Maria: Just checking in to see if Ram arrived in the US. I hope all is well. I had some more questions about karma… You said: “The karma does not come to you when you know you are awareness because nothing touches you. The karma comes to the body, which belongs to Isvara.”

So the jiva is tooling along accumulating karma that comes to the body, then receives moksa and the karma burns up.

Sundari: Correct, but one has to look at what “burns up” actually means. Karma does not burn up for awareness as there is no karma for awareness to burn up because nothing ever happened. None of it is real. Karma is just an idea in the mind, and identification with the body-mind is where the suffering is. So burning up karma is what apparently takes place for the jiva when the jiva is no longer identified with the body-mind and knows that it is awareness. This does not mean that the karma does not still play out for the jiva – remember the body belongs to Isvara. Prarabdha karma plays out as long as the jiva is alive. When prarabdha karma is finished, the body dies.

Maria: You said “…the karma does not come to you when you know you are awareness because nothing touches you.” Does that mean that the karma never comes to you because you are awareness?

Sundari: Correct. See above.

Maria: So when does it burn up, and what’s the advantage of that if it ends up with the body anyway?

Sundari: See above. What do you mean by “what’s the advantage of that?”? If you take yourself to be Maria, identified with the body-mind, the karma and therefore the suffering belongs to you because you are identified with it. If you know that you are awareness, the suffering takes place in the body which belongs to Isvara.

So you are free of the suffering. It is all a matter of identification, although the body-mind may still experience pain, like Ramji with his heart condition. This is Isvara, nothing to be done about it. It is prarabdha karma and it will play out as long as it long as it plays out. We know that it has nothing to do with us so we are always above it, observing it, free of it.

Karma is real if you think it is real. Take your situation, for instance. You need to clean up your karma because it is not congruent with the truth of who you are and you are suffering as a result. If you ignore this fact, you will keep rubbing up against Isvara – and Isvara rubs back real hard, especially when you know who you are. However, you could look at your situation and decide because it is not real and has nothing to do with who you are. You are trigunaatita, and Isvara, like the jiva, is an object known to you so there is nothing that needs to be done about it.

It would be quite possible to continue living with it and be totally dispassionate and removed from it. The question is, why would you want to do that when it does not serve either of you? Many enlightened beings opt for this choice; very often it is a cop-out for the ego that does not want to clean up its act.

Karma is almost impossible to understand because the one trying to understand it is in the field and part of the field. It is like trying to understand the mind of Isvara; it cannot be done. Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita: “On the topic of karma, even the sages are perplexed.”

Maria: Are you saying that it burns up for the subtle body but not the physical body?

~Love to you always, Maria

Sundari: I am saying that; see the above logic. Be well and hang in there. xxoo

~ Much love to you too, Sundari