Sadhguru: It's wonderful to be here. Coming to karma, you were talking about sutra.
Well, as you know, yoga sutras and various other sutras,
the word sutra literally means a thread, which is related to stitch and suture, of course.
So, when you give a thread, like, you can wear a garland,
nobody wears a garland for its thread. But without a thread, there is no garland.
Once you have the thread, you can add flowers to it, you can add mud beads to it,
you can add pearls to it, you can add diamonds to it,
it depends on your experience of life.
But the sutra cannot change, because without the thread, there is no mala, or there is no garland.
So, this is a multi-layered book in such a way
that each person when they read it, it will relate to them as it's relevant to them.
But as they evolve in their life, if they read it today and read it after 5 years, it will be a different book.
If they read it after 20 years, it will be a completely different book.
So, we took a certain amount of…
you know, normally, most of the 120 and odd books that have been published,
largely, there's what I have spoken in variety of situations;
somebody puts it together and publishes a book.
This is among the first few books, the first one was Inner Engineering,
and this one, and there's a book on death which we released only in India,
these are 3 books where I actually sat down and worked on it.
Otherwise, they’re just compilations of talks.
So, in that sense, I wanted to create a multi-layered book,
so that it will be relevant through your life, you can read it many times.
Every time you read it, it will be like a new book
because first time you might have just had tiny little weed flowers,
next time you may have roses, next time you have… it's your own experience of life.
So having said that, well, the karma as a fundamental principle of life,
people are thinking it's a concept - it is not a concept.
See, who we are is a product of the memory that we carry in our body.
Now, this is a human body. Why? There is evolutionary memory to say this is human body.
This is my body. Why? Because there is genetic memory to say this is this kind of body.
Like this, there are many layers of memory.
Usually in yoga we identify 8 significant forms of memory.
It's all this amalgamation of this complex web of memory which makes you who you are,
which makes me who I am, which makes everybody who they are.
So, memory is a great possibility, without it we would be nothing.
The richness of our life is only because of the vividness and vastness of memory that we carry in our lives.
At the same time, memory is also a boundary.
If you are in my memory, I say, “Oh, this is my friend.”
If you are not in my memory, I say, “Oh, this is a stranger.” Okay?
So, memory is a great possibility.
At the same time, memory is also a boundary that you set.
So, this memory bank which is in complex varieties,
which all of it may not be something that you can pull out and articulate or remember,
but it is playing a role in the very way you sit, the very way you stand - your genetic memory is playing its role.
If you see somebody walking half a mile away, if you know the person,
just the way they're moving their hand, out of the 7 billion people, you can recognize,
“This is my friend,” all right? Because there is a unique way his body moves,
because of the kind of amalgamation of memory that he has within himself - he, or she, has.
So based on this, this memory, or this karma as we call it,
- karma means accumulated memory of variety of kinds -
it goes far beyond one's logical understanding of life.
But at least from the point of our understanding, from the moment you are born to this moment,
everything that you have done in terms of action, thought, emotion, and energetic fluctuations,
all of that is remembered within this; all that is determining the characteristic of who you are.
Now this memory, if it works like a platform, or a stage for you to stand upon
and do your dance of the day - it's fine.
But for most people, because there is not enough surface tension on their karmic body,
now when they put their foot there, it sinks in.
So, past lives now: people are suffering what happened 10 years ago.
And because this happens, this memory projects itself as imagination,
and they're able to suffer what may happen day after tomorrow already.
So, this human suffering is essentially a consequence of your inability to handle your memory.
Your inability to handle your memory also means
it's your inability to handle your basic faculties
of vivid memory and fantastic imagination.
Once you don't have these 2 things, once you start suffering this,
you will start reducing it in some way; knowingly or unknowingly, you start pushing it down.
If these 2 things go away, you're not even human.