Karma and Rebirth

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

Page 24

The Law of Equilibrium
For the study of Karma it is best to consider the man at the level of his individuality or 'soul'. Here the Self creates, uses, suffers and in a very real sense is its Karma, and those who study Jung's diagram will note with interest that this Self unites the most outward and most inward, most material and most spiritual parts of the whole. For the keynote of the law of Karma is equilibrium, and nature is always working to restore that equilibrium whenever through man's acts it is disturbed. As Emerson wrote,
If you love and serve men, you cannot by any hiding or stratagem escape the remuneration. Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles for evermore the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and star and sun must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil.1
To the same effect wrote H. P. Blavatsky:
The only decree of Karma, an eternal and immutable decree, is absolute Harmony in the world of Matter as in the world of Spirit. It is not, therefore, Karma that rewards or punishes, but it is we who reward and punish ourselves, according as we work with and through Nature, abiding by the laws on which that harmony depends, or breaking them.2 And this in turn was echoed by W. Q. Judge, her pupil, when he wrote, in his famous Karmic Aphorisms," Karma is an undeviating and unerring tendency in the Universe to restore equilibrium, and it operates incessantly." Because this ceaseless effort to adjust a troubled harmony takes time, the doctrine of Rebirth is a necessary corollary of Karma, for the longest life on earth will not suffice to restore the harmony disturbed by a daily round of self-regarding actions; life after life must pass before the ultimate lesson is learned, and the 'triple fires' of hatred, lust and illusion die for want of fuelling.
Karma is the master Law of the Universe, but there is no 1 Lectures and Biographical Sketches, 1868. 2 The Secret Doctrine. 19