by Indira Dasi

Created on: January 20, 2007   Last Updated: February 16, 2007

The Law of Karma means: any qualitative action causes a similar qualitative reaction returning to the doer personally. It is based on the urge of material nature to keep balance between the opposite energies in her dualistic field of activities, which has artificially been extrapolated between subjective perceptions, such as hot/cold, man/woman, light/darkness, good/bad, ignorance/knowledge, etc.

Actually, nature has three material modes or qualities: tamo-guna (inertia in ignorance); rajo-guna (activity in passion); sato-guna (knowledge in goodness). The soul in ignorance will create tremendous quantities of bad karma, or negative reactions following his extremely egotistic activities and spiritual laziness. The passionate soul is a fruitive worker laboriously creating a lot of material happiness and an equal quantity of misery. A relatively small section of humanity has advanced to the mode of goodness and knowledge. These souls are psychologically balanced and emotionally neutral. They will create subtle happiness accompanied by a minimum of negative reactions (still negative, because their personal aim is to perform materially 'good' activities. Good means socially sophisticated, moral or ethical).

So all three modes support materialistic aims, either 'bad', 'highly fruitive, or 'good'. Therefore, the results of these actions are called 'karmic' and are subject to negative or positive material reactions. Even if a person performs so-called unselfish charity, it will create material results, such as promotion to the heavenly planets, which is a subtle material boon. Why? Even anonimous acts of charity create a sense of personal satisfaction to the well-wisher. Such acts are not completely unselfish or karma free. The mystic yogi, too, performs impure transcendental activities and is subject to karma. Why? His aim is to obtain personal yogic powers, material perfections, and often competes with the Lord. His desires are selfish and therefore karmic; they do not please the Lord personally - far from that.

Karma is restricted to activities performed in the material universes, where any action will either fructify in this life or in the next. This is the reason why karma binds one to the material universe. Material nature will force one to take successive births, perpetually, in order to enjoy one's righteous balance of good and bad karmas. Is there a way out of this karmic universe and painful repeated incarnations?

Yes. In the first place, we are all doomed to

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