Bhakti and Karma

If a person comes to Krishna bakthi and stops adding bad karma, will he be punished for past karma?

COUNSELLING:

A devotee (Name hidden by me) asked like this:

Hare Krishna. My question is if someone has done bad karma before coming to Krishna Consciousness and after that he takes KC very seriously,and tries to never commit mistakes done previously, do he will get reactions of bad karma after this life?

REPLY: 

Ref: http://www.spiritual-knowledge.net/articles/karma.php

My reply is: Not an immediate YES as clean chit, but, a conditional YES.

What condition?

I will repeat this thousand times in any forum: “Unless we desert all our material attachments, we can not get the suspension of the reactions of our negative karma, and we can not enter into the kingdom of Lord”

So, if we need to get the suspension of the reactions for all our past karma, we should do the following:

1. Chant Hare Krishna as much as possible and try to remain in the thoughts of Krishna all the time. Mechanical chanting rushed to complete the rounds will not help immediately, but, you need to wait till you come to the stage of sincere chanting and thoughts of Krishna.

2. Offer food to Lord and honour them only. Avoid karmic food from outside.

3. Surrender to a guru and offer your respects to him. Be sincere to follow the instructions given by a guru. If your guru is displeased, you can not get excuse from karma. Though you accept a diksha guru, unless you chant and follow all the devotional rules, you can not get excuse from karma and can not go back to Lord.

4. COMPULSORILY follow all the wonderful four regulative principles. If not, no excuse from past sins and can not go back to Lord with indiscipline.
5. Get as much blessings as possible from vaishnavas by offering all the respects and honours to every vaishnava. This will also redduce the severity of reactions of karma.

6. Visit Krishna temples as much as possible and associate more with vaishnavas and do possible services in the temple.

If you follow the above steps for a considerable period of time, say, few years, you should come to the stage of Prema. In this stage, you will see Krishna in everything and everyone and hence you will not have any material attachments. That means, you will not like to grab any material for your pleasure, but, you will use every material in the service of Krishna.

Since you have deserted your material attachments, the karma network can not give you any reactions because, only through the materials and material relations, the Karma network gives punishments and gifts. When we see everything as Krishna and work only for Krishna, then, karma network will be unable to give you any punishments. So, you will get excuse from all your past karma.

This is the reality. Material attachments is called CONTAMINATION or IMPURITY. So, we can not enter into the world of Krishna with contaminations/ impurities and pending karma.

So, everyone of us should aim for material detachments through more attachments with Krishna.

I request all of you to keep this post separately and read many times and store. Because, this is the real and ultimate advice to stop the reactions of our karma. Kindly do not expect any relaxations from this. Because karma network is very powerful and it requires sincere spiritual advancement to succeed this powerful karma network. Only the total surrender to krishna and His prema can do this.

Please keep this in mind and start to take steps for still more development in your spiritual sadhanas and realizations.

All the best.

ref: https://www.facebook.com/krishnaandbhagavadgita/posts/1233968133300927:0