Karma and Rebirth

The Karmic Law of Cause and Effect

Christmas Humphreys

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781135799557
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Karma, the law of cause and effect, of nature's retribution for lost harmony, and Rebirth, from which it is inseperable, have been described as the oldest doctrine in the world. In today's turmoil, an understanding of Karma is one of the foundations on which we can build a more reasonable world.

II Karma in Action

DOI: 10.4324/9780203986011-3

Karma creates nothing.

Karma creates nothing, nor does it design. It is man who plans and creates Causes, and Karmic Law adjusts the effects, which adjustment is not an act, but universal harmony, tending ever to resume its original position, like a bough which, bent down too forcibly, rebounds with corresponding vigour.¹

¹ The Secret Doctrine, H.P.Blavatsky.

It is man who creates his Karma, for it is the product of his thought. As is written in the most famous verse in the Dhammapada, ‘All that we are is the result of what we have thought; it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts.' Note the corollary which follows, when harmony demands the corresponding effect.

If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of him who draws the carriage. But if a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him.

It is of great importance to grasp the fundamental fact, as expressed by W.Q.Judge in The Ocean of Theosophy, that ‘No act is performed without a thought at its root, either at the time of performance or as leading to it’. According to Indian philosophy, the sequence is ignorance, desire, will, thought and act. First comes Avidya, Ignorance, because all manifestation, and all that proceeds within it, is unenlightened. In his ignorance man desires things for himself, believing that he has a ‘self’ which has interests of its own. ‘Man is altogether formed of desire; according as his desire is, so is his will; according as his will is, so are his deeds; according as are his deeds, so does it befall him.’¹ But between the will to act and the act is thought, the conception within the mind of which the act is the visible expression. It follows that control of thought, with which is included emotion, is a necessary prelude to control of action, for, as a man thinks, so he becomes.

¹ The Brihad Upanishad.

Thus man, as spirit, as the highest self-conscious aspect of the One Life, rules the Universe with the aid of Karma. But once he has created Karma, as he does with every act, he must necessarily bow the knee to the Nemesis of his creation, and it is not for him to complain that Fate, against his will, has bound his actions or decreed an unjust doom. ‘Karma-Nemesis is no more than the spiritual dynamical effect of causes produced and forces awakened into activity by our own actions.’² The higher the plane from which the harmony of nature is disturbed, the more powerful the reaction to the act.

² The Secret Doctrine, H.P.Blavatsky.

It is a law of Occult dynamics that a given amount of energy expended on the spiritual or astral planes is productive of far greater results than the same amount expended on the physical, objective plane of existence.¹

¹ Ibid.

The Law of Karma, therefore, is utterly impersonal, being the servant of its creator, man, and not the whim of a benevolent or avenging God. It follows that it is useless to attempt to placate it, pray to it, argue with it or defy it; for ‘as a man thinks, so he becomes’.

Karmic Agents

Yet it is, be it emphasized, supremely intelligent, and it therefore works through intelligent agents. These agents are manifold in kind.

The whole Cosmos is guided, controlled and animated by an almost endless series of Hierarchies or sentient Beings, each having a mission to perform, and who—whether we call them Dhyan Chohans or Angels—are ‘Messengers’ in the sense only that they are the agents of Cosmic or Karmic Laws. They vary infinitely in their respective degrees of consciousness and intelligence…. Each of these Beings was, or prepares to become, a man.²

² Ibid.

Such are the Buddhist Avalokiteshvara and Amitabha, and the four ‘Regents of the Earth’ who appear in many mythologies, and the ‘Thrones, Dominions and Powers’ of Christianity. But there is an ancient tradition that by reason of their own past Karma certain human beings act in a given life as focal points for mighty happenings, lightning conductors, as it were, through whom the Karmic force is ‘earthed’. These are men to whom and about whom things of wide importance are always happening, whether they be at the head of a nation or a factory, but they are quite unconscious of their special, self-attracted function. Only a genuine Adept, one who has attained Enlightenment, can consciously control the forces of mass Karma, and so be a conscious agent of the Law. Incidentally, somewhere in this esoteric aspect of Karma must be incorporated the ‘archetypal images’ of Jung's discovery, but this, although a fruitful field for later research and consideration, is beyond the scope of the present volume.

Karmic Responsibilities

It would seem that man is responsible only for such acts as are generated in the mind. He is not, in other words, responsible for actions where the thought or intent did not run with the deed. If, for example, in turning quickly on a station platform someone bumps into a person standing close behind him, and so tips him on to the line in front of a train, he would not be responsible for a death which he never intended. Here the Law would seem to be the ‘above’ of which our English law is the reflected, though unconsciously reflected ‘below’. For in English law there must, to constitute responsibility, not only bean actus reus, the wrongful deed, but also a mens rea, the wicked mind. A man is not responsible for a pure accident unless it was caused by such gross negligence that he must be held to have intended the ‘natural and probable consequences’ of his act. In the same way lunatics, children and persons completely drunk may be incapable of the mens rea which is a necessary ingredient of their responsibility.

This, however, is an over-simplification of an intensely difficult subject, for the latest discoveries in psychology enormously widen the range of the word ‘intend’. One may, for example, ‘intend’ those acts which seem the very reverse of those apparently intended, and the most fantastic ‘accident’ may be a deliberate act by the unconscious, though fiercely repudiated by the conscious mind. Many an apparently accidental death, for example, is unconscious suicide, and many an injury caused to another may be deliberate at unconscious levels though unintended by the normal consciousness. The mind of man is a realm of which but a tithe is yet explored, and that but superficially, and the oftrepeated cry from the dock, ‘I don't know what came over me’, displays, to the trained psychologist, a hidden motive which the victim of his own unconscious genuinely denies.

One clue to the mystery may lie in the fact that an act has separate and often different effects on the various planes of consciousness. A millionaire, for example, may build a local hospital at vast expense and offer it to the town. The effect of his generosity will appear on different levels of his being. The outward deed was good, and will produce ‘good’ Karma, whatever the motive, but the mental effect will vary with the motive. If the reason of the gift was a genuine desire to use his worldly means for the benefit of his fellow men, his mind will be ennobled with the deed. If, on the other hand, his secret motive was the love of applause or, worse, a desire to curry local favour before standing as the town's representative in Parliament, then the effect on his mind will be that of the misuse of a power for selfish ends. This crude illustration will also explain the difference, so much insisted on in the famous Sutra of Wei Lang, between ‘merits’ and ‘felicities’.

Such deeds [the Patriarch pointed out] as building temples, giving alms and entertaining the (Buddhist) Order will bring you only felicities, which should not be taken for merits. Merits are to be found within the Dharmakaya (Body of the Law), and have nothing to do with practices for attaining felicities.

Felicities, in other words, are pleasant Karma on the physical plane, but do not necessarily conduce to the attainment of Enlightenment. Merits, on the other hand, are reactions on the mind of mental welldoing or right motive, and are conducive to the mind's enlightenment.

Further light on our responsibility for ‘accidents’ is furnished by returning once again to the basic principles on which the Universe is built. Life is One, and all its forms are interrelated in a vastly complicated but insever able whole. It follows that every act by any form of life, from the highest to the lowest, must react on every other form. The power of thought is terrifying, for thoughts are truly things, and once created have an independent existence of their own. The length and strength of this life depends on the intensity and clarity of the thinker's mind, but good or bad, each thought is a power, a living power for good or evil respectively. As such it affects not only the thinker, ennobling or debasing his mind for future thinking, but it affects all other life in the Universe. As A.P.Sinnet wrote in The Occult World:

Man is continually peopling his current in space with a world of his own, crowded with the offspring of his fancies, desires, impulses and passions; a current which reacts on any sensitive or nervous organization which comes in contact with it, in proportion to its dynamic intensity.

As the average mind is too undeveloped to confine the springs of action to its own thought alone, most men are at the mercy of the myriad thoughts which press upon the brain as bodies press one's body in a swaying crowd, and each man’s actions are to that extent the effect not merely of his own volition but of the mass volition of the crowd. Hence the well-known phenomena of ‘mob psychology’, the power of slogans, the whims of fashion, the speed of rumour and, generally, the suggestibility of the weaker by the stronger mind.

Motive, therefore, is the dominating factor in every act, for the act that springs from ‘accident’, if such there be, will at any rate have less effect than the carefully intended act. Acting from the highest levels in his being, man is the creative and controlling force in the Universe; acting from the lowest he is the worst enemy both of himself and the One Life. He can, if he did but know it, control the forces of nature consciously as he at present uses them unconsciously to produce their inevitable effect. Whether the user of these forces is ‘white magic’ or ‘black magic’ depends on the motive alone. Every act is in accordance with or against the stream of progress. He who swims with the current will the sooner reach the sea; he who swims against it will sooner or later suffer for his determined folly and in the end, broken and exhausted, move unwillingly down to the self-same sea.

Hour by hour we are choosing our direction, and the Law with utter justice acts accordingly. The choice between right and wrong is difficult enough to make at times, but the choice is harder still when it lies between right and right. Each man has many duties and many loyalties, and when they conflict it is hard to decide which is the more ‘right’ of the two. Yet the choice must be made, on principle and, if the heart be stout enough, ‘in the scorn of consequence’. Thereafter the effect on various planes will mirror the wisdom and the selflessness of the decision made. Better, the Wisdom seems to say, a firm decision which, when found to be wrong, is as firmly changed and the punishment of error cheerfully borne than a vacillation which, if it breeds not error, breeds no right, and carries the weakling mind no further on the road to self-enlightenment.

Man as Karma

‘Life becomes what it does.’ There, in five words, is the essence of the Law. It follows that ‘human history, from one point of view is nothing but a record of the Karma of Humanity, working itself out according to the good or evil of our racial, national and personal deeds’.¹

¹ Mysticism of East and West, Loftus Hare.

Man is his Karma, and his deeds are part of him. Hence Maeterlinck's famous saying, ‘Let us always remember that nothing befalls us that is not of the nature of ourselves.’ Or, to quote from Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia,

Karma—all that total of a soul

Which is the things it did, the thoughts it had,

The ‘Self’ it wove—with woof of viewless time

Crossed on the warp invisible of acts—…

Compounded of good and evil, man as we know him is good in proportion as he has found the Light within, and learnt to ‘let the Light shine’; and he is bad to the extent that he is still under the dominance of Maya, illusion, and lets himself be led by the lower, personal desire.

Trishna, that thirst which makes the living drink

Deeper and deeper of the false salt waves

Whereon they float, pleasures,

ambition, wealth,

Praise, fame or domination, conquest, love;

Rich meats and robes, and fair abodes

and pride

Of ancient lines, and lust of days, and strife

To live, and sins that flow from strife,

some sweet,

Some bitter…

Yet once again it must be emphasized that the soul, wherein the ceaseless warfare between light and darkness, right and wrong, is waged, is not immortal nor eternal; still less is it changeless, for it is changing as a handful of a river changes, with every new thought and act that leaves or enters the whirlpool of the soul.

A Buddhist [wrote Mr R.J.Jackson¹] will regard his property as property, but not as his; will regard his body as body, but not as his; will regard his sensations and ideas as sensations and ideas, but not as his There is no truth in the thought that ‘this is mine and I have all these things’. If there is anything a man can truly call his own it is not what he possesses but...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface to New Edition
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• I The Law of Karma
• II Karma in Action
• III What Karma is not
• IV What Karma Explains
• V Some Difficulties Considered
• VI Rebirth
• VII Who Believes in Karma and Rebirth?
• VIII Karma and Rebirth Applied
• IX The Ending of Karma and Rebirth