Theos-Talk Archives (September 2002 Message tt00149)

Sept 23 2002

Dear Friends:

There is no such thing as "esoteric Karma" to my knowledge.
At least I have never heard or read anything in Theosophical
texts that refers to this or describes it -- whatever you
think it to be.

Here is what Karma is in a brad way described

APHORISMS ON KARMA

(1) There is no Karma unless there is a being to make it or
feel its effects.[PARA][PARA](2) Karma is the adjustment of
effects flowing from causes, during which the being upon
whom and through whom that adjustment is effected
experiences pain or pleasure.[PARA][PARA](3) Karma is an
undeviating and unerring tendency in the Universe to restore
equilibrium, and it operates incessantly.[PARA][PARA](4) The
apparent stoppage of this restoration to equilibrium is due
to the necessary adjustment of disturbance at some other
spot, place, or focus which is visible only to the Yogi, to
the Sage, or the perfect Seer: there is therefore no
stoppage, but only a hiding from view.[PARA][PARA](5) Karma
operates on all things and beings from the minutest
conceivable atom to Brahma. Proceeding in the three worlds
men, gods, and the elemental beings, no spot in the
manifested universe is exempt from its sway.[PARA][PARA](6)
Karma is not subject to time, and therefore he who knows
what is the ultimate division of time in this Universe knows
Karma.[PARA][PARA](7) For all other men Karma is in its
essential nature unknown and unknowable.[PARA][PARA](8) But
its action may be known by calculation from cause to effect;
and this calculation is possible because the effect is
wrapped up in and is not succedent to the
cause.[PARA][PARA](9) The Karma of this earth is the
combination of the acts and thoughts of all beings of every
grade which were concerned in the preceding Manvantara or
evolutionary stream from which ours flows.[PARA][PARA](10)
And as those beings include Lords of Power and Holy Men, as
well as weak and wicked ones, the period of the earth's
duration is greater than that of any entity or race upon
it.[PARA][PARA](11) Because the Karma of this earth and its
races began in a past too far back for human minds to reach,
an inquiry into its beginning is useless and
profitless.[PARA][PARA](12) Karmic causes already set in
motion must be allowed to sweep on until exhausted, but this
permits no man to refuse to help his fellows and every
sentient being.[PARA][PARA](13) The effects may be
counteracted or mitigated by the thoughts and acts of
oneself or of another, and then the resulting effects
represent the combination and interaction of the whole
number of causes involved in producing the
effects.[PARA][PARA](14) In the life of worlds, races,
nations, and individuals, Karma cannot act unless there is
an appropriate instrument provided for its
action.[PARA][PARA](15) And until such appropriate
instrument is found, that Karma related to it remains
unexpended.[PARA][PARA](16) While a man is experiencing
Karma in the instrument provided, his other unexpended Karma
is not exhausted through other beings or means, but is held
reserved for future operation; and lapse of time during
which no operation of that Karma is felt causes no
deterioration in its force or change in its
nature.[PARA][PARA](17) The appropriateness of an instrument
for the operation of Karma consists in the exact connection
and relation of the Karma with the body, mind, intellectual
and psychical nature acquired for use by the Ego in any
life.[PARA][PARA](18) Every instrument used by any Ego in
any life is appropriate to the Karma operating through
it.[PARA][PARA](19) Changes may occur in the instrument
during one life so as to make it appropriate for a new class
of Karma, and this may take place in two ways: (a) through
intensity of thought and the power of a vow, and (b) through
natural alterations due to complete exhaustion of old
causes.[PARA][PARA](20) As body and mind and soul have each
a power of independent action, any one of these may exhaust,
independently of the others, some Karmic causes more remote
from or nearer to the time of their inception than those
operating through other channels.[PARA][PARA](21) Karma is
both merciful and just. Mercy and Justice are only opposite
poles of a single whole; and Mercy without Justice is not
possible in the operations of Karma. That which man calls
Mercy and Justice is defective, errant, and
impure.[PARA][PARA](22) Karma may be of three sorts: (a)
presently operative in this life through the appropriate
instruments; (b) that which is being made or stored up to be
exhausted in the future; Karma held over from past life or
lives and not operating yet because inhibited by
inappropriateness of the instrument in use by the Ego, or by
the force of Karma now operating.[PARA][PARA](23) Three
fields of operation are used in each being by Karma: (a) the
body and the circumstances; (b) the mind and intellect; the
psychic and astral planes.[PARA][PARA](24) Held-over Karma
or present Karma may each, or both at once, operate in all
of the three fields of Karmic operation at once, or in
either of those fields a different class of Karma from that
using the others may operate at the same
time.[PARA][PARA](25) Birth into any sort of body and to
obtain the fruits of any sort of Karma is due to the
preponderance of the line of Karmic
tendency.[PARA][PARA](26) The sway of Karmic tendency will
influence the incarnation of an Ego, or any family of Egos,
for three lives at least, when measures of repression,
elimination, or counteraction are not
adopted.[PARA][PARA](27) Measures taken by an Ego to repress
tendency, eliminate defects, and to counteract by setting up
different causes, will alter the sway of Karmic tendency and
shorten its influence in accordance with the strength or
weakness of the efforts expended in carrying out the
measures adopted.[PARA][PARA](28) No man but a sage or true
seer can judge another's Karma. Hence while each receives
his deserts, appearances may deceive, and birth into Poverty
or heavy trial may not be punishment for bad Karma, for Egos
continually incarnate into poor surroundings where they
experience difficulties and trials which are for the
discipline of the Ego and result in strength, fortitude, and
sympathy.[PARA][PARA](29) Race-Karma influences each unit in
the race through the law of Distribution. National Karma
operates on the members of the nation by the same law more
concentrated. Family Karma governs only with a nation where
families have been kept pure and distinct; for in any nation
where there is a mixture of family - as obtains in each
Kaliyuga period - family Karma is in general distributed
over a nation. But even at such periods some families remain
coherent for long periods, and then the members feel the
sway of family Karma. The word "family" may include several
smaller families.[PARA][PARA](30) Karma operates to produce
cataclysms of nature by concatenation through the mental and
astral planes of being. A cataclysm may be traced to an
immediate physical cause such as internal fire and
atmospheric disturbance, but these have been brought on by
the disturbance created through the dynamic power of human
thought.[PARA][PARA](31) Egos who have no Karmic connection
with a portion of the globe where a cataclysm is coming on
are kept without the latter's operation in two ways: (a) by
repulsion acting on their inner nature, and (b) by being
called and warned by those who watch the progress of the
world.[PARA][PARA]



Karma -- The Law of Cause and Effect -- Compensation


Karma is an unfamiliar word for Western ears. It is the
Sanskrit word, and is a name adopted by Theosophists of the
nineteenth century for one of the most important of the laws
of nature. Ceaseless in its operation, it bears alike upon
planets, systems of planets, races, nations, families, and
individuals. It is the twin doctrine to reincarnation. So
inextricably interlaced are these two laws that it is almost
impossible to properly consider one apart from the other.

No spot or being in the universe is exempt from the
operation of Karma, but all are under its sway, punished for
error by it yet beneficently led on, through discipline,
rest, and reward, to the distant heights of perfection. It
is a law so comprehensive in its sweep, embracing at once
our physical and our moral being, that it is only by
paraphrase and copious explanation one can convey its
meaning in English. For that reason the Sanskrit term Karma
was adopted to designate it.

Applied to man's moral life it is the law of ethical
causation, justice, reward and punishment; the cause for
birth and rebirth, yet equally the means for escape from
incarnation.

Viewed from another point it is merely effect flowing from
cause, action and reaction, exact result for every thought
and act. It is act and the result of act; for the word's
literal meaning is action.

Theosophy views the Universe as an intelligent whole, hence
every motion in the Universe is an action of that whole
leading to results, which themselves become causes for
further results. Viewing it thus broadly, the ancient Hindus
said that every being up to Brahma was under the rule of
Karma.

It is not a being but a law, the universal law of harmony
which unerringly restores all disturbance to equilibrium. In
this the theory conflicts with the ordinary conception about
God, built up from the Jewish system, which assumes that the
Almighty as a thinking entity, extraneous to the Cosmos,
builds up, finds his construction inharmonious, out of
proportion, errant, and disturbed, and then has to pull
down, destroy, or punish that which he created. This has
either caused thousands to live in fear of God, in
compliance with his assumed commands, with the selfish
object of obtaining reward and securing escape from his
wrath, or has plunged them into darkness which comes from a
denial of all spiritual life. But as there is plainly,
indeed painfully, evident to every human being a constant
destruction going on in and around us, a continual war not
only among men but everywhere through the whole solar
system, causing sorrow in all directions, reason requires a
solution of the riddle.

The poor, who see no refuge or hope, cry aloud to a God who
makes no reply, and then envy springs up in them when they
consider the comforts and opportunities of the rich. They
see the rich profligates, the wealthy fools, enjoying
themselves unpunished. Turning to the teacher of religion,
they meet the reply to their questioning of the justice
which will permit such misery to those who did nothing
requiring them to be born with no means, no opportunities
for education, no capacity to overcome social, racial, or
circumstantial obstacles, "It is the will of God." Parents
produce beloved offspring who are cut off by death at an
untimely hour, just when all promised well. They too have no
answer to the question "Why am I thus afflicted?" but the
same unreasonable reference to an inaccessible God whose
arbitrary will causes their misery.

Thus in every walk of life, loss, injury, persecution,
deprivation of opportunity, nature's own forces working to
destroy the happiness of man, death, reverses,
disappointment continually beset good and evil men alike.
But nowhere is there any answer or relief save in the
ancient truths that each man is the maker and fashioner of
his own destiny, the only one who sets in motion the causes
for his own happiness and misery. In one life he sows and in
the next he reaps.

Thus on and forever, the law of Karma leads him.
Karma is a beneficent law wholly merciful, relentlessly
just, for true mercy is not favor but impartial justice.

How is the present life affected by bygone right and wrong
acts, and is it always by way of punishment? Is Karma only
fate under another name, an already fixed and formulated
destiny from which no escape is possible, and which
therefore might make us careless of act or thought that
cannot affect destiny? It is not fatalism.

Everything done in a former body has consequences which in
the new birth the Ego must enjoy or suffer, for the effect
is in the cause, and Karma produces the manifestation of it
in the body, brain, and mind furnished by reincarnation. And
as a cause set up by one man has a distinct relation to him
as a center from which it came, so each one experiences the
results of his own acts. We may sometimes seem to receive
effects solely from the acts of others, but this is the
result of our own acts and thoughts in this or some prior
life. We perform our acts in company with others always, and
the acts with their underlying thoughts have relation always
to other persons and to ourselves.

No act is performed without a thought at its root either at
the time of performance or as leading to it. These thoughts
are lodged in that part of man which we have called Manas --
the mind, and there remain as subtle but powerful links with
magnetic threads that enmesh the solar system, and through
which various effects are brought out.

The theory put forward earlier, that the whole system to
which this globe belongs is alive, conscious on every plane,
though only in man showing self-consciousness, comes into
play here to explain how the thought under the act in this
life may cause result in this or the next birth. The
marvellous modern experiments in hypnotism show that the
slightest impression, no matter how far back in the history
of the person, may be waked up to life, thus proving it is
not lost but only latent.

Karma is of three sorts:

First -- that which has not begun to produce any effect in
our lives owing to the operation on us of some other karmic
causes. This is under a law well known to physicists, that
two opposing forces tend to neutrality, and that one force
may be strong enough to temporarily prevent the operation of
another one.

This law works on the unseen mental and karmic planes or
spheres of being just as it does on the material ones. The
force of a certain set of bodily, mental, and psychical
faculties with their tendencies may wholly inhibit the
operation on us of causes with which we are connected,
because the whole nature of each person is used in the
carrying out of this law. Hence the weak and mediocre
furnish a weak focus for karma, and in them the general
result of a lifetime is limited, although they may feel it
all to be very heavy. But that person who has a wide and
deep-reaching character and much force will feel the
operation of a greater quantity of karma than the weaker
person.

Second -- that karma which we are now making or storing up
by our thoughts and acts, and which will operate in the
future when the appropriate body, mind, and environment are
taken up by the incarnating Ego in some other life, or
whenever obstructive karma is removed.

This bears both on the present life and the next one. For
one may in this life come to a point where, all previous
causes being worked out, new karma, or that which is
unexpended, must begin to operate.
Under this are those cases where men have sudden reverses of
fortune or changes for the better either in circumstances or
character.

A very important bearing of this is on our present conduct.
While old karma must work out and cannot be stopped, it is
wise for the man to so think and act now under present
circumstances, no matter what they are, that he shall
produce no bad or prejudicial causes for the next rebirth or
for later years in this life. Rebellion is useless, for the
law works on whether we weep or rejoice. The great French
engineer, de Lesseps, is a good example of this class of
karma. Raised to a high pitch of glory and achievement for
many years of his life, he suddenly falls covered with shame
through the Panama canal scandal. Whether he was innocent or
guilty, he has the shame of the connection of his name with
a national enterprise all besmirched with bribery and
corruption that involved high officials. This was the
operation of old karmic causes on him the very moment those
which had governed his previous years were exhausted.
Napoleon I is another, for he rose to a very great fame,
then suddenly fell and died in exile and disgrace. Many
other cases will occur to every thoughtful reader.

Third -- that karma which has begun to produce results. It
is the operating now in this life on us of causes set up in
previous lives in company with other Egos. And it is in
operation because, being most adapted to the family stock,
the individual body, astral body, and race tendencies of the
present incarnation, it exhibits itself plainly, while other
unexpended karma awaits its regular turn.

These three classes of karma govern men, animals, worlds,
and periods of evolution. Every effect flows from a cause
precedent, and as all beings are constantly being reborn
they are continually experiencing the effects of their
thoughts and acts (which are themselves causes) of a prior
incarnation. And thus each one answers, as St. Matthew says,
for every word and thought; none can escape either by
prayer, or favor, or force, or any other intermediary.

Now as karmic causes are divisible into three classes, they
must have various fields in which to work. They operate upon
man in his mental and intellectual nature, in his psychical
or soul nature, and in his body and circumstances. The
spiritual nature of man is never affected or operated upon
by karma.

One species of karma may act on the three specified planes
of our nature at the same time to the same degree, or there
may be a mixture of the causes, some on one plane and some
on another. Take a deformed person who has a fine mind and a
deficiency in his soul nature. Here punitive or unpleasant
karma is operating on his body while in his mental and
intellectual nature good karma is being experienced, but
psychically the karma, or cause, being of an indifferent
sort the result is indifferent. In another person other
combinations appear. He has a fine body and favorable
circumstances, but the character is morose, peevish,
irritable, revengeful, morbid, and disagreeable to himself
and others. Here good physical karma is at work with very
bad mental, intellectual, and psychical karma. Cases will
occur to readers of persons born in high station having
every opportunity and power, yet being imbecile or suddenly
becoming insane.

And just as all these phases of the law of karma have sway
over the individual man, so they similarly operate upon
races, nations, and families. Each race has its karma as a
whole. If it be good that race goes forward. If bad it goes
out -- annihilated as a race -- though the souls concerned
take up their karma in other races and bodies. Nations
cannot escape their national karma, and any nation that has
acted in a wicked manner must suffer some day, be it soon or
late.

The karma of the nineteenth century in the West is the karma
of Israel, for even the merest tyro can see that the Mosaic
influence is the strongest in the European and American
nations. The old Aztec and other ancient American peoples
died out because their own karma -- the result of their own
life as nations in the far past -- fell upon and destroyed
them.

With nations this heavy operation of karma is always through
famine, war, convulsion of nature, and the sterility of the
women of the nation. The latter cause comes near the end and
sweeps the whole remnant away. And the individual in race or
nation is warned by this great doctrine that if he falls
into indifference of thought and act, thus molding himself
into the general average karma of his race or nation, that
national and race karma will at last carry him off in the
general destiny. This is why teachers of old cried, "Come ye
out and be ye separate."

With reincarnation the doctrine of karma explains the misery
and suffering of the world, and no room is left to accuse
Nature of injustice.

The misery of any nation or race is the direct result of the
thoughts and acts of the Egos who make up the race or
nation. In the dim past they did wickedly and now suffer.
They violated the laws of harmony. The immutable rule is
that harmony must be restored if violated. So these Egos
suffer in making compensation and establishing the
equilibrium of the occult cosmos. The whole mass of Egos
must go on incarnating and reincarnating in the nation or
race until they have all worked out to the end the causes
set up.

Though the nation may for a time disappear as a physical
thing, the Egos that made it do not leave the world, but
come out as the makers of some new nation in which they must
go on with the task and take either punishment or reward as
accords with their karma. Of this law the old Egyptians are
an illustration. They certainly rose to a high point of
development, and as certainly they were extinguished as a
nation. But the souls -- the old Egos -- live on and are now
fulfilling their self-made destiny as some other nation now
in our period.

They may be the new American nation, or the Jews fated to
wander up and down in the world and suffer much at the hands
of others. This process is perfectly just. Take, for
instance, the United States and the Red Indians. The latter
have been most shamefully treated by the nation. The Indian
Egos will be reborn in the new and conquering people, and as
members of that great family will be the means themselves of
bringing on the due results for such acts as were done
against them when they had red bodies. Thus it has happened
before, and so it will come about again.

Individual unhappiness in any life is thus explained:

(a) It is punishment for evil done in past lives; or

(b) it is discipline taken up by the Ego for the purpose of
eliminating defects or acquiring fortitude and sympathy.
When defects are eliminated it is like removing the
obstruction in an irrigating canal which then lets the water
flow on.

Happiness is explained in the same way: the result of prior
lives of goodness.

The scientific and self-compelling basis for right ethics is
found in these and in no other doctrines. For if right
ethics are to be practised merely for themselves, men will
not see why, and have never been able to see why, for that
reason they should do right. If ethics are to be followed
from fear, man is degraded and will surely evade; if the
favor of the Almighty, not based on law or justice, be the
reason, then we will have just what prevails today -- a code
given by Jesus to the west professed by nations and not
practised save by the few who would in any case be virtuous.

On this subject the Adepts have written the following to be
found in the Secret Doctrine:

"Nor would the ways of karma be inscrutable were men to work
in union and harmony instead of disunion and strife. For our
ignorance of those ways -- which one portion of mankind
calls the ways of Providence dark and intricate, while
another sees in them the action of blind fatalism, and a
third simple chance with neither gods nor devils to guide
them -- would surely disappear if we would but attribute all
these to their correct cause. With right knowledge, or at
any rate with a confident conviction that our neighbors will
no more work harm to us than we would think of harming them,
two-thirds of the world's evil would vanish into thin air.
Were no man to hurt his brother, Karma-Nemesis would have
neither cause to work for nor weapons to act through. . . .
We cut these numerous windings in our destinies daily with
our own hands, while we imagine that we are pursuing a track
on the royal high road of respectability and duty, and then
complain of those ways beings so intricate and so dark. We
stand bewildered before the mystery of our own making and
the riddles of life that we will not solve, and then accuse
the great Sphinx of devouring us. But verily there is not an
accident in our lives, not a misshapen day or a misfortune,
that could not be traced back to our own doings in this or
another life. . . . Knowledge of Karma gives the conviction
that if --

'virtue in distress and vice in triumph
Make atheists of Mankind',

it is only because that mankind has ever shut its eyes to
the great truth that man is himself his own saviour as his
own destroyer; that he need not accuse heaven and the gods,
fates and providence, of the apparent injustice that reigns
in the midst of humanity. But let him rather remember and
repeat this bit of Grecian wisdom which warns man to forbear
accusing That which

'Just though mysterious, leads us on unerring
Through ways unmarked from guilt to punishment'

-- which are now the ways and the high road on which move
onward the great European nations. The western Aryans had
every nation and tribe like their eastern brethren of the
fifth race, their Golden and their Iron ages, their period
of comparative irresponsibility, or the Satya age of purity,
while now several of them have reached their Iron age, the
Kali Yuga, an age black with horrors. This state will last .
. . until we begin acting from within instead of ever
following impulses from without . . . Until then the only
palliative is union and harmony -- a Brotherhood in actu and
altruism not simply in name."

These statements are extracted from Mr. W. Q. Judge's The
OCEAN OF THEOSOPHY

Best wishes,

Dallas



-----Original Message-----
From: M
Sent: Sunday, September 22, 2002 8:04 PM
To:
Subject: re karma and its logic

I suspect that "esoteric karma" has an "interpretive
aspect" or "apparent handle" or "manasic/exoteric
version" that we humans (or "we Theosophists")
have formed just so we might at least "seem to have" some
kind of frame of reference re something that, like the
"esoteric tradition," "has," as if at the same time, (as "we
might admit". . . ), a "non-dualistic" and "confusing"
"reality" that we generally can't seem (?) to "recognize" or
"be in," so, instead using the words "esoteric karma," that,
in essence, is seen ("admittedly"?) by many Theosophists
as "beyond logic," I thought of making a reference (just a
reference, basically, along with my intended/speculative
"flow trends," say . . . ) to that which manas might more
readily acknowledge as
"understandable-yet-not-understandable"

cut