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THE KARMA DOCTRINE....
Vol. XXVI, 2003
accumulated a great number of merits from performing good deeds receive the opportunity to serve God's Saint, but those who have a few merits do not.12
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When there is the predominance of favorable Time, it diminishes the power of the impure karmas of the jivas. Yet, when a terrible famine strikes, every one suffers; or when there is a horrendous war, hundreds of thousands of people are killed at once. In these cases, it is the intense power of unfavourable Time that overcomes the force of favourable karmas of the jivas. So, when the influence of intense Time prevails, karmas have no influence."
Spiritual discipline (adhyatmika sädhanā), as admitted by all the holy saints of all the nations, really begins only when the meritorious deeds performed in previous births mature for activation. India and a half of the human race today accepts karma and reincarnation as established facts of nature, since the former implies the law of nature, rather that of cause and effect, ensuring that every action generates its results, and it connects itself to the doer of the actions; it is known in physics as the law of equilibrium; in jurisprudence as the law of justice which metes out rewards and punishments, and in ethics as the principle of right and wrong conduct. In Indian context, the word karma denotes the invisible astral effect generated by an action, rather than the action proper. Thus, the right actions are those that create good karma, and the bad ones those that create bad karma. This is expressed pithily in the well-known Sanskrit saying: 'Paropakāraḥ punyaya, papaya para-pidanam /
Emerson, the famous physicist, has shown that the law of compensation operates in every field of human thought and endeavour, moral and spiritual as well as the physical. This is but the same as the law of karma as has been found, since thousands of years, by the ancient Vedic seers of India, as actively prevailing in the world of animate beings, both static and mobile, also in the things seemingly inanimate but really highly mobile. This law of karma demand that every living being, every creature, from primordial protoplasm to human brain, from amoebae to archangel, must receive the exact balance of accounts, the precise compensation for each and every act. This is karma. The well-known law of physics is that action and reaction are equal, but opposite in directions. This is the law that brings back upon the doer, in spite of himself, the legitimate results of his conduct. He must gather the fruit of his own actions. That reaction he cannot escape. So action and reaction are the dual forms of karma.
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Animals and human beings comprise one big family with a complicated but inseparable history and an inseparable karma. Automatically, and by
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