Karma and Rebirth

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

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WHAT KARMA IS NOT Karma. Man-made labels do not clarify; they cloud the mind to proper values. As is written in a Japanese Scripture, Since everything in this world is caused by the concurrence of causes and conditions, there can be no fundamental distinction between things. The apparent distinctions cxist because of people's absurd and deluding thoughts and desires. In the sky there is no distinction of East and West; people create the distinction out of their own minds and then believe it to be true. The anonymous writer of this ancient Scripture gocs much further, and his words accord with the parent Indian philosophy. In the universal process of becoming there are inherently no distinctions between the process of life and the process of destruction ; people inake a distinction and call the one birth and the other death. In action there is no distinction between right and wrong, but people make a distinction for their own silly convenience. ... To Buddha every definite thing is illusion, something which the mind constructs ; he knows that whatever the mind can grasp and throw away is vanity ; thus he avoids che pitfalls of images and discriminative thought.
Predestination and Freewill
Once the Law of Karma is understood it will be seen that there is no such thing as luck, good or bad, but, to quote from the Stoic Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, “Subscquents follow antecedents by a bond of inner consequence; it is no merely numerical sequence of arbitrary and isolated units, but a rational interconnection.” Nor is the doctrine of Karma equivalent to the doctrine of Predestination or Determinism. Still less is it Fatalism. “The latter implics a blind course of some still blinder power, but man is a free agent during his stay on carth”,1 free, that is, within the working of the Law. For, viewed from one life, the ' operative' Karma of that life is cquivalent to the Greck Nemcsis or Destiny. But this destiny is not the decree of a wrathful God but the product of that man's imagining. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves that
1 The Secret Doctrine, H. P. Blavatsky.
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