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KARMA - THE MECHANISM
SUTRAS
SUTRA 8
सदसद्वेद्ये ॥ ८ ॥ Sadasadvedye (8) Karma that determines our feeling of life (vedaniya) manifests pleasant and unpleasant feelings. (8)
Pleasant or unpleasant emotions have no direct connection to the physical events we usually take as their very cause.
The origin of pleasant and unpleasant feelings is the manifestation of two types of 'feeling' karmas. Once these karmas activate, they influence our current emotional state in a positive or negative way. Though we usually attribute the rising of these feelings to an external event, this is a mere arbitrary association. If none of our 'feeling' karmas are active, even events that excited us on previous occasions will have no emotional effect on us.
This explains, why certain actions or events we usually experience as positive, will sometimes be marred by negative or neutral feelings for no apparent reason. In this case a different block of 'feeling' karma has been activated than the one we were accustomed to. Any attempt of ours to influence the event or the assumed cause to reinstate the previous pleasantness is useless. Only by dissolving our corresponding 'feeling' karma (by recognizing that we expect certain events to 'produce' certain emotions and by separating us from these expectations) can we fundamentally prevent the reoccurrence of unwanted feelings.
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