Theos-Talk Archives (February 2005 Message tt00176)

Feb 8 2005

Dear Lenny:

Lenny, look at the surface complexity of a pool of water on which a rain
cloud sends drops -- resulting waves are superficial as well as of volume,
only calculus can come close to expressing relations here, and only then if
a selected few reference points are defined. -- the rest follow identical
laws and the results are in finitude a total yet transitory resultant of all
forces including echoes. That's about as complex / simple as I can get.

Now to make it complex: View our own personal; self and its physical
vehicle: -- a "solar system" or a constitution where the "Sun" is as a
Master MONAD presently engaged in an "educational foray" located among
billions of sub-atomic forces, making up more and more concrete "robes" --
atoms, molecules, cells, etc that outline the average human body -- and
recall that it lives in a mutable environment and is continually adding and
loosing a multitude of "life-atoms" (monads) all the time.  

It incarnates (as one of the "Divine Rebels") in order to afford those
"monads of lesser experience" that nature gathers around it, a model of
greater knowledge that can (and should) direct them in the ways of
"righteousness and virtue" by itself being a "good example." His is the
moral code and directive which we are just beginning to understand It is
most important for all to grasp this idea, in the mastery of our own tools
and lower intelligence. 

So there is an ideal state on one very high plane (ATMA-BUDDHI) and various
mutable conditions on others and all are related by the Master ONE MONAD and
its legion of trained assistants ( The Ideal Astral ?) How does it, remote
as it has to be, get into contact with all its (free and independent)
subordinates ?

All else you say I agree with.

To, in some small way, mitigate Karma would take an individual mind of
considerable breadth and depth, No ? Also the capacity to handle billions
of problem / solutions with ideal efficiency and capacity in the smallest
units of available time?  

In any case See this small article again? Para 2 seems to me important as
an idea about mitigating Karma. Judge wrote it.

------------------------------
 
THOUGHTS ON KARMA

EVERY day in life we see people overtaken by circumstances either good or
bad and coming in blocks all at once or scattered over long periods of time.
Some are for a whole life in a miserable condition, and others for many
years the very reverse; while still others are miserable or happy by
snatches. I speak, of course, of the circumstances of life irrespective of
the effect on the mind of the person, for it may often be that a man is not
unhappy under adverse circumstances, and some are able to extract good from
the very strait lines they are put within. Now all this is the Karma of
those who are the experiencers, and therefore we ask ourselves if Karma may
fall in a lump or may be strung out over a long space of years. And the
question is also asked if the circumstances of this life are the sum total
result of the life which has immediately preceded it.

There is a little story told to a German mystic in this century by an old
man, another mystic, when asked the meaning of the verse in the Bible which
says that the sins of the father will be visited on the children to the
third and fourth generation. He said: "There was once an Eastern king who
had one son, and this son committed a deed the penalty of which was that he
should be killed by a great stone thrown upon him. But as it was seen that
this would not repair the wrong nor give to the offender the chance to
become a better man, the counsellors of the king advised that the stone
should be broken into small pieces, and those be thrown at the son, and at
his children and grandchildren as they were able to bear it. It was so done,
and all were in some sense sufferers yet none were destroyed." It was
argued, of course, in this case that the children and grandchildren could
not have been born in the family of the prince if they had not had some hand
in the past, in other lives, in the formation of his character, and for that
reason they should share to some extent in his punishment. In no other way
than this can the Christian verses be understood if we are to attribute
justice to the God of the Christians.

Each Ego is attracted to the body in which he will meet his just deserts,
but also for another reason. That is, that not only is the body to give
opportunity for his just reward or punishment, but also for that he in the
past was connected with the family in which the body was born, and the
stream of heredity to which it belongs is his too. It is therefore a
question not alone of desert and similarity, but one of responsibility.
Justice orders that the Ego shall suffer or enjoy irrespective of what
family he comes to; similarity decrees that he shall come to the family in
which there is some characteristic similar to one or many of his and thus
having a drawing power; but responsibility, which is compounded of justice,
directs that the Ego shall come to the race or the nation or the family to
which its responsibility lies for the part taken by it in other lives in
forming of the general character, or affecting that physical stream of
heredity that has so much influence on those who are involved in it.
Therefore it is just that even the grandchildren shall suffer if they in the
past have had a hand in moulding the family or even in bringing about a
social order that is detrimental to those who fall into it through
incarnation. I use the word responsibility to indicate something composed of
similarity and justice. It may be described by other words probably quite as
well, and in the present state of the English language very likely will be.
An Ego may have no direct responsibility for a family, national, or race
condition, and yet be drawn into incarnation there. In such an event it is
similarity of character which causes the place of rebirth, for the being
coming to the abode of mortals is drawn like electricity along the path of
least resistance and of greatest conductibility. But where the reincarnating
Ego is directly responsible for family or race conditions, it will decide
itself, upon exact principles of justice and in order to meet its
obligations, to be reborn where it shall receive, as grandchild if you will,
physically or otherwise the results of its former acts. This decision is
made at the emergence from Devachan. It is thus entirely just, no matter
whether the new physical brain is able or not to pick up the lost threads of
memory.

So to-day, in our civilization, we are all under the penalty of our
forefathers sins, living in bodies which medical science has shown are sown
with diseases of brain and flesh and blood coming in the turbid stream of
heredity through the centuries. These disturbances were brought about by
ourselves in other centuries, in ignorance, perhaps, of consequences so
far-reaching, but that ignorance lessens only the higher moral
responsibility and tends to confine the results to physical suffering. This
can very well lead, as it often does, to efforts on the part of many
reincarnating Egos in the direction of general reform.

It was through a belief in this that the ancients attempted to form and keep
up in India a pure family stream such as the highest caste of Brahmin. For
they knew that if such a clean family line could be kept existing for many
centuries, it would develop the power of repelling Egos on the way to
rebirth if they were not in character up to the standard of that stream of
life. Thus only teachers by nature, of high moral and spiritual elevation,
would come upon the scene to act as regenerators and saviors for all other
classes. But under the iron rule of cyclic law this degenerated in time,
leaving now only an imitation of the real thing.

A variation of the Eastern story told above is that the advice of the kings
counsellors was that the broken stone should be cast at the prince. This was
done, and the result was that he was not killed but suffered while the
pieces were being thrown. 

It gives another Karmic law, that is, that a given amount of force of a
Karmic character may be thrown at one or fall upon one at once, in bulk, so
to say, or may be divided up into smaller pieces, the sum of which
represents the whole mass of Karmic force. 

And so we see it in life. Men suffer through many years an amount of adverse
Karma which, if it were to fall all at once, would crush them. Others for a
long time have general good fortune that might unseat the reason if
experienced in one day; and the latter happens also, for we know of those
who have been destroyed by the sudden coming of what is called great good
fortune.

This law is seen also in physics. A piece of glass may be broken at once by
a single blow, or the same amount of force put into a number of taps
continuously repeated will accomplish the same result and mash the glass.
And with the emotions we observe the same law followed by even the most
ignorant, for we do not tell bad news at once to the person who is the
sufferer, but get at it slowly by degrees; and often when disaster is
suddenly heard of, the person who hears it is prostrated. 

In both cases the sorrow caused is the same, but the method of imparting the
news differs. Indeed, in whatever direction we look, this law is observed to
work. It is universal, and it ought to be applied to Karma as well as to
anything else.

Whether the life we are now living is the net result of the one just
preceding is answered by Patanjali in his 8th and 9th aphorisms, Book IV.

"From these works there results, in every incarnation, a manifestation of
only those mental deposits which can come to fructification in the
environment provided. Although the manifestation of mental deposits may be
intercepted by unsuitable environments, differing as to class, place, and
time, there is an immediate relation between them, because the memory and
the train of self-reproductive thought are identical," and also by other
doctrines of the ancients. When a body is taken up, only that sort of Karma
which can operate through it will make itself felt. 

This is what Patanjali means. The "environment" is the body, with the mind,
the plastic nature, and the emotions and desires. Hence one may have been
great or the reverse in the preceding life, and now have only the
environment which will serve for the exhaustion of some Karma left over from
lives many incarnations distant. 

This unexhausted Karma is known as stored-up Karma. It may or may not come
into operation now, and it can also be brought out into view by violent
effort of the mind leading to such changes as to alter the bodily apparatus
and make it equivalent to a new body. 

But as the majority of men are lazy of mind and nature, they suffer
themselves to run with the great family or national stream, and so through
one life make no changes of this inner nature. Karma in their cases operates
through what Patanjali calls "mental deposits." 

These are the net results stored from each life by Manas. For as body dies,
taking brain with it, there can be no storage there nor means of connecting
with the next earth-life; the division known as Kama is dissipated or purged
away together with astral body at some time before rebirth; astral body
retains nothing--as a general rule for the new life, and the value or
summation of those skandhas which belong to Kama is concentrated and
deposited in Manas or the mind. So, when the immortal being returns, he is
really Manas-Buddhi-Atma seeking a new environment which is found in a new
body, prana, Kama, and astral double. 

Hence, and because under the sway of cyclic law, the reincarnation can only
furnish an engine of a horsepower, so to say, which is very much lower than
the potential energies stored in Manas, and thus there remain unexhausted
"mental deposits," or unexhausted Karma. 

The Ego may therefore be expending a certain line of Karma, always bringing
it to similar environments until that class of Karma shall be so exhausted
or weakened as to permit another set of "mental deposits" to preponderate,
whereupon the next incarnation will be in a different environment which
shall give opportunity for the new set of deposits to bring about new or
different Karma.

The object that is indicated for life by all this is, to so live and think
during each life as to generate no new Karma, or cause for bondage, while
one is working off the stock in hand, in order that on closing each
life-account one shall have wiped off so much as that permits. 

The old "mental deposits" will thus gradually move up into action and
exhaustion from life to life, at last leaving the man in a condition where
he can master all and step into true consciousness, prepared to renounce
final reward in order that he may remain with humanity, making no new Karma
himself and helping others along the steep road to perfection.

EUSEBIO URBAN [ Judge]
Path, August, 1892
 
-------------------------------

Best wishes as always, 

Dallas
 

-----Original Message-----
From: leonmaurer@aol.com [mailto:leonmaurer@aol.com] 
Sent: Monday, February 07, 2005 9:00 PM
To: theos-talk@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Theos-World Re: FW: Collective Karma, an Esoteric Perspective


Dear Dallas,

Thank you for your reflections.  

I also have no argument with the teachings of Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, 
nor do I disagree with the Aphorisms on Karma offered by WQJ. However, I
still 
believe that a view of the mechanisms of karma are far more complex than 
simply seeing it as a direct cause-effect process that acts directly and 
inevitably without interference's, either from external sources, or by our
individual 
thoughts and actions.  

As Buddha said, "Everything we are is the result of what we have thought" --

implying that our past life thoughts influence the karma that determines who

we are in our present life. I assume this implies that changing those
thoughts 
can effect changes in the karma that results in who we are at any given 
moment, and who we will become in the next life.  

Of course, this doesn't mitigate the karma caused by our thoughts (and 
resultant actions) in the past that results in skandas that follow us in
this and 
our next lives... But, it also gives us a hint (verified by Judge's
aphorisms) 
that such karma can be interfered with, mitigated, transcended or avoided by

means which are left relatively obscure -- other than by a more or less 
simplistic admonition to follow the yogic path of harmlessness and
compassion as 
outlined in the Voice of the Silence and other yogic teachings, or as
Krishna 
covered in the Bhagavad Gita.  

Nevertheless, I still think that all such results can only be determined by 
each of us through our own individual study and practice, i.e., meditation, 
followed by life affirming actions, that leads to a fully comprehensive 
understanding of our true nature (and all the powers to change our karma
that that 
implies).  

When such "enlightenment" (which I see as, taking the burden of our karma
off 
our backs, so to speak) is achieved, and we realize our unity with the
higher 
Self and become that "beness" -- all such karma that adheres to the lower 
self, now discarded as an eternal reality in our higher mind or Buddhi
nature, no 
longer applies to our present or future being.  

Thus, in my view, karma cannot be such a simplistic concept as an unerring 
and inevitably direct cause and effect, as some theosophical teachers and 
students, and most theologians interpret it -- e.g., "an eye for an eye
and a 
tooth for a tooth" -- as some have misinterpreted the Mosaic admonitions
with 
respect to karma -- which should be interpreted as "give" rather than
"take," as 
Jesus advised.

I hope this further clarifies my thoughts on the metaphysical aspects of 
karma -- besides the purely scientific view I have of its actual coenergetic

inter-field mechanisms based on the fundamental laws of cycles and
periodicity in 
conjunction with their derived laws of electricity and magnetism -- that I
have 
devoted the past 40 years trying to comprehend and codify in conjunction
with 
the cutting edges of the observed and mathematically correlated physical 
sciences. Whether I have been successful in this or not, still remains to
be seen.

However, there are still many unanswered questions about the nature of karma

still to be thought about... Although, I have no disagreement with you
about 
its inevitability to be handled as "unfinished business" to be held over in
as 
many lives as necessary to resolve or mitigate it by counteraction, or 
transcend it entirely, by realization of who we really are.  

Best wishes,

Lenny