The Law of Karma and Rebirth

 Your birth is determined. The length of your life is determined. What you will get in your life, your enjoyment, the miseries, are also determined. Why is someone born in Ethiopia and someone else born in Switzerland? Is there any explanation?

Patanjali has. He gives an insight into it. This is the usual question asked, "Why so and so is born there and so and so is born somewhere else? Why so and so is miserable? Why so and so has so much suffering?" This is a big question. No logic can give you any understanding or explanation.

 

This is a comment on the Patanjali sutras, the texts are real good. It helps not only to understand the sutra, but also the teaching in general. Patanjali is the father of yoga and his sutras are famous, but here it is not about powers and miracles, but about birth and death and how we should really see it.  
He says, because of your past karmas. Jatyayur bhogo. It comes to you in different forms.

When a person, dying with all the memories of only chicken, chicken and chicken, in his consciousness, the strongest impression at that time was that of the chicken. So he comes into the poultry farm. His mind's impression gets him into that.

Whatever is the strongest impression in the mind, that persists. It is simple, very simple. You try this in the night. In the night, right before going to bed, just have a thought. Think very strongly about something. As soon as you get up in the morning, that will be your first thought. The same thought will also come up in the dream. If you practice this say for two months, three months, four months, six months, you will assume those qualities in you.

 

There was a time I was singing and I had to exercise a lot and if during that time if I got a cold, it was always first the throat, because the focus was on singing it ended in a sore throat. If that would be in the moment of death, it would determine the next birth. It means the habits are important. The spiritual path it is a lot about good habits and when it is explained with humor it often seems easier to be understood for our mind than only reading sutras. It has to be translated first like most of holy books.      

 

As soon as you wake up, say, "I should shake my head like a dog", and just do it. In six months, you will see that it will become out of your control. It becomes almost impossible for you not to do it. It gains such a pattern inside you because that karma, that impression has become so strong.

You say, "I should kick my leg like a dog", or stick your tongue outside like a dog, and in six months, it becomes such a pattern in you. Or, if you keep watching a dog, it will come into your mind all the time, again and again, over and over, and when you die, your mind, your consciousness gets sucked into that type of body. The last days of your life are much more important than your whole life itself. 

Patanjali Yoga Sutras

And here is mentioned the story of a saint who saved a deer and got that attached to it, that he became a deer.

He was a enlightend rishi taking care of a baby deer. This is the only instance where an enlightened person became an animal. It is said that it is almost impossible for a liberated man to be driven back into an animal body. But this is one of the impossibilities.
This example is quoted throughout just to tell that the last impression is the most important, because the sage became a deer. 

So, meditation is the way out of all that. You are just washing out everything. Then there is nothing. You become so hollow and empty and you sing and dance and you do all these things. To thin down all that is laid on the self. This is very precious. Sometimes when you are sitting, you get bored. Never mind. You are just burning some old seeds of boredom.