Part 4

Another rule that this disciple must follow is that no boasting may be indulged in on any occasion, and this gives us the formula that, given a man who speaks of his powers as an Adept or boasts of his progress on the spiritual planes, we can be always sure he is neither Adept nor disciple. There have been those in the Theosophical Society who gave out to the world that they were either Adepts in fact or very near it, and possessed of great powers. Under our formula it follows that they were mere boasters, with nothing behind their silly pretensions but vanity and a fair knowledge of the weakness as well as the gullibility of human nature; upon the latter they play for either their profit or pleasure. But, hiding themselves under an exterior which does not attract attention, there are many of the real disciples in the world. They are studying themselves and other human hearts. They have no diplomas, but there resides in them a consciousness of constant help and a clear knowledge of the true Lodge which meets in real secrecy and is never found mentioned in any directory. Their whole life is a persistent pursuit of the fast-moving soul which, although appearing to stand still, can distance the lightning; and their death is only another step forward to greater knowledge through better physical bodies in new lives.

XIV.

Looking back into the past the nineteenth-century historian finds his sight speedily striking a mist and at last plunging into inky darkness. Bound down in fact by the influence of a ridiculous dogmatism which allows only some six thousand years for man's life on earth, he is unwilling to accept the old chronologies of the Egyptians or Hindûs, and, while permitting the assumption of vast periods for geological changes, he is staggered by a few millions of years more or less when they are added to the length of time during which humanity has peopled the globe. The student of Theosophy, however, sees no reason why he should doubt the statement made by his teachers on this subject. He knows that the periods of evolution are endless. These are called Manvantaras, because they are between two Manus, or, two men.

These periods may be called waves whose succession has no cessation. Each grand period, including within it all the minor evolutions, covers 311,040,000,000,000 human years; under a single Manu the human years come and go, 306,720,000 in number, and the lesser yugas--or ages--more immediately concerning us, comprise of solar years 4,320,000. During these solar revolutions the human races sweep round and round this planet. Cave-dwellers, lake-dwellers and those of a neolithic or any other age appear and disappear over and over again, and in each of those we who now read, write and think of them were ourselves the very Egos whose past we are trying to trace.

But, going deep into geological strata, the doubt of man's existence contemporaneously with the plesiosaurus arises because no fossil _genus homo_ is discovered in the same stratum. It is here that the theories of the Theosophist come in and furnish the key. Those hold that before man developed any physical body he clothed himself with an astral form; and this is why H. P. Blavatsky writes in her _Secret Doctrine_: "it teaches the birth of the _astral_ before the _physical_ body, the former being the model for the latter." At the time of the huge antediluvian animals they absorbed in their enormous bodies so much of the total quantity of gross matter available for frames of sentient beings that the astral man remained without a corporeal frame, as yet unclothed "with coats of skin." For this reason he could exist in the same place with those huge birds and reptiles without fear. Their massive proportions inspired him with no terror, and by their consumption of food there was no lessening of his sustenance. And, therefore, being of such a composition that he left no impression upon mud or plastic rock, the death of one astral body after another left no fossil and no mark to be unearthed by us in company with the very beasts and birds which were his contemporaries.

Man was all this time acquiring the power to clothe himself with a dense frame. He threw off astral bodies one after another, in the ceaseless pursuit, each effort giving him a little more density. Then he began to cast a shadow, as it were, and the vast, unwieldy animal world--and others as well--felt more and more the draughts made upon it by the coming man. As he thickened they grew smaller, and his remains could not be deposited in any stratum until such time as he had grown to sufficient hardness. But our modern anthropologists have not yet discovered when that was. They are ready enough to make definite statements, but, learned as they are, there are surprises awaiting them not so far off.

While, therefore, our explorers are finding, now and then, the remains of animals and birds and reptiles in strata which show an age far greater than any assigned to the human race, they never come upon human skeletons. How could man leave any trace at a stage when he could not press himself into the clay or be caught by soft lava or masses of volcanic dust? I do not mean, however, to say that the period of the plesiosaurus is the period of the man of astral body devoid of a material one. The question of exact period may well be left for a more detailed account; this is only to point to the law and to the explanation for the non-appearance of man's remains in very early geologic strata. But the Theosophic Adepts insist that there are still in the earth bony remains of man, which carry his first appearance in a dense body many millions of years farther back than have yet been admitted, and these remains will be discovered by us before much time shall have rolled away.

One of the first results of these discoveries will be to completely upset the theory as to the succession of ages, as I may call it, which is given and accepted at the present time, and also the estimation of the various civilizations that have passed from the earth and left no trace except in the inner constitution of ourselves--for it is held that _we are those very persons_, now in different bodies, who so long ago lived and loved and died upon the planet. We began to make Karma then and have been under its influence ever since, and it seems fitting that that great doctrine should be taken up at another time for a more careful examination.

XV.

The Oriental doctrine of reward and punishment of the human Ego is very different from the theological scheme accepted throughout Christendom, since the Brahmins and Buddhists fix the place of punishment and compensation upon this earth of ours, while the Christian removes the "bar of God" to the hereafter. We may not profitably stop to argue upon logic with the latter; it will be sufficient to quote to them the words of Jesus, St. Matthew, and the Psalmist. "With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured unto you again," said Jesus; and Matthew declares that for every word, act, and thought we shall have to answer, while David, the royal poet, sang that those who serve the Lord should never eat beggar's bread. We all know well that the first two declarations do away with the vicarious atonement; and as for the Jewish singer's notion, it is negatived every day in any city of either hemisphere.

Among the Ceylonese Buddhists the name of the doctrine is Kamma; with the Hindûs it is Karma. Viewed in its religious light, it "is the good and bad deeds of sentient beings, by the infallible influence or efficacy of which those beings are met with due rewards or punishment, according as they deserve, in any state of being."[A] When a being dies, he emits, as it were, a mass of force or energy, which goes to make up the new personality when he shall be reïncarnated. In this energy is found the summation of the life just given up, and by means of it the Ego is forced to assume that sort of body among those appropriate circumstances which together are the means for carrying out the decrees of Karma.

Hence hell is not a mythical place or condition after death in some unknown region specially set apart by the Almighty for the punishment of his children, but is in very truth our own globe, for it is on the earth, in earth-lives experienced in human bodies, that we are punished for bad deeds previously done, and meet with happiness and pleasure as rewards for old merit.

When one sees, as is so common, a good man suffering much in his life, the question naturally arises, "Has Karma anything to do with it, and is it just that such a person should be so afflicted?" For those who believe in Karma it is quite just, because this man in a previous life must have done such acts as deserve punishment now. And, similarly, the wicked man who is free from suffering, happy and prosperous, is so because in a previous existence he had been badly treated by his fellows or had experienced much suffering. And the perfect justice of Karma is well illustrated in his case because, although now favored by fortune, he, being wicked, is generating causes which, when he shall be reborn, will operate then to punish him for his evil-doing now.

Some may suppose that the Ego should be punished after death, but such a conclusion is not logical. For _evil deeds committed here on the objective plane could not with any scientific or moral propriety be punished on a plane which is purely subjective_. And such is the reason why so many minds, both of the young and old, have rejected and rebelled against the doctrine of a hellfire in which they would be eternally punished for commission of sin on earth. Even when unable to formulate the reason in metaphysical terms, they instinctively knew that it would be impossible to remove the scene of compensation from the very place where the sin and confusion had been done and created. When the disciples of Jesus asked him if the man who was born blind was thus brought into the world for some sin he had committed they had in mind this doctrine of Karma, just as all the Hindûs and Buddhists have when they see some of their fellows crippled or deformed or deprived of sight.

The theory above hinted at of the person at death throwing out from himself the new personality, so to speak, ready to await the time when the Ego should return to earth seeking a new body, is a general law that operates in a great many other instances besides the birth or death of a being. It is that which is used by the Theosophists to explain the relations between the moon and the earth. For, as the moon is held by them to be the planet on which we lived before reaching the earth and before there was any such earth whatever; and that, when our so-called satellite came to die, all the energy contained in it was thrown out into space, where in a single vortex it remained until the time came for that energy to be again supplied with a body--this earth--so the same law prevails with men, the single units in the vast aggregate which is known among advanced Theosophists as the great Manu. Men being, as to their material envelope, derived from the moon, must follow the law of their origin, and therefore the Buddhist priest says, as quoted: "At the death of a being nothing goes out from him to the other world for his rebirth; but by the efficacy--or, to use a more figurative expression, by the ray--of influence which Kamma emits, a new being is produced in the other world very identical with the one who died away," for in this "new being" is held all the life of the deceased. The term "being," as applied to it may be taken by us with some qualification. It is more properly a mass of energy devoid of conscience and crowded with desires of the person from whom it emanated; and its special province is to await the return of the individuality and form for that the new body in which it shall suffer or enjoy. Each man is therefore his own creator under the great Cosmic laws that control all creations. A better term in place of "creation" is "evolution," for we, from life to life, are engaged in evolving out of the material provided in this _Manvantara_ new bodies at every turn of the wheel of rebirth. The instruments we use in this work are desire and will. Desire causes the will to fix itself on objective life; in that plane it produces force and out of that comes matter in its objective form.

FOOTNOTE:

[A] The Rev. T. P. Terunnanse, High-Priest at Dodanduwa, Ceylon.

XVI.

Very many Western people say that this Oriental doctrine of Karma is difficult to understand, being fit only for educated and thoughtful persons. But in India, Ceylon and Burmah, not to mention other Asiatic countries, the whole mass of the people accept and seem to understand it. The reason for this lies probably in the fact that they also firmly believe in Reïncarnation, which may be said to be the twin doctrine to Karma. Indeed, the one cannot be properly considered without keeping the other in view, for Karma--whether as punishment or reward--could have no actual or just operation upon the Ego unless the means for its operation were furnished by Reïncarnation.

Our deserts are meted out to us while we are associating in life with each other, and not while we are alone, nor in separateness. If being raised to power in a nation or becoming possessed of wealth is called a reward, it would lose all value were there no people to govern and no associated human beings with and upon whom we could spend our wealth and who might aid us in satisfying our manifold desires. And so the law of Reïncarnation drags us into life again and again, bringing with us uncounted times the various Egos whom we have known in prior births. This is in order that the Karma--or causes--generated in company with those Egos may be worked out, for to take us off separately into an unknown hell, there to receive some sort of punishment, or into an impossible serio-comic heaven to meet our reward, would be as impossible as unjust. Hence, no just-hanged murderer absolved by priest or praising Jesus can escape. He, together with his victim, must return to this earth, each to aid the other in adjusting the disturbed harmony, during which process each makes due compensation. With this doctrine we restore justice to her seat in the governance of men, for without it the legal killing of the murderer after condemnation is only a half remedy, since no provision is made by the State for the being hurled out of the body nor for the dependants he may have left behind, and, still further, nothing is done for those who in the family of the murderer survive him.

But the Theosophical sages of all ages push the doctrine of Karma beyond a mere operation upon incarnated men. They view all worlds as being bound together and swayed by Karma. As the old Hindû book, the _Bhagavad-Gîtâ_, says, "all worlds up to that of Brahmâ are subject to Karma." Hence it acts on all planes. So viewing it, they say that this world as it is now conditioned is the actual result of what it came to be at the beginning of the _pralaya_ or grand death which took place billions upon billions of years ago. That is, the world evolves just as man does. It is born, it grows old, it dies, and it is reïncarnated. This goes on many times, and during those incarnations it suffers and enjoys in its own way for its previous evolutions. For it the reward is a greater advance along the line of evolution, and the punishment is a degraded state. Of course, as I said in a former article, these states have man for their object and cause, for he is the crown of all evolution. And, coming down from the high consideration of great cosmic spaces and phenomena, the Theosophist is taught to apply these laws of Karma and Reïncarnation to every atom in the body in _especial_ and apart from the total Karma. Since we are made up of a mass of lives, our thoughts and acts affect those atoms or lives and impress them with a Karma of their own. As the Oriental thinkers say, "not a moment passes without some beings coming to life in us, acquiring Karma, dying, and being reïncarnated."

The principal divisions of Karma are three in number. One sort is that now operating in the present life and body, bringing about all the circumstances and changes of life. Of this we see illustrations every day, with now and then strange climaxes which throw upon the doctrine the brightest light. One such is immortalized in India by a building erected by the favored son of fortune, as we would say, and thus it came about. A Rajah had a very strange dream, so affecting that he called upon his soothsayers for interpretation. They said that their horoscopes showed he was required next day to give an immense sum of money to the first person he should see after awaking, their intention being to present themselves at an early hour. Next day the King arose unusually early, stepped to his window, threw it open, and there before him was a chandalah sweeping up the dirt. To him he gave a fortune, and thus in a moment raised him to affluence from abject poverty. The chandalah then built a huge building to commemorate his sudden release from the grinding chains of poverty.

Another class of Karma is that which is held over and not now in operation because the man does not furnish the appropriate means for bringing it into action. This may be likened to vapor held in suspension in the atmosphere and not visible to the eye, but which will fall as rain upon the earth the moment conditions are ripe.

The last chief class is that Karma which we are making now, and which will be felt by us in future births. Its appropriate symbol is the arrow shot forward in the air by the archer.

XVII.

The spirit is not affected by Karma at any time or under any circumstances, and so the Theosophical Adepts would not use the terms "cultivation of the Spirit." The Spirit in man, called by them _Ishwara_, is immutable, eternal and indivisible--the fundamental basis of all. Hence they say that the body and all objects are impermanent and thus deluding to the soul whenever they are mistaken for reality. They are only real on and for this plane and during the time when the consciousness takes them up here for cognition. They are therefore relatively real and not so in an absolute sense. This can easily be proved from dreams. In the dream state we lose all knowledge of the objects which while awake we thought real and proceed to suffer and enjoy in that new state. In this we find the consciousness applying itself to objects partaking of course of the nature of the experiences of the waking condition, but at the same time producing the sensations of pleasure and pain while they last. Let us imagine a person's body plunged in a lethargy extending over twenty years and the mind undergoing a pleasant or unpleasant dream, and we have a life just of that sort, altogether different from the life of one awake. For the consciousness of this dreamer the reality of objects known during the waking state is destroyed. But as material existence is a necessary evil and the one in which alone emancipation or salvation can be obtained, it is of the greatest importance and hence Karma which governs it and through whose decrees emancipation may be reached must be well understood and then be accepted and obeyed.

Karma will operate to produce a deformed or deficient body, to give in a good body a bad disposition or _vicè versâ_; it will cause diseases, hurts or annoyances, or bring about pleasures and favorable situations for the material frame. So we sometimes find with a deformed or disagreeable body a most enlightened and noble mind. In this case the physical Karma is bad and the mental good.

This leads us to the sort of Karma that works upon the mental plane. At the same time that an unfavorable Karmic cause is showing forth in the physical structure another and better sort is working out in the mind and disposition or has eventuated in conferring a mind well balanced, calm, cheerful, deep, and brilliant. Hence we discover a purely physical as compared with an entirely mental Karma. Purely physical would be that resulting, say from a removal from the ground of fruit peel which might otherwise cause some unknown person to fall and be hurt. Purely mental might be due to a life spent in calm, philosophical thought and the like.

There is in one of the Hindû books a strange sentence respecting this part of the subject, reading: "Perfection of body or superhuman powers are produced by birth or by herbs or by incantations, penances, or meditations."

Among mental afflictions esteemed as worse than any bodily hurt or loss is that Karma from a preceding life which results in obscurity of such a character that there is a loss of all power to conceive of the reality of Spirit or the existence of soul--that is, materialism.

The last field of operation for this law may be said to be the psychical nature. Of this in America we have numerous examples in mediums, clairvoyants, clairaudients, mind-readers, hysteriacs, and all sorts of abnormal sensitives. There could be no clairvoyant according to the Oriental scheme if the person so afflicted, using as I think the proper term, had not devoted much of previous lives to a one-sided development of the psychical nature resulting now in powers which make the possessor an abnormality in society.

A very strange belief of the Hindûs is that one which allows the possibility of a change of state by a mortal of such a character that the once man becomes a _Deva_ or lesser god. They divide nature into several departments, in each of which are conscious powers or entities called _Devas_, to put it roughly. Yet this is not so far apart from the ideas of some of our best scientific men who have said there is no reason why in each ray of the spectrum there may not be beings to us unseen. Many centuries ago the Hindû thinker admitted this, and pushing further on declared that a man might through a certain sort of Karma become one of these beings, with corresponding enjoyment and freedom from care, but with the certainty, however, of eventually changing back again to begin the weary round of birth over again.

What might be called the doctrine of the nullification of Karma is an application in this department of the well-known law in physics which causes an equilibrium when two equal forces oppose each other. A man may have in his Karmic account a very unpleasant cause and at the same time a cause of opposite character. If these come together for expression at the same time they may so counteract each other as that neither will be apparent and the equilibrium is the equivalent of both. In this way it is easy to understand the Biblical verse: "Charity covereth a multitude of sins," as referring to the palliative effect of charitable deeds as opposed to deeds of wickedness, and giving a reason for the mediæval knight devoting some of the years of his life to almsgiving.

In the _Bhagavad-Gîtâ_, a book revered by all in India, the highest place is given to what is called _Karma-Yôga_ or the Religion of the Performance of Works and Duty, and there it is said: "He who, unattached to the fruits of his actions, performs such actions as must be done, is both renouncer and devotee; not he who kindles no sacrificial fires and performs no ceremonies. He who remains inert, restraining the organs of action, and pondering with his heart on objects of sense, is called a false pietist of bewildered soul. But he who, restraining his senses by his heart and being free from interest in acting, undertakes active devotion through the organs of action, is praiseworthy."

XVIII.