Karma and Rebirth

Author(s): Christmas Humphereys
Publisher: Albemarle Street London

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THE LAW OF KARMA this doctrine went that which makes it necessary of acceptance, Karma. Now, under the double influence of English translations of the Hindu and Buddhist Scriptures, and the reproclaiming by Mme Blavatsky of the Ancient Wisdom, or Theosophy, of which all religions are part, Karma and Rebirth have returned to the West, and a glance at Chapter VII of this book will show to what a wide extent the dual doctrine has proved acceptable.
Either it is true or false. The Universe is either cosmos or chaos, for it cannot be partly ruled by law and partly by a blind, unreasonable chance. Karma is not a law of which it can be said: “There may be something in it." Either the Law exists or it does not. If it exists he is a fool who does not use it, and he alone is wise who studies it, proclaims it far and wide, and applies it to the smallest detail of his daily life. If it be not true it is a strangely venerable error, and secing that it has been taught as the basis of the world's accumulated wisdom since, it would seem, the search for truth began, it is strange that no other Law has been propounded to explain this life's phenomena. But the Law is only understandable from the spiritual point of view. To regard it as a mechanical law of debit and credit for good and evil actions is to rob the doctrine of its living power. If it is all-embracing, coeval with the Universe, it can only be grasped from a universal, that is to say, a spiritual point of view. Man has many levels of cognition, windows on the spiral staircase of his understanding, and even as the lighthouse-keeper, whose tower is based in the living rock, climbs to the level of the lantern where he tends the light which is not his light, so man's evolving consciousness must climb from plane to plane until he finds, and learns to tend, the Light within, which shines eternally. Beyond the intellect, which is the machinery of thought, is the plane of the intuition, the faculty of immediate, direct cognition of Reality. In most of us it sleeps, or functicns dimly in a low reflection as the 'instincts', or on the psychic plane. Yet all may develop it, and none may know the Law who has not to some extent
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