Karma and Rebirth

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

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KARMA AND MODERN PSYCHOLOGY with it. Here is a fascinating field for research and experiment. Industrial psychologists, for example, are troubled with the problem of the accident prone', workmen who are always suffering or somehow being mixed up in unnecessary accidents'. An American scientist writes that "it has been completely proved, beyond all shadow of doubt, that the elimination of certain men from industrial plants met with a decrease if not a cessation of accidents in that plant”. From the personal point of view these men may have ‘unconsciously-deliberately 'caused the accidents ; from the mass point of view they may be Karmic agents, that is, as W. Q. Judge defined it, “ one who concentrates niore rapidly than usual the lines of influence that bring about cvents, sometimes in a strange and subtle way”.
Karma would seem to be the missing link in modern psychology. Surely' complexes' are only deposits in the unconscious from action and reaction in past lives, and ‘character deficiencies', gaps in the moral development of the patient, defy the physician's skill because none can implant in another's mind à virtue which, though there potentially, has not been developed in the lives gone by. In other words, the psychologist, however skilful his analysis, can only restore the position at birth, removing the knots and inhibitions of wrong thinking and leaving the patient free to resume the path of development with less impediment and wasted energy. The application of psychology to crime, and in particular juvenile delinquency, would be far casier if the psychologist appreciated that he must look further back than the criminal's childhood for the true cause of the crime, and the whole field of insanity should be revised in the light of the Karınic Law. These, however, are the exceptions, for the West has need of applying the Law to the many, not only to the few. The outlook on life of the man in the street' could be utterly changed by a knowledge of Karma, and he who accepts it as a reasonable hypothesis will find by his own experience that the Law is true, and that he who uses it is master of life and death, and the sole custodian of his destiny.
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