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Law of Karma
birth and birth. Birth and death are links in the process of evolution. After death, the soul may stay in some intermediary plane or in some imiginary constructions. It may also pass through physical, vital and mental world. But it stays there temporarily. “It does not, however, always remain on carth, but alternates between earth and other worlds; celestial and infernal, where it exhausts its accumulated store of merit or demerit due to the enactment of sin or virtue and then returns to the earth and to some kind of terrestrial body, sometimes human, sometimes animal, sometimes even vegetable.":47
The new birth and its fortune are determined automatically by soul's actions. If the sum-total of past actions was good, the birth takes place in the higher form and the life becomes successful and fortunate. If the sum-total of past actions is bad, the birth takes place in the lower form and the life becomes unsuccessful and unfortunate. If our past actions were mixed, then our life becomes a mixture of happiness and suffering and of good luck and misfortune. Here we can quote an old story as ! )!] by Sri Aurobindo : There was a rich man who had violently deprived another of his substance. The victim is born as the son of the oppressor and in the delirium of a fatal illness reveals that he has obliged his old tyrant and present father to spend on him and so lose the monetary equivalent of the property, robbed minus a certain sum, but that sum must be paid now, otherwise the debt is absolved and as the last pice is expended, the reborn soul departs, for its sole object in taking birth is satisfied, accounts squared and the spirit of Karma content."d8 This is the ethical side of rebirth.
Rebirth is meaningless without Karma, and Karma has no meaning without rebirth. If we believe that the soul is repeatedly reborn in the body, we must also believe that there is a link between the life that preceded and the life that follows. Past acts have its effects in the present and future will be the result of the present and this is the spiritual essence of the Law of Karma. To deny it would be a chaotic condition.
The necessity of rebirth becomes obvious if we look at it outwardly. The energy and process which constitute the most
