E.SVOBODAAGHORA Ill THE LAW OF KARMA ROBERT E. SVOBODA BROTHERHOOD OF LIFE PUBLISHING / SADHANA PUBLICATIONS©1997 Robert E. Svoboda First published in 1998 Published by Brotherhood of Life, Inc. 110 Dartmouth SE Albuquerque, NM 87106 ISBN 0-914732-37-4 & Sadhana Publications PO Box 365 Floresville, TX 78114 ISBN 0-9656208-1-6 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information or retrieval system without permission in writing from Brotherhood of Life, Inc. or Sadhana Publications. Reviewers may quote brief passages. Cover art: from a photograph by Stuart Haman (The Preakness, 1996, Pimlico Park, Maryland) 03 02 01 99 98 97 10987654321 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 7 L.STONEY oo eee cece cece eet e cence renee terest ene eeeee 3 2. ELAN 2 3. TEASERS AND STALLIONS . » A, TIMIR «0... 00s eee eee i 5, SCARLET RUBY ......-++ 5: 6. THE City OF DELUSION 183 7. REPAY . ca . REDSTONE : tee 283 9. PRAKRITI SIDDHI EPILOGUE .. GLOSSARY ..ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I appreciate all the advice, intentional and inadvertent, that I received from everyone who read this manuscript in its various stages of comple- tion, including Pamela Barinoff, Hart de Fouw, Gulrukh Irani, Margaret Mahan, Roshni Panday, John Pilskog, Lynda Raby, Dr. Fred Smith, Bill Vincent, and Claudia Welch. I thank the machines, including especially my computer, that have made it so easy for me to rewrite this work so many times. I bow down to Vimalananda’s Guru Maharaj, whose blessings tran- scend time and space to continue to preserve and protect me. Most of all, I esteem those players without whom there would have been no story: the stouthearted foals and yearlings, fillies and colts, geldings, stallions and mares that raced in Western India during my tenure there. Finally, I salute the man who moment by moment enlivened this story for me as he creat- ed it: the peerless Vimalananda. INTRODUCTION It is always better to live with reality, because otherwise, without fail, reality will come to live with you. —The Aghori Vimalananda IF TO BE RELIGIOUS, in the truest sense of that much misunderstood word, is to thirst for water from reality’s fountain, then to walk the spiritual path is to turn your compass toward its ever-flowing well. The organized reli- gions, which have set up camps downstream from that spring, all provide sketchy maps that trace a single trail to the source. The one map illuminating all the tracks leading spiritwards through the diverse terrains of existence is accessible only through the world’s sole dogma-free spiritual trekking agency: Aghora. Aghora, which literally means “unagitated,” teaches aghoris (its practitioners) to focus and intensify their craving for reality until they learn how to transcend all that galls (the ghora) in life. Then no internal or external stimulus, however ordinarily ‘agitating, will be able to interrupt or interfere with their one-pointed guzzling of the nectar of being. obtained my orientation toward reality from my mentor, the Aghori Vi- malananda, who showed little regard for organized systems of belief: “J have never believed in religion. Religions are all limited be- cause they concentrate only on one aspect of truth. That is why they are always fighting amongst one another, because they all think they are in sole possession of the truth. But I say there is no end to knowledge, so there is no use in trying to confine it to one scripture or one holy book or one experience. This is why I say, when people ask what religion | follow, ‘I don’t believe in Sampra- daya (sect), I believe in Sampradaha (incineration). Burn down everything which is getting in the way of your perception of truth.” (Robert E. Svoboda, Aghora, At the Left Hand of God, Brother- hood of Life, Albuquerque, 1986, p.167)‘Aghora III: The Law of Karma Aghoris, who do their damnedest to stand up to reality without having to lean on any reassuring doctrine or creed, strive always to do exactly what must be done at the moment when it becomes necessary. They learn what they need to know in the smashan, the cremation ground, worshipping death that they may die to their restrictions and be reborn into purity of perception. They ac- cept with love everything that comes their way, knowing that whatever reality serves up is after all the meal that their karmas have created for them. The Law of Karma, which is one of the most profound and fiendishly per- plexing of reality’s axioms, is the Law of Cause and Effect, the law of “as you sow, so shall you reap.” The oldest of the Upanishads expresses it this way: “Truly, one becomes good by good action and bad by bad action.” (Briha- daranyaka Upanishad II1.2.13). This law is better known to most of us as Newton's Third Law of Motion: For every action there is an equal and oppo- site reaction. The mandate of this succinctly complex law regulates the po- tentially limitless implications of every small act performed by every actor within the manifested universe, meteor and microorganism alike. Everyone lives within the precincts of the ubiquitous Law of Karma, whether or not they accept its reality. Ignorance of this Law is no defense in the Court of Cause and Effect. As Lord Krishna declared in the Shrimad Bhagavata, “Karma is the guru; nay, it is the Supreme Lord.” Every physical or mental action you perform and with which you identify yourself as the doer becomes a karma for you and produces a reaction which you will eventually have to experience. Like everyone else, aghori or atheist, you consume at each moment of your life that portion of your karmic grain that has finally matured. Likewise, each of your self-identified actions or reac- tions today shapes your future by seeding yet further reactions. Every individ- ual being is a karmic slate of coming attractions and repulsions. Though we all physically share the same Earth-space and Earth-time, our individual caus- ative schemata create for us individual universes of experience. There are as many universes as there are beings, each locating the environment—war or peace, wealth or penury, misery or ecstasy—that each assortment of karmas requires. Since limitations of time and space prevent everything from happen- ing in our world all at once, the Law of Karma schedules its events to occur just in time, every time, in each cosmos large and small. Every interaction between two different universes of experience creates its own karma which duly propa- gates its own reaction. The more strongly you identify with your karmas, the more closely your experience will conform to the reaction they promise. Though very few people ever graduate from quotidian religion to authen- tic Aghora, everyone is free to make use of the truths that the world’s aghoris have sucked from reality’s teat. Arguably the most fundamental of these real- Introduction izations is this: the essence of living with reality is to continually surrender to what is. You have already created your own personal universe with your kar- mas and now you must live in it. Everyone who has sown the wind will even- tually reap the whirlwind. However, most people try to ride out their karmic storms by barricading themselves inside psychological houses no building however weatherproof can withstand every tornado, earthquake, flood and conflagration. Almost everyone accordingly finds himself or herself existen- tially homeless one day or another. Religions make good ideational road- houses: you are free to shelter yourself under these roofs for as long as you like—or at least until a tempest blows in and causes that shelter to collapse. A good aghori recognizes the innate flimsiness of all doctrinal thatch and knows there is no security of any kind to be had in life except the surety that each of us is going to die. Many aghoris forestall future personal derange- ment by emigrating to the srnashan where they can live their lives with noth- ing more substantial above their heads than God’s never-failing umbrella. Vimalananda, who could be one of the most sophisticated of philosophers when the mood struck him, never mistook philosophy for reality. Time and again during the more than eight years that I was with him, the faith he dis- played in Nature’s ultimate beneficence brought home to me the value of ca- pitulating to what is. Time and again I was wowed when I saw how his submission to reality solved his problems. It was that awe that inspired me to write this book. The Law of Karma, the unimaginable complexity of which has cowed the greatest of scholars, loses some of its ability to dismay when viewed through the prism of surrender. If having decided to surrender you are willing to keep surrendering, and then you surrender some more, you will simplify your personal choreography to the more managable—f still convoluted—process of resolving how, when, and what to yield. But though this simplification, properly applied, makes karma easier to work through it in no way neutral- izes the Law of Karma’s power to mystify and consternate. Nor does it render karma’s logic any more linear, as the Mughal Emperor Akbar discovered in the following, possibly apocryphal tale: WHATEVER GOD DOES IS FOR THE BEST ‘The Emperor Akbar once developed a chronic non-healing sore on his left pinky finger. It became so severe that his physicians eventually decided the