CHAPTER IV
THE LAW OF KARMA
Who toiled a slave may come anew a Prince,
For gentle worthiness and merit won;
Who ruled a King may wander earth in rags
For things done and undone.
— The Light of Asia
Little by little, as man's knowledge grows,
the world in which he lives is seen to be a world
of of law. Each law of nature, as it is discovered,
liberates more of our will, however much it may
seem at first sight to circumscribe our action;
and since actions are but the resultant diagonal
of a series of forces of thought and feeling of an
inner world, man's supreme need is to understand that inner world of his as one of law and
order. The great Law of Karma or Action,
which Theosophy expounds, reveals to man
something of the inner fabric of his being, and
so helps him little by little to be a master of
circumstance, and not its slave.
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We are already familiar in science with the
conception of the whole universe as an expression of energy. The electron is a storehouse of
energy; so too, though on a larger scale, is a
star. This energy is continually changing,
motion transforming itself into light or heat or
electricity, and a heavy element into a lighter,
and so on from one transformation to another.
Man himelf is a storehouse of energy; he takes
in energy with his food, and transforms it into
the movements of his body. The energy in
man, when utilized for a kindly action, is
beneficent; and we call such a use "good";
when it is employed to injure another, we
term such a use "evil". All the time that man
lives, he is a transformer; the universal energy
enters into him, to be transformed by him into
service or into injury.
The Law of Karma is the statement of cause
and effect as man transforms energy. It takes
into account not only, as science does, the
visible universe and its forces, but also that
larger, unseen universe of force which is man's
true sphere of activity. Just as, with the flicker
of an eyelid, man throws into the universe a
force which affects the equilibrium of all other
forces in our physical cosmos, so too, with
each thought and feeling, he changes the
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adjustment of himself to the universe, and the
adjustment of the universe to himself.
The first principle to grasp, in the attempt to
understand Karma, is that we are dealing with
force and its effects. This force is of the physical world of movement, or of the astral world
of feeling, or of the mental world of thinking.
We are using all three types of force, the first
with the activities of our physical bodies, the
second with the feelings of our astral bodies,
and the third with the concrete and abstract
thoughts of our mental and causal bodies. To
aspire, to dream, to plan, to think, to feel, to
act — all this means to set in motion forces or
three worlds; and, according to the use made
by us of these forces, we help or we hinder.
Now, all the force which we use, on all the
planes, is the energy of the Logos; we are but
transformers of that energy. As we so transform and use that energy, it is His Desire that
we use it to further His Plan of Evolution.
When we help that Plan, our action is "good";,
when we hinder it, our action is "evil". And
since we use His force all the time, we must, at
each moment of time, either help or hinder
that Plan.
Since man is not an individual by himself,
but is one unit in a Humanity of millions of
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individuals, each thought or feeling or act of
man affects each of his fellow-men, in proportion to the nearness
of each to him as the distributor of force. Each such use of force by a
man, which helps or hinders the whole, of
which he is a part, brings with it a result to
him; this result is briefly stated, in terms of
his action and its resultant reaction, in
Fig. 36.
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