Take Full Responsibility
If you take responsibility for all that happens to you, then you will have the power to deal with your karma through the grace of Lord Śiva. He will give you the intelligence to deal with it as you worship Him in the Śiva temple, contact Him within as the Life of your life and find Him in meditation. Let’s take an example. Say I am holding a plate of rice and curry and I pass it to you. All of a sudden the plate drops on the floor between us. I blame you, and you blame me. I don’t want to be responsible for dropping the rice and curry, and you don’t want to be responsible either. So, we blame each other. The rice and curry is scattered there on the floor. No one is going to clean it up until one of us takes responsibility and says, “I’m sorry I dropped the plate of rice and curry,” and gets down on hands and knees and cleans it up. In the same way, only by taking responsibility, by recognizing what we have done as our own doing, can we begin cleaning up the results of our actions. Those who do take responsibility for their own karma have all the help in the world.
Pride, arrogance and an ungiving nature are characteristics of those who don’t believe in the law of karma. These are qualities of those who do not take responsibility for their actions. They blame everything on someone or something other than themselves. This includes their mistakes and every unpleasant thing that has ever happened to them, is happening to them or may happen to them in the future. They live in the fears and the resentments born of their own ignorance.
Only through being born in a physical body can you experience certain kinds of karmas which cannot be fulfilled or experienced in your etheric/astral body. Therefore, between births those physical-body karmas live in seed form. Only in a physical body do you have all of the chakras functioning that will allow those karmas to manifest and be dealt with. Each birth is thus a precious window of opportunity. For heaven’s sake don’t blame your karma on somebody else and seek to escape from what you were born to deal with. That is the height of foolishness. Stop blaming and criticizing others, and take a good look at yourself. Stop excusing yourself and trying to make yourself look good in the eyes of others. Then a sense of strength will come up within you, a sense of independence and peace. Mental arguments will stop. Arrogance will vanish. Pride won’t be there anymore. You will be a full person. All of your chakras will function properly. Your nerve system will quiet down, and intuitively you will be able to bear up under your karmas and deal with them positively. If it is your karma to be poor in this life, you will be rich by living within the income that you have. You will be content by having desires that you can afford. We make ourselves discontented, we make ourselves unhappy, we make ourselves useless creatures on this planet by allowing ourselves to live in an ignorant state.
NANDINATHA SŪTRA 263: EXPRESSING DEVOTION WITH SONG
At gatherings among themselves, my devotees sing from our Śaiva Church hymnal, primarily Sage Yogaswami’s Natchintanai. When with devotees of other sects, they enthusiastically join in their devotional songs. Aum.