Questioner: What is the relationship between karmic body and mind? Is karmic body created out of the action of the mind?
Sadhguru: It’s not good to get into spiritual academics. Spiritual process should never become an academic subject. Unfortunately, it has become for a lot of people. So, I want you to relate this question to yourself. Do not use these things because it becomes an academic subject now.
You are assuming there is a karmic body, you are assuming you have a mind. No, I am saying you don’t really know, isn’t it? Okay, if you have a mind, you must be able to locate it, isn’t it? Can you locate it? Can you locate where your mind is? Then you don’t know whether it is there or not. See, suppose you walk into this hall, this guy says, “I am in this hall”, you look everywhere, you go behind this pillar, post, here, there, under this bench, everything – you don’t find the guy. Do you have a doubt or no, whether this guy is in this room or not? Yes or no? This is the way, isn’t it? So, you look wherever you want, there is no mind. Now this is not just playing with words.
Spirituality is not an academic process. It has to be an experiential longing to know
You need to understand – if you want to explore this, this must come from your context. From the context of your experience of life, only then it will come out well for you. Right now, you’re asking an academic question. Anywhere you go, the same thing – “What is the nature of the atman? What is the relationship between atman and paramatman”? You have not seen atman, you have not seen paramatman. Why are you interested in their relationship?
Atman, paramatman means – for those of you who do not know, these are common terminology in India – this means the soul and god, what’s the relationship? You’ve not seen both, how do you know they have a relationship? Maybe they are divorced. If you look at the quality of life people are living, probably they are divorced, isn’t it?
So, don’t go into academics of spirituality. Spirituality is not an academic process. It has to be an experiential longing to know.
So, what you are trying to ask is, “What is the impact of my past on my present working of my mind?” You tell me, can your mind function without memory? If I wipe out all your memory, would you have a thought? You have to build new memory, otherwise there would be no thought, isn’t it? So that’s the relationship. Without one, the other cannot exist. It’s only because of the karmic memory, a mind is functioning. If there’s no memory, how would it function? It wouldn’t function for a moment.
So if you have some esoteric idea of karma, drop that. Karma means just the residual impact of all the actions you have performed in your body, in your mind, in your emotions, in your energies. The residual imprint of that, so that is the karma. So, without that memory, your mind couldn’t even function, there’s no such thing. It is from that, this is all coming.
Another way of looking at it is, there is no such thing as mind, there’s just karma. There is a discriminatory buddhi, which is not mind. There’s a discriminatory intellect, and there is karma. There’s really no mind. There’s a huge mass of memory, with a certain discretion, you can pick what you want. But if you don’t have the discretion, they’ll just run riot within yourself all the time. This is all that’s happening. This is all that happening with people – because the discriminatory mind or the intellect has not been sufficiently developed or applied to, the past memory is running riot. All the time, it’s going on. What happened ten years ago is still bothering people, because it’s just going on.
So, whatever ideas you may have, whatever intentions you may have, whatever ambitions you may have, the karma will overrun it, because the necessary discrimination and awareness is not brought in. For this discretion, you need a certain level of awareness. Only if that is there, karma can be consciously used. Memory is not a bad thing. Whatever the memory is, whatever the content of the memory – no memory is a bad thing.
What your karma is, is not the problem
You remember something horrible, you remember something beautiful, you remember all kinds of things – this is not a problem. The problem is, you do not have the necessary discretion to pick what you want when you want, isn’t it? That’s all it is, isn’t it?
So all the horrible things that have happened on the planet – usually, only what horrible things that are happening, the news cameras go and take all this. It’s on the film, it’s stored somewhere in a computer. Is it biting you? No. If it is played here also, it need not bite you. Only if you react, it bites you, isn’t it? The same thing here – it’s all just stored and kept. If you react, it’ll bite you. If you consciously use it, you can use it in so many different ways. It doesn’t matter what is the recording.
What your karma is, is not the problem. Do you have the necessary awareness and discretion to employ this in the right sense or not? That’s all it is.
