Religion and Karma

The absence of the doctrine of karma from ordinary religious teaching causes a grave discrepancy: the difficulty of reconciling our conviction of the justice of the higher law with the facts of life as we find them. This difficulty is responsible for innumerable mental conflicts, sermons and essays, disputes, schisms, secessions, creations of new sects, and lapses into "infidelity." It is practically the whole of religious thought in a nutshell, for nearly all questions turn on this difficulty in some form or other. It is, in short, the conflict between our intuition (the divine voice from within) and our intellect, and arises from the fact that the latter is not developed proportionately but is hampered by ignorance and fallacies. There is no real conflict between intuition and intellect, between faith and reason; the conflict is between true faith and false reason. The justice of the law ought to be not only felt in the heart but perceived by the mind, and it would be so if we only had a comprehensible science of human life.

We all know that on the theory that man lives only one earth-life, the good go unrewarded and the wicked prosper; that people suffer experiences for which there seems neither rhyme nor reason; and that the Deity seems to be totally indifferent. Some have given up religion altogether and profess not to believe in the existence of Deity, and others have sought various ways of explaining the discrepancy; while still others dismiss it as far as possible from their minds. Some say that we cannot expect to understand "God's ways and purposes, but that he knows what is best." Some try to prove that the good are rewarded interiorly in some way and the wicked are punished in their consciences. Some say that all inequalities will be adjusted in heaven. But at best these explanations are very inadequate, and show the sublime power of faith against the obstacles of ignorance and superstition.

We have been told again and again that it is "presumptuous to reason about God's purposes and that our poor human intelligence cannot hope to understand them." Nevertheless, knowledge and science have progressed, and we slowly recognize that the laws of nature are but the voice of Deity and that we need not be afraid of finding out anything we ought not to know, for Deity's wisdom is infinite, surpassing all human knowledge. Our progress in science has enabled us to understand life better than we did before. In the same way we should surely endeavor to understand its laws in the moral world and to extend our knowledge as far as possible; and we ought to realize that the more we find out, the more it will exalt our conception of Deity. True science has nothing impious or irreverent in it. Our intellects are God-given and we should use them for what they are meant for -- for sounding the truth.

When we find that ordinary theories of human life are altogether at variance with the true religion of our souls -- with the divine revelation from within -- we ought to realize that there is something the matter with those theories. And when we find that the doctrine of karma, and its twin-doctrine of reincarnation, explain these discrepancies and reconcile the facts of nature with our faith in divine justice, we ought to treat that doctrine as worthy of consideration.

The idea that the inequalities of this life are adjusted in heaven is more consoling than logical. Under such a theory our life on earth becomes meaningless, being an utterly insignificant episode in the midst of an eternity of spiritual existence. We are sent here to learn lessons and snatched away before we have hardly begun, leaving behind many unfulfilled hopes, unachieved purposes, uncorrected mistakes and future lessons. There is nothing more glaringly inconsistent than this notion of a single unique earth-life lost in an infinite ocean of soul-life.

Though it is consoling to read the incomparable words that tell us that "Thy sun shall no more go down" and "God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes," these words acquire a sublimer meaning when understood as the promise of spiritual liberation and of the blessed state of the perfected man, than when taken as the description of a heaven to which the few elect shall go to be eternally recompensed for what they may have done during the few short years of earth-life.

Karma means that there is a perfect relation between cause and effect in the sphere of human acts and experiences, as in the sphere of natural science; in other words, that perfect justice rules in human affairs, and that experience is proportioned to merit. No one can possibly suffer or enjoy consequences which he has not merited by his own actions; and everything which we reap, that have we also sown. Our intuition and sense of the fitness of things tells us that the power which rules must be just. The alternative is to suppose that that power is capricious, a supposition which is equally untenable whether we conceive of that power as Deity or as any "scientific" equivalent for Deity. Theologians and scientists agree in attributing to their respective deities perfect justice and impartiality, the contrary hypothesis affording no basis for philosophy. Thus, whether ruled by God, or by some equally mysterious and all-powerful agency called chance or destiny, we are equally in the hands of law, just, impartial, unerring,

But how to show the just workings of this omnipresent law -- that is the difficulty. Difficult, however, only so long as we have an untrue theory of life; for the false must necessarily be out of key with the true.

The acceptance of reincarnation is an essential condition for the understanding of karma. For the period occupied by a single lifetime is so short in comparison with the career of the soul, which is the real man, that it does not suffice for a tracing out of the sequence of cause and effect. Many of the experiences which we undergo in this life are the result of things we have done in our past lives, and many of the things we are doing now will not take effect until a future life. For, as a day is but a single link in the chain of our life from birth to death, so is that life itself but a link in the greater chain of the soul's life.

The difficulty of reconciling our innate conviction that the universe is governed by just and impartial law, with the facts of life as they appear to our limited view, has been the great stumbling block of philosophy and religious speculation. Deeply religious natures have been content to trust and rest in the faith that all will be made clear in a future life. But more thoughtful minds have sought a more satisfactory explanation. Ingenious as some of these explanations are, the attempt is useless without reincarnation; for it is simply not true that justice is done within the space of a single life. But the knowledge of the fact of reincarnation makes all simple. Reincarnation and karma complete and explain each other. On the one hand, the principle of causation demands that we shall live again on earth, for we create during one life causes which cannot be worked out in any other way except in another earth-life. A man dies full of unrealized longings for certain experiences peculiar to life on earth and these intense desires will draw him back to the field of their fruition. He goes away with many things begun that must be finished and many purposes planned but not carried out. His life is only the preface to a necessary sequel -- one chapter out of many in the great story. On the other hand, reincarnation explains karma. The two truths are mutually consistent; and further, they are consistent with the other facts of experience. Thus does the truth vindicate itself by its consistency and wholeness.

The notion that perfect justice rules the world is one from which we cannot escape. It may be called a primary axiom of philosophy. No philosophy can be made on the opposite hypothesis, for the statement that all is chaos and haphazard is nonsense. We may accept such a statement, if we like, but we cannot build a philosophy on it, for all reasoning proceeds on rules and all thought has definite laws. We cannot do a sum on the hypothesis that 2 and 2 make 4 or 5 or 100 fortuitously. Thus, whether we call the source of eternal law, God, nature or eternal justice, or the conservation of energy, we are equally compelled to postulate that it is law and not chaos.

Ever since H. P. Blavatsky asserted as one of the fundamental principles of the Theosophical Society the existence of the spiritual powers of man, there has been in our modern world a rapid tendency to get the Christian religion out of its old dogmatic grooves and back to the original lines of its founder, to enlarge our conceptions both of God and of man. We used to hear that the authority of churches and of authoritative interpretations of the scriptures were the last court of appeal, and that any science which contradicted these was wrong and pernicious. Now the cry is rather, "Let us study life and nature in every possible way and endeavor to comprehend God's plan. No knowledge which science can give us can possibly transcend the limits of that knowledge which is man's right, nor can any study of nature lead us away from its divine author." Formerly we used to hear that the promptings of our own inner consciousness were unreliable and even sinful; but now we tend rather to recognize them as among the many channels through which the eternal reveals itself.

Let us then, in the spirit of this larger view of religion, try to understand eternal justice better. It is the theological God and the various narrow conceptions of Deity that have so confused our ideas as to the relation between Deity and man and given rise to the contrariety between science and faith. The idea of the eternal has been belittled by attributing to it all kinds of human limitations and infirmities. As said by H. P. Blavatsky:

INQUIRER. Do you believe in God?

THEOSOPHIST. That depends upon what you mean by the term.

INQUIRER. I mean the God of the Christians, the Father of Jesus, and the Creator: the Biblical God of Moses, in short.

THEOSOPHIST. In such a God we do not believe. We reject the idea of a personal, or an extracosmic and anthropomorphic God, who is but the gigantic shadow of man, and not even of man at his best. The God of theology, we say -- and prove it -- is a bundle of contradictions and a logical impossibility.

INQUIRER. Then you are atheists?

THEOSOPHIST. Not that we know of, and not unless the epithet of "Atheist" is to be applied to all those who disbelieve in an anthropomorphic God. We believe in a Universal Divine Principle, the root of ALL, from which all proceeds, and within which all shall be absorbed at the end of the great cycle of Being. . . .

Our DEITY is neither in a paradise, nor in a particular tree, building or mountain; it is everywhere, in every atom of the visible as of the invisible Cosmos; in, over, and around every invisible atom and divisible molecule; for IT is the mysterious power of evolution and involution, the omnipresent, omnipotent, and even omniscient creative potentiality. -- The Key to Theosophy, chapter 5

It is clear that the God of the universe can not be limited by those human attributes of personality which so limit man's knowledge and power. Such a conception of Deity is inconsistent with the notion of omnipotence. Yet there are those who, in their superficial reasoning, imagine that by depriving Deity of personality, we thereby reduce him. But there is no question of reducing the Deity to the level of those beings which have not yet developed personality; that would be mere nature- or fetish-worship. Deity is beyond and above personality.

.....con't