You are a conscious being, aware of your environment and capable of acting with intention. Everything you perceive, experience, and do—especially the choices you make, and especially those choices made consciously with a strong intention behind them—leaves an imprint on you.
Everything you have perceived and done has left an imprint, making you the individual you are right now. Like a tree whose shape reflects the availability of sunlight and water during its growth, your current expression is the sum total of everything you have experienced in your lifetime (and previous lives).
The Web of Cause and Effect
This process of receiving and creating subconscious imprints is called karma in the yogic tradition.
A perception or something that happens to you is the result of past karma. An action that you do creates future karma.
It’s happening all the time. The whole tapestry of life is an interweaving of karma, a vast and unspeakably complicated network of cause and effect, animated by the ineffable Spirit that transcends it all.
So you are not just blundering through the world with no consequences. Everything you do is deeply, personally significant, because with your choices, you create your own future.
In one very real sense, you have no control over your life. As a Yiddish proverb goes, “We plan and God laughs.” You may think you have it all sorted out, but that thought usually comes right before the tidal wave crashes down your sandcastle.
But from another perspective, your fate is in your own hands. You may have little choice over the external events that come your way, but how you react is ultimately up to you, and the more you are in touch with the essential freedom of your true nature, the more freedom you will have to react consciously, peacefully, and lovingly to any situation.
To take the largest possible zoom-out, eventually you end up going back to God. But the path you take—long or short, winding or direct, smooth or a rocky, wild ride—is up to you.
Caution and Opportunity
This self-responsibility is why yogis are so careful about what they do and what they let through the gates of their senses.
The camera of the mind is always recording. What you do during your mediation or asana session matters, but also what you do at work or while waiting in line at the shop. What you read, watch, and hear matters. Seemingly insignificant choices, like what you listen to during your daily commute or how you wind down at the end of the day, can have profound ripple effects across your spiritual life.
I emphasize this not to pass moral judgment or encourage you to become neurotic about your personal habits but as both a gentle caution and an invitation to a great opportunity.
Caution because so many habits and experiences that are very normalized in modern culture are simply not conducive to spiritual awakening. Average life in the Western world is firmly in the realm of rajas (desire and agitation), veering strongly into tamas (ignorance and self-destruction), while life in sattva guna (peace, harmony, purity) is the most conducive to recognizing your divine nature.
In the Western world, it’s quite standard to spend most of the day staring at a screen, waking up well after sunrise and going to sleep long after dark. You are almost expected to need a hit of caffeine to start your day and alcohol to have fun. Mainstream media are overwhelmingly negative and saturated with advertisements that condition us to grasp at material things for satisfaction and to want more, more, more.
And opportunity because, without expanding your formal sadhana, you can accelerate your progress through simple lifestyle changes that also make you feel better. (A sattvic lifestyle, regulation of the senses, and healthy discipline bring far more freedom than doing “whatever you want,” which usually means being enslaved to the mind’s whims.)
Clearing Out the Mind’s Storage Closet
If you’re unsure how your habits affect you, pay attention to how you feel afterward.
Sit down and watch the news for an hour. How do you feel? Compare that to how you feel after reading a spiritual book for the same length of time.
One night, relax before bed by browsing YouTube videos for a while. The next night, try instead a quiet period of reading or journaling, a short meditation, or Yoga Nidra instead.
On your way to work for the next week, turn off the radio and put on some kirtan or lecture by a spiritual teacher. How does the rest of the day unfold from there?
Nowhere is this more obvious than in meditation. When you sit down and try to quiet your mind, all the thoughts and imprints boiling below the surface make themselves known. Whatever you see is the fabric of your mind, which forms the fabric of your life.
Most of us have minds filled with junk, to put it bluntly. I can say for myself that my mind is a storage closet crammed with all sorts of obscure information, song lyrics, images from movies, and a cloud of feelings and opinions loosely related to said content. It isn’t noticeable most of the time, overwritten by the noise of ordinary life, but during a silent retreat, for example, the most bizarre tidbits from the distant past might pop up.
It’s fine—all of us have imprints to purify. We witness, draw the energies into the Heart, and allow them to sublimate. But imagine how different your life would be if, instead of the residues of pop culture and everyday reactivity, the depths of your subconscious mind were churning out bhajans and passages from Bhagavad Gita.
You are always planting seeds in your mind and you’ll harvest their fruit sooner or later, so take care to plant good seeds—seeds that will ripen into the sweet, all-fulfilling fruit of Self-realization.
Keep Your Heart and Mind with God
The more we repeat a choice, the stronger the habit becomes, taking us further in a particular direction. A choice might seem harmless at the time (“just one drink, just one gossipy conversation”), but it is leading your consciousness somewhere. Your mind, faithful servant that it is, will always try to give you more of the same.
Again, no moral judgment. There’s nothing inherently wrong with reality TV or processed food, or anything else. There’s nothing wrong with reality. Only that if you have spiritual aspiration, if your intention is to discover deeper truths in life, you will support yourself by making conscious choices about how you spend your time and where you direct your attention.
Your average day is almost certainly filled with unused little corners that could be injected with spirituality. Get creative! Set a timer that reminds you to ask, “Who am I?” every half hour. Put a picture of Ramana Maharshi as your phone background. And since you are most likely reading, watching, or listening to something every day, choose media that will nourish your soul.
Whatever you do, put Self-inquiry on top of it. Put devotion on top of it.
They say that when Krishna leaves home in the morning to herd His cows, the hearts and minds of the Brajavasis go with Him. While they do their daily tasks, wherever they are and whatever they are doing, their souls are with Him.
We can try to do the same. Whatever you do during the day, you do not lose sight of the bigger picture. The things of this world come and go; you remain. Give priority to what matters in your life, and at every juncture that you can, choose the path that aligns with your deepest values.
Naveen Radha Dasi is a Hridaya Yoga teacher and a frequent contributor to our blog. You can read all of her posts here.
