Karma

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

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will become automatic, and when opportunity offers will automatically be imitated on the physical. How often it is said after a crime, "It was done before I thought ", or If I had thought for a moment I would never have done it "! The speaker is quite right in his plea that he was not then moved by a deliberate thought-out idea, and he is naturally ignorant as to preceding thoughts, the train of causes that led up to the inevitable result. Thus a saturated solution will solidify if but one more crystal be dropped into it; at the mere contact, the whole passes into the solid state. When the aggregation of mental images has reached saturation point, the addition of but one more solidifies them into an act. The act, again, is inevitable, for the freedom of choice has been exhausted in choosing over and over again to make the mental image, and the physical is constrained to obey the mental impulsion. The desire to do in one life reacts as compulsion to do in another, and it seems as though the desire worked as a demand upon Nature, to which she responds by affording the opportunity to perform.1
The mental images stored up by the memory as the experiences through which the soul has passed during its earth-life, the exact record of the action upon of
1 See the later section on the working out of karma.