Karma and Rebirth

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

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KARMA IN ACTION
have found and known the Essence of Mind that nought is felt to be right save that which serves it utterly. So long as merit and demerit is the motive-power of action there is the danger of that heartless snobbery of thought which, seeing suffering, remarks that it must be the sufferer's Karma to suffer, and anyhow, what is it to do with me? Such thought will bear its own result, a further hardening of the heart which, blinded with its dear delusion, continues to feel separate from its fellow men and, like the Levite, passes by on the other side. Only the light of compassion, an understanding love for all that lives, can see that Karma as Law is a loving Law; that if it is just it is also utterly merciful. We who on earth make laws with which to judge our fellow men know that our justice is fallible, and therefore add to the cold machinery of justice the warmer quality of mercy which, so far from dropping like a gentle dew from heaven, is a virtue latent in the human heart. For "Compassion is no attribute. It is the Law of Laws,-eternal Harmony, Alaya's SELF; a shoreless universal essence, the light of everlasting right, and fitness of all things, the law of Love eternal." Only he who sees that law and justice and mercy and love are so many aspects of the Law of Harmony will understand that Karma is only a name we give that Law.
Classifications of Karma
The field of manifestation is subject to the illusion of time, for though in Reality all is Eternal Now, yet time is real to our senses. To our eyes there is past, present and future, and a cause and its effect are separated by an interval of time. In essence the cause-effect are as the two sides of a coin, inseverable and instantaneous, but we see them severally. It follows that we can, for purposes of understanding, analyse and classify the cause-effects of Karma, and four such classifications may be mentioned here.
Karma is often analysed in terms of time.
1 The Voice of the Silence.
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