In this episode of “5 Minutes”, Dr. Robert Svoboda explores why Vimalananda jumped into the ditch.

Vimalananda and his teaching about embracing the kamas that you cannot evade. And of course, because he was an exceptional kind of guy who always exaggerated and he was very open about he called himself the sun. (The shining thing in the sky) among Exaggerators. He would say, “if I know that I’m going to fall into a ditch and break my leg. I’m going to locate the ditch and jump into it so I can get it over with” and he did that sort of thing when I was around him, and it would drive me crazy because he would deliberately be putting himself into situations where he would be Disturbed, damaged, or disadvantaged in some way.

And I would ask, why are you doing this? And he said, “I know that this is a situation where my Prarabdha Karma is Dridha.” There’s three levels of Kama that we identify, particularly in jyotish. Three levels of Kama. One is, Adṛḍha means it is not fixed. That’s Kama. You don’t try to predict on you have more free will in that area than you do in other areas. There’s Dridha-adridha karma, which is, it’s fixed, but it’s not totally fixed.
You painted the wall, it’s starting to dry, but it’s not totally dry. You can still Strip off the paint and paint it something else, but it’s gonna be a lot of work. But Dridha karma is the karma you predict on, and that’s the karma that you are going to have to experience whether you like it or not- in this very lifetime. So Vimalananda would always say, “When you know that there is something that you have to experience. There is no use in trying to avoid it.”

Arrange the situation in such a way that you can experience it preferably in a way that you can recover from it relatively easily, and then move yourself into that situation. Do not try to avoid it when you know you cannot avoid it. So this is a very useful teaching for anyone. Do you have an illness that is creeping up on you and you’re trying to pretend is not there? Unfortunately, men are really bad about this.
They tend not to go to doctors or even mention it to other people until parts start falling off of them are you involved in a relationship that’s toxic and you are not willing to look at that, not willing to extract yourself so that you are not being damaged by it are there other situations in your life? Perhaps you’ve made a serious mistake and you’re not willing to admit it and you’re not willing to be ready to own up to it, and to try to make amends for it do not delay.

The longer you wait, the more it’s going to be corroding your own situation. The more it’s going to be causing that Karima to accumulate karmic interest and making it more difficult to deal with when you finally have to deal with it. So this doesn’t apply, of course, to the most minimalist of Kamas. The kamas that are, these are Adridha. They apply to things that you know you’re gonna have to deal with there may be value in delaying until an appropriate moment, and at that moment doing something about it.

But delaying past that moment is just attempting to avoid it and attempting to avoid it is the thing that Vimalananda always said not to do, “Always live with reality.” He said, because otherwise “Reality will come to live with you and it will be worse if that’s the way that it transpires.”