English
Here the stream FREE WILL AND KARMA. 135 of Karmic influence is stopped again. The man in question will not be troubled with having to accomplish noble deeds in his next life, nor embarrassed, it may be, with the power and influence required for thir accom- plishment. Whereas if, on the other hand, the life under notice had been as well filled with lofty emotions as its predecessor, if the seductive circumstances had been held in subordination to the continuous spiritual effort begun in the former life, the man would have been carried far on along the path to ulterior perfection, and the cumulative effort of good Karma in successive lives might have given rise to some very far-reaching results. Between the two extreme cases put forward, there is room, of course, for an infinitely varying operation of the same law on minor conditions of good and evil. Always, however, the same result will be seen emerging from all the complexities that might be imagined. We are—however little we can realise that state of the facts in our physical consciousness—the heirs of our last life’s Karma, the obedient progeny of its complicated impulses. But we have never parted company with the Free Will, the use gf which in the past has given rise to those impulses. We can apply it to the cultiva- tion of beneficent or maleficent states of mind in the current life, and so accordingly will the Karmic account of that life work out. I can imagine an objection raised against this view of the subject on the ground that it is a dangerous doctrine. It will be held by some people to lend too powerful a support to the theory of Necessity, by clear- 136 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. ing away the apparent absurdities which, in spite of its logical character, stood in the way of its acceptance. People will say, if our acts are dictated by an irresistible force, it is useless to struggle against them. And perhaps a very imperfect grasp of the doctrine here defined might be demoralising rather than beneficial. But this is only one of the many cases in which the exposition of occult laws is more or less ethically danger- ous. With enlarged wisdom and knowledge, comes enlarged responsibility, and an occult truth half under- stood may indeed be a perilous possession. But in the present case it is, at all events, easy to point out one consideration which militates against the notion that the doctrine of Necessity in Act, Free Will in Spirit, must tend to make people drift into evil and give way without an effort to temptation. Even though the accomplished act, whatever it may have been, may have been inevitable, no contemplated act can ever be assigned to that category up to the moment of its accomplish- ment, it may be that it belongs to the group of acts which we are destined to avoid! It would require a far greater degree of occult advancement than is embodied in an intellectual appreciation of the law under review, to help us in all cases beforehand to a knowledge as to what acts are decreed by the Karma of the past, and which are empty suggestions of the imagination. When that sublime foresight shall have been attained, we shall probably with it have attained to other characteristics that may enable us to bear the weight of increased responsibility and power. Of course, the only way in which we can deliberately FREE WILL AND KARMA. 137 apply the right spirit to the events of a current life in which we “‘ will” to elevate our destinies—to extinguish bad Karma in the past and accomplish spiritual progress —is by working on the hypothesis that we are free as to the acts. Nature has prescribed that hypothesis for our guidance by implanting so fixedly in our con- sciousness the feeling that we are free as to act. And here we revert to the “ qualification” I spoke of a few pages back. Within limits, we of the present stage of human evolution are not bound by Karmic necessity to acts with such a rigid destiny as to deprive us altogether of Free Will as regards them. Will any one suppose that there is going to be something loose here in the chain of occult reasoning, a flaw in the great system of cause and effect ? On the contrary, there is merely a beautiful adaptation of minor to higher laws. Gradu- ally, very gradually, the whole world, ‘‘ and all that it inhabits,’ is moving on to higher conditions of being in which continued evolution must be blended with the exercise of their own spiritual will by all who share it. It is a law of Karma—of the Karma we are now talking about, that of physical life—that the perfected Arhat gets above its operation. This is no legal quibble like the saying that the sovereign can do no wrong, but is simply another way of saying that a man does not become an Arhat till the temptations of the ordinary physical life have quite ceased to be temptations for him. He has got beyond the hopes and fears of physical life. His existence in the body is merely an incon- venient phase of his everyday existence out of the body. 138 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. He keeps it going for duty’s sake alone, and for no other conceivable or possible motive, and he is as likely —or shall we say less likely—to sin on the physical plane than a grown man with us is likely to cry and beat the table if he accidentally hurts his hand against it. Very well; that being so as regards the extreme case of the Arhat, there is clearly no Karma left binding him to physical acts. But Nature always shades her varieties of condition one into another like the rainbow’s tints. The man partially developed in the direction of arhatship is already partially exempt from the tyranny of Karma as regards his acts. His Free Will is becoming a more potent force in his life than it is in the case of the man whom it can merely influence through his interior states of mind. And at the present stage of human evolution that we have reached as a body, we human beings of the “nineteenth centurv,” or as the occultist would prefer to put it, of the fifth race, have all of us, broadly speaking, passed the stage at which we are mere automata in the hands of Karma ‘as regards our acts. It would not be true, for instance, to say at the present day that any man in a civilised country is under Karmic obligations to commit a murder. He may be under Karmic suggestion in that direction, but unless we can find a man whose education and training have been such that it has never been suggested to his mind that committing murder is wrong, then we may fairly deny that anyone is under Karmic pressure so unbending as to make him a mere instru- ment in respect to such an act as that. Observe, of course, that in speaking here of “ murder’? I mean FREE WILL AND KARMA. 139 the wilful murder which really involves the intention, and I am not noticing any crude distinctions made by legal enactments. So with any of the very great crimes against duty, whether they come within the catalogue of human codes or not. The least enlightened of us are at least beginning to be responsible beings. In most branches of science, and in occult science especially, the solution of one problem will often suggest others with which we may not previously have been in relation. So it may be well here at once to deal with a difficulty that will be sure to occur sooner or later to anyone who thinks over the limited Free Will, even as regards acts, which is assigned by occult teaching to people of the present race. All of us are in very close relations on this plane of life with one another. Perhaps, indeed, on all planes, and on others more even than here; but at all events the manner in which our acts influence one another is obvious. So obvious as to make loose thinkers recoil from the notion of anything resembling predetermina- tion in the course of events. If A robs B he may alter the whole course of B’s life. If A has Free Will whether to rob B or not, how can B’s Karma be correctly worked out ? And so on ad infinitum, with small acts and events as well as great ones. Indeed, the mightiest events in our lives often ensue from acts on the part of others that look quite insignificant at the time. Where are we to draw the line in any scientific spirit? Human affairs are so intensely entangled that it looks as though we must say—all or nothing, either every act, to the I40 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. smallest, must be automatic and inevitable, or there is no prearranged course of events and no regular working out of Karma at all. But there is a way of drawing the line which becomes intelligible in the light of some further revelations. These are so subtle that I must approach them gradually. When we talk about the laws of Nature being the will of God we use language with which few European thinkers will quarrel. Even materialism, if not abso- lutely atheistic, might let the phrase pass. Religious instinct will cling to it as a mode of bringing the incon- trovertible facts of physical science into harmony with theological ideas. But those beautiful generali- ties are never completely satisfactory to the occult student. He wants some closer interpretation of the spiritual facts. When two chemical salts are mingled in solution, and thereupon the acids and bases change hands and group themselves into a new arrangement of molecules, is the will of God consciously ordaining that change ? On the other hand, if a nebula of fire mist come under the conditions that convert it into a system of planets teeming with life, with joy and suffer- ing, with lofty human aspiration, and with evil tend- encies, with love and hatred, and so on, can we suppose that the will of God, if producing this result, is uncon- scious of it ? The double problem lies in the region respectfully put aside as inscrutable in most cases.