Continued from Verse Thirty-Seven
38. As long as a man is the doer, he also reaps the fruit of his deeds, but, as soon as he realizes the Self through enquiry as to who is the doer, his sense of being the doer falls away and the triple karma is ended. This is the state of eternal Liberation.
Commentary: Identification with the body and the mind is the egoic mode of consciousness. In this mode, you feel like you are doing. You identify with the one who makes decisions and exerts efforts. In this mode, you also enjoy and suffer the consequences of those actions, since both doership and experiencership depend on identification with the body and the mind.
As soon as you look into who seems to be doing things, or, for that matter, who seems to be experiencing them, this identification can no longer stand. It becomes clear that one is not the body and the mind. So doership and experiencership drop away. Or, to be more precise, they are no longer identified with. They become, in Vedantic parlance, like a burnt rope — the form may seem to remain, but the structure has lost its bite.
Karma in this context simply means the actions that you take and their results.
Traditionally in Vedanta, there are said to be three types of karma: sanchita karma, which is supposedly all the karma you have accumulated over your many previous lives; prarabhda karma, which is the karma that is used to make your current body and is supposed to unfold over this particular lifetime; and agamya karma, which is the karma which you generate anew from your actions in this lifetime.
But all three karmas can only affect you so long as you believe that you are the body and the mind. If that is dropped, then only the Self remains, and the Self is beyond action and its results. Thus all karmas are burned to the enlightened one. Some in the past have claimed that the prarabhda karma remains and that only upon physical death is one “fully” liberated, but this is untrue — Realization is the recognition that one was never born. And what was never born can never die a physical death.
The Self alone always is and always has been, which means that the very idea of karma, in the final analysis, cannot be said to be true.
At any time, see all the forty verses posts that I have published so far here.