A Dose of Karma
I was walking near the Culver Hotel in Los Angeles, and I saw a woman on a bench, smoking (and looking freaked out). I showed her a Bhagavad-Gita. She said she could not sleep because she was sure there was a ghost in her hotel room. I said that this will solve the problem: These sacred mantras liberate ghosts.
We chanted a mantra together from the second chapter. She was amazed. She had almost died eleven times, and she is used to seeing herself from outside her body. She is a bit ghostly herself. She has severe grand maul seizures of epilepsy. She was in town to appear on a talk show to discuss near-death experiences.
Her worst experience took place when she worked as a bartender and a man put a gun to her chest. He wanted to rob the bar. He had his face very close to hers. The bar was very crowded, and he wanted to keep his actions unnoticed. Looking at him face to face, she observed all his anger and violent feelings, and it seemed as though his hate suddenly transferred into her mind. Suddenly he turned white, looked scared, and could not speak or ask her for the money. Then he shot her and she almost died.
She told me that she always remembers how all of his intense aggression became as real to her as if it were her own. She wanted to know why that happened.
I said, "I hope you won't find this shocking, but the truth is that we experience violence in this world because we perpetrated violence in a previous life."
I told her that she was just getting a dose of karma, arranged in a way that she could realize her own part in it. To give someone an experience of what it means to cause harm to another, God can make special arrangements.
She took two books and gave a donation. Then we chanted the Hare Krishna maha- mantra, and I invited her to our temple in Florida, because she had been flown out to California to be on the talk show.
I am glad that Krishna let me meet her. For she reminded me of a devotee in many ways, like a very green mango, not yet ripe.
Your Servent,
Karuna Dharini Devi Dasi
