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CHAPTER II
THE NATURE OF KARMA
When the proposition-"Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John viii. 32) was propounded in the Bible, people failed to understand the nature of freedom which the knowledge of truth was to carry to their hearts. It was their ignorance of the nature of spiritual bondage which prevented them from grasping the true sense of the messianic observation. They looked upon freedom from only the political point of view, and had never thought of the true or spiritual freedom with which religion mainly concerns itself. They had then to be told that freedom signified einancipation from the bondage of sin, but it is not clear whether they fully comprehended the messianic speech even then; for even today it is difficult to believe that the full significance of the terms freedom and bondage has been adequately grasped by the humanity at large.
It is obvious that there is no concrete substance or thing to correspond to the word sin when used as a noun; the word expresses a pure mental abstraction, and conveys the idea of wrong-doing. The bondage of sin, thus, is clearly the thraldom of actions, z.e., karmus (actions or deeds), which is to be shaken off in order to bring the state of natural freedom of the soul into manifestation.
It must be bome in mind that there can be no bondage to pure mental abstractions, or purely wordy concepts; the word signifies some kind of real fetters, not, indeed, consisting of chains of iron, but of a very subtle and invisible material. It is well to know that nothing but force, in some form or other, is capable of holding things in the condition of slavery, and that no kind of force can be conceived apart from a substance or material of some sort. The bondage of sin must, then, be a bondage of matter, and the obtainment of freedom must consequently imply the destruction of bonds and the removal of the particles of foreign matter from the constitution of the soul.
