WHAT iS TAMAS?
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People run after material possessions and trophies without knowing the right context of 'why they are doing, what they are doing'. One day when they have acquired and reacquired so many things and still feel incomplete, unhappy, uneasy and listless, they wonder why they acquired the things that they struggled for. They go into deep depression, deep incompletion or what we call tamas.
The depression of success is difficult to address. To experience failure when we have always been successful and worked so hard is difficult to accept. What results then is depression, tamas. Tamas is generally born out of the ignorance of our true Self. Sometimes tamas can arise out of an effort to move out of that ignorance. A highly rājasic person, one who has been aggressively pursuing material gains, when moving into a spiritual path can easily move into tamas for a while.
WHAT iS SUCCESS?
Life happens to you inside and outside, both. If you think it is only inside and not outside, you don't know the outside. If you think it is only outside, you don't know the inside. If life is not happening to you inside, it is depression; if life is not happening to you outside, it is inefficiency. If life is happening to you inside, it is responsibility; if life is happening to you outside, it is success.
Tamas is darkness. It is negative. We can only remove darkness by bringing in light. In the same way, we dispel ignorance by bringing in awareness of the science of completion, pūrṇatva. The Upaniṣad says—tamaso mā jyotīrgamaya—meaning, let my darkness be removed by light.
Let the light and wisdom of Kṛṣṇa, the Jagadguru, dispel your darkness and tamas.
In these verses, Kṛṣṇa tells us where
the person goes after death when
steeped in these attributes of satva,
rajas and tamas. A sātvic person
becomes divine. A tāmasic person
chooses a lower life. A rājasic
person continues to suffer due to
greed.
In another verse in the Gītā, Kṛṣṇa
tells Arjuna that a person is reborn
based on the last thought before
death. Here Kṛṣṇa explains how
that last thought is not an accident.
It is based on one's guṇa, nature,
his patterns. The mental setup, the
conditioning, the mūla vāsanā with
which we led life and with which
we leave our life as well. When we
are reborn, our spirit finds another
body to occupy
