Osho Quotes on Law of Karma

Osho Quotes on Law of Karma

1. It exists only for the unconscious man. The law of karma exists only for the unconscious man; for the conscious man there exists no law of karma. It is really unconsciousness that makes you suffer. If you do something unconsciously then you will suffer, then karma will be created. ‘Karma’ means unconscious action. If you do something consciously, fully alert, no karma is created. If your act is total, spontaneous, it is finished in that moment. It is atomic, it is not a continuity. It leaves no traces behind. That’s why an enlightened man is unpredictable. Only an unenlightened man is predictable because he moves unconsciously, in a routine way, mechanically. There are no surprises in his life. Somebody loves you, and you love him. Somebody hates you, and you hate him. Somebody comes and praises you and you feel very expanded like a balloon. That’s why people use buttering so much — praising others helps.
2. When consciousness has dawned you act for the first time, you don’t react and that action is beyond the law of karma. The law of karma applies only to the unconscious being. The man of awareness has absolute freedom. No law binds him, no law defines him. He’s as vast as the sky, he’s as infinite as the sky. His freedom is absolute.
3. Remember, this as a VERY fundamental law: any experience that is complete, you are finished with it. It leaves no karma, it creates no karma. It creates no trace, it leaves no trace in you — not even footprints. Nothing is left of it. It simply disappears, evaporates.
4. Sannyas is the beginning of getting out of the law of karma. Because sannyas is the beginning of awakening. Sannyas is your effort to gt out of the rut in which you have lived for many lives. Sannyas is the insight that ‘Enough is enough, and I should get out of the routine life, I should get out of the mechanicalness of it. I should get out into a clearness, into clarity. Enough I have roamed in the jungle of unconsciousness, in the dark night of the soul. I should search for the dawn, for the morning.’ It is the search for the sun, it is the flight towards the sun. That’s why in the East we have chosen ochre as the color for sannyas — it is the color of the sun, the sunrays, the mornings. A search for light, a search for awareness, a search for enlightenment. Once you start becoming more and more aware, less and less will you be part of the law of karma. And once you have enjoyed and tasted a little bit of freedom then nobody can force you back into the prison. You will open your wings and you will fly towards the sun.
5. The law of karma says: Whatever you have done in the past is still dominating you. You are possessed by the dead past; you are manipulated by the dead past. Whatsoever you have done yesterday has become a pattern, a structure, a character, and you are simply repeating it today. By repeating it, you will be enforcing it. Tomorrow it will become stronger, and the day after tomorrow even stronger. And life after life if you go on repeating a certain thing, it creates grooves in your mind — and then it becomes an absolute necessity. You simply live like a robot. Gurdjieff used to say that man is a machine. It is true. Unless you become a Buddha, you are a machine. What does the word ‘Buddha’ mean? ‘Buddha’ means one who is awakened, aware. Become aware.
6. Nobody is responsible for you except yourself, remember. If you are mad you are mad — you have to sort it out: it is your deed! This is what Hindus say: your karma. The meaning is very deep. It is not a theory. They say, whatsoever you are it is your own work, so sort it out! Nobody else is responsible for you, only you are responsible.
7. This is what you are doing. Always the other is responsible: he should have done something or other and there would have been no suffering. No, the other is not responsible at all. You are responsible, and unless you take this responsibility consciously upon you, you will not change. The change will become possible, easily possible, the moment you realize that you are responsible for it. If you have suffered, it was your choice. This is what the law of karma is, nothing else: you are wholly responsible. Whatsoever happens — suffering or happiness, hell or heaven — whatsoever happens, ultimately you are totally responsible. This is what the law of karma is: total responsibility is with you. But don’t be afraid, don’t be scared by it, because if the total responsibility is with you, then suddenly a door of freedom opens — because if you are the cause of your suffering, you can change. If others are the cause, then you cannot change. Then how can you change? Unless the whole world changes, you will suffer. And there seems to be no way to change others — then suffering cannot end. But we are so pessimistic that even such beautiful doctrines  as the law of karma we interpret in such a way that they don’t free and liberate us, but rather, on the contrary,  they make us more burdened. In India the law of karma has been known for at least five thousand years or even more, but what have we done? It is not that we have taken responsibility upon ourselves; we have thrown all the responsibility on the law of karma — that it is happening because of the law of karma and we cannot do anything, nothing can be done; because of the past lives this life is such. The law of karma was to free you. It was giving you total freedom towards yourself. No one else can make any suffering for you — this was the message. If you are suffering you have created it. You are the master of your fate, and if you want to change it, immediately you can change it and the life will be different.
8. Remember this — God is a response. It is a resounding of your being. If you go to the hills and you say something, the hills resound with it. The whole existence resounds in you. Whatsoever you do will be returned to you; this is the law of karma. It is not a question of details: you have insulted somebody so the same man is going to insult you in some life. Don’t be foolish! Don’t be silly! But the law is exactly right. It says: Whatsoever you give, you will receive. Whatsoever you sow, you will reap. God comes to you the way you reach him.
9. I do not agree with the law of karma as it is preached by Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism; it is ugly. It is an effort to keep the status quo of society. It protects the rich, the powerful, and it keeps the poor suffering in a kind of drugged state. Nothing can be done about your past life; you have to wait for the future life. Nothing can be done in this life. If the East is so poor, these religions are responsible. You are miserable because you are not using your intelligence. You are miserable because you are still carrying conditions which make you miserable. You are poor, not because of your past life, but because of the stupidity of your parents who went on producing children: one dozen, two dozen. You are poor because you are being exploited. You are poor because you are living in a system which is immobile, no movement is allowed.
10. The East needs a tremendous revolution that destroys the distinction between castes: the brahmins, the high caste; the sudras, the lowest; and other castes. The East needs a revolutionary attitude — that the law of cause and effect functions here and now; it does not wait for death to come. If you do something good, you will immediately be rewarded. According to me, in the very act of doing good there is reward. If somebody has fallen on the ground, and you help him to get up, don’t you feel happy? Doesn’t your heart feel that you have done something human? If somebody is drowning in the ocean, and you turn your back and don’t care what happens to him, do you think you will be able to sleep that night? Will not that drowning man become a nightmare? Every action has its intrinsic reward or punishment. Existence does not wait that long. The whole law of karma is just an invention of the brahmins. It has kept the East poor, and it is keeping the east in tremendous suffering.
11. To me, if your aesthetic sense allows you an act, you will feel immensely fulfilled immediately. I don’t issue any promissory notes to you. All the religions have done that. I am absolutely for cash! I don’t believe in promissory notes, I believe in cash. My religion is a cash religion. You act, and out of your action you get the result immediately, connected to it as a continuation; there is no discontinuity. This is my law of karma. This is absolutely different from all the philosophies of the law of karma that have been preached in the past, particularly in the East. But my law of karma has a different dimension: it is aesthetic. The more your aesthetic sense becomes alive, the more you become full of reverence for life — this is bound to happen. With sensitivity, you will become so respectful that even to pluck a flower from a plant will be an ugly act.
12. Karma is a scientific law: the law of action. Whatsoever you do has its intrinsic reward or punishment. When you are angry, it is not that you will suffer in your next life. When you are angry, WHILE you are angry, you are suffering; there is no need for another life to give you punishment. While you are angry you are in a fire, you are poisoning your whole body, you are poisoning your whole system. Anger is poison. It may hurt the other, it may not — it depends on the other — but it is going to hurt you, certainly. If you insult a buddha it is not going to hurt him, but before you can insult a buddha you will have to go through much inner turmoil.
13. This is what in the East has been called the law of karma, the law of action. If your action follows the ultimate law, you will be attaining more and more bliss. If you go against it, immediately you will fall into suffering. There is no one like a grand manager deciding everybody’s actions, who is doing wrong and who is doing good, and who is to be sent to the heaven and who is to be thrown into hell — there is no one. With every movement you create your heaven and your hell. If you follow the ultimate law, you are creating heaven for yourself moment to moment. If you go astray, if you go against the law, you are creating hell, not the law.
14. Meditation is the way, and this harmony of oneness, this feeling of oneness with all, is the end, is the goal. Try it! Remember the ocean and forget the wave. And whenever you remember the wave and start behaving as the wave, remember, you are doing something wrong and you will create misery because of it. There is no God who is punishing you. Whenever you fall a prey to some illusion, you punish yourself. The law, DHARMA, the Tao is there. If you move in harmony with it, you feel blissful. If you move against it, you feel yourself to be in misery. There is no one sitting there in the skies to punish you. There is no record of your sins; there is no need for this. It is just like gravity. If you walk rightly, the gravity is a help. You cannot walk without it. If you walk wrongly, you will fall down, you may get a fracture. But no one is punishing you; it is just the law, the gravity — the impersonal gravity. If you walk wrongly and you fall down, you will have a fracture. If you walk rightly, you use gravity. The energy can be used wrongly or rightly. When you feel yourself as a wave, you are against the universal law, you are against the reality. Then you will create misery for yourself. This is what the law of KARMA means. There is no law-giver; God is not a judge. To be a judge is ugly, and if God were a judge, he would be completely bored, or else he would have gone mad by now. He is not a judge, he is not a controller, he is not a law-giver. The universe has its own laws, and the basic law is that to be real is to be in bliss, to be unreal is to be in misery.
15. See how things go together: if you tell one lie then many lies are invited — the same attracts the same — and now truth is unwelcome, because the darkness of the lies will not like the light of truth. So even when your lies are not in any danger of being exposed you will not be able to speak truth. If you speak one truth, many other truths are invited — the like attracts the like. If you are naturally truthful it is very difficult to lie, even once, because all that truth protects you. And this is a natural phenomenon. There is no God keeping a book. You are the book. You are the God, your being is the book. Abraham Maslow says, “If we do something we are ashamed of, it registers to our discredit. And if we do something good, it registers to our credit.” You can watch it, you can observe it. The law of karma is not some philosophy, some abstraction. It is simply a theory which explains something true inside your being. The net result: either we respect ourselves, or we despise and feel contemptible, worthless and unlovable. Every moment, you are creating yourself; either a grace will arise in your being or a disgrace: this is the law of karma. Nobody can avoid it. Nobody should try to cheat on karma, because that is not possible. Watch… and once you understand it things start changing. Once you know the inevitability of it you will be a totally different person.
16. This is the situation about evil and its absolutely inevitable result, sorrow. You may do evil today, and it is very good and everything looks beautiful, and you can’t see any bad thing resulting out of it. And deep down you know all these buddhas are wrong — where is the law of karma? Many times people come to me and they say, “We see that evil people are prosperous. Why? And we also see that good people are suffering. Why? That is proof enough that there is no God, that is proof enough that there is no law of karma. That is proof enough that might is right, whosoever is powerful is right.” It is not so. Just one needs a little patience. But fools have their own logic — foolishness has its own logic, remember.
17. Of course when you spit against the sky, it takes a little time to come back. It does not come instantly, it depends on many things — but everything comes back. Whatsoever you do is sowing: one day or other you will have to harvest, one day or other you will have to reap it. If you are miserable today, these are the seeds which have flowered. These seeds you may have sowed somewhere in your past — this life, another life, somewhere. Whatsoever you are today is nothing but your accumulated past. Your whole past is your present. Whatsoever you are going to be tomorrow will be whatsoever you are doing today. Nothing can be done about the past, but much can be done about the future. And to change the future is to change all. If you start changing your ways of life, your ways of awareness, if you start understanding the laws of life… this is one of the fundamental laws, the law of karma: whatsoever you do you will have to reap. Never forget it for a single moment. Because forgetting it has created so much misery for you. Remember it. Again and again old samskaras, old tendencies, will force you just by habit to do the old things. Remember — and drop out of old habits, drop out of mechanical reactions; become more conscious. A small awareness and great changes start happening.
18. To me, certainly each action has its result, but not somewhere far away in a future life. the action and the result are continuous, they are part of one process. Do you think sowing the seed and reaping the crop are separate? It is one process. What begins in sowing the seed, grows, and one day the one seed has become thousands of seeds. That’s what you call your crop. It is the same seed which has exploded into thousands of seeds. No death is intervening, no afterlife is needed; it is a continuum. So the one thing to be remembered is: in my vision of life, yes, every action is bound to have some consequences, but they will not be somewhere else, you will have them here and now. Most probably you will get them almost simultaneously. When you are kind to someone, don’t you feel a certain joy? A certain peace? A certain meaningfulness? Don’t you feel that you are contented with what you have done? There is a kind of deep satisfaction. Have you ever felt that contentment when you are angry, when you are boiling with anger, when you hurt somebody, when you are mad with rage? Have you ever felt a peace, a silence descending in you? No, it is impossible. You will certainly feel something, but it will be a sadness that you again acted like a fool, that again you have done the same stupid thing that you decided again and again not to do. You will feel a tremendous unworthiness in yourself. You will feel that you are not a man but a machine, because you don’t respond, you react. A man may have done something, and you reacted. That man had the key in his hands, and you just danced according to his desire; he had power over you. When somebody abuses you and you start fighting, what does it mean? It means that you don’t have any capacity not to react.
19. Unless others drop dead, you don’t feel alive. Unless others are in misery, you don’t feel happy. But how can you feel happy when others are unhappy, and how can you feel alive really when others are dead? We exist together. And sometimes you may be the cause of many people’s misery. Then you are earning a karma. You may not have directly hit them; you may not have been violent to them. Subtle is the law You need not be a murderer, but if simply you infect people by your misery, you are participating in it; you are creating misery. And you are responsible for it, and you will have to pay for it. Very subtle is the mechanism!.
20. Everybody goes on playing the game of being unhappy. You want to be happy, but unless you cut the investment in unhappiness you cannot be happy. And happiness is not somebody else’s responsibility towards you, remember. Nobody else can make you happy. It is your own growth, your own awareness, your own moving energy — higher and higher — that gives you bliss. But you have to understand the deep-down unconscious mechanism — that you talk about happiness but you desire unhappiness. That’s why…. And whatsoever you want happens! This world is really a magic place. If you want unhappiness it will happen, if you want happiness it will happen — because you are the deciding factor; you are the base of all that happens to you. This is the whole law of karma: whatsoever you want, you do, and it happens. If you are unhappy it is because you want it.
21. Patanjali says, ‘Actions are just like dreams. The whole world is nothing but a big stage, and the whole life is nothing but a drama. You did it because you were unaware. If you had been aware, there would be no problem.’ Now become aware, and bring the energy of awareness to your past. It will bum the whole past: pain and pleasure will both disappear, good and bad will both disappear. And when both disappear, when you transcend the duality of good and bad, you are liberated. Then there is neither pleasure nor pain. Then there comes a silence, a profound silence. In this silence arises a new phenomenon, satchitananda. In that silence, in that profound silence, truth happens to you, consciousness happens to you, bliss happens to you. I am all in favor of Patanjali.