ESCAPE FROM DEEDS

In your life,  you do whatever,

Eating drinking, dressing whatsoever,

O Arjuna! Offer all to Me,

Sacrifices, oblations, etc. that do ye.

Freed from the fruits of actions all,

Good or bad that you recall,

After giving up ego, your mind is pure,

You will merge in Pure Existence Bliss sure.

To perform deeds is natural to man. He can not remain idle. He must perform some deed or the other. As Lord Krishna enlightens:

Not for a moment can one stay,

Without action in life, I dare say,

By nature man is such born,

Under its impulse will action perform.

    The meaning is that man is compelled by his nature to do some deed or the other.

    Now the question arises, that what deed must he do so that he escapes from the fruit of those? The truth is that whatever deed does he do, he has to reap the reward thereof. The deed may be good or bad, but he cannot escape its consequences. The law of deeds performs just like a farmer who reaps the crop of those very seeds that he sows.

    The man also has to reap the reward of his deeds, good or bad. Learned ones preach:

O Man! Never be negligent towards the result of your deeds. If one grows wheat, he shall reap wheat and if barley is grown, the crop will be that of barley only.

If one does noble deeds, he may merit entry into heaven, where he will enjoy luxuries for long. But eventually, one gets reborn on this earth and goes through another cycle of eighty-four lakh species.

    Similar, those who do evil deeds go to hell or lower kingdom, where ghosts abide in darkness. They wander through life for a long time and then get born on earth and go through eighty-four lakh species.

  The meaning is that whatever type of deeds one may perform, noble or evil, he has to suffer the consequences of those and is driven into the cycle of eighty-four lakh births and deaths. Both are the cause of bondage. Learned saints have called noble deeds resulting in handcuffs of gold and evil deeds as handcuffs of iron, both being fetters of bondage.