Karma and Rebirth

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

Page 46

Karma-Its Operation and an Appraisal
It is however significant to note that the sprout comes into existence due to the seed and the same sprout develops the seeds for the future sprouts. Similarly the Karma of an action leads to further Karma and it leads to further actions. But if the seed is roasted the sprout will not grow from it. Similarly if Karma is annihilated through ta pas, bhakti or through ātma dhyana the soul becomes pure and reaches the highest perfection.
Shri Aurobindo states that we have not been able to see the philosophical reality of Karma, for two errors : first, it is the strenuous paradoxical attempt to explain the supraphysical things by a physical formula and a darkening second error of setting "behind the universal rule of Law and as its cause and efficient the quite opposite idea of the cosmic reign of Chance.
In the theory of Karma, there is first assurance that in the mental and the moral world, as in the physical universe, there is no chaos, fortuitous rule of chance of mere probability, but an ordered Energy at work which assures its will by law and fixed relations and steady succession and the links of ascertainable cause and effectuality. To be assured that there is an all-pervading mental law and an all-pervading moral law, is a great gain a supporting foundation. That in the mental and moral, as in the physical world, what I sow in the proper soil, I shall assuredly reap, is a guarantee of divine gevernment, of equilibrium, of cosmos; it not only grounds life upon an adamant underbase of law, but by removing anarchy opens the way to a greater liberty. 'Karma theory teaches us that the soul enters this life, not as a fresh creation, but after a long course of previous existences on this earth and elsewhere, in which it acquired its present inhering peculiarities and that it is on the way to future transformations which the soul is now shaping. It claims that infancy brings to earth, not a blank scroll for the beginning of an earthly record, nor a mere cohesion of atomic forces into a brief personality soon to disclose again into the elements but that is inscribed with ancestral histories some like the present scene and most of them unlike it and stretching back into the remotest past. The current phase of life will also be stored away in the secret vaults of memory for its unconscious effect upon ensuing lives.'
Karma is what we have done, and we have to enjoy the karmic results, Therefore it follows that the future is only the past. It should therefore be possible to predict the future. The astrologer feels, by means of his art, the unexpended Karma and tries to read it. Planets therefore simply indi. cate the results of previous Karma and hence there is nothing like fate or destiny in its absolute sense controlling the spiritual self. The ego accumulates a fund of individual character which remains as the permanent thread stringing together the separate lives. The soul is therefore an eternal water globule, which sprang in the beginningless past from mother ocean