Karma and Rebirth

Author(s): T G Kalghatgi
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 12

In the Vestibules of Karma
understand how Potter interprets Karma as a type of habit, Psychologists tell us that habit is a learned activity that has become almost automatic, and habit has the same relation to learning as the secondary automatic reaction has to the reflexes. The function of habit is to simplify the move. ments required to achieve a given result, to make the actions more accurate and to diminish fatigue, because we have a structure weak enough to yield to an influence but strong enough not to yield at once, Karma is least to be considered as habit in this sense. I cannot understand Potter's interpretation, I can only say one must be steeped in the Indian tradition in order to understand the nature and significance of Karma.
C. J. Jung, while distinguishing, Personal and the Collective Unconscious, hints at the possibility of comparing the archetypes of the Collective Unconscious to the Karma in Indian thought. The Collective Unconscious stands for the objective psyche. The personal layer ends at the earliest memories of infancy, but the collective layer comprises the pre-infantile period that is the residue of ancestral life. The force of Karma works implicitly and determines the nature and development of personality. The Karma aspect is essential to the deeper understanding of the nature of an archetype.28 Although it is possible to say that Karma has essentially a reference to individual differences and hence a personal acqisition, yet each individual has a common heritage which he shares with the community and which shapes his being. The archetypes refer to the common heritage. To this extent they refer to the Karma aspect. However, Jung was primarily concerned with interpretation of dreams and fantasies in presenting his theory of the Collective Unconscious. Had he developed the archetypes of the collective unconscious, he would have reached the doctrine of Karma, the store-house of the physical and psychical effects of the past."24
Fundamentally, "the meaning of Karma is that all existence is the working of a universal Energy, a process and an action and a building of things by that action, - an unbuilding too, but as a step to farther building, - that all is a continuous chain in which every one link is bound indissolubly to the past infinity of numberless links, and the whole governed by fixed relations, by a fixed association of cause and effect, present action the result of past action as future action will be the result of present action, all cause a working of energy and all effect too a working of energy". The moral significance is that all our existence is a putting out of an energy which is in us and by which we are made and as is the nature of the energy which is put forth as cause, so shall be that of the energy
23. Jung (C. J.) : Essays in Analytical Psychology (Personal and Collective or
Transcendental Unconscious) p. 76. Footnote. 21. Radhakrishnan (S.): Indian Philosophy, Vol. I. (1941). pp, 109-110.