Myths on Karma
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Some people think that karma can be exhausted by doing charitable service.
No, it cannot. Karma can be exhausted only through deep understanding, awareness and at least one glimpse of consciousness. The whole of mankind is swinging around result-oriented action. This is extended to service as well. At least in service, do not think of dollars or fame. Do not plan to impress. Do not plan to make your presence felt. Do the work for the work itself! Do not plan anything. Just do any service anywhere. This kind of service will infuse enormous power into your being. For at least half an hour a day do something selfless, without any thought of results or benefits for yourself. This service itself will become a meditation for you. It will inculcate in you the spirit of Collective Consciousness and lay the path to realizing the divinity underlying the service.
Even when we do selfless work, we must be careful not to bind ourselves to the results of our actions. Almost all those who do charitable service do it either because they cannot be without doing anything, or because they have been taught that service increases your points in the life-and-death cycle. Mostly, we do charitable work based on notions of earning brownie points that will do us good in our afterlife, whether we believe in rebirth or not. Or we would like to see ourselves in print or television and feel good about it. It is either fulfilling our need for attention in this world or in another world after death.
People often ask, ‘What is the point of meditation when the rest of the world is suffering? Instead of meditating, we can do some service.’ If we can genuinely feel the suffering of the rest of humanity and out of compassion, do work to alleviate their suffering, then it is very good. But we must have the understanding of this extended consciousness to feel this compassion. Not only that, the greatest service that you can do to humanity is to become a divine human being yourself! And meditation is the first step for that.
The problem is, you have been told that you will go to hell if you accumulate sins, and to heaven if you gain merits. Society uses these concepts to control you. Only with the help of these concepts, does it try to keep you under its control. It tries to control you through fear and greed - through fear of hell and greed of heaven.
Understand, there is no good deed or bad deed that will come to your help at the time of death. There is no hell or heaven. Hell and heaven are both states of your mind, not locations in some distant future in God's own land.
When you think good thoughts, when you do good deeds, you feel good and you are in heaven. When you think evil, when you act evil, you feel evil and you are in hell. That is all. That is all there is to karma. This is the cosmic cause-and-effect principle. You are what your intent is. You become what your intent is. If you create thoughts, words or actions that do not emanate from deep awareness but from a superficial layer, then you create karma that further propels you to fulfill those superficial thoughts, words or actions.