Question: When the mind is taken by another soul, does the mind carry the karma from its previous life?

Sri Chinmoy: The mind will keep the essence of all the bad qualities that it had; this is its punishment or karma. The essence of these bad qualities is like a very powerful dose of homeopathic medicine; it has tremendous potency. You will take two pellets of homeopathic medicine and in a second your boil will burst! Can you believe this potency! So, like that, the mind carries with it the full potency of the bad qualities it embodied. That is why the mind is not more evolved or more illumined. Also, that is why the mind is not all of a sudden illumined when it goes to the mind’s world. When you have earned only one dollar, you cannot expect suddenly to get one thousand dollars.

So the mind suffers most of the time. Only if the person had an accidental death — a sudden car accident, for example — will the mind not get punishment. Again, if a person lives for a long time, it is possible for the mind to nullify its karma. Let us say that someone had many bad thoughts or was very cruel to others for ten or twenty years. If this person begins to pray and meditate and tries to lead a good life for the next twenty years, then while he is on earth he can purify or illumine or nullify his mind’s bad qualities. Unfortunately, for many people it works the other way. When they are young, they have a pure mind, a broad mind, a sympathetic mind; then gradually, gradually they develop a greedy and destructive mind. So all their mind’s good qualities are nullified.