Karma and Rebirth

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

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WHAT KARMA EXPLAINS Wisdom is clear. Evil is man-made, and is of his choosing, and he who suffers suffers from his own deliberate use of his own free will. Cripples, dwarfs and those born deaf or blind are the products of their own past actions, and one's pity should be used, not in bewailing the injustice of their condition, but in assisting the new-born brain to appreciate its own responsibility and to produce new causes whose result will be the undoing of the evil whose results are manifest. Infant prodigies, on the other hand, are clearly the result of specialization in some particular line, and even special aptitudes and preferences are the outcome of the Law.
Conscience is a Karmic memory. The Essence of Mind is deathless, and its ray, the consciousness (vijnana) which moves from life to life, is a store-house of immensely complex memory. Even though the brain, which is new in each life, has forgotten the lessons of past experience, the inner mind remembers, and when temptation murmurs again of the pleasures of a certain low desire, the voice of memory replies, “ But what of the cost in suffering, the price that you paid ? " Heredity versus Environment
Karma explains heredity. “Karma' expresses, not that which a man inherits from his ancestors, but that which he inherits from himself in some previous state of existence." 1 In the same way, environment is a product of one's own past actions, for cach new birth accords with the Karma therein to be discharged. All that is inherited from parents is the body, the outermost garment of the many-robed, essential man. The mind, or returning unit of consciousness, so far from being the product of its body's parents, chose those parents, and the body which they would provide for the working out of a portion of past Karma. Heredity is therefore the servant of Karına and not its substitute. By the law of affinity, the magnetic law of attraction and repulsion, each new body attracts an appropriate
1 Buddhism in Translations, Henry Clarke Warren.
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