1.2 Satya and Resolving Karma

Satya and Resolving Karma

If you have explored the practice of Ahimsa for a time, including a relationship to deeper compassion for yourself and those around you and a commitment to your boundaries, then the next Yama, or social restraint, unfolds logically.  What does kindness need to support it in action?  In Yoga, the answer is honesty.

The next practice in yoga is Satya, or truthfulness.  You may believe that honesty is one of the highest virtues available to humans.  I agree.  But imagine honesty without kindness supporting, enveloping, and promoting it?  This would in fact give rise to a kind of violence, would it not?  When you are honest with others are you reacting with the lash of your words or are you giving thoughtful and honest feedback silently held by the compassion of your heart?

This Sanskrit word is quite telling: ‘sat’ means ‘deep wisdom nature,’ and is well-known in the term that describes the complete spiritual realization of self: satchitananda.  Sat-chit-ananda combines the words that represent existence, consciousness, and bliss.  Sat does not mean ‘honesty’ in the narrow way of abstaining from lies, although of course this too is included.  It represents the truth of your nature, of wisdom, of your existence. Someone who is ‘sattvic’ (see The Gunas) is clear and able to walk the middle road without dipping into the extremes of heaviness and apathy or of the manic and overwrought compulsion of mind.

Someone who practices Satya is not just choosing not to lie but is instead in fidelity with their essence, truth, and the clarity of the unchangeable divine within the always changing world.  In one of the oldest of the Vedas, the Rigveda, Satya is a form of reverence to the divine while non-truthfulness is described as a moral corruption. So truthfulness is a mark of the sage.  This is the pathway to transmuting and releasing karma.

SATYA and the Mechanism of Karma:

“...And give us our inheritance of divine love so that we can forgive like you. And let us be wise, so that we do not wed another’s madness and then make them in debt to us for the deep gash their helpless raging lance will cause.”

St. Francis of Assisi (Love Poems from God edited by Daniel Ladinsky, excerpt)

This passage reveals to us the secret of personal responsibility.  How often do we find ourselves tying ourselves to another’s insanity- agreeing to the rules of the game or that unhealthy relationship or that job that degrades us only to suffer for it and feel beaten down?  

We’ve just created a debt: when we rope ourselves to the insanity of another isn’t it inevitable that we will get hurt?  Personal responsibility teaches us that we are the ones indeed that agreed to the rules in the first place, and now we are suffering the immediate consequences from that lapse of wisdom, from that lapse of truth.

This is much closer to the rules of karma than most people advertise.  Karma is not “what goes around comes around,” but is instead more of an energetic exchange: by agreeing to this situation or energy, I will certainly and inevitably feel the pain, the “deep gash,” that will ensue directly from that agreement.  Not by purpose, not because the other party is malicious (even if you perceive that they are), but because it is the logical unfolding of energy.  

This means that we can become very attuned to our agreements- our relationships, our jobs, our “yes-es” and begin to draw boundaries around those yes-es to support the deeper Truth of the heart.

This is the development of wisdom.

Our relationships matter.  Our contracts and our jobs and the way we communicate matters.  How did you speak to your partner today, or your children, or the person in the checkout line at the grocery store? Are you open and honest in your heart, in your humanity, in your inner landscape of thought and self-inquiry?

And then… when the heart has those healthy boundaries, we have an opportunity to begin to see that everything is our own essence-nature.  Everything is the mirror.  Everything is made out of our knowing of it- our awareness- our love- our faith and our truth.

Enlightenment is often described as the death or the cessation of the wheel of karma. 

When you take some of the mystery out of Enlightenment and see that awareness, freedom, liberation, awakening or whatever you want to call it is simply a very deep form of personal responsibility at the heart core then all of a sudden the goal feels less goal-y and the process matters more.  Cause and effect gives way to an open, dynamic arena of exploration into yourself that is possible, worthy, and empowering.

For is it not the height of empowerment to see that we are truly in charge of our own liberation?  You do not need to look for the right teacher to heal you.  You don’t need to learn more techniques or go to another seminar or ceremony in order to capture back your connection to Truth.  If you want to do those things- great!  But not as a means to discover your wholeness, which assumes you’re arriving broken.  If you assume you’re already whole, the investigation carries a sweet scent of gratitude and joy. 

You need only to look into your own heart with real commitment and see where you have made agreements that have led to or perpetuated wounds.  Just see them- that’s all.  Once they’re seen they unravel on their own.

Karma is windy.

The mind is windy.

In fact, the quality of the human mind is most often described in the Samkhya and Yoga literature as “vrtti” or turning, spinning (Yogas citta vrtti nirodaha, YSP 1.2).  The Sanskrit word vrtti is cognate with the English word revolve- can you hear it?  

But what’s amazing about this revolving is that it’s also revealing and reviving.  The movement of the mind, of karma, and of life is exactly the medicine that reveals the heart if your vision is clear and your path is honest.  

What do you point to when you point to your self?  “Hi, this is me.”

You point to your heart, do you not?  You don’t point to your head.  Wisdom lives not in the mind but in the center of your Being. So the reminders are everywhere: we are returning to the heart.  This is how karma resolves.  This is how you learn about personal empowerment.  This is what blossoms the remembering and the revelation of your existence as wholeness.