Or the downfall of Western civilization. The Manu-samhita (8.304-309) describes how a king or ruler of a country receives one sixth of the total karma of the subjects he rules. If the majority of people are pious and spiritually oriented, and the ruler protects those citizens to maintain a peaceful society in which such people can flourish, then the king will also share in the good activities and good karma of the citizens. Otherwise, if the ruler does not properly protect and maintain the citi
karma (5)
It is said that there are six whips in the material energy – birth, disease, death, hunger, thirst and lamentation. We are always beaten by these six whips here in the material world, yet a vaisnava is always happy. Maybe not free from struggle, but certainly happy within, because a vaisnava has received the ultimate gift of perfection in life. Everyone else is trapped and there is no way out of this cycle of birth and death. There is no way to escape karma. People work to relieve the problems o
“Better to suffer than to protest,” is rather a mind-blowing remark when taken out of context. In the Gita, 12.13-14, an insightful purport had us probing into the nature of karma with these above-mentioned, profound words. At this morning’s class, I shared these words expressing the token of pain that a spiritual practitioner encounters against the massive load that one deserves to face on a normal basis.
Our group of monks and a few visitors sat with rapt attention at the exploration of the l
Have you ever asked yourself: What keeps holding me back despite my best efforts to advance and break the chain of undesirable habits? The answer, more often than not, is our karma. To be more precise, it’s the part of our karma that must be experienced and cannot be mitigated even through various methods like austerities or sacrifices. Such unavoidable karma is called prarabdha karma.
Prarabdha karma is so strong that even a Brahman-realised soul, who directly and uninterruptedly perceives the
Imagine if someone would remember that he was a meat-eater in his previous birth, and yet he did not become an animal and took a human birth again. Well, then he should think that this human birth is just a step in between, and he would still have an animal birth waiting for him.
Sometimes you see, karma is an interesting cocktail. You may recall the story of King Nrga in the Krsna book. He was such a pious king, however by giving the same cow twice by accident to the brahmanas, he got a reacti