Karma and Rebirth

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

Page 47

T. G. Kalghatgi
and is destined after an unreckonable course of meanderings in cloud and rain, snow and steam, spring and river, mud and vapour, to at last return with the garnered experience of all lonely existences into the central heart of all,
That we have forgotten the causes producing the persent sequences of pleasures and pains, talents and defects, successes and failures is no disproof of them, and does not disturb the justice of the scheme. For temporary oblivion is the anodyne by which the kindly physician is bringing us through the darker wards of sorrow into perfect health,
The law of Karma provides a graded sanction or reason for right living. It proves that men are in essence one, and that any deed which hurts one's neighbourhood or the common weal is an Injury to oneself. Above all, it reveals a plane of consciousness where right becomes the inmost law of being and a man does right not because it pays nor because it avoids selfinjury, but because, beyond all argument, he must. Karma destroys the cause of envy and jealousy and the consequent ill-will. It removes impatience. It largely removes the fear of death for where there is the inner conviction of rebirth and by the law of affinity reunion with those one loves, there is : nothing to worry.
The belief in the theory of Karma and reincarnation scattered through the philosophic writings of India reproduce the scientific theories of the involution and evolution of elements.
According to Shri Aurobindo Karma is a Universal energy working in all existence, a process, an action and a building of things by that action-an unbuilding too but as a step to further building-it is continuous change-that is the Philosophical reality of the theory of Karma, and that too is the way of seeing which has been developed by physical science but its seeing has been handicapped in the progress to the full largeness of its own truth by two persistent errors, as mentioned earlier, first, the straneous paradoxical attempt to explain supraphysical things by a physical formula, and a darkening second error of setting behind the Universal rule of Law and the quite opposite idea of the Cosmic reign of Chance.
Shri Aurobindo present the four pillars of the theory of Karma. (1) There Is an all-pervading mental law and an all-pervading moral Law and in these fields, as in the Physical, what we sow we reap. That gives the guarantee of the divine Government, an equilibrium and a cosmos. But if this energy were all I may only be a creation of an imperative force and my acts will be determined. That would resolve everything into predestination of Karma.
(2) Here comes the second step of the Theory of Karma, 'It is the Idea which creates all relation and all is the expression and expansion of the Idea.