Dr. N.L. Kachhara
Subsidence-cum-annihilation (ksayopashama) of psychical karma and the rise of biological karma make worldly activities possible. The soul enjoys favourable conditions on the subsidence-cum-annihilation of psychical karma and the rise of auspicious biological karma and faces adverse conditions on the rise of psychical karma and inauspicious biological karma. For any event in life, the proper combination of subsidence-cum-annihilation of all four psychical karmas is required.
To explain the working of karma, I will use the following example. Suppose you are enjoying music. At this moment, biological karmas are on rise. Age-determining karma is on rise so that you are alive to listen to the music. The morphological karmas are on rise so that your body is in a proper working condition, your ears are receiving sound and your brain is transforming the sound signals into suitable input for you to understand the music. The rise of feeling-producing karma is producing a good feeling in you, and the rise of status-determining karma is helping you to have a sense of good performance, a feeling of having access to good music. The psychical karmas are in a state of subsidence-cum-annihilation. The ocular and non-ocular awareness-obscuring karmas are being annihilated so that you are aware of the music, and the annihilation of the empirical and articulate knowledge-obscuring karmas enables you to cognize the music. The deluding karma may have either subsidence or annihilation, or both. Wrong belief-deluding karma, being under subsidence, is active - so you perceive the music as something that makes you enjoy it. Your ego passion, having subsidence, is active - so you have the feeling of possessing this good music album. Your indulgence quasi-passion, which is under subsidence, develops a liking for the music. The enjoyment and re-enjoyment karmas have annihilation so that so that there is no obstruction to your enjoyment. In this example, the soul is the enjoyer and is the main (upaadana) cause for the act. The karma body, fiery body and physical body are the principal auxiliary causes, since these help the soul to enjoy. The music system and favourable environment are other auxiliary causes that make listening to music possible.
We find that all eight types of karma are in operation to enable us to physically exist, work coherently in a meaningful manner, and perform the act of our choice. You may similarly try to explain other activities of life with the help of the karma principle.
While the existing karmas are annihilated, or subsided, new karmas of a similar type may bond. During any activity the soul is agitating, and the karma body is vibrating. The vibrating karma body attracts karma varganas and bonds new karma due to the passions at work. On analyzing our experience, we find that we pay maximum attention to our feelings, good or bad. Next, our attention goes to our perception of experience, our desires, our emotions, our liking and disliking and the satisfaction of our desires (ego). For this reason, we bond feeling-producing karma the most and deluding karma the second-most. In practice, seven types of karma bond at any one time (age-determining karma bonds only once in a lifetime and therefore has the smallest proportion out of the eight karmas). The net gain of karma in the karma body may be positive or negative, depending on the karma that is being bonded and that being annihilated.
For this reason, the soul is not able to get rid of karma in a normal way. To reduce the karma balance, the soul must stop the inflow of karma. To achieve this, the soul must control its passions, such as the feeling of ego and liking in the music example given above. The soul has to stop enjoying music; it should consider music to be like any other sound and take no interest in it, thinking that this is the cause of endless migration in the world. It has to develop a feeling of detachment from worldly pleasures, which look attractive at the time but ultimately bring sorrow and misery. This amounts to renunciation, which is the way to achieve the state of permanent bliss, a state of inner enjoyment.
