Karma Sutra: Insights into the Design of Life

Life is like one of those holographic pictures - if you look long enough, a three-dimensional image materializes out of the meaningless texture that initially meets the eye. Life is confusing when we see only that which meets the eye. We become a 'Seer' when we look long and hard and are able to see that which is not immediately visible. Life then begins to come together. Lama Lami's Karma Sutra is a look at life behind the smokescreen of automatic beliefs of daily living. She deconstructs life, going to the very source of it and coming to a new understanding of life as we know it - and as we don't. We all know life but pay little attention to existence; we are called human beings but we are human doings; we feel pain in the body and turn it into suffering in the head. Karma Sutra is a collection of insightful revelations on the design of life interspersed with illustrative stories that leave you with a profound sense of aha It doesn't attempt to instruct in the hope that these ruminations will help the reader design a creative as opposed to a reactive response to life. Cancer has been battling the Lama for five years. For five years she has been using her situation as an exercise ground for spiritual practice. Looking fear, mortality and pain in the eye and catching her mind the moment it begins to make a story of suffering out of the situation. 'Karma Sutra' Karma is both cause and effect because every moment is a consequence of past action and at the same time, the cause of a future outcome. Karma is not personal - it is a synthesis of individual, familial and genetic karma that unfolds as life. It is in this sense that karma has come to mean destiny. However, the root meaning of karma is action. Hindu scriptures have termed human life as Karma Bhoomi - the domain of action. Karma is inevitable here because even non-action has a consequence and also counts as karma. Since life is a series of actions, including non-action, karma is a unit of life. The word Sutra means thread, so Karma Sutra is the thread that strings karma and into a continuum called life. It is the unfolding. And the unfolding rules our lives. R. Buckminster Fuller takes the idea of unfolding to another level when he says "God, to me, it seems is a verb, not a noun, proper or improper."