Karma then, if you will, is Immanent Justice; only, it is no longer an inconstant goddess, inconsistent, incoherent, impotent, erratic13, capricious, inexact, forgetful, timid, inattentive, sluggish14, evasive, intangible and bounded by the tomb, but a god, vast and inevitable15 as Destiny, a god who fills up each outlet16, each horizon, each crevice17 of every existence and who is omnipresent, omniscient18, omnipotent19, infallible, impassible and incorruptible. He is in us, as we are in him. He is ourselves. He is more than we: he is what we are, while he is still what we were and is already what we shall become. We are small, evanescent and ephemeral; he is great, imperturbable,[283] immovable, eternal. Nothing escapes him of that which escapes us and no doubt will escape us even beyond the tomb. Not an action, not a wish, not a thought, not the shadow of an intention but is weighed more strictly20 than it was weighed by the forty-two posthumous21 judges who awaited the soul on that further shore of which we are told in one of the most ancient texts in the world, the Egyptian Book of the Dead. All is set down, dated, valued, verified, classified, entered as debit22 or credit, as reward or expiation23, in the immense and eternal index of the astral records. There can be nothing that he does not know, because he has taken part in all that he judges; and he judges us not from the depth of our present ignorance, but from the height of all that we shall learn much later. He is not only our intelligence and our consciousness of to-day, which are hardly waking and no longer count their errors; he is even now, for they already dwell within us, though they be inactive, impotent, dumb[284] and blind, our intelligence and our consciousness to come, when they shall have attained24, in the course of the ages and of the innumerable developments, expiations and ascents26, the loftiest summits of Wisdom and Discernment.
At the hour of our death the account seems closed; but he is simply asleep and will resume his hold of us again. He will slumber27 perhaps for hundreds, nay28, thousands of years in “Devachan,” that is to say, in the state of unconsciousness which prepares us for a new incarnation; but, when we awake, we shall find the assets and liabilities added up beyond recall; and our Karma will merely continue the life which we have laid aside. It will continue to be ourselves in that life and to see the consequences of our faults and our deserts burst into flower and afterwards to see other causes bear fruit in other effects, until the consummation of the ages when every thought born upon this earth ends by losing sight of it.
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Karma, as we see, is, when all is said, the immortal30 entity31 which man fashions by his deeds and thoughts and which follows him, or rather envelops32 and absorbs him, through his successive lives and changes, even as he incessantly33 changes, while preserving every previous impress. Man’s thoughts, as this doctrine34 very truly says, build up his character; his deeds make his environment. What man has thought, that he has become; his qualities and natural gifts adhere to him as the results of his ideas. He is, in all truth, created by himself. He is in the fullest sense of the word responsible for all that he is. He is contained in the net of all that he has done. He can neither undo35 nor destroy the past; but, so long as the effects of the past are yet to come, it is possible for him to alter them or to divert them by fresh exertions36. Nothing can affect him that he has not set in movement; no evil can befall him that he has not deserved. In the[286] infinite evolution of the eternities he will never find himself in the presence of any judge other than himself.
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It is certain that the idea of this supreme37 judge, who is our consciousness uninterrupted throughout the centuries and the millenaries, who is each one of us grown more and more enlightened, more and more incorruptible and infallible, leads to the highest, sincerest and purest system of morals that it is possible to conceive or to justify38 here below. The judge and the defendant39 are no longer face to face; they are one within the other and form but one and the same person. They can hide nothing from each other; and both have the same urgent interest in discovering the least fault, the slightest shadow and in purifying themselves as quickly and as completely as possible, in order to put an end to the reincarnations and to live at last in the One Being. The best, the saintliest are near doing so from the moment when[287] they quit this life; but, detached from all things, they do not cease to act for the good of all men, for already they know all things. They go farther than the mystic Christian40 who expects a reward from without: they are their own reward. They go farther than Marcus Aurelius, the great type of the man without illusions, who continues to act without hoping that his action can profit others: they know that nothing is useless, that nothing can be wasted; it is when they no longer need anything whatever that they work with the greatest ardour.
Contrary to what is too generally believed, this system of morals which leads to absolute repose41 extols42 activity. Hear, in this connection, the great teachings of the Bhagavad-Gita, the Lord’s Song, which is perhaps, as its translators, not without good reason, think, the most beautiful, that is to say, the most exalted43 book known up to the present time:
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“Thy business is with the action only, never with its fruits; so let not the fruit of action be thy motive44.... Perform action ... dwelling45 in union with the divine, renouncing46 attachments47 and balanced evenly in success and failure.... Pitiable are they who work for fruit.... Man winneth not freedom from action by abstaining49 from activity, nor by mere29 renunciation doth he rise to perfection.... Perform thou right action, for action is superior to inaction; and, inactive, even the maintenance of thy body would not be possible. The world is bound by action, unless performed for the sake of sacrifice....
“He who seeth inaction in action and action in inaction, he is wise among men, he is harmonious50, even while performing all action. Whose works are all free from the moulding of desire, whose actions are burned up by the fire of wisdom, him the wise have called a sage51. Having abandoned attachment48 to the fruit of action, always content, nowhere seeking refuge, he is not doing anything, although doing actions....[289] He should be known as a perpetual ascetic52, who neither hateth nor desireth; free from the pairs of opposites ... he is easily set free from bondage53....”
And remember that this, which forms part of the Mahabharata, the greatest epic54 on earth, was written four or five thousand years ago.
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Whatever we may think of the plausibility55 of the doctrine or revelation, we cannot dispute that this morality and this justification56 of justice are the most ancient and at the same time the most beautiful and reassuring57 that the mind of man has imagined. But they are based upon a postulate58 which we are perhaps too much inclined to refuse blindly. It asks us in fact to admit that our existence does not end at the hour of our death and that the spirit, or the vital spark, which does not perish, seeks an asylum59 and reappears in other bodies. At first the postulate seems[290] monstrous and unacceptable; but on closer examination its aspect becomes much less strange, less arbitrary and less unreasonable60. It is, to begin with, certain that, if all things undergo transformation61, nothing perishes or is annihilated62 in a universe which knows no nothingness and in which nothingness alone remains63 absolutely inconceivable. What we call nothingness could therefore be only another mode of existence, of persistence64 and of life; and, if we cannot admit that the body, which is only matter, is annihilated in its substance, it is no less difficult to admit that, if it were animated66 by a spirit—which it is hardly possible to dispute—this spirit should disappear without leaving a trace of any kind.
So the first point of the postulate and the most important is of necessity granted. There remains the second point, that of the successive reincarnations. Here, it is true, we have only hypotheses and probabilities. It is necessary that this spirit, this soul, this vital spark or principle, this idea, this immaterial substance—it matters little[291] what name we give it—must go or reside somewhere, must do or become something. It may wander in the infinity67 of space and time, dissolve, lose itself and disappear, or at least mingle68 and become confused with what it encounters there, and finally become absorbed in that boundless69 spiritual or vital energy which appears to animate65 the universe. But, of all hypotheses, the least probable is not that which tells us that, on leaving a body which has become uninhabitable, instead of escaping and wandering through the illimitable vast that fills it with terror, it looks about it for a lodging70 resembling that which it has lately quitted. Obviously this is only an hypothesis; but in our complete and terrible ignorance it presents itself before any other. We have nothing to support it save the most ancient tradition of humanity, a tradition perhaps prehuman and in any case absolutely general; and experience tends to show that at the base of these traditions and these instances of universal assent71 there is nearly always a great truth and[292] that they must be accorded a greater importance and a greater value than have hitherto been attributed to them.
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As regards evidence, or rather premonitory suggestions of evidence, we have scarcely anything beyond the experiments of Colonel de Rochas, who, by means of hypnotic passes, succeeded in making a few exceptional mediums retrace72 not only the whole course of their present lives, back to their earliest childhood, but also that of a certain number of previous existences. It cannot be denied that these extremely serious experiments, which were very scientifically conducted, are most bewildering; but the danger of unconscious suggestion or telepathy is not and doubtless will never be sufficiently73 remote to allow them to become really conclusive74.
We find further, on pursuing the same train of ideas, certain cases of reincarnation, like that of one of Dr. Samson’s little daughters, as related in the Annales des[293] sciences psychiques for July, 1913. This case, which is almost undisputed, is exceedingly curious; but, though it is not unique, those which resemble it are too rare to allow us to rely upon them.
There remains what are known as prenatal reminiscences. It happens fairly often that a man who finds himself in an unfamiliar75 country, in a city, a palace, a church, a house, or a garden, which he is visiting for the first time, is conscious of a strange and very definite impression that he “has seen it before.” It suddenly seems to him that this landscape, these vaulted76 ceilings, these rooms and the very furniture and pictures which he finds in them are quite well-known to him and that he recollects77 every nook and corner and every detail. Which of us but has, at least once in his life, vaguely experienced some such impression? But the recollections are often so definite that the person in whom they occur is able to act as a guide through the house or park which he has never explored and to describe beforehand[294] what his party will find in this or that room or at the turn of this or that avenue. Is it really a recollection of previous existences, a telepathic phenomenon or an ancestral and hereditary78 memory? The same question suggests itself touching79 certain
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