my article

A new friend recently wrote to me asking, ‘When we do meditation on I or atma-vichara will all the previous karma be destroyed? How is that?’ The following is what I replied to him: What is karma ? Karma means action, and it is classified into three categories: āgāmya , sañcita and prārabdha . Āgāmya means fresh action that we do of our own free will, and such action bears fruit, which we must later experience. Sañcita is the store of all the fruits of our past karmas that we have not yet experienced, and prārabdha is that portion of our sañcita that has been selected for us to experience in this lifetime. For whom is all this karma ? Who is it who does āgāmya , and who then experiences the resulting prārabdha ? It is only ourself as this ego. In sleep we do not rise as this ego, so we then do not do any karma or experience any fruit. But as soon as we (this ego) wake from sleep or begin to dream, we start doing karma and experiencing the fruit of our past karmas . Therefore...

In a comment on one of my recent article, The karma theory as taught by Sri Ramana , Sanjay wrote: Sir, if I my ego subsides completely for some length or duration of time by attending only to ‘I’ alone, obviously my free-will or agamya will become inactive, but during such subsidence, will my destiny of fate ( prarabdha ) will also remain inactive, or my mind, speech and body will continue to act as per prarabdha ? If it continues to act, who experiences these actions and the resulting experiences of my prarabdha , which I was supposed to experience then? Secondly, I believe, you have said in this article that as long as our ego is intact, we will continue to act as per our prarabdha , and simultaneously our mind, speech and body will also be able to do actions creating agamya , by exercising its free will, if it does not contradict our prarabdha . I remember a recorded conversation with Bhagavan somewhat to the effect: Devotee: I can understand that all the major events in my lif...

This article is the second half of my explanation of the first verse of Upadēśa Undiyār , the first half of which I posted in my previous article: The karma theory as taught by Sri Ramana . According to Sri Ramana, what we should be concerned with is only being and not doing. We need be concerned with karma — that is, with what we do — only to the extent that we should try as far as possible to avoid doing any action that will cause harm ( hiṁsā ) to any sentient being, but our primary concern should be not with what we do but only with what we are. Therefore we need not investigate karma in any great depth or detail, but should focus all our effort and attention only on investigating the ‘I’ that feels ‘I am doing karma ’ or ‘I am experiencing the fruit of karma ’. As he says in verse 38 of Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu : வினைமுதனா மாயின் விளைபயன் றுய்ப்போம் வினைமுதலா ரென்று வினவித் — தனையறியக் கர்த்தத் துவம்போய்க் கருமமூன் றுங்கழலு நித்தமா முத்தி நிலை. viṉaimudaṉā māyiṉ viḷaipayaṉ ḏṟuyppōm viṉai...

Since I started my website one of my long-standing aims has been to include in it detailed and explanatory translations of all of Sri Ramana’s original Tamil writings, but amidst all my other work I have not yet had time to do so. Last month I decided to make a start by writing such a translation of Upadēśa Undiyār (உபதேச வுந்தியார்), but I have so far completed writing only an introduction and a detailed explanation for the first verse. Due to circumstances that now make it necessary for me spend much more of my time working to increase my currently inadequate income, I will not have time to complete this translation and explanation of Upadēśa Undiyār in the near future, so I have decided in the meanwhile to post here my translation and explanation of the first verse, and since it is a very long explanation, I will post it as two consecutive articles, this and the next one: Why did Sri Ramana teach a karma theory? Incidentally, I have recently been spending most of my time replyin...

In a reply that I wrote to one of the comments on my previous article, Second and third person objects , I wrote: Whatever we experience in either waking or dream is determined by our destiny ( prārabdha ), so we have no power to alter any of it. However, though we cannot change what we are destined to experience, we can desire and make effort to change it, and by doing so we create fresh karma ( āgāmya ). Since all such desire and effort to change what we are destined to experience is futile and counterproductive, we should refrain from all such extroverted desire and effort, and should make effort only to subside within by focusing our entire attention upon ourself (the first person, the experiencing subject, ‘I’) and thereby withdrawing it from everything else (every second or third person object). By making such selfward-directed effort, we will not alter what the mind is destined to experienced, but will remove the illusion that we are this experiencing mind. This is what Sri Ra...