Karma and Rebirth

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

Page 84

THE ENDING OF KARMA AND REBIRTH the means to liberation. Thus karma-reincarnation is alike the machinery of the illusion and the escapement from it.1
But if the nature of man is determined by his user of the Law, so that in a very real sense he is his Karma, and if every act and thought is adding to the total of cause-effects, how will it end? According to the Wisdom the answer to this question, as to most others of its kind, is a paradox, that none may know the ending until he has reached the end. Only he who has exhausted' his Karma may utterly know the Law. How, then, is the unenlightened mortal to proceed? The answer seems to be, Christian terminology, with faith and works. There must be faith in the Law that the due performance of all duty will in some mysterious way remove one from the sway of Karma, and faith is not, as a humorist put it, believing what you know to be untrue, but knowing with a partially awakened intuition the truth of a law which the intellect has not as yet been able to grasp. In this sense only is faith of value, as an inner conviction that where the finger of the guide is pointing there is a way, the right Way to the goal desired. But faith is valueless unless it be expressed in works. We in the West are an action-loving people, and even in the more introverted Indian mind there is an equal necessity for the knowledge within to appear in acts without, even as the Universe itself becomes itself' by manifesting outwardly.
But action, right or wrong, alike produces fresh results. Where, then, is the end, if even the due performance of all duty brings us back again to reap the harvest, still the victim of our own endeavour, still on the Wheel of Rebirth, bound on the cycle of our own necessity? The answer is twofold and yet one. By removing the self which causes and is its Karma, and by acting so dispassionately, so 'resultlessly', that every act is without reaction, and therefore needs no actor to suffer the consequences, good or evil, of the act.
1 Mysticism of East and West, Loftus Hare.
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