Karma and Rebirth

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

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THE LAW OF KARMA But if no man's spirit is separate, in that being one with the Namelessness it is not even his, the soul is even less immortal, for it is changing every moment of the day. It is, as will be explained later, equivalent to character, the collection of attributes, good and bad, which make up the man. Still more impermanent is the 'body', using the word in the sense of the mask or personality through which the soul, and through the soul the spirit, is made manifest. This outward and visible aspect of the man is the densest of his vehicles, being that through which he contacts the lowest planes of matter, yet, said the Buddha, “ In this very body, six feet in length, with its sense-impressions and its thoughts and ideas, I declare to you are the world, the origin of the world and the ceasing of the world, and likewise the way that leads to the ccasing thereof ".1 It follows that he who waits for a heaven-world in which to begin his inner development will wait in vain. At page 122 of Dr. Jacobi's Psychology of C. G. Jung there is a diagram of what that famous psychologist, as the result of a life's work, believes to be the content of the invisible side of Man. To equate the analysed aspects of man as taught by Eastern philosophy with the enpirically discovered equivalents in Western psychology is a task which probably only a Dr. Jung could at the moment undertake, but those who meditate upon the respective analyses will learn a vast amount from the comparison. In either case the teaching is insistent on the indivisible wholeness of the thing we know as man. Whether his skins' be compared to those of an onion, which may be successively removed, or his consciousness be compared to that of a lighthouse-keeper, as in the analogy used above, or the various aspects be built into a glyph or diagram, ever the Self and all its vehicles is One, even as Karma is One, for both are subject to and aspects of the 'Be-ness' without name.
1 The Anguttara Nikaya.
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