Acharya Prashant: ‘Karma’ or doing, or action is easier to understand. That, with which you associate yourself as the doer is karma. Remember you are not the doer; you are associating yourself with the action. Where is the action happening? The action is happening in the domain of the senses. In the domain of the senses plus the mind, which in itself can be called an extended sense. Right? That’s where the action is happening. But you start identifying with that action. You start calling that action as your property, you start owning it. In that sense, I am calling it a property. You start taking responsibility for that action and this responsibility is not really a virtue. You start taking ownership of that action because you are desirous of the fruit of the action. You know very well that you want to consume the result of the action, you will, first of all, have to assume or claim; claim is a better word, that you are the owner of the action. If you do not own a property, let’s say a field, can you claim what grows on that field? Let’s say fruits and vegetables come upon that field. If you intend to consume them, then you should have first of all laid a claim to the very field itself, I own it.
That’s the reason why the misled, the ignorant, ‘I’ sense claim the action. Otherwise, there is hardly any need. Something is happening, something will come out of it. Right? These are just changing phenomenal states, cause and effect phenomena, something is happening, something will follow from that like a stream of time, stream of cause and effect, this is happening so something else results from that and then there are so many things that all get together to proceed towards something else. Right?
Now, first of all, we do not know what will come from what because the number of factors that get together to produce any outcome is simply innumerable. Secondly, we do not know in what particular way and to what effect will those factors combine. Yet we have a hope that they will combine in the way we desire and what’s our desire, our desire is that they will combine in a way that produces a fruit that we already know of in the past. Not very clear? Let me explain.
