing any parts of my body he would have sacrificed me!’‘The Lord is truly marvellous!’ repeated Akbar distractedly, stroking his beard in wonder as they rode to the palace. \u003c\/p\u003e     \u003cp\u003e \u003cspan\u003eLESSONS IN SIMPLICITY\u003c\/span\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e     \u003cp\u003e Vimalananda made ‘whatever God does is for the best’ the refrain for many of his adventures. For, early in life reality had shown him, as it had shown to Akbar and Birbal, how wise it is to cooperate with the universal flow. Vimalananda rarely tried to force his will on the world; when he did he usually lived to regret it. He openly declared his failings as warnings to others, and openly identified in others similar foibles when he felt that such pinpointing could teach valuable lessons. For, the teaching of lessons was one of his great interests in life. So concerned was he that his listeners not misinterpret his message that he often pared his expressions down to their least common denominators. He often observed that ‘unnecessary detail enmeshes people in maya. The mind loves to learn; in fact, the Sanskrit word for mind is \u003cspan\u003emanas\u003c\/span\u003e, that which measures or compares. And the power by which manas measures is \u003cspan\u003emaya\u003c\/span\u003e.’ In his opinion, when you try too hard to pin down a thing’s detail all you end up pinning down is its shadow, the illusion that is its maya. Vimalananda’s penchant for reduction to fundamentals has led some people to complain that he willingly distilled karma’s daunting intricacy into a relatively unsophisticated theory of brute retribution. Though there is of course more to the Law of Karma that the simple formulation, ‘If you killed Michael last time, Michael will kill you next time,’ this criticism seems to me to be unjustified. Though Vimalananda did not waste his time debating karma’s theoretical minutiae, he was well acquainted with them and he would speak in karmic technicalities whenever he had an audience who could appreciate them. However, he did expect that most people would misunderstand karma’s precepts. I have seen little to suggest he was wrong to do so. \u003c\/p\u003e    \u003c\/div\u003e \u003c\/div\u003e    \u003c\/div\u003e\n\n        \u003c\/div\u003e\n \u003c\/div\u003e\n       \u003c\/div\u003e                               \n                                         \u003cdiv\u003e \u003cdiv\u003e \u003cspan\u003eAghora-III\u003c\/span\u003e  \u003c\/div\u003e \u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003ca\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003eRead more\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e \u003c\/div\u003e                                    ","brand":"Amazon","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53100116246835,"sku":"Aghora-III--The-Law--10099982958899","price":9.47,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0953\/4183\/8643\/files\/81IYrtkO10L._SY522.jpg?v=1772484747","url":"https:\/\/aumka-dua.com\/products\/aghora-iii-the-law-of-karma-0914732374","provider":"AumKa Dua","version":"1.0","type":"link"}