Karma and Rebirth

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

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KARMIC RESPONSIBILITIES also explain the difference, so much insisted on in the famous Sutra of Wei Lang, between 'merits' and 'felicities.' Such deeds [the Patriarch pointed out) as building temples, giving alms and entertaining the (Buddhist) Order will bring you only felicities, which should not be taken for merits. Merits are to be found within. the Dharmakaya (Body of the Law), and have nothing to do with practices for attaining felicities. Felicities, in other words, are pleasant Karma on the physical plane, but do not necessarily conduce to the attainment of Enlightenment. Merits, on the other hand, are reactions on the mind of mental welldoing or right motive, and are conducive to the mind's enlightenment.
Further light on our responsibility for accidents' is furnished by returning once again to the basic principles on which the Universe is built. Life is One, and all its forms are interrelated in a vastly complicated but inseverable whole. It follows that every act by any form of life, from the highest to the lowest, must react on every other form. The power of thought is terrifying, for thoughts are truly things, and once created have an independent existence of their own. The length and strength of this life depends on the intensity and clarity of the thinker's mind, but good or bad cach thought is a power, a living power for good or evil respectively. As such it affects not only the thinker, ennobling or debasing his mind for future thinking, but it affects all other life in the Universe. As A. P. Sinnett wrote in The Occult World : Man is continually peopling his current in space with a world of his own, crowded with the offspring of his fancies, desires, impulses and passions ; a current which reacts on any sensitive or nervous organization which comes in contact with it, in proportion to its dynamic intensity.
As the average mind is too undeveloped to confine the springs of action to its own thought alone, most men are at the mercy of the myriad thoughts which press upon the brain as bodies press
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