Karma and Rebirth

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

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CHAPTER VIII
KARMA AND REBIRTH APPLIED It has been said that a man believes a doctrine when he behaves as if it were truc. Assuming, then, that for a while one were to behave as if the Law of Karma were the all-embracing Law, and that life, instead of a span of a few minutes to seventy odd years, were an endless series of days and nights, days of labour and nights of rest, wherein each fragment-mind of the Essence of Mind was slowly learning the only lesson, to become what it is—assume this for a while, and consider the result on character.
The Self is One ; it IS ; and Karma is its Law : Never the spirit was born ; the spirit shall cease to be never ;
Never was time it was not; End and Beginning are dreams ! Birthless and deathless and changeless remaincth the spirit for ever;
Death hath not touched it at all, dead though the house of it seems! Such is the answer of the Bhagavad Gita to those who believe that life can die. There is no death.,
If this be true, the effect is immediate and tremendous. Each man learns that he is and always has been master of his future, the captain of his soul. He knows, in the words of the Dhammapada, “ By oneself the evil is done, by oneself one suffers ; by oneself the evil is left undone, by oneself one is purified. Purity and impurity belong to oneself; no one can purify another." But he knows, too, that “ Self is the lord of self”, and that he must therefore curb himself “as the merchant curbs a good horse". Henceforth he is master of himself as well as of his destiny. For him there is no more drifting, as a rudderless ship. He knows that all that pertains to the separative self is cvil, that all that pertains to the larger Self, his truer self, is proportionately good. He must choose, for “the cycle of
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