Notion of Growth

Author(s): Hermann Kuhn
Publisher: Crosswind Publishing Germany

Page 48

THE NOTION OF GROWTH
trol over our life, more money etc. The emotional power with which we pursue our ideas and desires acts like a magnet that attracts all components necessary for the fulfillment of these ideas.
Karma is the mechanism that enables this process to happen. Karma13 is nothing other than the mechanism that makes us thoroughly experience the themes of our life until we gained optimal knowledge from them and until our emotional attachment to these themes falls off.
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What we experience is basically a neutral growth-process that we need not interpret in a negative way. The better we understand how this process works, the less we feel victimized by it. The more we can control it and the faster we achieve the results we desire, the less we will regard this mechanism as obstructive.
After describing consciousness (jiva) and the environment it is embedded in the non-living elements (ajiva) the sutra therefore lists the mechanisms that control our actions, - i.e. how our interactive karmic field works and how we can influence and dissolve it.
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13 The best key to understanding the original concept of karma provides the word itself. 'Karma' means 'action' - and nothing other than 'action happening in the present'.
The Tattvarthasutra clarifies that our present individual karmic field always holds the entire actualized status of all our karma. It also states that the character and inclination of all our karma can be changed at any given moment and entirely at our own discretion. There just doesn't exist a shadowy 'mountain of karma' in which supposedly all our past actions are stored.
True, the contents of our interactive karmic field have been shaped by (previous) activities - as all our life is, - but this does not mean that it contains memories of all the details of (previous) actions. The field only holds the directions in which we actively move (our desires and motives) and the intensity and the emotional thrust with which we endow our actions to reach objectives.