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Laws and Patterns of Experience
Defining karma, fate, and destiny
In karma we find a key to many puzzles of contemporary history. It is a doctrine which warns us that we have prepared the cocoon of our present lot largely by the thoughts and deeds spun out of ourselves during bygone earth-lives and the present re-embodiment. Now the doctrine is as applicable to the history of whole peoples as to the history of single individuals. Its corollary is that our characters and minds are in travail through the ages; some are old with the rich experience of a hoary past but most are young, unwise, and ungoverned. Its lesson is that the changing tides of public fate and private fortune are not meaningless. On the contrary, they invite our philosophical consideration so that we may understand how neglected duties or positive wrong-doing are the hidden root of our troubles. Those who understand the principle of karma aright, who do not misunderstand it as being an external independent fate but see it as a force originally set in motion by our actions, understand also the significant part played by suffering in the lives of men. It is educative rather than retributive. Merited punishment is really a crude form of education. Thoughtful men learn lessons from their sorrows and resolve not to commit the same sin or the same error a second time. The unexpected events which happen to us apparently without cause or connection in our conduct constitute fate. The tendencies by whose influences and the circumstances by whose compulsion we act the way we do, constitute necessity. The results of those actions constitute Karma (recompense).(P) What a higher power has decreed must come to pass. But what a man has made for himself he can modify or unmake. The first is fate, the second destiny. The one comes from outside his personal ego, the other from his own faults. The evolutionary will of his soul is part of the nature of things but the consequences of his own actions remain, however slightly, within his own control.(P) Karma's will could not prevail in one special part of our life and not in any other parts, nor in one special event of our life and not in the others. It could not be here but not there, in the past but not now. Nor, going even farther still, could it confine itself only to major items and not to minor ones. It must be ever present or never present at all. If it puts more destiny into the happenings we experience than lets the Westerner feel comfortable, we must remember that other facet of truth, the creative and godlike intelligence in our deeper humanity and the measure of freedom which accompanies it.(P) Whereas fate (in the original and Greek sense of the word) is decreed by whatever Powers there be, karma is the result of our own doing.(P) The correct meaning of the word "karma" is willed action through body, speech, and mind. It does not include the results of this action, especially those which produce or influence rebirth. Such inclusion has come into popular concepts, but shows a loose use of the term. Karma is cause set going by the will, not effect at all. The phrase "Law of Recompense" is therefore not satisfactory and a better one is needed.(P) In the universal drama every man is playing the role required of him. Neither the drama nor the role depends upon his personal choice. The very circumstances which instigate his decisions or prompt his actions are written into the script in advance. Even the attempt to change his part or the refusal to continue in it is also in it. No one will deny that the past is now absolutely fixed and completely unalterable. All the karmic tendencies are not present in consciousness at the same time; some have yet to pass from the potential to the kinetic condition. If we could really know what was going to happen to us, it would certainly be important to us. But who really knows? The future is in God's hands. Every creature comes to earth with a certain potential of life-force which, ordinarily, must exhaust itself before it leaves. The same destiny which brings two persons together, also parts them. Since in the end the entire universe is destined to turn to ashes, what future is there for the human species? The workings of the law of recompense are carried out by a means as beyond human comprehension as are most of the other workings of the World-Mind behind it. They are not thought out step by step but appear suddenly by a single magical stroke just as the result of a problem presented to an electronic calculator suddenly appears on its dial. The law of recompense may possibly be better named the law of reflection. This is because every act is reflected back to its doer, every thought is reflected back to its source, as if by a vast cosmic mirror. Perhaps the idea of recompense carries too strong a moral implication and hence too limited a meaning to be the correct equivalent for the word "karma." A doctrine which has the power to deter men from wickedness or to stimulate them to virtue, not by fear of punishment or hope of reward but by convincing them that the Good is to be followed for its own sake, is valuable both to society and the individual. It is not that some mysterious superphysical angel, deva, or god intervenes personally and manipulates karma as a puppet performer pulls the wires of his suspended figures, but that karma is part of the equilibrium of the universe, bringing a come-back, recording a pressure, allowing each reaction to come about by its own momentum. If life is a drama put on the stage of this planet for us (and others) to play in, then karma is the audience, the witness of it all. Quite logically it is taught that some sort of a balance is struck between the two kinds of a person's karma, so that the bad may be mitigated or even outdone, but equally the good may be reduced or even offset. Events happening to us are not necessarily karmic in the sense that we earned them. They can also have a non-karmic source. No physical doing on our part brought them on, but they are what we need at that point for character or capacity, development or correction. Both kinds are fated. In that sense they are God's will. Human instruments are used to cause suffering to others and they do cause it out of human viciousness. Both statements are correct. They are complementary, not contradictory as we may think. Destiny naturally looks around for a vicious person when she wants to do harm, or a foolish one who can be led emotionally by the nose for a time, or an impulsive one who may do in a moment what he regrets for years. She will not waste time looking for ultra-wise and ultra-good people when she wants to do harm. The destiny of man is whatever happens to him, be it self-earned or ordained by a higher power. The fate of a man is the special kind of destiny which is so ordained and hence beyond his control. The victory of the spiritual nature in man is foreordained and unavoidable, but the hour of that victory no man knoweth. If he could see his present path and goal more clearly, he could foresee his future ones more correctly. Man's destiny always exists potentially and only waits the propitious moment when it may rightly reveal itself. Destiny follows tendency. What we are makes us go in a certain direction. Philosophy sees the end from the beginning. This tenet is not offered as consolation to the afflicted; indeed it would be a poor panacea for them. It is offered because we see no other that appears to possess its truth, harsh though that be. Ouspensky's theory of eternal recurrence is both true and false. We repeat ourselves and our circumstances but always on a different level. It is a spiral not a circle. An event or a period in life corresponds to a previous one but is not identical with it. The future is analogous with the past but does not duplicate it. The spiral does not bring you back identically the same self or the same work: it brings you to what corresponds to it on a different level. There is an inescapable balance between our principal thoughts and deeds and our principal life experiences. And this balance shows itself where it is least expected--in the moral sphere. Our wrong-doing produces sorrows, not only for others but principally for ourselves. Our good action produces a rebound of good fortune. We may not escape from the operation of this subtle law of moral responsibility. Causation is the top of a wheel whose bottom is consequence. This is just as true collectively as individually. When, for instance, a nation comes to believe that the conception of right and wrong is a false one, it marks itself down for destruction. We have seen this in our time in the case of the German nation. The moral law is not a figment of man's imagination. It is a divinely established reality. It would be an error to separate karma from the universal power and to treat it as an independent power. This error accounts for the difficulty in understanding its role in bringing the cosmos into manifestations. Treat karma rather as an aspect of God and as inseparable from God, or as one of the ways in which God's presence manifests itself. Karma, being made by human will, is subject to human modification. Fate, being decreed by the higher power, is not. The general fact of death is an example of fate, and in this sense the poet James Shirley's line: "There is no armour against Fate," is true. But the particular fact of death, its time and manner, may be alterable. If it be true that the course of life is predetermined, this does not necessarily mean that it is arbitrarily predetermined. No--the good and bad qualities of your character, the development or lack of development of your capacities, and the decisions made in passing or by reason are the real determinants of your life. There is an inescapable equation between conduct and consequence, between thought and environment, between character and destiny. And this is karma, the law of creative equivalence. It is because this tenet has been so often ill-understood that it has taken extravagant or erroneous forms and consequently ridicule has been cast upon it. In philosophical tradition, the sword has been the symbol of God's Law of Recompense and Justice. The law of consequences is not primarily an ethical law: more properly it may be said to have an ethical side. Destiny is not working blindly and unintelligently, arbitrarily and antagonistically against us as most of us are likely to believe when enduring through a cycle of unfavourable karma. On the contrary, it is Absolute Wisdom itself in operation. The processes of imagining are endless and incessant. It is inherent in mind that one idea should give rise to another because of the dynamic character of mind itself. Karma is the law that links the two. The experience of hearing inner music is an interesting and significant happening. It is rare when it happens upon meeting, being more apt to occur at parting--usually with someone who is very dear, whom Destiny has decreed cannot stay with us. Things act according to their nature. The World Idea records these actions in a secret way and reflects back their appropriate results. And as with things so with persons. Each of us sings a note out into the universe, and the universe answers us in the same key. Whether he looks under a microscope at the lowest form of life or whether he looks deep within his own consciousness, this one law prevails unbrokenly. Where misfortune seems to have visited a man through no contributory cause of his own, where he does not seem to have deserved in any way the poor cards which have been dealt out to him by destiny, he has no other alternative than to ascribe it to the deeds and thoughts of a former existence on earth, or to the necessary education of his inner nature by his higher self. Every man is really on trial. Life itself is his judge with the working of karma, the ignorance or wisdom of his fellows, the voice of his conscience, and the capacities or incapacities of his personality. As he looks back over all the events of his outer life, they seem like pages in a book he has been reading, already written out, with the events yet to happen being the unread pages. Or he is only a character in the book's story, seemingly acting out of his own choice but really and quite unconsciously working out the author's choice. Buddha's statement of the karmic law, as made in the Dhammapada, is brief, lucid, firm, and confident. We are inescapably confronted with its truth as if it were a granite-hard mountain--a fact, fixed and undeniable. The Greeks of antiquity believed in three Fates (The Moirai, or spinners): three old women, sometimes thought of as past, present, and future, or the holder of the distaff, the one who pulls the thread of destiny, and the one who cuts it. The early Romans believed in the birth-fairy who writes down the child's destiny when it is born. Life owes you only what you have given it. Karma is the king who rules this earth. Life has no real purpose for its own essential self; it has just gone on and on. Man lives and lives, but the iron law of Compensation guards it, producing effects from Cause, good or bad, and adjusting the good or bad acts of man to the consequences. The action which completes a thought is thrown back at him by Nature in the guise of karma. In this view he carries the responsibility for himself. He cannot turn it over to any human institution such as a church, or to any other human being such as a guru or saviour. Karma is an impersonal force. It is not to be swayed by prayers as a Personal God is supposed to be. When rendering an account of good or bad fortune, people usually forget to include the ethical values which were acquired from each experience. But when a man has attained some understanding of such matters, he will involuntarily bring the truth of personal responsibility into this light, not merely as an intellectual dogma but as a heartfelt conviction. He has to foresee the consequences not only of an action but also of an attitude or an outlook. He may deceive himself or others, but he cannot deceive the power of karma. Before it, he must stand responsible for his acts and receive their due effects. There is no other way he can go. Those who will not learn from correct reflection about their experiences will have to learn from kicks delivered by the fresh karma they make. Each birth makes fresh links in that chain of consequences which is karma. From our study of the law of karma, we may deduce that a man must grow up, become adult, and learn to be responsible for his actions, decisions, emotions, and even thoughts. It is he who is accountable for which ideas, especially which impulses, he accepts and which he lets pass or pushes away. Whoever ignores these higher laws and especially flouts the law of karma is opening a volcano under him. Karma puts a certain responsibility upon every man alike--upon the philosopher no less than the primitive. The man who imagines that he can go through life and manage his various affairs in independence of any alleged higher laws is following an illusion. Somewhere or at some time his awakening is inevitable. A life that is not directed towards this higher goal, a mind that is entirely uninterested in becoming a participant in the Overself consciousness--these failures will silently censure a man both during his bodily tenancy and his post-mortem existence. Men act out of self-interest; but through ignorance of the higher laws, especially that of karma, they may act against that interest. Many groups in many lands demand justice from their governments, with varying definitions of the word. Apparently the claims are not easily satisfied for there are more today than ever before. Some individual persons go farther and demand justice from God. In a world where mischief and misfortune are so active they too seem only partly satisfied, if that. Here the notion of karma may seem fairer than governments are, but it is tied to other births in which these persons have lost interest! It is largely their own doing which makes men suffer their own karma. But this is no reason why we should stand aside and leave them to their destiny. Each of us carries a certain amount of responsibility for himself: none of us can justly renounce it on the plea that fate governs, directs, and arranges all things. Let us not imagine that we are merely puppets bewitched hither and thither into pleasure and pain by an unseen showman. If men ascribe to the overwhelming nature of fate the miserable weakness of their own inertia, they worsen their bad situation. If men complain that life brings them its worst, they ought to pause and consider whether they have prepared themselves inwardly to receive anything better than the worst. Too many people complain that they have been unfairly singled out by fate from others for unwarranted troubles, that they have had more misfortunes than they can bear, and that the good life they have led has availed nothing against such cosmic ill will. The fact is not that they have been specially harassed but that they have convinced themselves they have been harassed! When we think of all the possible permutations and combinations of destiny and compare them with what actually happens, and note its relation to our inner being, condition, fault, virtue, or need, a line that is more than merely coincidental can be traced. We are seldom fair to fate. When events do not happen in the way we would like them to, we refuse to accept the idea that it is our own fault, so we blame our harsh fate. But when they do happen favourably, we personally take the credit for bringing them about! It is quite possible to trace the world's troubles to any cause--from eating certain food to the presence of certain people--which human fancy picks upon. For there is nothing which is not in some way and however remotely connected with some other thing. All that is needed is some imaginative faculty and some logical facility. Too many people are praying to be delivered from the consequences of their errors or weaknesses, too few are trying to set themselves free from the faults themselves. If the prayers of the larger group are answered, the weaknesses still remain and the same consequences are bound to recur again. If the efforts of the smaller group are successful, they will be delivered forever. I am well aware that there are "occultists" aplenty who can furnish full and detailed descriptions of the operations of karma, who know its Alpha and Omega, who can trace its activity among men as easily as a heraldist will trace your pedigree. They have led many into their camps with their glib "knowledge," and they shall lead many more. But they are only tendering the counterfeit coin of mere opinion for the rare currency of factual knowledge. A man need not sit all night under a peepul tree to get the revelation of this truth about the law of recompense. He can get it sitting in a professional office or walking in the marketplace, if he will watch what happens with his eyes and put two and two together with his brain. This blaming of others for one's misfortunes or even for one's misdeeds is, for the quester, a device whereby the ego directs attention away from its own guilt and thus maintains its hold upon the heart and the mind. For the ordinary man, it is merely the emotional expression of spiritual ignorance. Everyone has to feel and think and act and speak. But everyone does not perceive the consequences, near or remote, swift or slow, of these operations.Whoever chooses a wrong aim or an unworthy desire must endure the consequences of his choice. In every evil act, its painful recoil lies hidden. The process is a cumulative one. Each act begets a further one in the same downward direction. Each departure from righteousness makes return more difficult.
To bemoan and bewail one's lot helplessly on the plea of inexorable fate is to pronounce oneself a slave. Whence came this fate? It was not arbitrarily forced on one. The very person who complains was its maker. He therefore can become its un-maker! If the cause of his troubles is left unremoved, it will in time lead to new effects and simply add more misery to his existing burden. All his so-called escapes from them will be illusory, so long as this cause is still operative. There is a spiritual penalty to pay for every intellectual misbehaviour and every moral misconduct, whether there be a worldly penalty or not. For the one, there is the failure to know truth; for the other, there is the failure to find happiness. Man is responsible for his own acts. The belief that any Saviour can suffer for his sins or any priest remit them, is incorrect. He may resent and resist the law, but it requires him ultimately to go forward alone. To ascribe the results of man's negligence to the operation of God's will is blasphemy. To blame the consequences of human stupidity, inertia, and indiscipline upon divine decrees is nonsense. Those who say they deem it unjust to be forced to accept the painful consequences of deeds somebody else has done, who consider the lack of remembrance between the two earthly incarnations sufficient excuse for their lack of belief in the doctrine of re-embodiment, utter reasonable objections. If men knew that the law of compensation was no less operative than the law of their country, they would unquestionably become more careful. People should be warned that cause and effect rule in the moral realm no less than in the scientific realm. They should be trained from childhood to take this principle into their calculation. They should be made to feel responsible for setting causes into action that invite suffering or attract trouble or lead to frustration. When men come to understand that the law of compensation is not less real than the law of gravitation, they will profit immensely. It is not only a misfortune for which he is to be pitied, when a man endures trouble of his own making, but also a fault for which he is to be blamed. Where a man will not put himself under his own discipline, life eventually compels him to accept its sterner one. Where he will not look his defects in the face, sufferings that result from them will eventually remind him of their existence. Sins of omission are just as important karmically as sins of commission. What we ought to have done but did not do counts also as a karma-maker. The same man who is responsible for our mistakes is likewise responsible for our misfortunes. If the teaching of Karma (the law of recompense) imbues men with the belief that it is not all the same whether they behave well or ill, if it arouses their sense of moral responsibility, then none can deny its practical value. He who discovers these moral truths and reveals them to his benighted fellows is not only their educator but also their benefactor. For he saves those who heed him from much avoidable suffering. There is a justice in human affairs which only impersonal eyes can see, only impartial minds can trace. Once a man really takes the law of consequences to heart, he will not willingly or knowingly injure another man. And this is so primarily because he will not want to injure himself. Modern man needs this awakening to the fact that he is responsible for his fate and must not seek to saddle it on a whimsical God or blind chance. And so far as he has brought evil upon himself he should acquiesce in the justice of it, confess his sins, retract his deeds, and reorient his conduct. When we thoroughly imbibe this great truth, when we humbly acknowledge that all human life is under the sway of the law of consequences, we begin to make a necessity of virtue. When considered from the long-range karmic point of view, each of us creates his own world and atmosphere. Therefore, we have no one but ourselves to thank or blame for our comfort or wretchedness. It should be remembered, too, that present correct or incorrect use of free will is right now deciding the conditions and circumstances of lives to come. It is absurd to treat the idea of karma as if it were some outlandish Oriental fancy. It is simply the law which makes each man responsible for his own actions and which puts him into the position of having to accept the results which flow from them. We may call it the law of self-responsibility. The fact that it is allied with the theory of reincarnation does not invalidate it, for we may see it at work in our own present incarnation quite often. The attempt to evade karma may itself be part of the karma. Foolish actions damage a man's life and may damage other men's lives, too. Wicked actions claim him as their first victim for he will suffer morally at some time in life or death, and physically if the karma justifies it. Since it is demonstrably true that it is the degree to which events affect your thoughts or move your feelings that they have power over you, it must also be true that to gain control over thought and feeling is to become pleasurably independent of fortune. If you let your life be managed entirely by the hazards and chances of outside happenings instead of by your own intelligence, you imperil it.Our outward miseries are symbols and symptoms of our inner failures. For every self-created suffering and every self-accepted evil is an avoidable one. It may not depend entirely upon yourself how far events can hurt you but it does depend largely upon yourself. If you had the strength to crush your egoism by a single blow, and the insight to penetrate the screen of a long series of causes and effects, you would discover that half your external troubles derive from faults and weaknesses of internal character. Every time you manifest the lower attributes of your internal character you invite their reflection in external events. Your anger, envy, and resentment will, if strong enough and sustained enough, be followed eventually by troubles, enmities, frictions, losses, and disappointments.
Yes, if you wish to understand the first secret of fate, you should understand that its decrees are not issued by a power outside you, but by your own deepest self.
Will the West ever admit the notion of karma to its mind? I feel assured that it will do so. This is because it will have to admit the idea of rebirth which, once accepted, introduces karma as its twin. Do they notice the sequence of cause and effect in the lives of others, as well as in their own? His own actions will in turn lead to someone else's further actions. It is because of this pressure of their limitations that men are driven sooner or later to seek the inner life. Men will moan about their unhappy past, and ache because they cannot undo it; but they forget to undo the unhappy future which they are now busy making. The weapons which wound us today were forged by our own selves yesterday. "Know thou also that the woes of men are the work of their own hands: Miserable are they, because they see not and hear not the good that is very nigh them; and The way of escape from evil, few there be that understand it." --Pythagoras: Golden Verses So long as men love only the ephemeral and lose themselves in it, so long will they continue to suffer from that portion of their troubles which is avoidable. This was a chief element in the Buddha's message twenty-five hundred years ago and it is still as true today. We reject the fatalism which would preordain every happening in such a total way that there is nothing left to personal initiative, nothing more that the individual man can do about it. We accept the existence of a line of connection between actions and their ultimate effects in one's life, even if those effects are deferred to later reincarnations. Nobody succeeds in extinguishing karma merely because he intellectually denies its existence, as the votaries of some cults do. If, however, they first faced up to their karma, dealt with it and used it for self-cultivation and self-development, and then only recognized its illusoriness from the ultimate standpoint, their attitude would be a correct one. Indeed, their attempt to deny karma prematurely shows a disposition to rebel against the divine wisdom, a short-sighted and selfish seeking of momentary convenience at the cost of permanent neglect of the duty to grow spiritually.(P) If we look at men in the mass, we must believe in the doctrine of fatalism. It applies to them. They are compelled by their environments, they struggle like animals to survive precisely because they are not too far removed from the animal kingdom which was the field of their previous reincarnational activity. They react like automatons under a dead weight of karma, move like puppets out of the blind universal instincts of nature. But this is not the end of the story. It is indeed only its beginning. For here and there a man emerges from the herd who is becoming an individual, creatively making himself into a fully human being. For him each day is a fresh experience, each experience is unique, each tomorrow no longer the completely inevitable and quite foreseeable inheritance of all its yesterdays. From being enslaved by animality and fatality, he is becoming free in full humanity and creativity.(P) The old Japanese method of cultivating rice yields larger crops on poorer soil than the old Indian method. It was introduced and publicized by the Indian Republic's Ministry of Agriculture with such favourable results that it has become unnecessary to import the annual balance required to meet the population's growing needs. It is estimated that cheaper and more plentiful rice will within a few years reduce or remove the traditional hunger of this vast country. The people have hitherto religiously interpreted their starved existence as the will of God. The episode may teach them the philosophic truth that they are here to become co-workers with God by developing their intelligence, knowledge, and abilities. By improving themselves, they are able to improve the environment. The supine fatalism saddled on them by a mistaught religion and a miscomprehended mysticism may yield at last to the correct kind of fatalism taught by their own highest philosophy. Such an enlightened and qualified fatalism need not lead to a paralysis of the will and passivity of the brain. It emphatically does not lament that man can do nothing to change his lot for the better nor, worse, leave him without even the desire to change it. No--the submission to fate which a doctrine teaches is not less enlightened and qualified than itself. Its effect upon those who not only believe in it but also understand it, is towards the striking of a balance between humble resignation and determined resistance, towards the correct appraisal of all situations so that the truly inevitable and the personally alterable are seen for what they are. It yields to God's will but does not therefore deny the existence of man's. Can the puniness of man pit itself against the immensity of the universe? This is the attitude behind Fatalism. The believer in such rigid fatalism finds himself trapped; there is nothing he can do about a situation except let it take its own course. Whichever way he turns he feels that he is caught. No choice that he makes is really his; it is always an imposed one. He cannot act of his own free will. The belief that he can do nothing to control his future is paralysing to a man. Why try to become a better person if the matter is already totally arranged, if the same result will come about whether he acts well or evilly? Philosophy refuses to acquiesce in a wrong or foolish deed merely because it has happened. Therefore it cannot acquiesce in it even if and when the happening is asserted to be God's will. Philosophy teaches the truth of destiny but not the half-error of fatalism. This utter dependence on destiny, this refusal to lift arm or limb to change one's circumstances, this complete acquiescence in every miserable event that time and others may bring us--this is not fatalism, but foolishness. The fatalist who believes his future is irrevocably fixed, loses ambition, initiative, and other valuable spurs to human effort. The malignant spirit of fatalism cannot be exorcised by a word or by a sentence, but when religion consistently entreats men to come up higher, to live out the fullness of their being, it is certain to have a wholesome influence upon those who hear. The materialist doctrine of "determinism" is a mixture of truth and falsity. It rightly points to the way our outer lives are determined by our outer circumstances and events. It wrongly deprives us of the freedom to react as we choose to those circumstances and events. It is quite untrue where moral choice is concerned. That the course of our actions and decisions has been unalterably fixed for us by an external power is manifestly an exaggeration. If it were really so, it would be useless for prophets to preach their religion and for philosophers to teach their system. When the belief in fatalism is pushed to the Oriental extreme, the believer assumes no more responsibility for his life, his misdeeds, his health, his errors, and his fortunes. All these have been decided long beforehand by a power completely outside his control; it is not for him to question the decisions or complain against the actions of this power. No man need resign himself to utter helplessness in the face of fate. Let him try to change what seems inevitable, and his very trying may be also fated! In other words, what is destined to happen, paradoxically comes to pass through the exercise of our free will. The choice between right and wrong can only exist where there is freedom of will to make it. Man is neither responsible nor free, declares materialistic determinism. If he is or becomes a criminal, environment is to blame, heredity is to blame, society is to blame--but not he. Spiritual determinism, karma (recompense), does not give him so wide a license to commit crime. It asserts that he was and is in part the author of his own character, consequently of his own destiny. How can a man hold at one and the same time a belief in the existence of destiny and a sense of personal responsibility? Philosophy reconciles the two, solves the dilemma, and makes this position quite reasonable. Three ways of looking at the world, out of many: (1) young optimism, such as that of Christian Science, New Thought, etc., which solves problems by ignoring them or by dismissing them as imaginary; (2) individual optimism which believes that man can conquer all difficulties by supreme self-exertion of will; and (3) the fatalistic acceptance of all difficulties as unavoidable and unmodifiable. A freedom which permits everything to man is quite deceptive. A fatalism which denies everything to him is quite depressive. He can accept neither the arrogant Occidental attitude which believes itself to be the master of life nor the hopeless Oriental attitude which believes itself to be the victim of life. The one overvalues man's creativeness, the other undervalues it. The one believes it can banish all human ills, the other regards them as irremediable. That the future already exists in time does not necessarily mean that we must become fatalists, that it cannot be changed, and that escape from its confinement is impossible. That the retribution of guilt is as much a haphazard thing as the reward of goodness--this is a logical conclusion from the doctrine of materialism, as dangerous to the individual who believes it as to the society in which he lives. The rigid fatalism which ignores the fact that what we do now is contributing towards the making of the future and which resigns itself to endure the effects of what it has made in the past--that rigid kind of fatalism which is mesmerized by those effects and makes no effort at all--has no place whatever in philosophy or in the philosophical understanding of the law of karma. The idea that everything is already preordained and that nothing we can do will alter the destiny is accepted with a melancholy finality by millions of Orientals, but resisted by millions of Occidentals. There is a large and decided factor between the original meaning of karma and that which has come to be assigned to it through the efflux of time. Once I rented a house in India and had to take the gardener into my employ with it. After a few days he asked my secretary to approach me to give him an increase in wages. As his former pay was by Western standards pitiably small, I instantly agreed to grant an increase. But as a student of human nature I took the opportunity to send for him and pretend that it could not be granted. He blandly raised his eyes to the sky and muttered: "It is your karma to sit comfortably inside the house but mine to toil fatiguingly outside it in the grounds. If the Lord had willed that you should give me an increase in wages you would surely have done so. As it is, my karma is bad and yours is good. There is nothing to be done but to accept it." He went back to his work, scraping the ground with a shaped piece of wood as his ancestors had scraped it two thousand years earlier. I saw that piece of wood as a symbol of inertia and unprogressiveness which the misunderstanding of karma had stamped upon his character. For whereas karma has come to mean that a man's life is predestined and patterned for him all the way from conception before birth to cremation after death, its original meaning was simply that a man could not escape from the consequences of his habitual thoughts and acts. It meant that success or failure in life lay largely in his own hands, that satisfaction or sorrow followed inevitably upon the heels of virtue or wrong-doing. There is certainly a distinction to be drawn between determinism and fate. Those who have never been determinists, in the materialistic sense of the word, showed intuitive powers even in the earlier stages of the Quest of Truth. If by determinism it is meant that something outside of oneself is the cause that determines one's actions, this can be only partly true. For the thought and energy behind them must come out of oneself.Karma's role in human development
That which compels us to act in a certain way is in part the pressure of environment and in part the suggestion of our own past. Sometimes one is stronger, sometimes the other is stronger. But the root of the whole problem lies in our mind. Its proper cultivation frees us largely from both compulsions. If you want to change your karma, begin by changing your attitude: first, toward outer events, people, things; second toward yourself. The centuries-old debate between those who believe that all happenings are predetermined and those who believe they are the mere play of chance, can be resolved only by understanding that both predetermination and chance take their rise out of the divine Void. When he fails to admit this first blunder, the way is opened for more blunders linked with it and possibly, emerging as a larger consequence of it. His efforts to modify the effects of evil karma (recompense) must, where he can possibly trace any of them to causes set going in the present life, include remorse for wrongs done to others, as well as for harm done to himself. If the feeling of remorse does not come naturally at first, it may do so after several endeavours to reconsider his wrong actions from an impersonal standpoint. Constant reflection upon the major sins and errors of his past in the right way, setting the picture of his actual behaviour against the picture of how he ought to have behaved, may in time generate a deep sense of sorrow and regret, whose intensity will help to purge his character and improve his conduct. If, by such frequent and impartial retrospection, the lessons of past misbehaviour have been thoroughly learnt, there is the further likelihood that the Overself's grace may wipe out the record of evil karma waiting to be suffered, or at least modify it. What he has brought upon himself may come to an end of itself if he finds out what positive quality he needs to develop in his attitude toward it to replace the negative one. We learn in time to accept everything that happens to us as the will of the Supreme Father, and hence never grumble or complain about misfortunes. The karma made in past births is like a shot from a gun; we cannot recall it and must endure the consequences. But once we have surrendered ourself to the Spiritual Preceptor, he guides our hands and prevents us from shooting out further bad karma. Although karma is clinched by what a man does in fact, it is built up also by what he long thinks and strongly feels. If a man will not repent his ill-deeds, will not make restitution where he has wronged others, and will not try to change his thoughts and doings for the better, then his bad karma (recompense) must run its inevitable course. It would be an error to confuse this serene peacefulness, this calm acceptance of life with mere stagnation or unfeeling sluggishness. The latter makes no effort to improve circumstances or to progress personally whereas the former is ready to do so at any time. The latter is stupefied by its situation, whereas the former patiently endures the necessities of its situation only so far and so long as it is unable to change them. He will naturally try to smooth his destiny but he will not do so at the expense of his character. If there be no other way to keep his ideals, then he will be prepared to endure and suffer. Only when a man can judge his own fortunes with impersonality and without complaint, can he develop the capacity to understand the mystery of his destiny and why it has taken one particular course rather than another. Although philosophy considers all attitudes to be relative, it makes use of particular attitudes as and when necessary. Because it recognizes the factor of destiny and tries to detect the trend of events and to adjust itself to that trend, at certain periods it is optimistic, at other periods pessimistic. It knows there are times when the greatest efforts will still go badly. This is why the philosopher disciplines himself to endure with equanimity misfortunes which are such that none can avoid them, but on the other hand he seeks to overcome with resolution those which need to be fought against. When a man finds that a condition is beyond his power to change, he may better endure it by holding the faith that all things and all conditions are ultimately ordered by the Universal Mind, and that they will work out for the best in the end. When he becomes a philosopher, he will become strong enough to bear his fate with submission, if he finds that he cannot or should not modify it. Then neither grief nor distress, neither other people's evil-doing nor their evil-speaking will force him into emotional self-betrayal of the inner peace which has been won with so much effort. We must learn to let go, to renounce voluntarily that which destiny is determined to take away from us. Such an acceptance is the only way to find peace and the only effective path to lasting happiness. We must cease to regard our individual possessions and relationships as set for all time. The man who can live without troubles has yet to be found, but the man who can live without worry about them may be found wherever philosophy is found. There is no capacity of mind which will always and easily give the foresight of consequences; but there is a capacity which will give an insight into truths which, when applied to practical affairs, guarantees the best possible consequences. Before a man can submit to his destiny he needs to know what it is. Because something has happened to him in the past and is again happening in the present, must it necessarily happen in the future? He will then see that the ego is not his true self, that the evil and error which it spawns are the avoidable causes of avoidable distresses. The same illness whose enforced inactivity brings boredom or despair to one man, may bring literary discoveries or spiritual awakenings to another man. It may quickly dull the first one's mind but directly stimulate the second one's to reflect about life, suffering, and death. It takes time, and plenty of it, before the new ideas and ideals become established in the mind, the feelings, and the actions. In the making of our future, a mixed result comes from the mixed and contradictory character of the thoughts feelings and desires we habitually hold. Therefore our very fears may contribute their quota in bringing about what we do not desire. Here lies one advantage of positive affirmations and clear-cut decisions in our attitude toward the future. When we discover how small is the measure of freedom we possess, the first reaction is one of stunned hopelessness; the second, which may come months later, is of weary surrender to it all. Let him place his trust in the universal laws and turn his face towards the sun. It is a valuable exercise for him to find out just where his own responsibility for his troubles begins, to separate what is really an outward projection of his inward defects from what is being saddled upon him by an untraceable destiny or a formidable environment. The unpaid mistakes and debts from former lives are now here to haunt us. If we want release from them, we must either get release from our egos or else set up counteracting thoughts and deeds of an opposite character and in overwhelming amount. The measure of this counter-influence will be the measure of the sincerity of his repentance, of the refusal to take any alibis from himself, of the effort to change his mode of thought, and of the practical steps he voluntarily takes to undo the past wrongs done to others. A wiser attitude carries its outward problems into the inward realm of character, to intelligence and capacity, and deals with them there. By watching our thought life, keeping out negatives, and cultivating positive ideas, full of trust in the higher laws, we actually start processes that eventually bring improvement to the outer life. He is wise who sifts, screens, and absorbs the bygone years, taking only their lessons, counsels, warnings, and encouragements. In this way, he frees himself from much of it. He must use his combined reason and intuition, that is, intelligence, to discern the handiwork of karma in the pattern of some of the external events of his own life. Repentance for wrong-doing may not commute its karma but will at least provide the indispensable preliminary condition for such a commuting. Life is largely what we make it by our way of thinking about it. How important then to remove error from the mind and to put truth in its place! How different would our fortunes be if we recognized this need and always acted upon it! It is a Jain belief that bad karma can be cancelled by practising austerity, penance, and self-mortification. The harsher the asceticism the quicker will be this process of destroying the results of an evil past. There is a certain logic in this belief, for by suffering this self-imposed pain one is also suffering the bad karma, albeit in a concentrated form, and not evading it. He may have to learn how to accommodate what he cannot control or avoid. This is resignation, the very name--Islam--of the religion given to the world by Muhammed. But if he has to accept certain things, this is not to say that their accommodation implies his approval of them. It means rather that he ceases to grumble or worry about them. He is content to leave them, these evil-doers, to the judgement of time, knowing that the power of karma is inseparable from it. Your karma is being speeded up; everything is being accelerated to a certain extent. This is necessary for a period to bring quicker progress through forcing different parts of mind and character into activity.Think how much has been accomplished since you took up these studies. Look back to your state of mind before that.
Only when he sees that he himself is the prime cause of his own troubles, and that other people have been not more than the secondary cause, does he see aright. Where it is possible to undo the past, he will try to do so, but where it is not he will remember the lessons but forget the episodes. To state the doctrine is one thing; to apply it to practical problems is another. Even deliberate inaction does not escape the making of a karmic consequence. It contains a hidden decision not to act and is therefore a form of action! The law of recompense is not nullified nor proved untrue by the objector's proffered evidence of hard ruthless individuals who rose to influence and affluence over the crushed lives of other persons. The happiness or well-being of such individuals cannot be properly judged by their bank account alone or their social position alone. Look also into the condition of their physical health, of their mental health, of their conscience in the dream state, of their domestic and family relations. Look, too, into their next reincarnation. Then, and only then, can the law's presence or absence be rightly judged.(P) We humans have to bear the decrees of Allah as best we may. Forces out of his own reincarnatory past come up and push him towards certain decisions, actions, and attitudes. Men being what they are, the results of their actions must be what they will be, too. One of the greatest misunderstandings of karma by its believers, and perhaps one of the chief hindrances to its acceptance by others, is the idea that it produces its effects only after very long periods of time. What you do today will come back to you in a future incarnation several centuries later; what you experience today is the result of what you did hundreds or even thousands of years ago; what you reap here in this twentieth century is the fruit of what you sowed there in Rome in the second century--such are the common notions about reincarnation and karma. But we have only to open our eyes and look around us to see that everywhere men are getting now the results of what they have done in this same incarnation. Karma waits for a proper time before calling in its accounts; its settlements being periodic and grouped together explains why good and bad fortune so often run in apparent cycles. Our intellect acknowledges the justness of this law, but our heart craves for the mitigation of its harshness. We pray for the forgiveness of our sins, the remission of their penalties. The Day of Judgement is not only on the other side of the grave. It may be here, on this side, and now, in this month. A man may break these higher laws through his own personal weakness or moral failure, or through deliberate rebellion and refusal. Quite unwittingly, the criminal, the evil-doer, or the sadist is trying to punish himself. Soon or late he will succeed in doing so, and in proportion to the extent that he hurts others. When the cause is put too far from the effect, as in some beliefs about karma, the moral effectiveness is weakened. Karma is really neutral although to the human observer its operations seem to be rewarding or punitive. All through history we see men inflicting suffering upon other men. This shows their ignorance of the higher laws, for by their own sin they punish themselves. Not to harm others is as much in one's own interest as theirs. For if one does harm them he sets up causes which lead in the end by a mysterious cosmic working to a consequential suffering. Cosmic justice is then self-provoked. The working of karma may often seem a grim affair, dragging in the past when he would prefer to forget it--whether it include unpleasant things done or pleasant things not done--permitting no appeal and offering no pardon. The good merits of conduct in former lives bring pleasant benefits in the present one. Retribution comes, even if it comes so late as to be deferred to another lifetime on this earth. Some ancients thought it came down too heavily, especially when the sin was only one of pride or folly, and complained to the gods. Trotsky made a point of being merciless to the enemy during Russia's Civil War: it is not surprising that his own murder was a merciless affair. If in the end--and sometimes well before--karma catches up with a man, it is not all painful; the term need not fill him with foreboding. For the good he has thought and done brings a good come-back too. There are times when the karma of an action comes back to a man with the speed and precision of a boomerang. The working of karma traces complicated effects back to complicated causes. The web of karma tightens around a man as the lives increase with the centuries or thins away as the ego gets more and more detached. The brutal egotist who ruthlessly knocks others aside on his way upward will himself receive harsh treatment when the time is decreed. Most men do not learn the practical wisdom of life the easier way. They do not heed the true seers, the far-seeing sages, the inspired prophets. There is a harder way, which they choose because it appeals to both their animal instincts and their selfish purposes. This is why they must be tutored by necessity--that is to say, by harsh circumstances of their own making, by karma. Man rules this planet but the gods rule man. Take them into account in your mortal reckonings. It will be asked: Why should the innocent suffer because of the activities of wicked men? Their innocence belongs to the present; we do not know of their past evil deeds and misdeeds! The errors and disorders in his consciousness reflect themselves eventually in his general fortunes and outward conditions. History shows that there are implacable forces around man which can elevate him in a day or cast him down in a night. Events and environments are attracted to man partly according to what he is and does (individual karma), partly according to what he needs and seeks (evolution), and partly according to what the society, race, or nation of which he is a member is, does, needs, and seeks (collective karma). The law of compensation does not measure its rewards and penalties according to the little scale of little human minds. It is sheer nonsense habitually to interpret karma (recompense) as something which is operative only in remote reincarnations. Actually it is mostly operative within the same lifetime of a man or nation. The working of karma from former lives is mostly in evidence at birth and during infancy, childhood, and adolescence. The working of karma made in the present life is mostly in evidence after the maturity of manhood has been reached. For some errors we have to pay with the misfortune of a few years. But for others we have to pay with the misfortune of a lifetime. An injury done to a Sage who incarnates compassion may easily, if not repented and amended, fall into the second class. A man's sins are the outcome of the limitations of his experience, faculties, and knowledge. Retribution must one day overtake the wrong-doer. His sins and mistakes will pile up until one day the karmic hour strikes and they come down on him with a crash. All failure to wake up to responsibilities constitutes an ethical error for which a man must bear the consequence eventually. Thus the failure to do a right deed in a certain situation may be a karmic sin, although very much less so than doing a wrong deed. Every infraction of the great law of compensation on its moral side is cumulative, piles one eventual affliction upon another into a heap, which is one reason why we often hear the complaint that afflictions are not in just ratio with sins. The working of recompense (a piece of karma) also affects those who are closely associated with the person whose own acts or thoughts originated it. The course of karma is not rigidly predetermined. It may have alternative patterns. If an evil deed does not find retribution in some other way, then it will always find retribution in the form of disease. This must not be foolishly misinterpreted to mean that all disease is the result of evil karma. If we live in an unhealthy manner, the disease which is thereby generated is the karma of our present ignorance or bodily imprudence, not necessarily the expiation of moral faults committed in other lives. When at length he will be called to account by karma, he will be judged not by the certificates of character which others bestow upon him, whether good or bad, but by the motives felt in his heart, the attitudes held in his mind, and the deeds done by his hands. These doctrines assert that those unlucky wretches are merely paying for their misdeeds in former bodies. Why, if that is correct, should they suffer for errors which they cannot possibly remember and which might have been committed by others, for all they know? I can understand and appreciate the philosophical arguments for the doctrine of rebirth, but I cannot understand the justice of punishing men for misdeeds of which they are completely unaware. Such is a reasonable criticism. We invite the future through our aspirations. We get the consequences of our thinking, feeling, and doing. Nature has no favouritism but gives us our deserts. Any man who artfully hurts another in the end hurts himself. For he denies the principle of love in his relationships, a principle that is part of the higher laws set for his development, and must pay the penalty of his denial. The karma of a man cannot be measured by the world's yardsticks. Wisdom is worth a fortune at any time and goodness is a solid protection. Those who live for the immediate moment, the immediate enjoyment, may not perceive this; but those who wait for the ultimate result, the ultimate event, know its truth. Indeed, how could it be otherwise in a Universe where infinite intelligence and infinite benevolence have made the laws which make the destiny of mankind? It is a mistake to regard the karma of a deed as something that appears later in time, or comes back to its doer soon or long afterwards. It is not a sequence to follow after what was done before. On the contrary, the karma is simultaneous with the deed itself. A grievous marriage situation may itself change completely for the better or else a second marriage may prove a happier one, if there is sufficient improvement in thinking to affect the karma involved. If men behave like wild beasts of prey, violent and greedy; if they show an utter lack of conscience, we may write them down as doomed to suffer themselves one day the painful consequences of their misdeeds. A callous egotism is a bad-paying investment. For it means that in time of need, there will be none to help; in the hour of distress, none to console. What we give out we get back. The war showed in the plainest possible way that the cost of wrong-doing is painful retribution. For we lived to see Hitler destroyed by his own hand, his Nazi hierarchy with its loathsome deviltry destroyed by all humanity's hands, and his deluded followers eating the sour fruits of their own planting. The karma of a thought-habit or a deed becomes effective only when it reaches maturity. The time this takes is variable. Karma expresses itself through events which may seem to be accidents. But they are so only on the surface. The moral fallacy which leads a man to think that he can build his own happiness out of the misery of other men, can be shattered only by a knowledge of the truth of karma. If you throw a pebble into the sea, its ripples go on and on, until they are exhausted. In the same way, there comes a time when the accumulated effects of doing or thinking lets loose a ripple of karmic come-back. The consequences of several years of wrong doing and wrong thinking may crowd into a few months. In the final test, they may show by their own words and actions during the next decade whether they honestly wish to enter the path of reconciliation. Their last yet first hope is to purify themselves by discipline and to make restitution--either physical or verbal--to those whom they have wronged. His situation in the world is highly paradoxical, at once comic and tragic: comic because he knows that he is not so sure of himself as he appears to others, tragic because he does not know if adversity's sudden blows will miss him and strike others. The prophet becomes the butt of the vulgar and violent mob, but in heaven the mob itself is gibbeted and hung. So justice works. Each period of a life has its own evaluation, and opinions differ about them. Some say the early years are best, others the middle years, and so on. But the truth is that it depends on a person's karma more than on his age as to which shall prove best for him and from which he shall extract the most satisfaction. Failure to act at the right time in the right way may bring its own karmic consequences. Although the higher laws bring man the kind of experience--pleasurable or painful--which is so just, so right, and so fitting to his true deserts and need, he is mostly unable to see this, being blinded by his ego or his ignorance. Here are facts which are vital to our conduct of life, primal to our search for happiness, yet which he leaves ignored or, worse, deliberately sneers at. Karma is one of them. It is a fact in many people's lives that some of the troubles which befall them have no origin in the karma of former lives but belong solely to causes started in the present life. The spiritually ignorant are to a large extent makers of their own misery. Whoever fails to take advantage, by his co-operation and effort, of the right time for beginning an enterprise or the right opportunity that fortune thrusts in his path, will never again be able to do so to the same extent, if at all--for neither he nor circumstance can remain the same. Every prophet knew and taught that virtue rewards itself as sin punishes itself. For the lucky few, life is pleasure spotted by suffering. For the unlucky many, it is suffering relieved by pleasure. For the rare sage, it is ever-flowing serenity. If his evolutionary need should require it, he will be harassed by troubles to make him less attached to the world, or by sickness to make him less attached to the body. It is then not so much a matter of receiving self-earned destiny as of satisfying that need. Both coincide usually but not always and not necessarily. Nor does this happen with the ordinary man so much as it does with the questing man, for the latter has asked or prayed for speedier development. The wisdom which he has the chance to gain from his sufferings should lead not only to some self-renunciation, but also to some self-resignation to destiny's will when it reveals itself as inexorable. Once he brings himself to this submission, time will then more quickly heal up its own wounds and inner peace will more easily be obtained. So destiny shows itself also as a teacher. There are times when, for a man's inner evolution, his ego has to be crushed, and he may then find himself bent under harsh events or melancholy reflections. Fate is fashioned in such a way that it gives people at times what they want, so that they shall eventually, through this experience, learn to evaluate it more justly. They have then the opportunity to see the adverse side of the experience, which desire too often prevents them from seeing. Fate is also fashioned to go into reverse and block the fulfilment of the wishes of other people. Through this inhibition they may have the chance to learn that we are not here for a narrow, egoistic satisfaction alone, but also, and primarily, to fulfil the larger purposes of life as formed in the World-Idea. The Law is relentless but it is flexible: it adjusts punishment to a man's evolutionary grade. The sinner who knows more and who sins with more awareness of what he is doing, has to suffer more. When man knows the results of his actions, he has the chance to know the value of those ideas which led to these actions. In other words, experience will bring responsibility, if he allows it to, and that will bring development. To look upon the encounters with suffering, misfortune, mistakes, and disappointment as the principal offering of each reincarnation is one view, and especially the Indian view. To see in them the requitals and rewards of the Goddess of Justice is another. The subconscious connection between wrongs done and sufferings incurred leads him to feel more uncertain and more uncomfortable the more he engages in such acts. Everyone has periods of pleasurable delusion when he affixes a rosy label on life but the awakening to what lies on its other side must follow sooner or later. Only after both experiences is he able to form a fair judgement upon it. The philosopher however does not want to wait for this tutoring by experience alone. By a deliberate detachment from every feeling likely to falsify the picture of life, he puts himself in a position to see it as it truly is. The spiritual inertia which keeps most men uninterested in the quest is something which they will not seek to overcome by their own initiative. Life therefore must do this for them. Its chief method is to afflict them with pain, loss, disappointment, sickness, and death. But such afflictions are under karma and not arbitrary, are intermittent and not continuous, are inlaid with joys and not overwhelming. Therefore their result is slow to appear. If this is the way his life has to be, if this is how the cards of his destiny have fallen, and if the inner voice bids him accept it after the outer voice has led him into unavailing attempts to alter it, then there must be some definite reason for the situation. Let him search for this reason. As a man flings his cigarette suddenly upon the floor and stamps his heel savagely upon it until the red spark is extinguished, so too life flings some of us to the ground and stamps upon our ardours and passions until they are dead. Life will bring him, if he is teachable, through the tutelage of bitter griefs and ardent raptures to learn the value of serenity. But if he is not, then the great oscillations of experience will tantalize him until the end. Life is not trying to make people either happy or unhappy. It is trying to make them understand. Their happiness or unhappiness come as by-products of their success or failure in understanding. The modern struggle for existence is nothing new. It is the same sky and the same world of pre-historic times. The scenes have been changed only in details; the actors, men and women, remain the same but they are now more experienced. Incessant struggle has ever been the lot of the human race. No human existence is without its troubles at some period or without its frictions at another. The first arises out of the element of destiny which surrounds human freedom, the second out of the element of egoism which surrounds human relations. Sorrow, loss, and pain may be unwelcome as evils but they are at the same time opportunities to practise the philosophic attitude and to train the will. There is peace behind the tumult, goodness behind the evil, happiness behind the agony. The painful elements in your destiny are the measure of your own defects. The evils in your conduct and character are mirrored forth by the troubles which happen to you. Despite its insistence that suffering is always close to life, it tries to charge its message with the flavour of hopefulness, and to inspire men to make efforts and be daring in their inner lives. When suffering stimulates a man to re-adjust his life on sounder philosophical lines, it can hardly be called an evil. I believe in love, not hate, as a motivating force for reform. At the same time, I see karma at work, punishing the selfish and the heartless, and I know that it will inexorably do its work whatever anyone says. God never makes a mistake and this universe is run on perfect laws. Unfortunately, suffering is one of its chief instruments of evolution and especially so where people will not learn from intuition, reason, and spiritual prophets. How priceless would be the knowledge of the outcome of our actions at the time we did them! How invaluable the capacity to foretell beforehand the consequences of our deeds! We would then certainly avoid the tragedy of error and the misery of failure--so runs our thinking. But life is wiser and lets us profit by the commission of error and the experience of failure to find out what needs correction or cultivation in our own personalities. Everyone has his burden of bad karma. What kind and how heavy it is are important, but more important is how the man carries it. While fulfilling its own purpose, karma cannot help fulfilling another and higher one; it brings us what is essential to our development. When his life does not develop along the line he has planned, his mind will become confused and self-doubt will creep in. It is then that the ambitious man is taken in hand by his higher self, to learn through frustration and disappointment released by the new cycle of bad karma those lessons he could not receive through success and triumph. He makes many wrong decisions in the course of a lifetime, suffers their consequences, and learns the lessons of these results. If he is willing to learn them, they will be more quickly, fully, and consciously learnt; if not, they will be only partially, slowly, and subconsciously learnt. All relative truths are fluctuating truths. They may become only partially true or even wholly falsified from a higher standpoint. The case of evil is a noteworthy instance of this change. A karma (recompense) which is outwardly evil may be inwardly spiritually beneficial. The deer which lies mortally wounded by a hunter's shot is not capable of asking Life why it should suffer so, but the man who lies mortally wounded by a murderer's shot is capable of doing so. When he accepts affliction as having some message in it which he must learn, he will be able to bear it with dignity rather than with embitterment. When justice is done to a man for the injuries he has done to others, when his wrong actions end in suffering for himself, he may begin to learn this truth--that only the Good is really able to triumph. It is true that sometimes the past, or at least some portion of it, will not bear looking at. It hurts to know that its unworthiness was created by his own actions, its foolishness by his own choices. Yet it may help somewhat to reconcile him to mistakes which are now unmendable, to recognize that they arose out of his inheritance from former lives, out of the nature this caused him to be born with, and out of the circumstances this allotted as his destiny--that, in short, he could hardly have acted or chosen differently. It would be futile to be angry with himself or resentful against fate. Generation follows generation. Of what avail all this striving and struggling which always ends in death and dust? It is salutary at times to sink in this mournful thought, provided we do not sink to the point of despair. People bound by their littleness, uninterested in Truth and unable to see it, dominated by puerile aims and petty desires--their way is long and slow, it is the way of instruction by karma. The iron of man's character turns to tempered steel in the white-hot furnace of trouble. We do not easily grow from the worse to the better or from the better to the best. We struggle out of our imperfections at the price of toil sacrifice and trouble. The evil of these things is not only apparent nor, in essence, in any ultimate conflict with divine love. Whatever helps us in the end towards the realization of our diviner nature, even if it be painful, is good and whatever hinders, even if it be pleasant, is bad. If a personal sorrow tends towards this result it is really good and if a personal happiness retards it, then it is really bad. It is because we do not believe this that we complain at the presence of suffering and sorrow in the divine plan and at the absence of mercy in the divine will. We do not know where our true good lies, and blindly following ego, desire, emotion, or passion, displace it by a fancied delusive good. Consequently, we lose faith in God's wisdom at the very time when it is being manifested and we become most bitter about God's indifference just when God's consideration is being most shown to us. Until we summon enough courage to desert our habitual egoistic and unreflective attitude, with the wrong ideas of good and evil, happiness and misery which flow out of it, we shall continue to prolong and multiply our troubles unnecessarily.Destiny turns the wheel
When he knows that no good phase can last, that fortune will never let him rest durably in its undisturbed sunshine, he is ready for the next step. And that is to seek for inner peace. It is as foolish to attribute all events to fate as it is to claim that all decisions and choices are free ones. It is possible to take any and every situation and assert that it is in entire conformity with God's will. It is possible to find reasons to support the assertion. And the argument would be right, for if the universe with all its complications, ramifications, and connections, with all its network of relations and events, is not a manifestation of God's will in the end, then what is it? But two opposing events, or two hundred varying and contradictory ones happening at the same time as each other, can be brought into the same argument, thus making nonsense of it. "Mektoubi!" exclaims the North African Arab. "It is written (fated)," implying that there is nothing to be done as action is useless. "Mektoubi." There are events which a greater power than man's has preordained. Some he can modify, change, or prevent altogether but others he cannot. All of them exist already in future time. He will meet them in present time. He never leaves present time. Therefore it is not he that is moving to meet the future but the future is moving to meet him. He clanks the earth in iron chain, each link stamped with the word "destiny." But because he neither sees nor hears his chains, he imagines that he walks where he wishes and as far as he wishes. A man's whole destiny may hang upon one event, one decision, one circumstance. That single cause may be significant for all the years to follow. There are times when events have to happen as they do, because such is the decree of the higher power which governs life. Sometimes, here and there a man foresees his fate, but to most it is a blank page. What is the message of Greek tragic drama, what do these doomed figures who make us shiver as they commit or endure horrors have to tell us? Is it not that do what you will circumstances will catastrophically overwhelm you, that the gods will drive you to an allotted disastrous end however much you may plan the contrary? From this depressing view, we may gladly turn to Shakespeare's, arrived at in the last maturest years of his life, expressed in the final four plays, ending in the philosophic view of The Tempest, that out of all life's troubles good somehow will emerge. The same opportunity does not recur because it cannot. No man is, or can become, fully free. Some events in the future are inevitable, either because they follow from the actions of men who fail to amend character or improve capacity or deepen knowledge, or because they follow from the basic pattern of the World-Idea and the laws it sets to govern physical life. He cannot withdraw from this destiny, try as he may. When he reaches the end of a cycle, there will necessarily come with it some inner adjustment and outer change. This may also produce a little mental confusion. Cycles of destiny make their periodical returns, for individuals and for nations. The prudent man foresees the coming one in advance and lets neither adversity nor prosperity overwhelm him but bears the one well and the other calmly. All too often does an important enterprise, a long journey, or a serious undertaking carry in its start the insignia of its end. However carefully we choose our course and plan our actions, we discover in the sequence that what is to be, will be. We have no power over happenings. Life itself will work out his future course without consulting him. "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings." Shakespeare's bold words sound reassuring, but he omitted to add that Brutus and Cassius were both struck down by violence. Does this not show that the last move was with fate after all? But the ordinary man, who has not yet come to scorn time or seek a higher consciousness, will not like this terrible truth. If all men knew all that would happen to them, how many would be willing to go on living into the worst period? Even if deprived of hope most perhaps would not abandon the body. The feeling of being trapped by fate, held down by forces beyond his control, is partly true. He becomes penetrated with the thought of his personal helplessness as against this inexorable and impersonal power controlling his life. He feels that there is nothing he can do when confronted by the unfavourable situations it creates for him, no way in which he can help himself. He sees himself in a little boat tossed by the waves of this immense power, a boat whose drift toward catastrophe he may observe but not prevent. Atlantis shaped itself out of the condensing fire mists. Land hardened. Animals appeared. Men and women appeared. Civilizations appeared. The continent was developed. Then the wheel turned. The continent sank and all went with it. In 1919, Germany lay at the feet of her victors. She was disarmed and dismembered. She was weak, depressed, and fearful. Nobody was afraid of her. The wheel turned. Germany armed to the teeth. Her frontiers grew. She was strong, optimistic, and aggressive. Everybody was afraid of her. Today she is again disarmed, weak, and fearful. Arabia was unknown, insignificant, unimportant, obscure, her people barbarous, semi-savage. The wheel turned. A prophet arose, instructed and inspired his people. They spread out and took an empire that spread from the Atlantic to China. The wheel turned. The Arab power dwindled again. Arabia itself became a mere province, or colony, of the Turks. Empires are formed but to dissolve again; continents rise but to sink. Peoples collect but to be redistributed once more. Cycles operate, the wheel turns, evolution becomes involution. Only the intellectually blind, the spiritually paralysed can fail to perceive this. And the seeker of truth needs to be brave to be a hero, if he would tear down the veil and behold the Goddess Isis as she really is. Our own decade has witnessed strange things but things which prove this truth up to the hilt. Even if his intuitive feeling warns him of an impending event in such a manner that he knows it to be unalterably preordained and inevitable, his inability to prevent it from happening need not prevent him from making all possible preparations to protect himself and thus to suffer less from it than he might otherwise have done. Such a warning can only be useful and saves a man from falling into the panic in which fear of the unexpected may throw others. When a favourable cycle of destiny is operative, a little right action produces a lot of fortunate results. But when an unfavourable cycle is dominant, a lot of right action produces little result. The man and his capacities have not changed but his destiny has. At such a time, the new sequence of events in his life is dictated not by his individual will but by a higher will. You can win if at the beginning of any enterprise you determine to do so, unless the fates are equally determined that you shall not. This is the "X" factor, the unknown hand which can gather up all your winnings in one grasp and toss them all aside. You may call it Luck if you wish. The wise man will in all reckonings allow for this mysterious factor and accept its existence as a fact. If we accept the fact that man is as predestined to suffer as to enjoy life, that both experiences have been allotted to him, sometimes in juxtaposition but more often in rhythm, we can better prepare ourselves for life. If we refuse to accept it, we may have to pay the price which Oscar Wilde had to pay. The same Wilde, who until he was forty years old said that he did not know what it felt like to be unhappy, who repeatedly said, "We should seek the joys of life and leave the sores alone," lived to utter this confession and commentary upon his earlier attitude: "I seem dead to all emotions except those of anguish and despair." Professor Don Mackenzie Brown, of the University of California at Santa Barbara, told me the story of a professional Hindu seer who visited that city. Under the strictest scientific test conditions, the man correctly predicted a number of headlines which would appear in the local newspaper within the next week. Did this mean that the events to which they referred were already present? If so, did that lead to the corollary that they were fully preordained and ruled by Fate? Or was there some entirely different explanation? Many events in a person's or a nation's life are foreseeable, but only if existing trends of thought and existing courses of action are continued. There is always some part of a man's person or fortune which remains wholly beyond his control. Do what he will he cannot alter it. It is then more prudent to acknowledge the inevitability of this condition than to waste strength in useless struggle. Sometimes he may then even turn it to his advantage. But how is he to know that this inevitability, this decree of fate, exists? By the fact that no matter how much he exerts himself to alter it, he fails. We meet our destined experiences, for we have been given sealed orders at the beginning of our incarnation. He knows that fate moves in rhythms of gain and loss, in cycles of accumulation and deprivation. The force which brings us loving friends and hating enemies is one and the same. The wheel of life is a fixed one. Its turning spokes bring now elation, then depression, now prosperity, then adversity. There are periods of years when good health and good fortune crowd together, but then there are succedent periods when death and disasters try to break one's heart. If, for instance, he is not destined to enjoy marital happiness, it would be futile for him to go on seeking it. If he does, he will one day get tired of beating the wings of desire against the bars of fate. But it is not always possible to know through past experience or present reasoning what his destined lot really is. For the past may be quite misrepresentative of the future, and thought can only throw light on some of its mysteries, not on all. Consequently he is forced to seek aid from revelation. This may come to him unreliably through the channel of one of the predictive arts or, most reliably, through a deeply felt intuition granted by his own higher self. Those ignorant of the dark power of Destiny struggle with their lot and try to alter Fate's decrees. As well might they try to stop the roar and rush of a Niagara, alone and unaided. Even the mighty Napoleon, who nearly conquered all Europe, could not conquer Fate. He had to bow before its terrible sentence, as his own pathetic words at Saint Helena testified later. It is better to bow to the inevitable, and endure bravely what we cannot alter, than to cast our strength away in vain struggles. We imagine we are the masters of destiny, when the truth is that we are as the barges that float down the Thames with each tide. I am never tired of telling myself, when things appear to go wrong, that the Gods rule this universe, and not man, that the last word lies with them, and if they see fit to dash all our plans to the dust, perhaps it is as well. There is one striking passage wherein Emerson's pen neatly turns out the truth about the problem. I give it in its entirety because it is worth passing down intact. "I lean always to that ancient superstition (if it is such, though drawn from a wise survey of human affairs) which taught men to be beware of unmixed prosperity . . . Can this hold? Will God make me a brilliant exception to the common order of his dealings, which equalizes destinies? There's an apprehension of reverse always arising from success." Destiny gives him hills of difficulty to climb because of its own impersonal balancing activity. But if he is thus able to, he demonstrates the superiority of the Man over the inferiority of the Position. Destiny befriends him. He could not have met any person whose contact left deeply felt or important after-effects at any particular time in his inner life without the almighty power and infinite wisdom behind life having brought the meeting about for his own eventual development. So many seemingly unrelated occurrences and inconsequential events shape into a pattern when looked at later, when they have long fallen into the past. The wheel of life keeps turning and turning through diverse kinds of experiences and we are haplessly bound to it. But when at last we gain comprehension of what is happening and power over it, we are set free. The broken fragments of destiny's mosaic are put into their correct places by his growing insight and thus an intelligible pattern eventually appears. Internally and externally, we find through experience that a certain arc of fate has been drawn for us and must consummate itself. Futile is the endeavour to try to cross that arc; wise is the submissiveness that stays within its limits. We must leave to it the major direction which our mental and physical life must take. The thoughts that shall most move us and the events that shall chiefly happen to us are already marked on the lines of the arc. There is nothing arbitrary, however, about this, for the thoughts and the events are related and both together are still further related to an interior birth in the long series that makes up human life on this planet. There are tides of fortune and circumstances whose ebb and flow wash the lives of men. There are cycles of changes which must be heeded and with which our plans and activities must be harmonized, if we are to live without friction and avoid wasting strength in futile struggles. We must learn when to move forward and thus rise to the crest of the tide, and when to retreat and retire. Time and thought have fixed in my mind the unpleasant but unescapable notion that the major events of a man's life are as preordained for him as are the destinations of a million different letters all posted on the same day. It was not blind fatalism but clear perception which made Mary, Queen of Scots, say that her end was in her beginning. Can the oracular writing of destiny be deciphered? Can its mysterious pattern be foreseen? Destiny may bring them together for the purpose of the spiritual birth of the younger one of them, may confront them so that the elder may pass his living vision and enlarged understanding to the other. He misses the road-signs of life, the events which could tell him where he is going, the episodes which indicate success or disaster as a destination if he does not heed their meaning. That the human will is but a thin straw floating on an irresistible tide, is a hard conclusion for the human mind to accept. Yet it is not less reasonable than it is distasteful. For long I fought desperately against the notion of fate, since I had written screeds on the freedom of will. But an initiation into the mysteries of casting and reading a horoscope began to batter down my defenses, while an initiation into profounder reflection caused me to suffer the final defeat. Human will may plan its utmost for security, but human destiny will have something to say about the matter. There is no individual life that is so secure as to be without risk. Every man's personal freedom stretches to a certain distance and then finds itself ringed around by fate. Outside this limit he is as helpless as a babe, he can do nothing there. Envy not those with good fortune. The gods have allotted them a portion of good karma, but when this is exhausted they will be stripped of many things, except those inner spiritual possessions. If fate's decrees are preordained but a man's prayer seems to bring result, then his prayer too was part of his fate and also preordained. But after we have listed all these various sources and influences which make us what we are, it would be an exaggeration to assert that they do so inexorably, immovably, and inevitably. We are not condemned to be the plaything of all these forces. There is a mysterious X-factor in every human being which he can call upon if he will. The fact that so few do so merely means that through ignorance they condemn themselves to remain as they are. Those who look for some swift miraculous renaissance of peace and goodwill in the Occident look in vain, for such miracles do not happen. The world is making its own destiny, and nobody can neutralize it. Nobody can abrogate the past. A grim Justice rules all worlds, from the strange and weird places where ghosts foregather to the more matter-of-fact haunts of earthly cities. Only the psychically blind and the spiritually sightless ever hope to evade this Justice or to escape the final accounting which tracks down individuals and nations alike with mathematical accuracy. Only the sage perceives with deadly clarity how like the dust blown hither and thither is the weary labour of their days; how frail are the timbers of the ships which men send out, laden with their self-spun hopes and fears; how dream-like are their entire lives. What different course our life might have taken if we had not casually met a certain person--a meeting which led to momentous consequences--affords material for tantalizing speculations. Fate sometimes hangs upon a thread, we are told; but it always hangs upon such a tangled knot of dependent circumstances that the game of speculating how different it would have been had a single one of them been changed, is futile though fascinating. That our mortal destiny is made up of welcome and unwelcome circumstances or happenings is a certainty. There is no human being whose pattern fails to be so chequered--only the black and white squares are unequal in number, and the proportion differs from one person to another. It hurts to confess this duality of pain with joy, this temporality which threatens every happiness; but this truth is unassailable, as Buddha knew and taught. You cannot defraud self-made Destiny. It enters unannounced upon your best-laid plans. Life whirls us around as the clay is whirled upon the potter's wheel. If good cycles seem to pass all-too-quickly, the bad ones seem to linger. His spiritual destiny remains hidden far out of sight in the future. Our lives are like a jigsaw puzzle; we collect our little queerly shaped pieces and then one day the pattern is seen. Where nothing is certain, nothing is really predictable. That an irresistible power dictates the major events of our lives, who can doubt that has lifted a little of the veil? "We trail our destiny with us wherever we go. Even the gods cannot alter the past," says a Greek aphorism. The disintegration and disappearance of things is an inescapable part of their history if they are to come into existence at all. Nature could not be formed by God on any other basis than this. But it is followed by their reappearance. In the story of life there is misfortune and suffering, frustration and calamity; but it is not completed by them alone. It usually includes other chapters which bring out some of its positive, attractive, and happier sides and even its potential glory. We are at one and the same time both the consequence of our environment and the creator of it. The philosophic menta