Miracle
Karma Yoga
Mother Teresa has lived a life of dedicated action.
THE PARADOX
OF KARMA
Before
discussing Miracle Karma Yoga, it
is important to draw a distinction between the traditional yoga idea of
karma
and how the Course describes karma. Below is an excerpt from the
autobiography
“Memory Walk in the Light,” which explains the paradox that karma
exists and
does not exist:
Parts of the
Old Testament depict God as
being righteously wrathful, which contradicts the idea that God is
all-loving.
Similarly, even the New Testament provides an image of God offering
righteous
justice that would send some of His children to hell to be punished
forever.
This belief in divine justice provides an illusory picture of God made
in the
image and likeness of man, not the other way
around. In my study of the
Course, I discovered that God’s idea of justice is that everyone
deserves
heaven, and I found nothing that contradicts that God is Love.
The Course offers
spiritual principles that are different than some ideas in the Bible
and also
different from some commonly held ideas in Eastern philosophy. For
example, the
Course takes the position that evil, sin, and guilt are illusory. In
order for
me to accept this viewpoint, I had to reconcile this understanding with
my
former study of karma. The idea of hell is that we have to pay for our
grave
mistakes, and this is very similar to the concept in yoga philosophy of
paying
for our karma. However, the Course maintains that, as far as God is
concerned,
there is no such thing as karmic retribution. The belief in karma means
our
sins have real effects that cause real damage, and we will have to pay
for that
damage. In the past I would keep an account of the offenses of others
the way
some people collect stamps. Occasionally I would cash in the
accumulated stamps
by releasing my pent-up grievances in a display of private or even on
rare
occasions public emotion. But then, with the help of the Course and the
application of forgiveness, I was able to discard this foolish and
unloving
practice. Similarly, those who believe in hell also think of karma as
God’s
collecting of stamps—His accounting system, which He uses as a means of
judging
our worthiness for heaven or hell. The Course would say that those who
see God
as a judge with a karmic accounting system are just projecting their
own
judgments onto God, making Him into an ego image of themselves.
The belief in karma is the
idea that our past actions determine what we deserve and produce our
present
positive or negative circumstances. We appear to live our lives under
the
effects of karma, but this appearance is due entirely to our own belief
in
karma. God has nothing to do with this cherished, self-imposed belief
in
assigning rewards and punishments based on past actions. According to
the Course,
karma does not exist because the past does not exist and has no real
power to
determine our conditions. Nevertheless, the past can affect us if we
allow it
to do so by believing in it and by specifically believing in guilt,
which in
turn requires self-assigned punishment. The Course does affirm cause
and
effect, but it maintains that the past cannot be the cause of anything.
Cause
and effect occurs through our present choices that
are the cause of our
current circumstances.
We are accustomed to
believing the past can affect us, so it is hard to accept the Course
saying,
“…the past is gone, and what has truly gone has no effects.”1 Let’s use
a
simple illustration to explain this difficult idea. Imagine a ship,
which was
loaded with cargo in New York, is currently at sea headed toward
London. In
this analogy, New York represents the past, and London represents the
future.
The ship stands for the present and for the individual mind, which only
functions in the present. If I said that the ship is carrying New York,
no one
would believe such an impossible idea. Yet many people do believe the
mind
carries the past, even though this is quite impossible. New York is
gone and
has no effect on the ship, just as the past is gone and has no effect
on the
mind. It is true that the cargo was loaded in the past in New York, but
only
the cargo that is on the ship now can have any
effect. Similarly, only
the thoughts we have in our mind now can have any effect on us. The
cargo can
be dumped off of the ship at any present moment, and likewise we can
let go of
any thoughts presently in the mind, including any memories or thoughts
related
to the past. Cause and effect do take place, but only in the present
where we
can decide what to keep in the mind and what to discard. This puts us
in
control of what we experience. Discarding unhealthy thoughts and
keeping
healthy thoughts will be calming to the mind. Similarly, discarding
healthy
thoughts and holding onto unhealthy thoughts will be disturbing to the
mind.
The only cause of our current condition is a present decision in the
mind.
My former understanding of
karma, represents the traditional Eastern philosophy that there are
three kinds
of karma: The first is accumulated karma, which is the total of all
past
experiences. The second is fruit-producing karma, which is experienced
now and
must be experienced. And the third is new karma that will produce fruit
in the
future. In my mind I thought of the accumulated karma as past
karma, the
fruit-producing karma as present karma, and the new
karma as future
karma. Now I realized there is no such thing as past or
future karma. There
is only present karma, which I prefer to call present
cause and
effect. It is the cause and effect occurring in the
mind in each present
moment. Decisions may have been made in the past, but these would have
evaporated if the mind is not holding these decisions currently. We
could have
loaded our minds with mental cargo at any time in the past, even in
past lives.
Past lives can affect us now only because of the thoughts we currently
hold in
the conscious or subconscious mind about them. That is why it was so
important
for me to bring my traumatic experiences to my conscious awareness so I
could
become fully aware of this unhealthy mental cargo stored away in back
of my
mind. Then I could make a current decision to throw that emotional
turmoil
overboard. This is why I have been and continue to be motivated to
bring the
hidden pieces of my shadow puzzle out of the darkness and to release
them into
the light through forgiveness.
The stored thoughts in the mind are
constantly renewed, and it is this keeping of them in our present
consciousness
that makes them affect us. In this sense the mind is like a computer
that
stores information and will hold it until we decide to delete it. If no
new
decisions are made, former decisions automatically remain in effect and
are
currently active in the mind. That is why miracles of forgiveness
involve
changing our minds to remove decisions currently in the mind, which
could have
been decided long ago, but remained in effect in each present moment
since
then. Old decisions that currently continue to remain in the mind
involve
holding on to illusions, such as illusions of the past. Consequently,
miracles replace
our illusions about the past and reveal the reality of divine truth
that is
always within us now.
Our present choices and
actions can affect our navigating through the world of form, but can
have no
effect on who we are in reality.
By forgiving ourselves and
others, we can let go of our false beliefs in the past. Also,
forgiveness helps
us to let go of the negative effects of our present choices by showing
us that
our own mind is investing in ego-based illusions that do not have the
power to
produce effects. Forgiveness heals our minds by replacing these
illusions with
the truth of our reality—the truth that God is our only Cause. Since
God is our
Cause, we are His Effect, His holy Son. Our purity may appear to be
lost in the
illusions of this world, but when God created us in eternity, the
holiness He
gave us must be forever ours.
Instead of requiring
retribution for our mistakes, God only forgives by overlooking all
errors and
seeing the truth of our holiness and oneness with Him. Although we may
think
our actions deserve rewards or punishments, God always knows we deserve
only
love at all times. In God’s loving awareness, all of our errors in
thought or
behavior evaporate altogether into nothingness. Unfortunately, we have
the
tendency to hold on to the memory of these unloving acts and to blame
ourselves
for them. In contrast to the accusations we make against ourselves, God
sees
only our innocence so we remain holy in His eyes. Nevertheless,
believing in
guilt, we would make the mistake of punishing ourselves with karmic
retribution. We would hold ourselves accountable for the past mistakes
God has
already forgiven. We may even believe we have done something that is
unforgiveable. Yet there is nothing that cannot be forgiven because
everything
has already been forgiven. This must be so because of the unwavering
Love of
our Father. No matter what sins we think we have committed or what
punishment
we think we deserve, God still sees us as being just as sinless as when
he
created us in His own image of holiness with no stain of guilt and
fully
deserving of heaven at all times. The only question we need to ask
ourselves is
this: “Can we learn to see ourselves with the eyes of love as God sees
us in
our true holiness?”
In
his article “Karma” quoted
below, Robert Perry, the founder of the Circle of Atonement, summarizes
the
paradox of karma. He explains that karma seems to exist because of our belief in it, yet karma
does
not exist as far as God is concerned:
So to summarize what we’ve
seen, I am picturing two lines, one of karma and one of no karma, both
running
in parallel. On the line of karma, I made choices
in the past, and those
choices did determine my present condition, but only because I held
unto them
and punished myself for them, only because of my magical belief that
they had
the power to create me in their image. At the same time, on the line of
no
karma, God has constantly cancelled out those choices,
constantly forgiven
me, in the knowledge that my choices have literally no power to create
me. He
knows that He created me, and in doing so gave
eternal holiness. No
matter what I’ve done, that holiness always remains my true condition.
It
always remains my present reality. And I can always lay hold of it in
that same
present—now.1
1. T-28.I.1:8,
p. 589
2. The
entire article by Robert Perry can be found on the Circle of Atonement
website
at www.cirlceofa.org by entering the word “karma” in the search
function. Among
several articles on the subject of karma, Robert’s is the one
simply
titled “Karma.”
When you dedicate your actions to God,
you can have fun getting your hands dirty
— or even your face dirty.
MIRACLE KARMA YOGA
The Hindu
ideal of karma yoga takes ordinary actions and everyday mundane work
and
elevates these to divine expressions. Karma yoga can be practiced by
simply
doing your work as a service to God without any thought of receiving
the fruits
of your labor. Karma yoga is sometimes considered to be the yoga of
“work.”
However, it is more accurately understood as the yoga of “dedicated
action.” In
fact, the verb “kri,” meaning to do,
is the root word from which
the word karma is derived. So any action can be an expression of karma
yoga, if
that action is performed with dedication to the divine. By dedicating
the
action to God, the action becomes selfless and a divine expression.
Miracle Karma Yoga is the
Christian yoga of selfless action. Of course, Christianity has
had a long history of advocating and manifesting service as a Christian
ideal.
Service is the horizontal approach to the divine through expressing
love to
others in contrast to the vertical approach to the divine through
inward
seeking of God. Seekers who make progress going within during
meditation and
contemplation as a vertical experience are often inspired to find
balance in
their lives through selfless outer service to others. The West has been
focused
very much on material progress and in turn produced a society that has
valued
social service, especially in a material sense, to a higher degree than
in the
East. The Christian expression of social service has been understood as
an
expression of Christian love, as exemplified by the life and teachings
of Jesus.
However, the selfless action of Miracle Karma Yoga is more
than simply
social service. Like all the yoga expressions, Miracle Karma Yoga
involves a
turning inward, which is often missing from social service. Other forms
of yoga
involve changing the focus from an initial external orientation to an
internal
orientation. But Miracle Karma Yoga involves the reverse
direction—having an
inner dedication initially to the divine and then going outwardly to
express
the divine through actions. This inner dedication separates Miracle
Karma Yoga
from social work. It is not enough to just make a dedication inwardly;
you must
carry your divine alertness with you in the actions as they are being
performed.
In Miracle Karma Yoga every action is dedicated to the
divine and
becomes worship manifested in action. This sanctifies everyday life,
making even
the most mundane actions become worship. Worship is giving. In Hindu
karma yoga
the emphasis is on giving to God without thought of personal reward.
Instead of
the broader Hindu idea of karma as dedicated action, the word “karma” is
most
commonly associated with the law of cause and effect. In Hindu
philosophy
because of the law of karma, good actions produce good results, such as
rewards, and bad actions produce bad results, such as punishments. This
Hindu
understanding of karma is the basis for the belief in reincarnation in
which we
encounter the fruits of our karma reaped from past lives. Traditional
karma
yoga advocates giving both the good and bad results to God.
Miracle Karma Yoga recognizes the paradox of karma
described in the
section above titled “The Paradox of Karma,” which explains how karma
exists
only because of your belief in it, but it does not exist from God’s
perspective.
You believe in karmic retribution, yet God does not share your belief
because
it is entirely illusory. Although you are bound by the self-made law of
karma,
this is not God’s law. Karma is a self-imposed accounting system in
which you
assign to yourself rewards and punishments according to your
self-evaluation of
our own actions based on our firm belief in guilt. Imagine going to
court and
being entirely acquitted by the judge (God), who says you are innocent.
But
instead you refuse to accept your innocence. You go into a room and
pretend that
it is a prison, even though it has no bars and no locks on the doors.
Thus you
make yourself into a prisoner, although you have not been sentenced
except by
yourself. The process of letting go of self-inflicted guilt and accepting forgiveness
helps
you to resign your role as karmic accountant and to recognize that you
are
only and always under God’s law of Love. One aspect of Miracle Karma
Yoga is to
recognize that we are not bound by karma and that God gives us only his
love
and forgiveness as He recognizes our eternal holiness in His sight.
The other aspect of Miracle Karma Yoga takes into account your current
condition of imagining that you are bound by karma. Although you bind
yourself
with your belief in karma and guilt, you can overcome karma by giving
the fruits
of your actions to God so you accumulate no karma and are surrendering
all of
yourself to God. This may sound like a simple idea, and it is. But
because of
the human tendency to want to focus on meeting one’s own needs
primarily, it is
hard to keep focused on giving to God with no thought of oneself. Jesus
addressed this by saying, “But seek first the kingdom of God and his
justice,
and all these things shall be given you besides.”1
The virtue that manifests by practicing Miracle Karma Yoga
is purity of
heart—which here means purity of intention. When you have no motivation
directed toward what you will get from your actions, you can act with a
pure
heart for love of God alone. Each of the aspects of Miracle Yoga that
will be
described include a manifestation of forgiveness as “looking and
overlooking,”
which is a combination of attachment to the divine and non-attachment
to
anything not divine. In Miracle Karma Yoga, the “looking” is a looking
to God
and the “overlooking” is an overlooking of the ego. Specifically in
Miracle
Karma Yoga you are looking first inwardly at the divine in making your
dedication and then looking at the divine manifesting through you in
your outer
actions stripped of ego desires. You are overlooking your ego desires.
The
separating of ego desires from actions gives a sense of inner freedom
that
comes from knowing that you are doing God’s will and provides a release from
anxiety
caused by investing in the ego.
Perhaps the best example that can be found of Christian
selfless action
is the life of Brother Lawrence. His book, entitled The
Practice of the
Presence of God, is recommended as a primer on the practice
of letting your
activities become a divine expression. The following quotation explains
Brother
Lawrence’s outlook:
He [Brother Lawrence] said that our
sanctification does not depend as much on changing
our activities as it
does on doing them for God rather than for ourselves. The most
effective way
Brother Lawrence had for communicating with God was to simply do his
ordinary
work. He did this obediently, out of a pure love of God, purifying it
as much
as was humanly possible. He believed it was a serious mistake to think
of our
prayer time as being different from any other. Our actions should unite
us with
God when we are involved in our daily activities, just as our prayer
unites us
with Him in our quiet time.2
Brother Lawrence was a perfect example of Miracle Karma Yoga and was
also an
example of Miracle Bhakti Yoga, the yoga of love. Under ideal
circumstances all
activities can be done for the love of God. However, not every seeker
will be
filled with divine love, and certainly not all the time, as was the case
with
Brother Lawrence. Consequently, if the feeling of love is not the
motivation,
you can be motivated simply by the high ideal of wanting to do God’s
Will. Thus
you can dedicate your actions to doing God’s will rather than doing
your own
will and in so doing be manifesting Miracle Karma Yoga.
So much time and energy is spent on satisfying the desires
of the ego
that the time spent devoted to God with no thought of self can become a
freeing
experience. At times you may find yourself in conflict between wanting
to
satisfy ego desires and wanting to follow spiritually motivated
desires. Sometimes
you may notice that your actions are expressions of ego desires, even
though
you want to perform actions dedicated to God. In this case, there is a
lack of
harmony between your ego-based actions and your wanting to follow
divine
inspiration. The result is tension and anxiety leading to fear or in
other
words the loss of the awareness of inner peace and love. This means you
have
dual goals that are conflicting.
The solution to conflicting goals is adopting a single
unified goal. The
mind has many different thoughts which are often in conflict with one
another,
and through meditation you choose one thought as your single focus.
This single
thought becomes your unified goal that produces a unified mind and
therefore
brings peace to the mind. Similar to this inward practice of unifying
the mind
by adopting a unified goal in meditation, Miracle Karma Yoga is
designed to be
an outer way of unifying the mind and producing peace. In Miracle Karma
Yoga
the unified goal is the dedication of your outer actions to God. Being
successful at practicing Miracle Karma Yoga means holding firmly to the
single
goal of dedicated action, which enables you to let go of conflicting
goals
based on satisfying ego desires. It is not necessary to willfully stop
ego desires
and the actions they produce. Ego-based desires and actions will fall
away
naturally as you keep your focus on maintaining your unified goal of
dedicated
action. This single-minded dedication, like the single-mindedness of
meditation, brings peace to the mind.
The problem with any spiritual philosophy is the gap between the ideal
and the practical application of that ideal. In contrast to the ideal
intention
of practicing total selfless motivation in karma yoga, you may be faced
with
the fact that you generally live a life based often on meeting the
needs of the
self and body. Consequently, you may feel that the perfect ideal of
karma yoga
can be particularly challenging and beyond your capabilities. It may be
unrealistic and foolish to think that you could remove all your personal
desires
from your actions and dedicate them entirely to God.
Fortunately Miracle Karma Yoga offers a less exalted form of karma yoga
than the totally selfless service, which is nearly saint-like. Just as
a person
can be a Christian without being a perfect follower of Christ, a person
can be
practicing karma yoga to a certain degree by any form of service, such
as being
a teacher or social worker, even if some selfish motives are mixed with
unselfish motives. Yet your job is not your only way of expressing
karma yoga.
Any action, no matter how mundane, can be an expression of karma yoga,
if that
action is performed with a spiritual motivation.
Traditionally karma yoga involves being totally desireless so all of
the
fruits of your actions are given to God with no thought of gaining for
yourself. Miracle Karma Yoga does not require this total
desirelessness.
Miracle Karma Yoga advocates the expression of enlightened
self-interest.
This requires a positive goal orientation and discipline necessary to
achieve
goals. Instead of trying to remove desires, you decide to choose goals
that
express spiritually oriented desires rather than selfish desires.
Rather than
seeking to experience no fruits of your actions, you seek the fruits of
the
Spirit—“love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,
gentleness, self-control.”3 Seeking such fruits is not entirely
selfless from
the perspective of traditional karma yoga, but it does express enlightened
self-interest that would lead you in the direction of waking up to your
oneness
with God.
It would be unrealistic to expect that you can or should dedicate all
of
your actions to God. It is enough to just increasingly incorporate
dedicated
action into your life as part of a natural growth process. Even if you
want to
increase your practice of dedicated action, you may find that you
forget to do
so. To help you remember to practice dedicated action, you can
incorporate your
dedication of activities into your daily routine. Saying grace at meals
on
special occasions is a commonly accepted practice, but you can choose
to get in
the habit of blessing your activity of eating whenever you eat during
the day.
After your meditation practice, you may want to inwardly dedicate all
your
activities of the day to God. This enables your actions to be offered
as a service in which you give the fruits of your work to God. One last
recommendation of adding the dedication of your actions
to your
daily routine is to schedule times for mini-meditations. Perhaps you
can decide
to have a mini-meditation every morning, afternoon, and evening so that
three
times a day you take a minute or two to make contact with the divine
within and
dedicate the upcoming few hours to God.
Miracle Karma Yoga involves dedicating your actions to God, but each
separate
act of dedication is an expression of a larger dedication—the
dedication of
your whole self to God. You can make your dedication to God or a more
personalized dedication to Jesus. Today’s society is very
compartmentalized.
Because of compartmentalization, it is easy to separate off your
religious life
and expression from the rest of your life and feel justified in doing
so since
that is the norm of Western society. Miracle Karma Yoga affords the
opportunity
to perceive your whole life in all of its activities in the world, even
sitting
on the toilet, as a divine expression. The idea
is to encourage a sense of prayerfulness throughout the whole day.
The Course encourages you to make the
dedication of all your actions to the Holy Spirit, Who serves the function of
being the link between you and God the Father. Also, the Holy Spirit provides
the link between you and all your brothers and sisters in Christ. If you give
Him permission to guide you, the Holy Spirit reminds you of your divine nature
of love while you navigate through the world of form. The Holy Spirit can even
guide you when you sleep if you allow Him to do so.
Yet the Holy Spirit, too, has use for sleep, and can use
dreams on behalf of waking if you will let Him.
How you wake is the sign of how you have
used sleep. To whom did you give it? Under
which teacher did you place it? Whenever you wake dispiritedly, it was not
given to the Holy Spirit. Only when you awaken joyously have you utilized sleep
according to His purpose.4
In addition to the function of dedicating
your individual actions to the Holy Spirit, you have a larger function that God
has assigned to you. You have been given a unique function in God’s divine
plan. There is a deep satisfaction in knowing that you have accepted your part
in God’s plan. You also have the following reassurance from the Holy Spirit:
Once you accept His plan as the one function that you would fulfill,
there will be nothing else the Holy Spirit will not arrange for you without
your effort. He will go before you making straight your path, and leaving in
your way no stones to trip on, and no obstacles to bar your way. Nothing you
need will be denied you. Not one seeming difficulty but will melt away before
you reach it. You need take thought for nothing, careless of everything except
the only purpose that you would fulfill. As that was given you, so will its
fulfillment be. God's guarantee will hold against all obstacles, for it rests
on certainty and not contingency.5
God’s plan is for you and all your brothers and sisters to wake up in
Heaven. When it says in the quotation above that the Holy Spirit will remove all
obstacles, it does not mean that you will be given whatever you think you need
in the world. It means that the Holy Spirit will give you whatever you truly
need to help you to awaken and to help you assist others in awakening. You have
a unique place in God’s plan that only you can fulfill. Your part in God’s plan
is called your “special function,” and it always includes the application of
forgiveness in the divine plan. The link to information on this website about
your special function of forgiveness is below.
1. Matthew 6:33
2.
Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence, (Springdale,
Pennsylvania: Whitaker House, 1982), pp. 20-21
3.
Galatians 5:22-23
4. T-8.IX.3:8,
4:1-5, p. 158
5.
T-20.IV.8:4-10, pp. 432-433
Click
here for information about your special function of forgiveness
Memory
Walk in the
Light:
My
Christian Yoga Life as
"A Course in Miracles"
Author:
Donald James
Giacobbe
“The central message of the Course
is forgiveness, and the key to yoga is opening to the divine presence.
As a
teacher of Miracle Yoga based on Course principles, my goal is to live
my life
as an expression of forgiveness and openness to the experience of
Spirit.”
Listen to "Authors's Radio Interview"
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