Ask Ananda’s Experts
Questions and answers about meditation, yoga, the spiritual life, and more

Nayaswami Seva

Ananda Village

Answer

Dear SG,

Thank you for this very important question. A question everyone faces at one time or another and one that can bring us deeper into the spiritual life, if this is the real goal.

There are many answers here all which you need to seriously look at. It may be that God has heard you, but felt that your success in this exam was not what needed to happen. He may have felt that you needed to develop through this apparent failure some quality or new approach to life that is essential for you to develop. Therefore, don’t think of this as a failure, but say to yourself there is something better trying to happen. Don’t put a negative twist on it.

Nayaswami Gyandev

Ananda Village

Answer

Karma is energy that a person has put into motion and is coming back to that original agent. It is we who think of it as positive or negative. In reality, it is merely a force that, by universal law, must complete itself.

Just as a strong person can carry some or all of a weaker person’s physical burden, often without apparent difficulty, so also a great saint can take on another person’s karmic burden. The karma hasn’t gone away; it is simply being drawn to the saint instead of back to the person who acted in the first place.

Nayaswami Hriman

Ananda Seattle

Answer

Dear William, you ask an ages-old question that has pursued human kind for a very long time. God, in order to create a universe of diversity and infinite complexity from "nothing," from Himself, had to resort to a kind of trick, or illusion. We call this duality.

When from a center of perfect rest God’s consciousness moves "outward" it must be countered by an equal and opposite movement. The illusion of the reality of objects separate from God is maintained by motion or vibration. We have the motion and movements of atoms, molecules, and sub-atomic particles. All creation is in constant flux.

Nayaswami Devarshi

Ananda Village

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Any strong human attachment or desire will keep us reincarnating again and again. Each of us has an extraordinarily large bundle of seeds of past karma, born by attachment and desire.

If we were to work on each of them one by one, it would take us forever. Even if we were ever to finish, there would be a brand new bundle of karma, since we would likely have been acting from attachment and desire, thus creating even more desires and attachments.

Nayaswami Anandi

Ananda Village

Answer

Dear Neil,

Yogananda tells us that the it is the soul, which comes into the body at the moment of conception, that creates the body that is appropriate for working out the karma of the upcoming lifetime.

Can we say what you will look like in your next life? I don’t think there’s a way to know that.

Nayaswami Hriman

Ananda Seattle

Answer

Well, despair not.........for the Masters are none other than your, own higher Self. Perhaps the greatest harm is the weakening of your own will and inner strength caused by not living up to your own commitment. However, it is past. Pick yourself up, dust off the guilt and anxiety, and resolve to do better. Even if you give in, don’t give up. "A saint is sinner who never gave up" is how Yogananda put it.

Nayaswami Gyandev

Ananda Village

Answer

The animal level is the “last stop” before the soul incarnates on the human level. The route it takes through various animal forms may not be the same in all cases, but certainly insects, for example, are earlier in the sequence, whereas dogs and horses are more toward the end.

Nayaswami Savitri

Ananda Village

Answer

Dear Bhushan,

I hope that I have understood well enough to answer you correctly. If I have misunderstood your question, please write again.

If you are asking if illness and suffering are caused by one’s misdeeds in this or other lifetimes, the answer, generally speaking, is yes.