Hermann Kuhn
Chapter 8 of Tattvarthasutra
Once we attract karma to our consciousness, we often become deeply involved in the events we create or react to. Our entanglement in activities and emotions may be so intense that it captures all our attention and diverts us totally from any path we initially wanted to pursue.
We experience this e.g. when we start our day with a clear idea of what to achieve, but then get so thoroughly distracted (by phone-calls, colleagues and others) that by the end of the day we wonder, where on earth our time has gone.
But as widespread as this experience is, as easy it is to prevent these kind of distractions. We only need to become aware of the mechanisms giving rise to our almost hypnotic involvement with events. Once we know what subtle karmic side-effects all our actions produce and how to handle them, we become able to direct our thinking, emotions and activities far more efficiently and consciously and thus prevent the erratic results that so often frustrate us.
The distracting karmic side-effects are nothing mystic. They are familiar, basic elements of our every-day existence that appear in form of emotional attraction or rejection of certain themes of life. There is also nothing mystic in the way to handle and to eliminate these karmic distractions. Yet if we want this to be efficient, we first need to become conscious of how they effect us.
This chapter explains
- why karmic mechanisms attach to our consciousness - sutra 1 and 2 and
- how this attachment makes us experience certain themes of life (types of karma) again and again - sutra 3 to 26.
How we can eliminate karmic distractions and to proceed to more efficient and satisfying levels of existence is dealt with in the third chapter.
