The sense of agency in action arises on account of the asmita, in the language of
Patanjali. These results of action follow from a peculiar complex whose details we
observed previously. Every result that is produced by an action becomes an occasion
for experience by the individual concerned, and it is this that is the cause of rebirth.
This is the cause of experience through a phenomenal universe. The various
incarnations, or births and deaths, undergone by an individual as a process are the
punitive processes which perforce have to be undergone as an expiation, as it were,
for the error committed by the individual through the wrong notion of agency in
action.
Rebirth cannot be stopped as long as the potency of karmas exist. It is futile to
imagine that one can escape the vicious circle of the law of karma by adding to it in
the form of further actions. No action can rectify action. It will only accentuate it, and
add an attribute to it, whether pleasant or unpleasant, but it cannot nullify the action
because even the action that we perform with an intention to nullify an action
proceeds from the sense of agency in us and, therefore, it cannot have the power to
nullify the action. The difficulty arises on account of the sense of agency behind the
action, and it cannot be solved by another action proceeding from the same sense of
agency. Thus it is that karma cannot destroy karma. It can make readjustments, but
it cannot completely abolish the root of karma, for obvious reasons.
Another sutra tells us that only ripe vasanas—that is, impressions of actions which
are ready for manifestation—become visible in conscious experience. The others get
buried and do not become a content of one’s consciousness or experience. Tataḥ
tadvipāka anuguṇānām eva abhivyaktiḥ vāsanānām (IV.8) is the sutra. Only those
vasanas which have become ready for manifestation will manifest themselves in the
form of experience. As it was pointed out previously, which potency, which karma,
which result becomes manifest at what time no one can say, unless one is omniscient.
Short of omniscience, nothing can reveal the mystery of karma. There is a karma
vipaka, the ripening of the results of karma, the fructification of the deeds of the past
in a particular manner, at a particular time, under given circumstances. And then it is
they germinate into experience. The germination into experience of these potencies is
rebirth. It was already mentioned that they carry with them these rules and
regulations concerning the kind of birth one would take, the span of life for which
one would live, and the type of experiences which one would undergo. All these will
be determined by the nature of the seed that has been sown—just as we can see by
inference what sort of fruit a tree will yield by noting the kind of seed that we have
sown.
The seed potentially contains, in a latent form, the fruit that will be yielded by the
tree that will grow out of that seed. Likewise, from the nature of our actions, we can
have an idea of the kind of experience that will follow in future. We cannot
experience something quite the opposite of what we are sowing today. There is an old
saying in Sanskrit, the meaning of which is that nobody would like to reap the fruit of
sin, because it is painful. But yet, people deliberately commit sin. They expect the
fruit of good deeds, but nobody wants to do good deeds. We only want the fruit of
good deeds, without doing the good deeds. And we want to avoid the consequence of
sin, but we deliberately commit it.
These peculiar characters of the law of karma will give us an idea of how far we are
removed from the solution of the problem. A careful scrutiny of one’s own motives,