The Soul's Journey

Nayaswami Pranaba shares this beautiful inspiration during his Sunday service at Ananda Village, January 30th 2022. You can find the complete talk here.

Transcription

For all of us, as we open up and explore, we start to grow spiritually. We experience self-realization: that realization of the true self which is the individual aspect… the soul is that individual aspect of spirit. And as we grow in that experience, we start to shed the attachments and shed the karma of what we've brought with us in delusion, in the poles of duality.

And as we grow in this inner realization, we arrive at the point where we are free inside of ourselves, even while living in these bodies. And this is the term referred to as being a jivanmukta, in spiritual consciousness. And in this experience, we are freed from any more karma being attached to us, because we don't have the ego predominating who we are in our experience of being alive in this world.

There is no—as Swami Kriyananda said—there is no post for that ego to latch itself onto. So we no longer can accrue karma when we have that experience of being a jivanmukta. And that's a permanent experience. It isn't as if it comes and it goes.

What remains, though, is past karma. It still is there. And it's the vestiges of that karma that remain with us. It's said in one way of understanding it: We have a memory of that past karma that stays with us.

You know, in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, in the first pada—the first part of the first of the four parts of the sutra—he talks about the vrittis: the obstacles that prevent us from being who we are, from really feeling our oneness as our true experience. And one of them is memory. And the word in Sanskrit is smriti.

Now, smriti does mean several things, and the way that normally we use it is more to do with divine memory. But in its initial usage in the sutras, it is a vritti: it is an obstacle. And it relates to this idea that we have the memory of the past that holds us back, that holds us down from really attaining the true nature of who we are.

But for the jivanmukta, this past memory of past karma really doesn't affect the soul anymore. And it can be gone in an instant, if that's what is the right thing for that soul in God. Or it may take some time, but it has no effect anymore.

But once that past karma is also released, and there is no vestige of memory of that karma, then one arrives at the point of being a paramukta, or a siddha. And this is where there is that oneness in God completely, without any at all reservations or tentacles of keeping us bound in any way. And in a sense, this is really the stage of being an ascendant master.

And when that ascendant master—a paramukta, siddha—leaves the body and goes to be in that kingdom of heaven with the Divine, then there are those great masters that because of great compassion, because of great support for humankind, choose to be reincarnated and come to bring that solace and—more than solace—the divine support and grace to overcome all evil, all delusion. And this is what's referred to, as we heard in the reading, of an avatar. An avatar is the descent of the Divine into human form again for the redemption of all mankind.