KARMA YOGA 17

The world of what may, perhaps, be termed man-vibration is fraught with contradictions, for it is a world of duality and opposing forces are an imperative for the balance of things. Thus, evil is as vital a component in the scheme of things as good. War and violence are as much forces that facilitate evolution as peace and non-violence, for who will vouch that the forces of destruction do not sow the seeds of a fresher renewal of life, who will aver that a sameness of peace is the sole civiliser to the exclusion of its dynamic play with war? Peace builds and war destroys for peace to build anew. Thus the cyclical flow of collective karma carries the evolutionary process on as man matures to envision life in a higher light where contradictions meet, duality ceases and the chaotic disparate elements of Nature synthesise in the grand harmony of transcendence. Then the knots of the heart are cut asunder and all doubts are dispelled. Man, a transfigured being, now realises that all duality was but an appearance, all contradictions of perception were but delusive dreams and that the whole of existence is an unbroken homogeneous mass of consciousness without beginning and without end. The whole of Nature falls off then as a cloud drifts off the face of the sky to reveal the glorious sun. So also, this vast panoramic universe dissolves into utter nothingness to reveal the Self of man.

Where is then karma? With the dissolution of the universe all karmic bonds are sundered for the individual and he is released of its stranglehold. But as the liberated soul descends from the realm of the Absolute to the plane of relativity, once more he feels the tug of unexhausted karma which can no longer bind him to cosmic nescience anymore but provides the force to hold his psycho-physical being together as the living-free soul expends the last vestige of unspent karma before dissolving into nothingness his phenomenal personality even as he attains to identity with the infinitude of his Being. For him, who is now no more, there is no karma. Like a figure in a dream it has melted into nothingness on waking up.

All karma was in the dream. The slumbering soul did karma in its dream. Now it has woken up to its pristine state of 'naishkarma'. There is no work for it for there is no duality anymore for interaction to take place and karma is nothing but the resolution of forces in the field of multiplicity. But the cosmic dream continues and Mother Nature keeps nurturing her children with fresher fantasies fraught with fresher karma as she guides them along through the maze of her Maya towards the destination of individual liberation. As to the collective mass being liberated, there comes a time when all of this mass of sentience is allowed passage to freedom but thereby cosmic karma does not end. Even in the dissolution of the universe after a cycle of manifestation, universal karma remains in seed form in the dissolved universe to project after a 'while' a fresher cosmic manifestation. And, thus, the cosmic cycle goes on ad infinitum ... 'anaadi sristy, ananta sristy'. And this is the saga of KARMA YOGA.