Section 6

64
Applying these principles in every direction the student will begin to realize how man is handicapped by ignorance, and how great is the part played by knowledge in human evolution. Men drift because they do not know; they are helpless because they are"^ blind ; the man who would finish his course more rapidly than will the common mass of men, who would leave the slothful crowd behind "as the racer leaves the hack," he needs wisdom as well as love, knowledge as well as devotion. There is no need for him to wear out slowly the links of chains forged long ago ; he can file them swiftly through, and be rid of them as effectively as though they slowly rusted away to set him free.
The Ceasing of Karma.
Karma brings us ever back to rebirth, binds us to the wheel of births and deaths. Good Karma drags us back as relentlessly as bad, and the chain which is wrought out of our virtues holds as firmly and as closely as that forged from our vices. How then shall the weaving of the chain be put an end to, since man must think and feel as long as he lives, and thoughts and feelings are ever generating Karma? The answer to this is the great lesson of the Bhagavad Gitd, the lesson taught to the warrior prince. Neither to hermit nor to student was that lesson given, but to the warrior striving for victory, the prince im- mersed in the duties of his state.
65
Not in action but in desire, not in action but in attachment to its fruits, lies the binding force of action. An action is performed with desire to enjoy its fruits, a course is adopted with desire to obtain its results; the Soul is expectant and Nature must reply to it, it has demanded and Nature must reward. To every cause is bound its effect, to every action its fruit, and desire is the cord that links them together, the thread that runs between. If this could be burned up the connection would cease, and when all the bonds of the heart are broken the Soul is free. Karma can then no longer hold it; Karma can then no longer bind it; the wheel of cause and effect may continue to turn, but the Soul has become the Liberated Life.
Without attachment, constantly perform action which is duty, for, performing action without attachment, man verily reacheth the Supreme.*
To perform this Karma- Yoga — Yoga of action — as it is called, man must perform every action merely as duty, doing all in harmony with the Law. Seeking to conform to the Law on any plane of being on which he is busied, he aims at becoming a force working with the Divine Will for evolution, and yields a per- fect obedience in every phase of his activity. Thus all his actions partake of the nature of sacrifice, and are offered for the turning of the Wheel of the Law, not for any fruit that they may bring; the action is performed as duty, the fruit is joyfully given for the * Bhagavad GUd, iii. 19.
66
helping of men ; he has no concern with it, it belongs to the Law, and to the Law he leaves it for distribu- tion.
Whose works are all free from the moulding of desire, whose actions are burned up by the fire of wisdom, he is called a Sage by the spiritually wise.
Having abandoned all attachment to the fruit of action, always content, seeking refuge in none, although doing actions he is not doing anything.
Free from desire, his thoughts controlled by the Self, having abandoned all attachment, performing action by the body alone, he doth not commit sin.
Content with whatsoever he receiveth, free from the pairs of opposites, without envy, balanced in success and failure, though he hath acted he is not bound;
For with attachment dead, harmonious, his thoughts estab- lished in wisdom, his works sacrifices, all his action melts away.*
Body and mind work out their full activities ; with the body all bodily action is performed, with the mind all mental; but the Self remains serene, un- troubled, lending not of its eternal essence to forge the chains of time. Right action is never neglected, but is faithfully performed to the limit of the available powers, renunciation of attachment to the fruit not implying any sloth or carelessness in acting:
As the ignorant act from attachment to action, O Bharata, so should the wise act without attachment, desiring the main- tenance of mankind.
Let no wise man unsettle the mind of ignorant people at- tached to action; but acting in harmony (with Me) let him render all action attractive, t
* Ibid., iv. 19, 23. t IMd., iii. as, 26.
67
The man who ' reaches this state of *' inaction in action, ' ' has learned the secret of the ceasing of Kar- ma ; he destro3^s by knowledge the action he has gen- erated in the past, he burns up the action of the present by devotion. Then it is that he attains the state spoken of by ''John the Divine" in the Revela- tion, in which the man goeth no more out of the Tem- ple. For the Soul goes out of the Temple many and many a time into the plains of life, but the time ar- rives when he becomes a pillar, "a pillar in the Tem- ple of my God ; ' ' that Temple is the universe of liber- ated Souls, and only those who are bound to nothing for themselves can be bound to everyone in the name of the One Life.
These bonds of desire then, of personal desire, nay of individual desire; must be broken. We can see how the breaking will begin; and here comes in a mistake which many young students are apt to fall in- to, a mistake so natural and easy that it is constantly occurring. We do not break the "bonds of the heart" by trying to kill the heart. We do not break the bonds of desire by trying to turn ourselves into stones or pieces of metal unable to feel. The disciple be- comes more sensitive, and not less so, as he nears his liberation, he becomes more tender and not more hard; for the perfect "disciple who is as the Master" is the one who answers to every thrill in the outside universe, who is touched by and responds to every- thing, who feels and answers to everything, who just because he desires nothing for himself is able to give
68
everything to all. Such a one cannot be held by Kar- ma, he forges no bonds to bind the Soul. As the dis- ciple becomes more and more a channel of Divine Life to the world, he askes nothing save to be a channel, with wider and wider bed along which the great Life may flow: his only wish is that he may become a larger vessel, with less of obstacle in himself to hinder the outward pouring of the Life ; working for nothing save to be of service, that is the life of discipleship, in which the bonds that bind are broken.
But there is one bond that breaks not ever, the bond of that real unity which is no bond, for it can- not be distinguished as separate, that which unites the One to the All, the disciple to the Master, the Master to His disciples ; the Divine Life which draws us ever onwards and upwards, but binds us not to the wheel of birth and death. We are drawn back to earth — first by desire for what we enjoy there, then by higher and higher desires which still have earth for their region of fulfillment— for spiritual know- ledge, spiritual growth, spiritual devotion. What is it, when all is accomplished, that still binds the Masters to the world of men? Not anything that the world can offer Them. There is no knowledge on earth They have not; there is no power on earth that They wield not; there is no further experience that might enrich Their lives; there is nothing that the world can give Them that can draw Them back to birth. And yet They come, because a Divine com- pulsion that is from within and not from without
69
sends Them to the earth — to help Their brethren, to labor century after century, millennium after millen- nium, for the joy and service that make Their love and peace ineffable, with nothing that the earth can give Them, save the joy of seeing other Souls growing into Their likeness, beginning to share with them the conscious life of God.
Collective Karma.
The gathering together of Souls into groups, form- ing families, castes, nations, races, introduces a new element of plexity into Karmic results, and it is here that room is found for what are called ''accidents," as well as for the adjustments continually being made by the Lords of Karma. It appears that while noth- ing can befall a man that is not "in his Karma" as an individual, advantage may be taken of, say, a national or a seismic catastrophe to enable him to work off a piece of bad Karma which would not normally liave fallen into the life-span through which he is passing; it appears — I can only speak hereon specu- latively, not having definite knowledge on this point — as though sudden death could not strike off a man's body unless he owed such a death to the Law, no mat- ter into what whirl of catastrophic disaster he may be hurled; he would be what is called "miraculously preserved" amid the death and ruin that swept away his neighbors, and emerge unharmed from tempest or fiery outbreak. But if he owed a life, and were drawn
70
by his national or family Karma within the area of such a disturbance, then, although such sudden death had not been woven into his Linga Shirira for that special life, no active interference might be made for his preservation; special care would be taken of him afterwards that he might not suffer unduly from his sudden snatching out of earth-life, but he would be allowed to pay his debt on the arising of such an op- portunity, brought within his reach by the wider sweep of the Law, by the collective Karma that in- volves him.
Similarly, benefits may accrue to him by this in- direct action of the Law, as when he belongs to a nation that is enjoying the fruit of some good national Karma; and he may thus receive some debt owed to him by Nature, the payment of which would not have fallen within his present lot had only his individual Karma been concerned.
A man's birth in a particular nation is influenced by certain general principles of evolution as well as by his immediate characteristics. The Soul in its slow development has not only to pass through the seven Root Races of a globe (I deal with the normal evolution of humanity), but also through the sub- races. This necessity imposes certain conditions, to which the individual Karma must adapt itself, and a nation belonging to the sub-race through which the Soul has to pass will offer the area within which the more special conditions needed must be found. Where long series of incarnations have been followed it has
71
been found that some individuals progress from sub- race to sub-race very regularly, whereas others are more erratic, taking repeated incarnations perhaps in one sub-race. Within the limits of the sub-race, the individual characteristics of the man will draw him towards one nation or another, and we may notice dominant national characteristics re-emerging on the stage of history en hloc after the normal interval of fifteen hundred years; thus crowds of Romans rein- carnate as Englishmen, the enterprising, colonizing, conquering, imperial instincts re-appearing as nation- al attributes. A man in whom such national char- acteristics were strongly marked, and whose time for rebirth had come, would be drafted into the English nation by his Karma, and would then share the na- tional destiny for good or for evil, so far as that des- tiny affected the fate of an individual.
The family tie is naturally of a more personal char- acter than is the national, and those who weave bonds of close affection in one life tend to be drawn together again as members of the same family. Sometimes these ties recur very persistently life after life, and the destinies of two individuals are very intimately interwoven in successive incarnations. Sometimes, in consequence of the different lengths of the Devachans necessitated by differences of intellectual and spiritual activity during the earth-lives spent together — mem- bers of a family may be scattered and may not meet again until after several incarnations. Speaking gen- erally, the more close the tie in the higher regions of
72
life, the greater the likelihood of rebirth in a family group. Here again the Karma of the individual is af- fected by the inter-linked Karmas of his family, and he may enjoy or suffer through these in a way not in- herent in his own life-Karma, and so receive or pay Karmic debts, out-of-date, as we may say. So far as the personality is concerned, this seems to bring with it a certain balancing up or compensation in Kama- Loka and Devachan, in order that complete justice may be done even to the fleeting personality.
The working out in detail of collective Karma would carry us far beyond the limits of such an ele- mentary work as the present and far beyond the knowledge of the writer; only these fragmentary hints can at present be offered to the student. For precise understanding, a long study of individual cases would be necessary, traced through many thou- sands of years. Speculation on these matters is idle ; it is patient observation that is needed.
There is, however, one other aspect of collective Karma on which some word may fitly be said: the relation between men's thoughts and deeds and the aspects of external nature. On this obscure subject Mme. Blavatsky has the following:
Following Plato, Aristotle explained that the term arolxeia [elements] was understood only as meaning the incorporal principles placed at each of the four great divisions of our cosmical world, to supervise them. Thus, no more than Christ- ians do Pagans adore and ivorship the Elements and the (imag- inary) cardinal points, but the ''Gods" that respectively rule over them. For the Church, there are two kinds of Sidereal
73
Beings, Angels and Devils. For the Kabalist and Occultist there is one class, and neither Occultist nor Kabalist makes any difference between the **Eectors of Light" and the "Eectores Tenebrarum, " or Cosmocratores, whom the Eoman Church imagines and discovers in the *' Rectors of Light," as soon as any one of them is called by another name than the one she addresses him by. It is not the Rector, or Maharajah, who punishes or rewards, with or without ' ' God 's ' ' permission or order, but man himself — his deeds, or Karma, attracting in- dividually and collectively (as in the case of whole nations sometimes) every kind of evil and calamity. We produce Causes, and these awaken the corresponding powers in the Sidereal World, which are magnetically and irresistibly attracted to — and react upon — those who produce such causes; whether such persons are practically the evildoers, or simply '^ thinkers" who brood mischief. For thought is matter, we are taught by Modern Science ; and ' ' every particle of the existing matter must be a register of all that has happened, ' ' as Messrs. Jevons and Babbage in their Principles of Science tell the profane. Modern Science is every day drawn more into the maelstrom of Occultism; unconsciously, no doubt, still very sensibly.
' ' Thought is matter ' ' : not, of course, however, in the sense of the German Materialist Moleschott, who assures us that "thought is the movement of matter" — a statement of almost unparalleled absurdity. Mental states and bodily states are utterly contrasted as such. But that does not affect the posi- tion that every thought, in addition to its physical accompani- ment (brain-change), exhibits an objective — though to us su- persensuously objective — aspect on the astral plane.*
It seems that when men generate a large number of malignant Thought-forms of a destructive charac- ter, and when these congregate in huge masses on the Astral Plane, their energy may be, and is precipitated on the physical plane, stirring up wars, revolutions and social disturbances and upheavals of every kind, * The Secret Doctrine, i. 14d, 149.
74
falling as collective Karma on their progenitors and effecting widespread ruin. Thus then collectively al- so Man is the master of his destiny, and his world is moulded by his creative action.
Epidemics of crime and disease, cycles of accidents, have a similar explanation. Thought-Forms of anger aid in the perpetration of a murder ; these Elementals are nourished by the crime, and the results of the crime — the hatred and the revengeful thoughts of those who loved the victim, the fierce resentment of the criminal, his baffled fury when violently sent out of the world — still further reinforce their host with many malignant forms; these again form the astral plane impel an evil man to fresh crime, and again the circle of new impulses is trodden, and we have an epidemic of violent deeds. Diseases spread, and the thoughts of fear which follow their progress act di- rectly as strengtheners of the power of the disease; magnetic disturbances are set up and propagated, and re-act on the magnetic spheres of people within the affected area. In every direction, in endless fash- ions, do men's evil thoughts play havoc, as he who should have been a divine co-builder in the Universe uses his creative power to destroy.