‘not white’; akrsna means ‘not black’. The karma of a yogin is neither white nor
black, which means to say, it has no ethical character which we attribute ordinarily,
in the case of people. It is rid of these restrictions or classifications of this type or that
type. The karmas of a yogin are not of any type at all—they do not belong to any
category—while the karmas of people like us belong to the category of good or bad in
the sense that they can set up reactions which are either pleasurable or otherwise.
They can create conditions for us which bring us happiness or pain; there can be
rebirth. But the karmas of a yogin are not of such a nature.
Karma aśukla akṛṣṇam yoginaḥ trividham itareṣām (IV.7). The karmas of an ordinary
person can be good, bad or mixed; they can be of three types. If our karmas are
predominantly good—a large measure, a greater percentage of our karma is made up
of goodness, of virtue—then we will be reborn in a higher realm. It may be a celestial
region or something even higher than that. But if the karmas are of an opposite
character—predominantly bad, vicious and reactionary—they may hurl a person to a
lower birth, lower than even the human. And if the karmas are mixed, then it is that
we become human beings. We have mixed karmas—we are neither very good nor
very bad—and, therefore, we are hanging here on this earth plane as human beings,
with both types of experience. We are sometimes like brutes, and occasionally feel as
if we are in hell. At other times we feel highly elevated and aspiring, and feel there is
something great and noble that is ahead of us. Both the good and the bad that we
have done—both—work with different emphasis and intensities in our personal lives.
The karmas of a yogin are totally distinguished from this type of experience. They
are neither good, nor bad, nor mixed. These attributes cannot be applied to the
karmas of a yogin because they are not karmas at all, really speaking. The word
‘karma’ should not be applied to the functions of a yogin’s mind. It is something like
God’s mind itself—we cannot say that God’s actions are good or bad. This is not the
way of describing it, because the ethical or casuistic definitions of karma are
applicable only to individuals, but the yogin is not an individual—he has become
super-individualistic. He has started working according to the law of nature itself.
We cannot say that nature’s actions are good or bad. They are impersonal. Likewise
is the karma of a yogin. There is no reaction set up by the actions of a yogin. There
will be no rebirth for him because his actions do not proceed from a particular ego.
He has overcome his ego. He has no attachment to his personal body. He can operate
through other media also, other than this particular body. We suffer the
consequences of action because of the fact that we are under the false notion that the
actions which proceed through the instrumentality of this body are really the
belongings of this body only—that they have no reference to any other factor. It is not
true that actions can emanate from a person, absolutely independent of other factors.
In the case of a yogin, such a difficulty does not arise because he has a new concept
of his personality altogether. Even the idea of one’s being a human being is
overcome—he becomes an impersonal instrument in the hands of a wider realm of
law. That is why Patanjali tells us here that the karmas of a yogin are neither good
nor bad—neither white nor black—while the karmas of other people can be either
good, bad or fixed.
We have to reach this stage of impersonal action before we are liberated from the
bondage of samsara. As long as we remain humans only, we have to take rebirth. It is
not possible to remain as a human being—think as a human being and evaluate