Karma

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

Page 52

42
It is from the mental images of experiences, and more especially from those which tell how suffering has been caused by ignorance of law, that conscience is born and is developed. The soul during its successive earth-lives is constantly led by desire to rush headlong after some attractive object; in its pursuit it dashes itself against law, and falls, bruised and bleeding. Many such experiences teach it that gratifications sought against law are but wombs of pain, and when in some new earth-life the desire-body would fain carry the soul into enjoyment which is evil, the memory of past experiences asserts itself as conscience, and cries aloud its forbiddance, and reins in the hurrying horses of the senses that would plunge heedlessly after the objects of desire. At the present stage of evolution all but the most backward souls have passed through sufficient experiences to recognize the broad outlines of "right" and " wrong," i.e., of harmony with the Divine Nature, and of discord, and on these main questions of ethics a wide and long experience enables the soul to speak clearly and definitely. But on many higher and subtler questions, belonging to the present stage of evolution and not to the stages that lie behind us, experience is still so restricted and insufficient that it has not yet been worked up into