Karma

Author(s): Annie Besant
Publisher: Theosophical Publishing House

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makes the character; the outer mirrors the inner, and as cells aggregate into the tissues of the body and are often much modified in the process, so do these mental images aggregate into the characteristics of the mind, and often undergo much modification. The study of the working out of karma will throw much light on these changes. Many materials may enter into the making of these mental images by the creative powers of the soul; it may be stimulated into activity by desire (kāma), and may shape the image according to the prompting of passion or of appetite; it may be Self-motivated to a noble ideal, and mould the image accordingly; it may be led by purely intellectual concepts, and form the image thereafter. But lofty or base, intellectual or passional, serviceable or mischievous, divine or bestial, it is always in man a mental image, the product of the creative soul, and on its existence individual karma depends. Without this mental image there can be no individual karma linking life-period to life-period: the manasic quality must be present to afford the permanent element in which individual karma can inhere. The non-presence of manas in the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms has as its corollary the non-generation of individual karma, stretching through death to rebirth.