Robert Svoboda - AGHORA III: The Law of Karma

AGHORA
BOOK III
THE LAW OF KARMA

ALSO BY ROBERT E. SVOBODA

The Hidden Secret of Ayurveda

1st Edition Bombay 1980, 2nd Edition The Ayurvedic Press,
Albuquerque, 1994

Prakriti: Your Ayurvedic Constitution

1st Edition Geocom, Albuquerque, 1988, 2nd Edition

Sadhana Publications, 1999

Ayurveda: Life, Health and Longevity

1st Edition Penguin Books, London, 1992; reprinted by
The Ayurvedic Press, Albuquerque, 2004.

Tao and Dharma

(with coauthor Arnie Lade) Lotus Press, 1995

Ayurveda for Women,

David & Charles Publishers, Newton Abbot, 1999

Aghora I: At the Left Hand of God

Nmarpa LLC, Dublin, New Hampshire, 2019

Aghora II: Kundalini

Nmarpa LLC, Dublin, New Hampshire, 2019

Light on Life: An Introduction to the Astrology of India

(with coauthor Hart de Fouw) Penguin Books, London, 1996

The Greatness of Saturn: A Therapeutic Myth

Sadhana Publications, 1997

Light on Relationships: The Synastry of Indian Astrology

(with coauthor Hart de Fouw) Samuel Weiser Inc., 2000

The Ayurvedic Home Study Course

The Ayurvedic Institute, Albuquerque, 1985

Vstu, Breathing Life Into Space

Nmarpa LLC, Dublin, New Hampshire, 2013

Living with Reality, Wisdom from the Aghori Vimalananda

(with Paula Crossfield, Editor and Satya Moses, Illustrator)

Nmarpa LLC, Dublin, New Hampshire, 2013

Advisor Nmarpa, Categories of Indian Thought

AGHORA

BOOK III

THE LAW OF KARMA

ROBERT E. SVOBODA

Copyright 2019 Robert E. Svoboda

All rights reserved. No part of this publication including illustrations may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information or retrieval system, including the Internet, without permission in writing from Nmarpa LLC. Reviewers may quote brief passages.

As this and the other two volumes of this trilogy have repeatedly been and continue to be found available for free download on the Internet, I feel obliged to state that it was Vimalanandas express wish that a substantial portion of the income from this trilogy be delivered to certain of his impecunious spiritual children to assist them to defray their living expenses. Accordingly, anyone who posts these works on the Internet and makes them available for free reading or download and anyone who avails of such postings is incurring a debt to Vimalananda that s/he is then wholly responsible for paying back. You have been warned.

NMARPA, LLC

Published by Nmarpa, LLC

P.O. Box 271, Dublin, NH 03444, USA

All rights reserved.

NMARPA, LLC Publishers

Designed and produced by

NMARPA, LLC Publishers

First printing:1998 by Brotherhood of Life, co-published with Sadhana Publishing

This printing incorporating new foreword and edits

2019 by Nmarpa, LLC

ISBN 978-0-9889169-6-8

Editor: Paula Crossfield

Assistant Editor and Proofreader: Meenakshi Moses

Cover and illustrations by Satya Moses

Book design, layout and production by Robert Moses

Printed in the United States of America

Set in Adobe Garamond Pro and Adobe Myriad Pro

The Aghora Trilogy by Robert E. Svoboda

Aghora I: At the Left Hand of God

Aghora II: Kundalini

Aghora III: The Law of Karma

CONTENTS

CHAPTERS

APPENDICES

She, the Eternal One, is the Supreme Knowledge,
the cause of freedom from delusion and
the cause of the bondage of manifestation.
She indeed is sovereign over all sovereigns.

Devi Mahatmya, I.57-58

Dedicated to the Great Goddess Adya,
the Divine Mother of the Universe,
and to the Mother of the Microcosm: the Kundalini Shakti

THANKS TO: MY PARENTS, Laura and Edwin Svoboda; Nmarpa and the Moses family, for producing the work, Satya Moses, creator of the cover, in particular; Paula Crossfield, for editing, advising, proposing, and keeping the entire project focused and on track and, as always, reverence to Jatalasadhu Sri Ram Vishvambhardas Ji, our Guru Maharaj, and to Vimalananda, for everything. Guru Om!

LITTLE CAN COMPARE TO THE CLEANING OUT of your parents home, a task my sister and I accomplished during 2019. Items long buried surfaced to summon Proustian remembrances of times past, strata of evidences of our familys life in seven different communities before Laura and Edwin retired in 1982 overlaid in palimpsest with the effluvia of more recent activities. Several attention-grabbing tidbits emerged from our excavations, including a letter home from India in which I mentioned the date that I first attended a horse race: January 4, 1976, in Bombay. Then twenty-two years old, I am as I write this soon to turn sixty-six.

Two-thirds of my life has thus passed since I first encountered equine thoroughbreds and was introduced to just how convoluted karma and rnanubandhana can be. I now have more than four decades of evidence of when and how I employed skillful means or failed to do so, nearly half a century of working to make Vimalanandas precepts come alive within me. Two generations of births and deaths in many countries, punctuated by moments of exaltation, as while circumambulating Kailash, and despair, as when helplessly watching the furious Ganga bear away one of her devotees, a dear friend young enough to be my son. Only one whose child has died can ever know the profundity of that anguish, and only one whose parents have died knows how that changes one, as I know now that my own parents have passed. No wonder dying childless so terrifies some, for post-parents you are truly alone in the world of nature, your direct connection to your genetic line and to your species (Homo sapiens sapiens) irrevocably severed.

Vimalanandas passing, which prepared me for the departures of my parents, brought me into a more direct relationship with his Junior Guru Maharaj Sri Jatalasadhu Ram Vishwambhardas Ji, who left his body nine and a half years after Vimalananda, on June 5, 1993. Though I likely spent less than a total of two months (all in 3-day parcels) in his company I have, as with Vimalananda, continued to feel his presence and continued to contemplate his teachings, from the abundantly clear (Everything is due to the grahas) to the thought-provoking (Lanka still exists but humans cannot go there) to the incredible (Bears had syphilis centuries ago).

Guru Maharaj emphasized to me that America is the land of Sahasra Arjuna, and that in the past a lot of visha collected there. A word that usually means poison, visha can also mean ordure, or anything else that is actively pernicious. Sahasra Arjuna, perhaps better known as Kartavirya Arjuna, was a legendary king described as having a thousand hands and as being a great devotee of Dattatreya. Powerful enough to have once humiliated Ravana, he came to grief when he killed the Rishi Jamadagni and was then killed by Jamadagnis son Parashurama, an incarnation of Vishnu conceived specifically for this Arjunas downfall. Precisely why Guru Maharaj observed this to me, an American, I have never known, though in this as in most all else there was always a sense that he was motivated by karmic traces from some previous, almost incalculably ancient, epoch that somehow still continue to reverberate in our modern era.