Karma and Rebirth

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

Page 81

KARMA AND REBIRTH APPLIED to pay. Yet none, so the Wisdom teaches, is ever faced with more than he can bear. Whether or not we can grin, we must bear it, and it is folly to attempt to run away. Yet thousands believe that by moving their bodies across the world they will escape from Karma. Others, equally foolish, believe that they can escape from “ the whips and scorns of time" by suicide. Only the body dies ; the Karma remains, with the added burden of self-murder and the weakling will that feared to pay. Others, as all psychologists know,' escape ' into neuroses, often attaining the degree of madness, believing that in their own minds they will escape from the harshness of the world without; others again, like the proverbial ostrich, seek to escape by pretending that, as they cannot see the doom approaching, it is not there. Their efforts are vain. As a gentleman pays his debts, so a Karmically educated gentleman invites the bill and pays it willingly.
Here, however, a curious minor law asserts itself. It seems to be that he who deliberately takes himself in hand, and sets about the task of his own self-development, calls down on himself a larger share of 'suspended' Karma that otherwise he would have had to endure. The price of entry on the Path with open eyes, it seems, is an immediate testing, self-demanded; and many a student, finding the reward of incipient effort to be, not as he hoped a sense of spiritual well-being but a host of trials and obstacles, gives up the attempt, and joins once more the army of drifters who, with no higher goal than personal happiness, form the bulk of mankind. Those who survive these apparent testings find themselves at the entrance to a Path whose end is self-Enlightenment, and on this path, “the first step is to live to benefit mankind”. In a message to the American Thcosophists in 1889 H. P. Blavatsky quoted a Master of the Wisdom as saying, The Universe groans under the weight of Karma, and none other than self-sacrificial Karma relieves it. How many of you have helped humanity to carry its smallest burden, that you should all regard your
74