Take all eight floors together. Add every habit, every fear, every liking and every dislike, from this life and, as the Gurus teach, from the lives before it. Put it all under one roof.
The old teachers of India called that store sanchit karma. Sanchit means gathered, heaped up, laid by. It is fair to think of it as a warehouse.
More exactly, sanchit is every mark left by past deeds that has not yet ripened into fruit. A mark that has ripened, and been lived through, is spent and leaves the store. A mark that is still waiting is in it. The warehouse holds only what is waiting.
Three things are true of this warehouse. It is vast, larger than any one life, larger than a person could walk through in a lifetime. It is mostly unlabeled. We do not know what is in most of the boxes, and we would be surprised if we opened them, the way a man clearing out his garage finds his son's first shoe and cannot remember keeping it. And no one carries all of it at once. If we did, it would crush us. Only a small part is unpacked for any one life.
People who first hear of the warehouse are sometimes afraid. So much, from lives I cannot even remember? But a warehouse is not a prison. It is storage. And storage can be cleared.
How is it cleared? Not, it turns out, one box at a time. Guru Amar Das wrote:
ਸਾਥਿ ਤੇਰੈ ਸੋ ਸਹੁ ਸਦਾ ਹੈ ਇਕੁ ਖਿਨੁ ਹਰਿ ਨਾਮੁ ਸਮਾਲਹੇ ॥
sāth terai so sahu sadā hai ik khin har nām samālahe |
Your Beloved is always with you, if you hold on to His Name even for a moment.
ਜਨਮ ਜਨਮ ਕੇ ਤੇਰੇ ਪਾਪ ਕਟੇ ਅੰਤਿ ਪਰਮ ਪਦੁ ਪਾਵਹੇ ॥
janam janam ke tere pāp kaṭe ant param pad pāvahe |
The wrongs of your many lives are cut away, and in the end you reach the highest place.
Guru Amar Das, Asa Chhant, Ang 440
Even for a moment. That is the startling part. Not a hundred years of hauling boxes out into the yard. A single moment of turning toward the One who has been there all along.
Guru Nanak said the same thing in Japji Sahib, with washing instead of boxes.
ਭਰੀਐ ਮਤਿ ਪਾਪਾ ਕੈ ਸੰਗਿ ॥
bharīai mat pāpā kai saṅg |
But when the mind is soiled by wrongdoing,
ਓਹੁ ਧੋਪੈ ਨਾਵੈ ਕੈ ਰੰਗਿ ॥
ohu dhopai nāvai kai raṅg |
it is washed only in the colour of love for the Naam, God's own Name.
Japji Sahib, pauri 20
The warehouse is real. So is the water.