Karma and Rebirth

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

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PREDESTINATION AND FREEWILL we are underlings.” In order, however, to understand Professor Radhakrishnan's dictum, “ Freedom and Karma are two aspects of the same reality,” it may be wise to return to first principles.
The soul of man, as distinct from his 'spirit and the physical body, is the battleground of the pairs of opposites' which, ranged under the banners of Good and Evil, contend for the mastery. On the side of light is the will, in the sense of the driving force towards enlightenment ; on the other are the massed desires of the lower, personal self which craves for its separative own aggrandisement. These two forces strive unceasingly, and now the one and now the other gains the field. Such is “the sickness of the spirit (soul)" (as St. Augustine called it) "chat raiseth itself not to its full stature, being sustained by the truth but weighed down by custom. And thus there are two wills, and neither is entire. ..." Bearing in mind this internal duality of the soul, and remembering that the mind is the father of Karma and that it is choosing every moment whether its acts shall be 'good' or 'bad', the words of the writer Pascal will provide the solution to the problem of Freewill and Destiny, which is in fact no problem at all. “Though slaves of the past,” he wrote, “ we are masters of the future." The following analogy may help. A man is in a room with two doors. He piles up the furniture against one door and falls asleep. Later he wakes, and complains that he has no choice of exit, for there is only one door available. The answer is—remove the furniture. It sometimes happens hat a man may truly say," There seemed no other course open to me-I had no choice.” But it is he who by his own past action piled up the furniture against the alternate door. He is bound by his fate, but he is his fate, and nothing in the world save his own debility of will prevents him becoming free. There are many who cry in the bonds of circumstance, “I bow before the will of God.” But as there is no God save the God
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