If he will have the courage to let the ego-illusion die out, a new and real life will come to birth within his being.

The Ego > Detaching from The Ego (Part 2) > Results of dethroning ego

#11534 – 6.8.5.478

BN – ZZ – DK

The automatic, constant, and undisciplined thought-movement comes at last to an end. It is the central part of the ego which has surrendered.

The Ego > Detaching from The Ego (Part 2) > Results of dethroning ego

#11536 – 6.8.5.480

BN – ZZZ – DK

He brings his personality into his thoughts and acts, as everyone does; but even in the next and higher stage, where he becomes a spectator of that personality, it still happens, although in a subtler and diminished way. There is a further stage where ego becomes entirely subservient and consciousness is centered on a still deeper level.

The Ego > Detaching from The Ego (Part 2) > Results of dethroning ego

#11538 – 6.8.5.482

BN – ZZ – DK

Take away the thoughts and feelings, including the body-thought and the specific I-feeling, and you take away the whole basis of man's personal existence. It is indeed the only mode of his life that he can conceive. After all, the personality is only a series of continuous thoughts, strongly held and centered around a particular body. He who can win the power to free himself from all thoughts, wins the power to free himself from the personal "I"-thoughts. Only such a man has really obeyed Jesus' injunction to lose his life. For what other life has man ordinarily than the personal one? But Jesus also promised a certain reward for successful obedience. He said that such a person would "save" his life. What does this mean? When the thoughts lapse and the finited personality goes, will the man be bereft of all consciousness? No—he will still possess pure consciousness, the deeper life that supports the finited self and sustains its very thoughts.

The Ego > Detaching from The Ego (Part 2) > Results of dethroning ego

#11539 – 6.8.5.483

BN – ZZ – DEK

Whether you ascribe the secrets of happenings in your life to karma, to fate, to other people, to blind processes of Nature, or to any other cause, leave some space for the X-factor, the unknown and unknowable which does not belong to anything which you can measure or comprehend.

From Birth to Rebirth > From Birth to Rebirth > From Birth to Rebirth

#11541 – 6.9.0.2

BN – ZZ – K

Life-in-Itself is infinite and unchanging, but there 'is' an end to the kind of experience undergone by the living entity in its finite human phase.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11542 – 6.9.1.1

A250930 – Z – K

Just as sound goes back into silence but may emerge again at some later time, so this little self goes back into the greater being from which it too may emerge again at another time.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11543 – 6.9.1.2

A250930 – Z – K

Even stars must die one day, more violently and dramatically than most human beings, for even they come under the law that whatever had a beginning must also have an ending.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11548 – 6.9.1.7

A250930 – Z – DK

The innermost being of man, his mysterious Overself, links him with God. It does not change with time nor die with the years. It is eternal.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11555 – 6.9.1.14

BN – Z – DK

This dismal fact is the mark on all things, and creatures: that they pass away, have a transient existence, and in this absolute sense lack reality. They appear for a while, seem substantial and eventful, but are in truth prolonged mirages. If this were all the story it would be melancholy enough. But it is not. 'That' whence they came, to which they go back, does 'not' pass away. That is the real, that is the consciousness which gave the universe, of which 'we' are a part, its existence. Out of that stems this little flower in each life which is the best, highest self. If we search for it and discover it, we recover our origin, return to our source, and 'as such' do not pass away. Yes, the forms are lost in the end but the being within them is not.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11560 – 6.9.1.19

A250930 – ZZZ – DK

Dying into annihilation is one thing but dying into another form of consciousness is quite different. It is the latter which happens at the passing away of the life-force from the body.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11562 – 6.9.1.21

A250930 – ZZZ – DK

If the thought of death horrifies so many people, the thought of the void—of the utter annihilation of ego, of the abandonment of everything and of the cessation of suffering, frustration, and anxiety which belong to life in the world—is a welcome idea for those who think more deeply. But since life is only partly suffering, since there are also joys and satisfactions in it and positive values which ought not to suffer destruction, a better balanced view is provided by philosophy and that is that consciousness, real consciousness, cannot die, but only returns to its ultimate source.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11563 – 6.9.1.22

A250930 – ZZ – K

A better balanced view is provided by philosophy and that is that consciousness, real consciousness, cannot die, but only returns to its ultimate source.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11563E – 6.9.1.22

UR_5 – ZZZ – K

We ought to be glad that we do not live forever. It is a frightening thought. If there were no death we would go on and on and on, captives in the body, having tried all experiences which promised much but in the end yielded nothing. No, it is good that in the end we are released from the physical tomb, as Plato called it, and will be able to enjoy a period of dignified rest until we plunge back again into the next re-embodiment.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11564 – 6.9.1.23

A250930 – ZZ – DK

What man undergoes in his physical life seems so real, so lasting, and so intimate—yet it is only a brief episode in the immensely larger span of his cosmic cycle.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11566 – 6.9.1.25

A250930 – ZZ – DK

So long as man listens to his little ego alone, and lets the voice of the Overself remain unheard and unknown, so long will all his cunning and his caution avail him little in the end when the body has to be left and the mind must return to its own proper sphere.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11576 – 6.9.1.35

A250930 – ZZ – DK

The inner work of philosophy results in liberation from the fear of death—whether the death which comes naturally through old age or that which comes violently through war.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11577 – 6.9.1.36

A250930 – ZZ – DK

A time comes when the prudent person, feeling intuitively or knowing medically that he has entered the last months or years of his life, ought to prepare himself for death. Clearly an increasing withdrawal from worldly life is called for. Its activities, desires, attachments, and pleasures must give way more and more to repentance, worship, prayer, asceticism, and spiritual recollectedness. It is time to come home.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11578 – 6.9.1.37

A250930 – ZZZ – DK1

Even a little perception of, or faith in, the World-Idea redeems the littleness of so many human lives, and at their end, in dying moments, becomes tremendously important.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11582 – 6.9.1.41

BN – X – DK

If we have all had many many previous lives on earth, we have also had many many previous deaths on earth. The actual experience of dying must leave some residual lesson or meaning or message behind in the subconscious.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11584 – 6.9.1.43

A250930 – ZZZ – K

We who find ourselves in old age with brittle bones and shrunken flesh, with wrinkled face and greyed hair, may find this a depressing experience. But like every other situation in life there is another way to look at it—perhaps in compensation for what we suffer. And that is to sum up the lessons of a lifetime and prepare ourselves for the next incarnation so that we shall better perform the necessary work on ourselves when that comes.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11585 – 6.9.1.44

A250930 – ZZ – DK

Life is a preparation for death, just as death is a preparation for re-entry into life.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11588 – 6.9.1.47

A250930 – Z – DK

There is a part of himself which cannot die, cannot pass into annihilation. But it is very deep down. The sage encounters it before bodily death and learns to establish his consciousness therein. The others encounter it during some phase in the after-death state.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11590 – 6.9.1.49

A250930 – Z – DK

Since the Overself is outside time it is also outside events. Nothing happens in it or to it.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11594 – 6.9.1.53

BN – Z – DK

With death, consciousness takes on a new condition but does not pass into mere emptiness, is not crumbled away with the fleshly brain into dust. No! It survives because it is the real being of a man.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11598 – 6.9.1.57

A250930 – ZZ – DK

The same destiny which brought us to birth will bring us to death. And just as a drama of different phases of consciousness unfolded itself after birth, so a drama of changes in consciousness will unfold itself after death. It is not annihilation that we ought to fear, for that will not happen, but rather the evil in our own self, and the pain that follows in the train of that evil as a shadow follows a man in the sunlight.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11599 – 6.9.1.58

A250930 – Z – DEK

Whoever has been freed from the demands of his earthly self, and from the desires of his ignorant self, does not need to return here after passing into the disembodied state.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11601 – 6.9.1.60

BN – Z – DK

Life between incarnations consists of a dream-like state followed by a period resembling deep sleep. There is, however, no remembrance of one's former birth upon emerging from this state.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11602 – 6.9.1.61

A250930 – Z – DK

The difference between life as we ordinarily know it and as it appears between incarnations is that here we have an apparent mixture of two worlds, the mental and the phenomenal, whereas there only the former exists.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11603 – 6.9.1.62

A250930 – ZZZ – DK

We pass through the dream and deep sleep states after death just as we do before it.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11604 – 6.9.1.63

A250930 – ZZ – DMK

With the understanding of life in the body comes the knowledge of what life is without the body, that is, death. Both are existences in Mind, which is their reality.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11605 – 6.9.1.64

A250930 – Z – DK

When the decreed time comes the body is discarded but the mind remains. It passes through varied experiences and finally sleeps them off. After a while it awakes deeply refreshed. Then the old propensities slowly revive and it returns to this world, putting on a new body in new surroundings.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11606 – 6.9.1.65

A250930 – ZZZ – DK

Concealed behind the passing dream of life there is a world of lasting reality. All men awaken at the moment of death but only a few men are able to resist falling at once into the astral dream. These are the few who sought to die to their lower selves whilst they were still alive. These are the mystics who enter reality.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11607 – 6.9.1.66

BN – Z – DK

Every unfulfilled desire acts as an attractive force to draw us back to earth again after every death.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11610 – 6.9.1.69

BN – X – DK

So hard are the lessons which earth-life forces us to learn, so hard its sufferings, that it is only fair to say that the bliss to which we shall emerge after leaving it, or even now in mystic states, is not less in any way.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11612 – 6.9.1.71

BN – Z – DK

Our troubles are but transitory, whereas our spiritual hopes survive the incarnations and bridge the gaps between births.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11614 – 6.9.1.73

BA11 – ZZZ – DK

This dream-like progress after death is not valueless. It acts as a reminder during each pre-birth of the true purpose of life.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11616 – 6.9.1.75

A250930 – ZZ – DK

How short a time does an animal need for the rest period between its births by contrast with that needed between human births! In its case just months, in the human case, more years than it lived on earth.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11620 – 6.9.1.79

BN – X – DK

The sense of time between incarnations varies. Five minutes to one is a hundred years to another.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11621 – 6.9.1.80

A250930 – ZZZ – K

We leave the body with the first death and the ego with the second death. But this is not the end. In the Overself we find our final being.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > Continuity, transition, and transformation

#11623 – 6.9.1.82

BN – Z – DK

When the end of life comes, and we go out of it like a candle in the wind, what then happens depends upon our character, our prevailing consciousness, our preparedness, and our last thoughts.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The event of death

#11624 – 6.9.1.83

BSG_4 – Z – DK

I have witnessed some advanced souls going through the process of passing to another sphere of consciousness, the process we call death, who spread mental sunshine around so that the bereaved ones gathered at the bedside felt it as a consoling counterbalance to their natural human grief. The truth made some kind of impression upon them that this universal event in Nature can actually be a change to brighter, happier, and freer existence.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The event of death

#11625 – 6.9.1.84

BN – ZZ – DK*

The anonymous young airman who wrote to his mother just before he was killed in battle: "I have no fear of death; only a queer elation," possessed something more than mere courage. For the time at least he had passed over from self-identification with the body to self-identification with the mind.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The event of death

#11626 – 6.9.1.85

BN – X – DK

The aspirant whose efforts to attain inner freedom and union with the Overself while living seem to have been thwarted by fate or circumstances, may yet find them rewarded with success while dying. Then, at the very moment when consciousness is passing from the body, it will pass into the Overself.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The event of death

#11627 – 6.9.1.86

BN – Z – DK

If there is any loss of consciousness during the change called death, it is only a brief one, as brief or briefer than a night's sleep. Many of the departed do not even know at the time what has really happened to them and still believe themselves to be physically alive. For they find themselves apparently able to see others and hear voices and touch things just as before. Yet all these experiences are entirely immaterial, and take place within a conscious mind that has no fleshly brain.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The event of death

#11629 – 6.9.1.88

BN – ZZ – DK1

The dying man should cross his arms over his chest with interlaced fingers. He should withdraw the mind from everything earthly and raise it lovingly in the highest aspiration.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The event of death

#11630 – 6.9.1.89

BN – Z – K1

This is the way a man may best die—while resting on a chair or couch or sleeping in a bed, a peaceful expression on his face as if seeing or hearing something of unusual beauty, a pleased expression around the mouth.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The event of death

#11631 – 6.9.1.90

BN – Z – K1

It is a teaching in both India and China that by concentrating his thoughts during his dying moments on the name of his spiritual leader with full faith, undivided ardour, and sincere deep attention, a man saves himself some or all of the post-mortem purificatory torments that he would otherwise have to undergo. It is also written that if he prefers to concentrate on the kind of environment in which his next birth is to appear, he contributes toward its possible realization.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The event of death

#11632 – 6.9.1.91

BN – X – DK1

Death is the great revealer. In that vivid but dreamlike experience which follows it, each man is shown what he has 'really' done with his earth-life, what he 'should' have done with it, and what he failed to do with it.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The event of death

#11634 – 6.9.1.93

A250930 – ZZ – DK

Just when life is ebbing fast away, when death is vividly in attendance, the long-sought but little found state of enlightenment may arise and accompany the event.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The event of death

#11635 – 6.9.1.94

BN – Z – DK

The process of dying may become a fulfilment of long years of aspiration for the quester or a veritable initiation into the soul for the ordinary man.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The event of death

#11636 – 6.9.1.95

BN – Z – DEK

There is a particular moment while a person is dying when the Overself takes over the entire process, just as it does when he is falling asleep. But if he clings involuntarily and through inveterate habit to his smaller nature, then he is only partly taken over; the remainder is imprisoned in his littleness.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The event of death

#11637 – 6.9.1.96

BN – Z – DK

Deep into the centre of his being does a man's mind withdraw as he passes out of this life, if his karma or his aspiration, his stage of development are not obstructive.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The event of death

#11640 – 6.9.1.99

BN – Z – DK

I have seen upon the face of certain dying or just-deceased persons, an expression of joyous inner calm that reassures the sensitive onlooker not only about their inner condition at the time but also about death's aftermath.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The event of death

#11643 – 6.9.1.102

BN – Z – DK

When he was dying, Heisenberg said to von Weizsäcker, "It is very easy: I did not know this before." At another moment he said, "I see now that physics is of no importance, that the world is illusion." He passed away in peace.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The event of death

#11645 – 6.9.1.104

BN – Z – K

The tremendous event of dying and leaving the body does not interrupt the Quest.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The event of death

#11647 – 6.9.1.106

BSG_4 – P – DK

In these closing hours of life with its lengthening shadows, one seeks to collect oneself and be ready for the final passing. How well it is to gather those reserves and foster those perceptions which now support one with, may I humbly say, a wise divine passivity. The end will come but it will be a transformation of form and a passage to a freer higher state.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The event of death

#11649 – 6.9.1.108

BN – ZZ – DEK

It is paradoxical that the moment of his death should automatically bring to life again all of a man's past. He has to repeat it all over again, this time from a different point of view, for the selfish, coloured, and distorting operation of the ego is absent. Now he sees it from an impersonal and uncoloured point of view. In other words, he sees the real facts for what they truly are, which means that he sees himself for what he really is. His brief experience over, he then begins to live like a man in a dream. His own will is not responsible for what happens to him as a dreamer and it is just the same with what happens to him as a spirit. He does not personally and consciously choose, decide, and predetermine the course of his spirit life any more than his dream life. It flows on by its own spontaneous accord here as there. This is more vividly brought home to him, if he is an evil man, when the after-death experience turns into a nightmare.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The event of death

#11654 – 6.9.1.113

A250930 – Z – DEK

It would be wrong to say that the pictorial review of life experience when dying is merely a mental transference from oneself … to those persons with whom one has been in contact during the life just passed, as the pictures unveil before him. What really happens is a transference from the false ego to the true Self, from the personal to the impersonal. It is a realization of the true meaning of each episode of the life from a higher point of view.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The event of death

#11655 – 6.9.1.114

A250930 – Z – DK

All possessions are left behind when a man makes his exit from this world. Every physical belonging, however prized, and even every human association, however beloved, are taken abruptly from him by death. This is the universal and eternal law which was, is, and ever shall be. There is no way to cheat or defeat it. Nevertheless there are some persons who, in a single particular only, escape this total severance. Those are the ones who sought and found, during their earthly life, the inspiration of a dead master or the association with a living one. His mental picture will vividly arise in their last moments on earth, to guide them safely into the first phase of post-mortem existence, to explain and reassure them about the unfamiliar new conditions.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The event of death

#11656 – 6.9.1.115

A250930 – Z – DEK

We may deplore our foolish behaviour in life, our stupid errors or our fleshly weaknesses, but in those moments of dying we have the chance to die in wisdom and in peace. Yes, it is a chance given to us, but we have to take it by keeping our sight fixed on the highest that we know.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The event of death

#11661 – 6.9.1.120

BN – Z – DK

Death can open out higher possibilities to the man who leaves this existence in faith, who trusts the Overself and commits himself to its leading without clinging to the body which is being left.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The event of death

#11662 – 6.9.1.121

BN – Z – DK

It is better to pass out of the physical body in possession of consciousness rather than in a state of drugged anesthesia. This applies more particularly to spiritual aspirants. But where there is great pain, local anesthesia may be unobjectionable.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The event of death

#11663 – 6.9.1.122

A250930 – Z – DK

Only in those last few days or hours or minutes do most men find out the truth that as one kind of life leaves both them and their flesh, another opens up to them.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The event of death

#11664 – 6.9.1.123

A250930 – ZZZ – DK

When he lies almost dying he may receive verification of the belief that a dying votary will see his god or guru or saviour come to take or guide his soul to the higher world.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The event of death

#11666 – 6.9.1.125

BN – Z – DK

Drowning persons who were saved and survived have told of the feeling of time slipping backward and their whole lifetime being replayed. This is an experience which is not theirs alone; it happens to all who pass through the portal of death.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The event of death

#11669 – 6.9.1.128

A250930 – Z – DK

The student has learned that the death of the body is extrinsic to the consciousness, which lives on unchanged in itself. But when death claims the body of someone he loves, his faith will be put to test. At such a time, he must remember that the loved one has actually evolved to a more highly developed phase of life.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The aftermath of death

#11674 – 6.9.1.133

A250930 – ZZ – DK*

The passing away of a loved one is a heavy blow—one for which most people are improperly prepared, because they are not yet willing to face the inescapable fact that all life is stamped with transiency and loss and sorrow. Only by seeking refuge in the immortality of the Overself and in discovering the truth and wisdom of the Divine Purpose, can we also learn how to endure the suffering on the ever-changing face of life. "Letting go" is the hardest of all lessons to learn; yet it is the most necessary for spiritual advancement.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The aftermath of death

#11675 – 6.9.1.134

A250930 – ZZZ – DEK

The passing of a loved one is usually a major experience, and one's reaction to it shows the degree of development attained. He must remember that sometimes it is best for a loved one to pass away if in doing so he or she is rid of a serious and painful bodily disease. He must also be happy in the thought that the loved one has now gone on to a sphere of existence where happiness, bliss, comfort, and rest can be found as can only be imagined but not found here. He may be assured that the loved one is really in a better world where only the beautiful side of life can penetrate and where ugly and base things can never find lodgement. He may help best at such a moment by an occasional loving remembrance during the peak point of meditation.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The aftermath of death

#11678E – 6.9.1.137

BN – ZEL1/2 – DEK

The passing of a loved one is usually a major experience, and one's reaction to it shows the degree of development attained. He must remember that sometimes it is best for a loved one to pass away if in doing so he or she is rid of a serious and painful bodily disease. For the sensitive aspirant, such an experience as seeing death face to face as it were, is always a great one. It should mark the beginning of a new period, of a more vivid evaluation of the transient character of earthly life, and result in a powerful aspiration to wrest something of an enduring character from the comparatively few years spent on this space-time level.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The aftermath of death

#11678E – 6.9.1.137

BN – ZEL2/2 – DEK

He who has had the good fortune to have a loving companion in marriage should not rail at Destiny when this helpmate is taken away. The same karma which brought the two together has also severed the relationship. But this is only temporary. There is really no loss, as mind speaks to mind in silent moments. Love and companionship of high quality will act as an attractive force to bring them together again somewhere, sometime. Many feel this in the inner understanding.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The aftermath of death

#11682 – 6.9.1.141

A250930 – ZZZ – DMK

Cremation is a definite and emphatic challenge. If one really believes that the soul of man is his real self, or even if one believes that the thinking power of man is his real self, then there can be no objection to it, but, on the contrary, complete approval of it. The method of burying dead bodies is fit only for one who believes that this thinking power is a product of the body's brain, that is, for a materialist.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The aftermath of death

#11684 – 6.9.1.143

A250930 – Z – DK1

I recommend the process of cremation to dispose of the body of a deceased person. An interval of three days should take place between the death and the actual cremation, because that is the transition period which makes complete the passing out of the spirit.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The aftermath of death

#11685 – 6.9.1.144

BN – Z – DK

The honour that is shown to a corpse by attempting to prolong its form is misplaced. It is a glaring contradiction to accept the credo of survival and then give to dead flesh what should be given to living soul. A rational funeral would be a completely private one. A rational funeral service would be one held to memorialize the memory of the deceased, and held not in the presence but in the absence of the corpse. A rational disposal would be cremation, not burial. The psychic and spiritual health of a community demands the abolition of graveyards.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The aftermath of death

#11686 – 6.9.1.145

A250930 – ZZ – DEK

The death of the body does not mean the death of the mind.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The aftermath of death

#11695E – 6.9.1.154

BA11 – ZZ – DEK

The death of the body does not mean the death of the mind. Where there is deep love there can be interludes of mental communion between the so-called dead and the living and there may be meetings from time to time when each is conscious of the other. These meetings take place in a reverie-like state. But some practice in meditative stilling of the mind is necessary, as any emotional excitement would prevent this communion. Nature, however, does not permit a continuous relation, only an intermittent one. For spirits have their own higher destinies to work out.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The aftermath of death

#11695 – 6.9.1.154

BN – ZZ – DEK

When suffering reaches its zenith or frustration is drawn out too long, when the heart is resigned to hopelessness or the mind to apathy, people often say that they do not wish to live any more and that they await the coming of death. They think only of the body's death, however. This will not solve their problem, for the same situation—under another guise—will repeat itself in a later birth. The only real solution is to seek out the inner reality of their longing for death. They want it because they believe it will separate them from their problems and disappointments. But these are 'the ego's burdens'. Therefore the radical separation from them is achievable only by separating permanently from the ego itself. Peace will then come—and come forever.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The aftermath of death

#11713 – 6.9.1.172

A250930 – ZZZ – K

There are the visible living people and the invisible living ones. None are ever lost to existence or destroyed in consciousness, but only their bodies.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The aftermath of death

#11717 – 6.9.1.176

A250930 – Z – DK

This lesson, that a man is not his body, will be learnt in modern times through his reasoning intelligence as it was learnt in former times through his believing feelings.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The aftermath of death

#11720 – 6.9.1.179

A250930 – Z – DK

Every person maintains his or her individuality during and after the perishing of the body-thought.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The aftermath of death

#11722E – 6.9.1.181

UR_5 – ZEL1/6 – DEK

The inequalities and injustices, which trouble many, are all balanced sooner or later by the law of recompense (karma). Each person receives in return precisely what he or she gives out; thus there is justice in the world, despite appearances to the contrary.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The aftermath of death

#11722E – 6.9.1.181

BA11 – ZEL2/6 – DEK

When others ridicule the idea of immortality, the aspirant should not be upset nor allow his own faith to be weakened; he must remember that these people are merely expressing their own opinions, not passing on knowledge. The fact that many persons are not too happy about the idea of physical annihilation—and fail to take into consideration the fact that the "I" endures—has, of course, coloured their personal tastes. Their opinions are, however, incompatible with truth.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The aftermath of death

#11722E – 6.9.1.181

B_13 – ZEL3/6 – DEK

The superstition that a childless person cannot reincarnate is nonsense.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The aftermath of death

#11722E – 6.9.1.181

BN – ZEL4/6 – DEK

There are two kinds of immortality (so long as the lower self dominates consciousness): first, the "endless" evolution of the ego, gradually developing through all its many manifestations; and, secondly, the true immortality of the everlasting, unchanging Real Self—or Overself—which forever underlies and sustains the former.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The aftermath of death

#11722E – 6.9.1.181

UR_5 – ZEL5/6 – DEK

My reference to not clinging to the ego simply means that the aspirant must learn the art of releasing what is transitory in himself and in his existence—that which can survive only temporarily. The Real Individuality—the sense and feeling of simply Being—can never perish, and is the true immortality. No one is asked to sacrifice all interest and appreciation in "things": one may continue to appreciate them—provided their transiency is understood and one does not deceive himself into overvaluing them. The prophets merely say that the eternal life cannot be found in such things.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The aftermath of death

#11722E – 6.9.1.181

UR_5 – ZEL6/6 – DEK3

We must find heaven this side of the grave; we must understand that heaven and hell are deep inside the heart and not places to which we go; and we must know that the true heart of man is deathless.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The aftermath of death

#11723 – 6.9.1.182

BN – X – DEK

The personal man will survive death but he will not be immortal. The "I" which outlives the fleshly body will itself one day be outlived by the deeper "I" which man has yet to find.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The aftermath of death

#11724 – 6.9.1.183

BN – X – DK

If death is the price of dwelling in this space-time world, then a spaceless and timeless world where there is no "here" and no "there," no "then" and no "now," no change from one stage to another, would also be an immortal one; and if death is the price of being associated with a separate individuality, then an existence which mysteriously embraces the whole world-system in unity must be imperishable.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The aftermath of death

#11725 – 6.9.1.184

BN – Z – DEK

The man who has studied these teachings does not believe that death can bring him to an end even though it must bring his body to an end. It is both a logical and biological truth for him that his inner personality will survive, his mind will continue its existence.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The aftermath of death

#11726 – 6.9.1.185

BN – X – DK

The life that is in us goes at death into the life that is in the universe. It is as secure there as it was in us. It is not lost. Thereafter it reappears in another form, another body.

From Birth to Rebirth > Death, Dying, and Immortality > The aftermath of death

#11728 – 6.9.1.187

A250930 – ZZZ – DK

The wheel of life does not stop for long—soon it will turn again and pass from the point of death to the point of life.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Rebirth and Reincarnation

#11729 – 6.9.2.1

A250930 – ZZ – DK

The thought of the body, of being identified with it, guarantees that a dying person will come back here again.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Rebirth and Reincarnation

#11730 – 6.9.2.2

BA11 – Z – DK

Better than being born to wealthy parents is being born to wise ones, for then the child will not only be taught spiritual values but will see them demonstrated before his eyes.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Rebirth and Reincarnation

#11737 – 6.9.2.9

BN – ZZZ – DK

A child is born into a family not by mere chance but as the resultant of forces set agoing in the previous births both by the newly born and by its parents.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Rebirth and Reincarnation

#11739 – 6.9.2.11

BA11 – ZZZ – DK

Parents may do what they wish to encourage the good and discourage the evil in the characters of their offspring, but in bringing them into the world they took a chance. For the children brought their own characters with them from previous incarnations.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Rebirth and Reincarnation

#11740 – 6.9.2.12

BN – ZZ – DK

None of us is thrown into this world against his will. All of us are here because we want to be here.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Rebirth and Reincarnation

#11742 – 6.9.2.14

BN – Z – DK

We reincarnate in part through the pressure of accumulated karma and in part through the pressure of habitual tendencies.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Rebirth and Reincarnation

#11743 – 6.9.2.15

BN – Z – DK

All men come back to bodily life again if they leave a residue of karma. All karma that is not brought to an end by bringing the mind's bondage to the ego-thought to an end, makes reincarnation inescapable.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Rebirth and Reincarnation

#11745 – 6.9.2.17

BA11 – ZZZ – DK

The tendencies brought over from past births, the experiences and contacts made then as well as in the present one, explain his acting as he does, and his being what he is.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > The influence of past tendencies

#11746 – 6.9.2.18

BN – ZZ – DK

He excuses his weaknesses by complaining against nature, which has provided him with instincts and passions leading to them. But that which he calls nature is really the inheritance of his own tendencies from former lives.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > The influence of past tendencies

#11747 – 6.9.2.19

BN – ZZ – DK

At any given moment, a man thinks and acts according to, and as a result of, his whole mental and physical experience of life and his whole character and nature. These cannot be limited to the single short life on earth he now knows, for that will not explain many of his tendencies and traits. They must include all his previous lives.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > The influence of past tendencies

#11748 – 6.9.2.20

BA11 – ZZZ – DK

All things contribute to the making of man—the history of his past and the climate of his land, the people among whom he is born, and his own particular tendencies. The most important is his karma.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > The influence of past tendencies

#11749 – 6.9.2.21

BA11 – ZZ – DK

The complexes and tendencies pre-existing the present birth and hidden deep in his subconscious mind, must sooner or later come through to the surface mind.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > The influence of past tendencies

#11758 – 6.9.2.30

BN – ZZ – DK

In the final accounting it is less what a man receives from education than what he receives from former lives that matters most. His education may help to bring it out and round it out but his innate stock will largely be the measure of his assets.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > The influence of past tendencies

#11759 – 6.9.2.31

BN – ZZ – DK

The traits and tendencies which a man receives from the preceding births constitute in their totality the personal self which he knows as ”I.”

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > The influence of past tendencies

#11761 – 6.9.2.33

BN – ZZ – DK

What a man brings over from former births are the fixed ideas in his consciousness, the habitual direction of his feelings and the innate impulses of his will.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > The influence of past tendencies

#11762 – 6.9.2.34

BN – ZZ – DK

What a man is, needs, or has done puts him just where he is.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > The influence of past tendencies

#11764 – 6.9.2.36

UR_4map – ZZZ – DMK2

The ego inherits the tendencies, the affinities, and the antagonisms which have shaped themselves in a long series of births behind the present one.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > The influence of past tendencies

#11766 – 6.9.2.38

BN – ZZ – DK

The innate tendencies of his mental life give rise to the natural compulsions of his active life. He cannot behave differently from the way he does—that is, if he is not on the quest and therefore not struggling to rise beyond himself. His own past—and it stretches back farther than he knows—created the thoughts, the acts, and the conditions of the present.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > The influence of past tendencies

#11767 – 6.9.2.39

BN – Z – DEK

Men are not separated from each other by the yards between their bodies alone, but even more by the inequality of their characters and the discord between their attitudes. Men do not become neighbours merely because their bodies live near to each other, but because there is affinity between their characters and harmony between their attitudes. Two loving friends are near each other even though their bodies are in separate continents; two hating enemies are far from each other even though their bodies are in the same room.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > The influence of past tendencies

#11773 – 6.9.2.45

BN – ZZZ – DEK

The more I reflect about my global travels, observations, and studies, the more I hold firmly to this truth: “Character is fate.”

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > The influence of past tendencies

#11774 – 6.9.2.46

BN – ZZ – DK

We automatically try to repeat the old patterns of behaviour created in former lives whether they are beneficial or injurious to us. This happens because we can hardly help doing so.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > The influence of past tendencies

#11778 – 6.9.2.50

BN – Z – DK

Tendencies, habits, and desires inherited from past lives may be worth following. But they may also be harmful, or negative and not easily dislodged.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > The influence of past tendencies

#11783 – 6.9.2.55

BN – Z – DK

What we were in the past is not important. What we are now is important. What we intend to make of ourselves in the future is vitally important.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > The influence of past tendencies

#11785 – 6.9.2.57

BN – ZZZ – DK1

A man can respond to events or to prophets, to demands or to experiences, only on the level of his own capacity and mentality. We have no right to ask that he shall be better or wiser.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > The influence of past tendencies

#11786 – 6.9.2.58

B_13 – ZZ – DK

The pathetic thoughts of what might have been torment him. But are they futile? If they show how actions could have been improved and decisions bettered, they sow seeds for the next birth.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > The influence of past tendencies

#11788 – 6.9.2.60

BN – Z – DMK

We come into birth as distinct persons—even babies begin to show their individual differences with characters formed already in previous existences. This is one reason why some amount of tolerance, some acceptance of one another as we are, is necessary if we are to live peaceably together.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > The influence of past tendencies

#11790 – 6.9.2.62

BN – ZZ – DK

The essence of countless experiences and states through which he has passed is here and now with him as the degree of character, intelligence, and power which he possesses.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > The influence of past tendencies

#11792 – 6.9.2.64

BN – X – DK

He who has taken many births has a great wealth of total experience behind him. This manifests itself naturally in wiser decisions and better self-control.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > The influence of past tendencies

#11793 – 6.9.2.65

BN – Z – DK

Memory is a spiritual faculty inasmuch as it gives us the chance and means to extract teaching wisdom and guidance from the past. It enables us to visualize past experience and make it either a guide or a warning in dealing with present problems.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > The influence of past tendencies

#11794 – 6.9.2.66

BN – Z – K

That a truth which is so clear to their own minds could be so obscure to other minds, is easily explicable by the grading processes of reincarnation. Each man's present state and views are the outcome of his past experiences in past lives.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > The influence of past tendencies

#11795 – 6.9.2.67

BA11 – ZZZ – DK

It is easy to despise as stupid those of obvious inferior intelligence, but it would be well to remember that we were once at the same level. The notion of rebirth teaches patience, tolerance.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > The influence of past tendencies

#11805 – 6.9.2.77

B_01 – ZZZ – DK

The man who finds his mind suddenly illuminated, but does not know why it came about, may find his answer in the doctrine of ”tendencies” —prenatal and karmic— reappearing from former lives and held hitherto in the deeper mental levels.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > The influence of past tendencies

#11809 – 6.9.2.81

BN – ZZ – DK

When intuitive recognitions of truth, swift flashes of understanding, come on hearing or reading these inspired statements, this is a sign of having been engaged in its quest during former reincarnations.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > The influence of past tendencies

#11813 – 6.9.2.85

BN – ZZZ – DK

There is no direct and incontrovertible proof of reincarnation, but there is logical evidence for it. Why should there be certain abilities almost without previous training? Why should I be possessed at an early age of the mental abilities of a writer, or someone else of a musician? Heredity alone cannot account for it. But it is perfectly accounted for if we consider them to a subconscious memory. I am unwittingly remembering and using again my own capabilities from a former birth. This is possible only because I am mind. Mind alone can continue itself. Capacities in any field cannot appear out of nothing. The individual who shows them forth is repeating them out of his own deeper memory. There is the evidence of Nature. When I wake up in the morning, I pick up all that I had the day before. I remember my own individuality and use the same literary talents as before. Otherwise, I could never write again, or someone else could never sing. The basis of this reminiscence is not a physical occurrence, but a mental one.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and Mentalism

#11817 – 6.9.2.89

BN – ZZZ – DEK1

The views which anyone holds intellectually are relative to his experience and status, his innate character and reincarnatory history.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and Mentalism

#11819 – 6.9.2.91

BN – X – D

The capacity to commune with the Overself exists in all men; it is a universal one. But it does not exist to an equal degree. For those who can accept the doctrine of rebirth, the explanation of this inequality lies there.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and Mentalism

#11821 – 6.9.2.93

BN – X – D

The very nature of reincarnation prevents anyone from completely proving it. But there is no other theory that is so reasonable to help us understand our evolution, history, capacity, genius, character, and inequality; no other so useful to help us solve the great problem of why we are here on earth at all. This doctrine, that the ego repeatedly visits our plane in fresh physical forms, is demanded by reason, supplied by intuition, and verified by revelation.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and Mentalism

#11823 – 6.9.2.95

BA11 – ZZZ – DEK

Freud's postulate of the Unconscious mind as a structure of forgotten unrecoverable memories is a precursor of the rebirth theory. It prepares the way for scientific acceptance of the latter and should inevitably lead to it. In turn, it throws light on the doctrine of karma. For the ego which revives out of apparent nothingness is the conscious mind which reappears out of the unconscious. When the production of these idea-energies (that is, tendencies, 'samskaras') is brought to rest, then they can never again objectify into a physical environment, a fresh rebirth, and thus man becomes karma-free and enters Nirvana. As long as he believes that he is the body he must reincarnate in the body.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and Mentalism

#11826 – 6.9.2.98

BN – Z – K1

The reincarnations which precede the present one contribute to its characteristics and help to shape its happenings. But this does not mean they give all its characteristics and happenings. Some develop out of the outer facts and inner reactions of this present birth.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and Mentalism

#11827 – 6.9.2.99

BN – X – D

His conduct while alive will contribute to the kind of body and environment he gets next time, his thought and feelings too. We earn from life and pass up higher or go down lower like pupils in graded school.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and Mentalism

#11829 – 6.9.2.101

BN – X – D

Where is any man's biography which is more than fragmentary, opinionated, and biased? For without the background picture of earlier lives in other bodies the materials are thinner than the compiler believes them to be.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and Mentalism

#11830 – 6.9.2.102

BN – X – D

If thousands of prenatal memories were to come crowding in together, the mind's life would be horrible, crazy. Worse, one's own personal identity would be lost, merged in all the others.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and Mentalism

#11834 – 6.9.2.106

BN – X – D

One may experience a sense of loss if he has not recovered the degree of awareness achieved in previous incarnations.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and Mentalism

#11838 – 6.9.2.110

BN – X – D

What we know from past births does not have to be learned again from experiences of the same kind in the present birth, unless we do not know it or feel it strongly enough.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and Mentalism

#11839 – 6.9.2.111

BN – X – D

This feeling that we have seen this place before, passed through that situation, comes from a former personality. The soul is the same, but the outer man is not.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and Mentalism

#11842 – 6.9.2.114

BN – ZZ – DEK

The same forces which bring us into the experience of a new reincarnation also deprive us of the memory of previous reincarnations.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and Mentalism

#11849 – 6.9.2.121

BN – X – D

Just as in the playing of billiards the impact of a ball hitting a second one gives the latter an impetus and a direction, so the 'karma' of one birth is brought over to the next birth. This is not the same as a particular entity, a thing called ego, being carried over.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and Mentalism

#11854 – 6.9.2.126

BN – Z – K

The feeling of familiarity with someone met for the first time, of vague indistinct recognition which we sometimes get, may have varying significances. But one of them is an echo of remembrance of previous contact in a past birth.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and Mentalism

#11857 – 6.9.2.129

BN – X – D

Some find it fascinating to speculate about whom they are the reincarnation of, but they ought to keep clear in mind that this is imagination given free play. In other cases, however, there is genuine remembrance, which may appear in either waking or dream states.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and Mentalism

#11859 – 6.9.2.131

BN – X – DK

The saints were martyrs. They accepted all their suffering as coming from God and even embraced it. The Philosophic way is to realize that it is often karma, self-earned and brought upon oneself; hence one should analyse it and try to understand why it has come so that the lesson won't have to be repeated. > >The Christian, Muhammedan, and Jewish religions must accept the doctrines of reincarnation and karma if they want to establish a reasonable place for suffering in the scheme of things.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and Mentalism

#11860 – 6.9.2.132

B_01 – ZZ – K

Since it is not from the animal but from the human state that the Essence of Being can be realized (because the animal does not possess the necessary faculties), the processes of rebirth must fill the gap between lowest animal to highest human.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and Mentalism

#11864 – 6.9.2.136

BN – X – D

When the energies have run out, and the advance of years must be measured sadly; when a man knows at last what he ought to have done, it is too late. This is why another chance, another birth on earth is needed.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and Mentalism

#11865 – 6.9.2.137

BN – X – D

Only when the desire for perpetuation of personal existence finally leaves him is a man really near the point where even a little effort produces large results on this quest. But getting tired of the wheel of rebirth's turnings does not come easily.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and Mentalism

#11867 – 6.9.2.139

BN – X – D

But who can count the number of times a living being must incarnate in the plant world before it is ready to enter the animal kingdom? Nearly a half of the average life is spent in recapitulating the previous incarnational development so that the work of a new incarnation does not really begin until then.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and Mentalism

#11869 – 6.9.2.141

BN – X – DEK

It would seem that the experience of a whole lifetime is wasted when people exist in such spiritual torpor, merely keeping their animal bodies alive. But of course it is not really so; for however slight and outwardly unrecognizable inward growth may be, it must be there, or Nature's process of reincarnation would be meaningless and useless mechanical repetition.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and Mentalism

#11870 – 6.9.2.142

BN – Z – D

If a new birth is a new opportunity to gain spiritual experience, it is also a new opportunity to commit errors and acquire vices.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and Mentalism

#11871 – 6.9.2.143

BN – X – D

Looking at the monstrous wickedness and folly in the world today, it would seem a stupid and hopeless effort to believe that human character will become any better than it was and still is. But the fact of reincarnation, with its tremendous possibilities, restores this hope.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and Mentalism

#11872 – 6.9.2.144

BN – X – D

We are incarnated to be educated. Experience provides the lessons, and necessity gives the disciplines.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and Mentalism

#11874 – 6.9.2.146

BN – X – D

All the reincarnations which are necessary to the unfoldment of his character and capacities must be lived through.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Beliefs about reincarnation

#11878 – 6.9.2.150

BA11 – ZZZ – DK

The journey of life is both an adventure and a pilgrimage to our essential being. All the reincarnations which are necessary to the unfoldment of our character and capacities must be lived through. We pass from body to body to collect experience. The fruit of experience is Enlightenment: the established awareness of the essential being's presence, the Overself or soul. The aspirant must take heart that one day the goal will be reached, even if there were no law of evolution to confirm it—as there is.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Beliefs about reincarnation

#11878M – 6.9.2.150

B_01 – ZZZ – DXK

When he looks back upon the long series of earth lives which belongs to his past, he is struck afresh by the supreme wisdom of Nature and by the supreme necessity of this principle of recurring embodiment. If there had been only one single continuous earth life, his progress would have been brought to an end, he would have been cluttered up by his own past, and he could not have advanced in new directions. This past would have surrounded him like a circular wall. How unerring the wisdom and how infinite the mercy which, by breaking this circle of necessity, gives him the chance of a fresh start again and again, sets him free to make new beginnings! Without these breaks in his life-sequences, without the advantages of fresh surroundings, different circumstances, and new contacts, he could not have lifted himself to ever higher levels, but would only have stagnated or fallen to lower ones.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Beliefs about reincarnation

#11888 – 6.9.2.160

BN – ZZZ – DEK1

The law which pushes us into, or out of, physical bodies is a cosmic law. There is no blind chance about it…; [there is] a vast harmony, an immense love, an incredible peace, and a universal support.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Beliefs about reincarnation

#11889EM – 6.9.2.161

BSG_4 – P – DX

We are given one life, one day, one present time, one conscious space-time level to concentrate on so that Nature's business in us shall not be interfered with. Yet other lives, other days, other times, other levels of consciousness already exist just as much at this very moment, even though we do not apprehend them, and await our meeting and experience by a fated necessity.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Beliefs about reincarnation

#11891 – 6.9.2.163

BN – ZZZ – K1

I was not surprised when Jung told me that he could not accept the idea of reincarnation but could accept the idea of karma.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Beliefs about reincarnation

#11892 – 6.9.2.164

BN – X – K

We repeat these appearances on earth in a constant process and a long cycle of time. But contrast it with the beginninglessness and endlessness of life itself. What is this but a fraction of a fraction of a moment?

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Beliefs about reincarnation

#11893 – 6.9.2.165

BA11 – ZZZ – DK

When a man has established himself in the Universal self, in the awareness of its oneness, the series of earthly reincarnations of his personal self comes to an end. For himself, they would serve no further purpose.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Beliefs about reincarnation

#11900 – 6.9.2.172

BN – X – D

Somewhere in Shakespeare there is that phrase about our human “exits and entrances” which, with its reversal of the natural order of birth and death, I take to mean our reincarnation.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Beliefs about reincarnation

#11905 – 6.9.2.177

BN – X – D

We may be surprised that so many intelligent people refuse to believe in reincarnation and karma, even though they cannot explain God's justice without them. The truth is that they are defective in intuition and dependent on intellect and emotion. But emotion and intellect alone are too limited as instruments for finding truth.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Beliefs about reincarnation

#11913 – 6.9.2.185

BN – ZZ – DK

Whatever we constantly concentrate on provides one of the factors in reincarnation. If we love a race or an individual strongly enough, we shall sooner or later necessarily be drawn into their orbit when reincarnating. It is equally true, however, that if we hate a race or an individual strongly enough we shall have the same experience. Both love and hate are forms of concentrated thought. The nature of concentration, whether it be that of like or dislike, attraction or repulsion, does not alter its strength.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Beliefs about reincarnation

#11914 – 6.9.2.186

BN – X – D

The common interpretation of the Biblical sentence, ”Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return,” was interpreted by the Jewish medieval Kabbalists and by initiated Rabbis of antiquity as referring to reincarnation.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Beliefs about reincarnation

#11921 – 6.9.2.193

BN – X – D

Greeks who believed strongly in the idea of rebirth were not only the initiates of the Orphic Mysteries, but also among the most celebrated thinkers, especially Plato.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Beliefs about reincarnation

#11922 – 6.9.2.194

BSG_5 – P – D

To carry the burdens of existence in one body after another through a long series may seem an unpleasant prospect to some minds, as it did to Gautama in India and Schopenhauer in Germany.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Beliefs about reincarnation

#11927 – 6.9.2.199

BN – X – DM

In the lengthy writings of the fathers of the early Christian Church, we can find approval of belief in the doctrine of reincarnation expressed by Saint Methodius, Origen, Synesius, and Pamphilius.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Beliefs about reincarnation

#11931 – 6.9.2.203

BN – X – D

Each comes to the front of the stage, plays out his allotted role, and moves away. Shakespeare's picturesque statement of the human predicament comes to larger meaning when interpreted in terms of rebirth in series. All mankind become a company of actors, appearing in play after play, each story different, each part acted in a new body.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Beliefs about reincarnation

#11932 – 6.9.2.204

BN – Z – DEK

The periodic return to earth-life was a belief shared by poets like Goethe, Shelley, and Browning, by thinkers like Plato, Schopenhauer, and Swedenborg.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Beliefs about reincarnation

#11933 – 6.9.2.205

BN – X – D

We have to become in actuality what we are in potentiality; all our rebirths are engaged in this process.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and the Overself

#11938 – 6.9.2.210

UR_4map – ZZZ – DK

Whether we confront the mystery called death or the equal mystery called life, the revelation must come in one or the other state: there is a connection with HE WHO IS. For this are we born and our oscillation between the two happens at the Mind of the World's behest. As, so sleepily and unwittingly, we shape and light up these fragments of being that we are, quite simply the connection gets uncovered more and more.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and the Overself

#11939 – 6.9.2.211

BN – Z – K

Until he finds his Overself, no man can escape this coming back to the earthly life. And this remains true whether he loves the world or is disgusted by it.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and the Overself

#11940 – 6.9.2.212

BN – Z – DK

We come back to this earth of ours and not to some other earth because it is here that we sow the seeds of thought, of feeling, and of action, and therefore it is here that we must reap their harvest. Nature is orderly and just, consistent and continuous.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and the Overself

#11942 – 6.9.2.214

BN – ZZ – DK1

Hope comes to him from this benevolent source, evil departs from him as he draws on these higher energies for defense, and ethereal purpose surrounds his entire life like an aura. He knows that his history did not begin in the country where he was born. He knows that it will not end in the body in which he dies.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and the Overself

#11945 – 6.9.2.217

BN – ZZ – DEK

The passage from quest to conquest would be impossible for most humans if they had only one life to live, one body for the start and the finish.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and the Overself

#11946 – 6.9.2.218

BN – X – D

There can be no Second Coming of Christ—the Consciousness—for it never went away. There can be a return of Jesus—the man embodying and reflecting that Consciousness—for the person may be born and reborn as God wills.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and the Overself

#11947 – 6.9.2.219

B_12 – ZZ – K

Are all the varied joys and sufferings undergone only to come to a complete end in death? Is all the vast intelligence of this universe which gave birth to our own minute fragment to be forever separated from us? No! We shall live again, die again, and return again unless and until we have fulfilled the divine purpose which brought us here.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and the Overself

#11949 – 6.9.2.221

BA11 – ZZZ – DEK

If it had been possible to attain salvation in the non-physical worlds, we would not have been born in this one. We are here because nowhere else could we, in our present state of progress, find the right environment to ripen those qualities which will lead us further toward this ultimate goal.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and the Overself

#11950 – 6.9.2.222

BN – X – D

We do die to the earthly self and are born again in the higher self. That is the only real death awaiting us.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and the Overself

#11951E – 6.9.2.223

BSG_4 – P – DE

The possession of moral values, metaphysical capacities, and spiritually intuitive qualities which distinguish more evolved from less evolved men takes time to acquire—so much time that reincarnation must be a continuous process.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and the Overself

#11952 – 6.9.2.224

BSG_4 – P – D

If it were true that a bad man must always remain bad, where would the hope be for mankind? But in the perfect wisdom of the Infinite Mind, human lives are so arranged that the bad man will go on garnering the untoward results of his deeds until his mind, first subconsciously but later consciously, perceives the logical and causal connection between his act and his suffering and begins the attempt to control his evil tendencies. Both this education and this effort will continue through many births for a single one would be too short in time, too poor in opportunity, for such a total reformation to be achieved. 

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and the Overself

#11953 – 6.9.2.225

UR_5 – ZZZ – DMK

Even those who are well-intentioned and spiritually minded make many mistakes in life simply because they cannot see the unfortunate results to which their wrong decisions and actions must necessarily lead. Only experience can lead to their correction and only reincarnation can give enough experience.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and the Overself

#11954 – 6.9.2.226

BA11 – ZZ – DK

Life in the flesh is a gift if we are using it rightly but it becomes a curse if we are not. Every incarnation should be used to help one get somewhat farther in doing this job of achieving an Overself-inspired existence.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and the Overself

#11955 – 6.9.2.227

BN – X – D

What is happening to his characteristics, what he is learning from experience lies in more or less degree below the threshold of consciousness. Only time, with its repetitions, and thought, with its conclusions, will shift the lesson or ability into visible manifestation above the threshold.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and the Overself

#11956 – 6.9.2.228

BN – X – D

The difference between savage and sage may be only two letters in spelled words but it may be two thousand incarnations in historic meaning.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and the Overself

#11957 – 6.9.2.229

BN – Z – K

Plant, animal, and human bodies pass through this cycle of growth, maturity, decay and death. All this means being exposed to different forces, different experiences, resulting in the development of consciousness.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and the Overself

#11960 – 6.9.2.232

BN – X – D

To become Man as evolution intends him to be, he must draw out all his latent resources, fill out a wide experience. This is why so many reincarnations on earth are needed. Until then, his realization as Man will be an incomplete one.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and the Overself

#11961 – 6.9.2.233

UR_5 – ZZZ – DK

There, in this necessity of developing, balancing, and coordinating all the parts of one's being, is a further argument for the necessity of reincarnation. A single lifetime is too short a period in which to fulfil such a task.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and the Overself

#11963 – 6.9.2.235

BN – ZZ – DK

The ripe wisdom of a sage could not possibly be the fruit of a single lifetime, but only of many lifetimes. 

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and the Overself

#11964 – 6.9.2.236

UR_5 – ZZZ – DK

The experiences of life will in the end overcome these inner resistances. The silent instruction multiplied during the re-embodiments will defeat the psychological defense mechanisms set up against unpalatable truths or new ideas. It is the repetition and deepening of all these lessons through the accumulating rebirths that enables wisdom to penetrate consciousness completely and effectively.

From Birth to Rebirth > Rebirth and Reincarnation > Reincarnation and the Overself

#11965 – 6.9.2.237

UR_5 – ZZZ – DK

In karma we find a key to many puzzles of contemporary history. It is a doctrine which warns us that we have prepared the cocoon of our present lot largely by the thoughts and deeds spun out of ourselves during bygone earth-lives and the present re-embodiment. Now the doctrine is as applicable to the history of whole peoples as to the history of single individuals. Its corollary is that our characters and minds are in travail through the ages; some are old with the rich experience of a hoary past but most are young, unwise, and ungoverned. Its lesson is that the changing tides of public fate and private fortune are not meaningless. On the contrary, they invite our philosophical consideration so that we may understand how neglected duties or positive wrong-doing are the hidden root of our troubles.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#11966E – 6.9.3.1

BN – ZEL1/2 – DEK

Those who understand the principle of karma aright, who do not misunderstand it as being an external independent fate but see it as a force originally set in motion by our actions, understand also the significant part played by suffering in the lives of men. It is educative rather than retributive. Merited punishment is really a crude form of education. Thoughtful men learn lessons from their sorrows and resolve not to commit the same sin or the same error a second time.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#11966E – 6.9.3.1

B_01 – ZEL2/2 – DEK

The unexpected events which happen to us apparently without cause or connection in our conduct constitute fate. The tendencies by whose influences and the circumstances by whose compulsion we act the way we do, constitute necessity. The results of those actions constitute Karma (recompense).

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#11967 – 6.9.3.2

BN – ZZ – K1

What a higher power has decreed must come to pass. But whhat a man has made for himself he can modify or unmake. The first is fate, the second destiny. The one comes from outside his personal ego, the other from his own faults. The evolutionary will of his soul is part of the nature of things but the consequences of his own actions remain, however slightly, within his own control.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#11968 – 6.9.3.3

BN – ZZ – K1

Karma's will could not prevail in one special part of our life and not in any other parts, nor in one special event of our life and not in the others. It could not be here but not there, in the past but not now. Nor going even farther still, could it confine itself only to major items and not to minor ones. It must be ever present or never present at all. If it puts more destiny into the happenings we experience than lets the Westerner feel comfortable, we must remember that other facet of truth, the creative and godlike intelligence in our deeper humanity and the measure of freedom which accompanies it.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#11969 – 6.9.3.4

BN – ZZ – K1

Whereas fate (in the original and Greek sense of the word) is decreed by whatever Powers there be, karma is the result of our own doing.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#11970 – 6.9.3.5

BN – ZZZ – K1

The correct meaning of the word "karma" is willed action through body, speech, and mind. It does not include the results of this action, especially those which produce or influence rebirth. Such inclusion has come into popular concepts, but shows a loose use of the term. Karma is cause set going by the will, not effect at all. The phrase "Law of Recompense" is therefore not satisfactory and a better one is needed.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#11971 – 6.9.3.6

BN – ZZ – K1

The law of recompense may possibly be better named the law of reflection. This is because every act is reflected back to its doer, every thought is reflected back to its source, as if by a vast cosmic mirror. Perhaps the idea of recompense carries too strong a moral implication and hence too limited a meaning to be the correct equivalent for the word "karma."

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#11980 – 6.9.3.15

BA11 – ZZZ – DEMK

It is not that some mysterious superphysical angel, deva, or god intervenes personally and manipulates karma as a puppet performer pulls the wires of his suspended figures, but that karma is part of the equilibrium of the universe, bringing a come-back, recording a pressure, allowing each reaction to come about by its own momentum.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#11982 – 6.9.3.17

BN – ZZ – K

If life is a drama put on the stage of this planet for us (and others) to play in, then karma is the audience, the witness of it all.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#11983 – 6.9.3.18

BN – X – DK

Quite logically it is taught that some sort of a balance is struck between the two kinds of a person's karma, so that the bad may be mitigated or even outdone, but equally the good may be reduced or even offset.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#11984 – 6.9.3.19

BN – X – DK

Human instruments are used to cause suffering to others and they do cause it out of human viciousness. Both statements are correct. They are complementary, not contradictory as we may think. Destiny naturally looks around for a vicious person when she wants to do harm, or a foolish one who can be led emotionally by the nose for a time, or an impulsive one who may do in a moment what he regrets for years. She will not waste time looking for ultra-wise and ultra-good people when she wants to do harm.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#11986 – 6.9.3.21

B_17 – ZZ – K

The victory of the spiritual nature in man is foreordained and unavoidable, but the hour of that victory no man knoweth.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#11988 – 6.9.3.23

BT1008 – ZZZ – DK

Our wrong-doing produces sorrows, not only for others but principally for ourselves. Our good action produces a rebound of good fortune. We may not escape from the operation of this subtle law of moral responsibility.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#11994E – 6.9.3.29

BA11 – ZZZ – DEK

It would be an error to separate karma from the universal power and to treat it as an independent power. This error accounts for the difficulty in understanding its role in bringing the cosmos into manifestations. Treat karma rather as an aspect of God and as inseparable from God, or as one of the ways in which God's presence manifests itself.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#11995 – 6.9.3.30

BN – Z – K

Karma, being made by human will, is subject to human modification. Fate, being decreed by the higher power, is not. The general fact of death is an example of fate, and in this sense the poet James Shirley’s line: “There is no armour against Fate,” is true. But the particular fact of death, its time and manner, may be alterable.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#11996 – 6.9.3.31

BN – X – DK

If it be true that the course of life is predetermined, this does not necessarily mean that it is arbitrarily predetermined. No—the good and bad qualities of your character, the development or lack of development of your capacities, and the decisions made in passing or by reason are the real determinants of your life. There is an inescapable equation between conduct and consequence, between thought and environment, between character and destiny. And this is karma, the law of creative equivalence.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#11997 – 6.9.3.32

BA11 – ZZZ – DEK

If it be true that the course of life is predetermined, this does not necessarily mean that it is arbitrarily predetermined. No—the good and bad qualities of your character, the development or lack of development of your capacities, and the decisions made in passing or by reason are the real determinants of your life. There is an inescapable equation between conduct and consequence, between thought and environment, between character and destiny. And this is karma, the law of creative equivalence.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#11997 – 6.9.3.32

BSG_4 – ZZZ – DEK

Destiny is not working blindly and unintelligently, arbitrarily and antagonistically against us as most of us are likely to believe when enduring through a cycle of unfavourable karma. On the contrary, it is Absolute Wisdom itself in operation.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12001 – 6.9.3.36

BN – ZZZ – K

The processes of imagining are endless and incessant. It is inherent in mind that one idea should give rise to another because of the dynamic character of mind itself. Karma is the law that links the two.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12002 – 6.9.3.37

BN – Z – K

We are all really on trial. Life itself is our judge with the working of karma, the ignorance or wisdom of our fellows, the voice of our conscience, and the capacities or incapacities of our personality.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12007 – 6.9.3.42

UR_1 – ZZZ – DK

Karma is the king who rules this earth.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12012 – 6.9.3.47

BN – ZZZ – DK

The action which completes a thought is thrown back at him by Nature in the guise of karma. In this view he carries the responsibility for himself. He cannot turn it over to any human institution such as a church, or to any other human being such as a guru or saviour.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12014 – 6.9.3.49

BN – ZZ – DK

Karma is an impersonal force. It is not to be swayed by prayers as a Personal God is supposed to be.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12015 – 6.9.3.50

BN – ZZ – K

He has to foresee the consequences not only of an action but also of an attitude or an outlook.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12017 – 6.9.3.52

BN – X – DK

Nobody succeeds in extinguishing karma merely because he intellectually denies its existence. He may deceive himself or others, but he cannot deceive the power of karma. Before it, he must stand responsible for his acts and receive their due effects. There is no other way he can go.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12018M – 6.9.3.53

UR_1 – ZZZ – DEXK

He may deceive himself or others, but he cannot deceive the power of karma. Before it, he must stand responsible for his acts and receive their due effects. There is no other way he can go.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12018 – 6.9.3.53

BA11 – ZZZ – DK

Those who will not learn from correct reflection about their experiences will have to learn from kicks delivered by the fresh karma they make.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12019 – 6.9.3.54

BA11 – ZZ – DK

Each birth makes fresh links in that chain of consequences which is karma.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12020 – 6.9.3.55

BN – ZZ – K

From our study of the law of karma, we may deduce that a man must grow up, become adult, and learn to be responsible for his actions, decisions, emotions, and even thoughts. It is he who is accountable for which ideas, especially which impulses, he accepts and which he lets pass or pushes away.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12021 – 6.9.3.56

BN – ZZ – DEK

Whoever ignores these higher laws and especially flouts the law of karma is opening a volcano under him.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12022 – 6.9.3.57

BN – ZZ – K

Karma puts a certain responsibility upon every man alike—upon the philosopher no less than the primitive.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12023 – 6.9.3.58

BN – ZZ – DK

The human being who imagines that he can go through life and manage his various affairs in independence of any alleged higher laws is following an illusion. Somewhere or at some time his awakening is inevitable.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12024 – 6.9.3.59

B_01 – ZZZ – DK

A life that is not directed towards this higher goal, a mind that is entirely uninterested in becoming a participant in the Overself consciousness—these failures will silently censure a man both during his bodily tenancy and his post-mortem existence.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12025 – 6.9.3.60

BN – ZZZ – DK

Men act out of self-interest; but through ignorance of the higher laws, especially that of karma, they may act against that interest.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12026 – 6.9.3.61

BN – ZZ – DMK

Many groups in many lands demand justice from their governments, with varying definitions of the word. Apparently the claims are not easily satisfied for there are more today than ever before. Some individual persons go farther and demand justice from God. In a world where mischief and misfortune are so active they too seem only partly satisfied, if that. Here the notion of karma may seem fairer than governments are, but it is tied to other births in which these persons have lost interest!

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12027 – 6.9.3.62

BN – ZZZ – K

It is largely their own doing which makes men suffer their own karma. But this is no reason why we should stand aside and leave them to their destiny.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12028 – 6.9.3.63

BN – ZZ – DK

We are seldom fair to fate. When events do not happen in the way we would like them to, we refuse to accept the idea that it is our own fault, so we blame our harsh fate. But when they do happen favourably, we personally take the credit for bringing them about!

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12035 – 6.9.3.70

B_01 – ZZ – DK

Too many people are praying to be delivered from the consequences of their errors or weaknesses, too few are trying to set themselves free from the faults themselves. If the prayers of the larger group are answered, the weaknesses still remain and the same consequences are bound to recur again. If the efforts of the smaller group are successful, they will be delivered forever.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12037 – 6.9.3.72

BN – X – D

I am well aware that there are "occultists" aplenty who can furnish full and detailed descriptions of the operations of karma, who know its Alpha and Omega, who can trace its activity among men as easily as a heraldist will trace your pedigree. They have led many into their camps with their glib "knowledge," and they shall lead many more. But they are only tendering the counterfeit coin of mere opinion for the rare currency of factual knowledge.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12038 – 6.9.3.73

BN – X – K

Everyone has to feel and think and act and speak. But everyone does not perceive the consequences, near or remote, swift or slow, of these operations. Whoever chooses a wrong aim or an unworthy desire must endure the consequences of his choice. In every evil act, its painful recoil lies hidden. The process is a cumulative one. Each act begets a further one in the same downward direction. Each departure from righteousness makes return more difficult.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12041 – 6.9.3.76

BA11 – ZZZ – DK

If men knew that the law of compensation was no less operative than the law of their country, they would unquestionably become more careful.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12049 – 6.9.3.84

BA11 – ZZ – DK

People should be warned that cause and effect rule in the moral realm no less than in the scientific realm. They should be trained from childhood to take this principle into their calculation. They should be made to feel responsible for setting causes into action that invite suffering or attract trouble or lead to frustration.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12050 – 6.9.3.85

B_17 – ZZ – DK

When men come to understand that the law of compensation is not less real than the law of gravitation, they will profit immensely.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12051 – 6.9.3.86

BA11 – ZZZ – DK

Where a man will not put himself under his own discipline, life eventually compels him to accept its sterner one. Where he will not look his defects in the face, sufferings that result from them will eventually remind him of their existence.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12053 – 6.9.3.88

B_17 – ZZ – K

Sins of omission are just as important karmically as sins of commission. What we ought to have done but did not do counts also as a karma-maker.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12054 – 6.9.3.89

BA11 – ZZ – DK

If the teaching of Karma (the law of recompense) imbues men with the belief that it is not all the same whether they behave well or ill, if it arouses their sense of moral responsibility, then none can deny its practical value.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12056 – 6.9.3.91

BN – ZZ – K

He who discovers these moral truths and reveals them to his benighted fellows is not only their educator but also their benefactor. For he saves those who heed him from much avoidable suffering.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12057 – 6.9.3.92

BN – X – D

Once a man really takes the law of consequences to heart, he will not willingly or knowingly injure another man. And this is so primarily because he will not want to injure himself.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12059 – 6.9.3.94

BN – X – D

When we thoroughly imbibe this great truth, when we humbly acknowledge that all human life is under the sway of the law of consequences, we begin to make a necessity of virtue.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12061 – 6.9.3.96

BA11 – ZZ – DK

When considered from the long-range karmic point of view, each of us creates his own world and atmosphere. Therefore, we have no one but ourselves to thank or blame for our comfort or wretchedness. It should be remembered, too, that present correct or incorrect use of free will is right now deciding the conditions and circumstances of lives to come.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12062 – 6.9.3.97

B_13 – ZZ – DK

It is absurd to treat the idea of karma as if it were some outlandish Oriental fancy. It is simply the law which makes each man responsible for his own actions and which puts him into the position of having to accept the results which flow from them. We may call it the law of self-responsibility. The fact that it is allied with the theory of reincarnation does not invalidate it, for we may see it at work in our own present incarnation quite often.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12063 – 6.9.3.98

BA11 – ZZ – DEMK

The attempt to evade karma may itself be part of the karma.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12064 – 6.9.3.99

BN – X – K

Foolish actions damage a man's life and may damage other men's lives, too. Wicked actions claim him as their first victim for he will suffer morally at some time in life or death, and physically if the karma justifies it.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12065 – 6.9.3.100

BN – ZZ – K

Our outward miseries are symbols and symptoms of our inner failures. For every self-created suffering and every self-accepted evil is an avoidable one. It may not depend entirely upon yourself how far events can hurt you but it does depend largely upon yourself. If you had the strength to crush your egoism by a single blow, and the insight to penetrate the screen of a long series of causes and effects, you would discover that half your external troubles derive from faults and weaknesses of internal character. Every time you manifest the lower attributes of your internal character you invite their reflection in external events. Your anger, envy, and resentment will, if strong enough and sustained enough, be followed eventually by troubles, enmities, frictions, losses, and disappointments. Yes, if you wish to understand the first secret of fate, you should understand that its decrees are not issued by a power outside you, but by your own deepest self.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12066E – 6.9.3.101

B_17 – Z – K

Will the West ever admit the notion of karma to its mind? I feel assured that it will do so. This is because it will have to admit the idea of rebirth which, once accepted, introduces karma as its twin.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12067 – 6.9.3.102

BN – ZZZ – DK

Men will moan about their unhappy past, and ache because they cannot undo it; but they forget to undo the unhappy future which they are now busy making.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12071 – 6.9.3.106

BN – Z – DK

So long as men love only the ephemeral and lose themselves in it, so long will they continue to suffer from that portion of their troubles which is avoidable. This was a chief element in the Buddha's message twenty-five hundred years ago and it is still as true today.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12074 – 6.9.3.109

BN – X – D

Nobody succeeds in extinguishing karma merely because he intellectually denies its existence.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12076E – 6.9.3.111

BSG_4 – ZZZ – DEK

Nobody succeeds in extinguishing karma merely because he intellectually denies its existence, as the votaries of some cults do. If, however, they first faced up to their karma, dealt with it and used it for self-cultivation and self-development, and then only recognized its illusoriness from the ultimate standpoint, their attitude would be a correct one. Indeed, their attempt to deny karma prematurely shows a disposition to rebel against the divine wisdom, a short-sighted and selfish seeking of momentary convenience at the cost of permanent neglect of the duty to grow spiritually.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12076 – 6.9.3.111

BA11 – ZZZ – DEK1

Nobody succeeds in extinguishing karma merely because he intellectually denies its existence. He may deceive himself or others, but he cannot deceive the power of karma. Before it, he must stand responsible for his acts and receive their due effects. There is no other way he can go.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12076EM – 6.9.3.111

UR_1 – ZZZ – DEXK

If we look at men in the mass, we must believe in the doctrine of fatalism. It applies to them. They are compelled by their environments, they struggle like animals to survive precisely because they are not too far removed from the animal kingdom which was the field of their previous reincarnational activity. They react like automatons under a dead weight of karma, move like puppets out of the blind universal instincts of nature. But this is not the end of the story. It is indeed only its beginning. For here and there a man emerges from the herd who is becoming an individual, creatively making himself into a fully human being. For him each day is a fresh experience, each experience is unique, each tomorrow no longer the completely inevitable and quite foreseeable inheritance of all its yesterdays. From being enslaved by animality and fatality, he is becoming free in full humanity and creativity.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12077DP – 6.9.3.112

BN – X – DEK

The choice between right and wrong can only exist where there is freedom of will to make it. Man is neither responsible nor free, declares materialistic determinism. If he is or becomes a criminal, environment is to blame, heredity is to blame, society is to blame—but not he. Spiritual determinism, karma (recompense), does not give him so wide a license to commit crime. It asserts that he was and is in part the author of his own character, consequently of his own destiny.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12093 – 6.9.3.128

BN – ZZ – K

The rigid fatalism which ignores the fact that what we do now is contributing towards the making of the future and which resigns itself to endure the effects of what it has made in the past—that rigid kind of fatalism which is mesmerized by those effects and makes no effort at all—has no place whatever in philosophy or in the philosophical understanding of the law of karma.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Defining karma, fate, and destiny

#12100 – 6.9.3.135

BA11 – ZZ – K

That which compels us to act in a certain way is in part the pressure of environment and in part the suggestion of our own past. Sometimes one is stronger, sometimes the other is stronger. But the root of the whole problem lies in our mind. Its proper cultivation frees us largely from both compulsions.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12105 – 6.9.3.140

BN – Z – DK

If you want to change your karma, begin by changing your attitude: first, toward outer events, people, things; second toward yourself.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12106 – 6.9.3.141

BN – Z – DK

When he fails to admit this first blunder, the way is opened for more blunders linked with it and possibly, emerging as a larger consequence of it.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12108 – 6.9.3.143

BN – Z – DK

His efforts to modify the effects of evil karma (recompense) must, where he can possibly trace any of them to causes set going in the present life, include remorse for wrongs done to others, as well as for harm done to himself. If the feeling of remorse does not come naturally at first, it may do so after several endeavours to reconsider his wrong actions from an impersonal standpoint. Constant reflection upon the major sins and errors of his past in the right way, setting the picture of his actual behaviour against the picture of how he ought to have behaved, may in time generate a deep sense of sorrow and regret, whose intensity will help to purge his character and improve his conduct. If, by such frequent and impartial retrospection, the lessons of past misbehaviour have been thoroughly learnt, there is the further likelihood that the Overself's grace may wipe out the record of evil karma waiting to be suffered, or at least modify it.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12109 – 6.9.3.144

BN – ZZ – DEK

What he has brought upon himself may come to an end of itself if he finds out what positive quality he needs to develop in his attitude toward it to replace the negative one.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12110 – 6.9.3.145

BN – Z – DK

We learn in time to accept everything that happens to us as the will of the Supreme Father, and hence never grumble or complain about misfortunes. The karma made in past births is like a shot from a gun; we cannot recall it and must endure the consequences. But once we have surrendered ourself to the Spiritual Preceptor, he guides our hands and prevents us from shooting out further bad karma.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12111 – 6.9.3.146

BA11 – ZZZ – DEK

Although karma is clinched by what a man does in fact, it is built up also by what he long thinks and strongly feels.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12112 – 6.9.3.147

BA11 – ZZ – DK

If a man will not repent his ill-deeds, will not make restitution where he has wronged others, and will not try to change his thoughts and doings for the better, then his bad karma (recompense) must run its inevitable course.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12113 – 6.9.3.148

BN – ZZ – K

When a man finds that a condition is beyond his power to change, he may better endure it by holding the faith that all things and all conditions are ultimately ordered by the Universal Mind, and that they will work out for the best in the end.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12118 – 6.9.3.153

BN – ZZ – DK

The man who can live without troubles has yet to be found, but the man who can live without worry about them may be found wherever philosophy is found.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12121 – 6.9.3.156

BN – Z – DK

He will then see that the ego is not his true self, that the evil and error which it spawns are the avoidable causes of avoidable distresses.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12124 – 6.9.3.159

BN – Z – DK

In the making of our future, a mixed result comes from the mixed and contradictory character of the thoughts feelings and desires we habitually hold. Therefore our very fears may contribute their quota in bringing about what we do not desire. Here lies one advantage of positive affirmations and clear-cut decisions in our attitude toward the future.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12130 – 6.9.3.165

BN – X – DK

By watching our thought life, keeping out negatives, and cultivating positive ideas, full of trust in the higher laws, we actually start processes that eventually bring improvement to the outer life.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12134 – 6.9.3.169

BN – X – DK

He is wise who sifts, screens, and absorbs the bygone years, taking only their lessons, counsels, warnings, and encouragements. In this way, he frees himself from much of it.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12135 – 6.9.3.170

B_03 – ZZ – K

He must use his combined reason and intuition, that is, intelligence, to discern the handiwork of karma in the pattern of some of the external events of his own life.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12136 – 6.9.3.171

BSG_4 – ZZZ – DK

Repentance for wrong-doing may not commute its karma but will at least provide the indispensable preliminary condition for such a commuting.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12137 – 6.9.3.172

BN – Z – K

Life is largely what we make it by our way of thinking about it. How important then to remove error from the mind and to put truth in its place! How different would our fortunes be if we recognized this need and always acted upon it!

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12138 – 6.9.3.173

BN – Z – DK

It is a Jain belief that bad karma can be cancelled by practising austerity, penance, and self-mortification. The harsher the asceticism the quicker will be this process of destroying the results of an evil past. There is a certain logic in this belief, for by suffering this self-imposed pain one is also suffering the bad karma, albeit in a concentrated form, and not evading it.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12139 – 6.9.3.174

BN – X – K

He may have to learn how to accommodate what he cannot control or avoid. This is resignation, the very name—Islam—of the religion given to the world by Muhammed. But if he has to accept certain things, this is not to say that their accommodation implies his approval of them. It means rather that he ceases to grumble or worry about them.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12140 – 6.9.3.175

BN – Z – DK

He is content to leave them, these evil-doers, to the judgement of time, knowing that the power of karma is inseparable from it.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12141 – 6.9.3.176

BN – Z – K

Your karma is being speeded up; everything is being accelerated to a certain extent. This is necessary for a period to bring quicker progress through forcing different parts of mind and character into activity. Think how much has been accomplished since you took up these studies. Look back to your state of mind before that.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12142 – 6.9.3.177

BN – Z – DK

Only when he sees that he himself is the prime cause of his own troubles, and that other people have been not more than the secondary cause, does he see aright.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12143 – 6.9.3.178

BA12 – ZZZ – DK

Even deliberate inaction does not escape the making of a karmic consequence. It contains a hidden decision not to act and is therefore a form of action!

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12146 – 6.9.3.181

BA11 – ZZ – DMK

The law of recompense is not nullified nor proved untrue by the objector's proffered evidence of hard ruthless individuals who rose to influence and affluence over the crushed lives of other persons. The happiness or well-being of such individuals cannot be properly judged by their bank account alone or their social position alone. Look also into the condition of their physical health, of their mental health, of their conscience in the dream state, of their domestic and family relations. Look, too, into their next reincarnation. Then, and only then, can the law's presence or absence be rightly judged.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12147 – 6.9.3.182

BN – ZZ – K1

We humans have to bear the decrees of Allah as best we may.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12148 – 6.9.3.183

BN – ZZ – K

Forces out of his own reincarnatory past come up and push him towards certain decisions, actions, and attitudes.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12149 – 6.9.3.184

BN – ZZ – DK

One of the greatest misunderstandings of karma by its believers, and perhaps one of the chief hindrances to its acceptance by others, is the idea that it produces its effects only after very long periods of time. What you do today will come back to you in a future incarnation several centuries later; what you experience today is the result of what you did hundreds or even thousands of years ago; what you reap here in this twentieth century is the fruit of what you sowed there in Rome in the second century—such are the common notions about reincarnation and karma. But we have only to open our eyes and look around us to see that everywhere men are getting now the results of what they have done in this same incarnation.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12151 – 6.9.3.186

BN – ZZ – DEK

El karma espera el momento oportuno antes de ajustar cuentas; el hecho de que sus ajustes sean periódicos y se agrupen explica por qué la buena y la mala suerte suelen alternarse en ciclos aparentes.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12152 – 6.9.3.187

BN – ZZ – K

The Day of Judgement is not only on the other side of the grave. It may be here, on this side, and now, in this month.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12154 – 6.9.3.189

BN – ZZZ – DK

When the cause is put too far from the effect, as in some beliefs about karma, the moral effectiveness is weakened.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12157 – 6.9.3.192

BN – X – K

Karma is really neutral although to the human observer its operations seem to be rewarding or punitive.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12158 – 6.9.3.193

BN – Z – K

All through history we see men inflicting suffering upon other men. This shows their ignorance of the higher laws, for by their own sin they punish themselves.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12159 – 6.9.3.194

BA11 – ZZZ – DK

Not to harm others is as much in one's own interest as theirs. For if one does harm them he sets up causes which lead in the end by a mysterious cosmic working to a consequential suffering. Cosmic justice is then self-provoked.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12160 – 6.9.3.195

B_17 – ZZZ – K

El funcionamiento del karma puede parecer a menudo algo sombrío, arrastrando el pasado cuando uno preferiría olvidarlo —ya se trate de cosas desagradables que se han hecho o de cosas agradables que no se han hecho—, sin permitir apelación alguna ni ofrecer perdón alguno.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12161 – 6.9.3.196

BN – X – K

The good merits of conduct in former lives bring pleasant benefits in the present one

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12162 – 6.9.3.197

BN – Z – DK

If in the end—and sometimes well before—karma catches up with a man, it is not all painful; the term need not fill him with foreboding. For the good he has thought and done brings a good come-back too.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12165 – 6.9.3.200

BA11 – ZZ – DK

There are times when the karma of an action comes back to a man with the speed and precision of a boomerang.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12166 – 6.9.3.201

BN – Z – K

The working of karma traces complicated effects back to complicated causes.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12167 – 6.9.3.202

BN – X – K

The web of karma tightens around a man as the lives increase with the centuries or thins away as the ego gets more and more detached.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12168 – 6.9.3.203

BN – Z – DK

Most men do not learn the practical wisdom of life the easier way. They do not heed the true seers, the far-seeing sages, the inspired prophets. There is a harder way, which they choose because it appeals to both their animal instincts and their selfish purposes. This is why they must be tutored by necessity—that is to say, by harsh circumstances of their own making, by karma.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12170 – 6.9.3.205

B_17 – ZZZ – K

Events and environments are attracted to man partly according to what he is and does (individual karma), partly according to what he needs and seeks (evolution), and partly according to what the society, race, or nation of which he is a member is, does, needs, and seeks (collective karma).

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12175 – 6.9.3.210

BN – Z – DK

It is sheer nonsense habitually to interpret karma (recompense) as something which is operative only in remote reincarnations. Actually it is mostly operative within the same lifetime of a man or nation.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12177 – 6.9.3.212

BN – X – K

The working of karma from former lives is mostly in evidence at birth and during infancy, childhood, and adolescence. The working of karma made in the present life is mostly in evidence after the maturity of manhood has been reached.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12178 – 6.9.3.213

BN – X – DK

We invite the future through our aspirations. We get the consequences of our thinking, feeling, and doing. Nature has no favouritism but gives us our deserts.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12179 – 6.9.3.214

BN – X – DK

A man's sins are the outcome of the limitations of his experience, faculties, and knowledge.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12180 – 6.9.3.215

BN – X – DK

Retribution must one day overtake the wrong-doer. His sins and mistakes will pile up until one day the karmic hour strikes and they come down on him with a crash. All failure to wake up to responsibilities constitutes an ethical error for which a man must bear the consequence eventually. Thus the failure to do a right deed in a certain situation may be a karmic sin, although very much less so than doing a wrong deed.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12181 – 6.9.3.216

BN – ZZ – DEK

The working of recompense (a piece of karma) also affects those who are closely associated with the person whose own acts or thoughts originated it.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12183 – 6.9.3.218

BN – Z – K

El curso del karma no está predeterminado de forma rígida. Puede seguir patrones alternativos. Si una mala acción no encuentra su retribución de otra manera, siempre la encontrará en forma de enfermedad. Esto no debe interpretarse erróneamente, pensando que todas las enfermedades son el resultado del karma negativo. Si vivimos de forma poco saludable, la enfermedad que se genera por ello es el karma de nuestra ignorancia actual o de nuestra imprudencia corporal, no necesariamente la expiación de faltas morales cometidas en otras vidas.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12184 – 6.9.3.219

BN – Z – K

When at length a human being will be called to account by karma, he will be judged not by the certificates of character which others bestow upon him, whether good or bad, but by the motives felt in his heart, the attitudes held in his mind, and the deeds done by his hands.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12185 – 6.9.3.220

B_01 – ZZZ – DK

The karma of a man cannot be measured by the world's yardsticks. Wisdom is worth a fortune at any time and goodness is a solid protection. Those who live for the immediate moment, the immediate enjoyment, may not perceive this; but those who wait for the ultimate result, the ultimate event, know its truth. Indeed, how could it be otherwise in a Universe where infinite intelligence and infinite benevolence have made the laws which make the destiny of mankind?

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12189 – 6.9.3.224

BN – ZZ – K

It is a mistake to regard the karma of a deed as something that appears later in time, or comes back to its doer soon or long afterwards. It is not a sequence to follow after what was done before. On the contrary, the karma is simultaneous with the deed itself.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12190 – 6.9.3.225

BN – X – K

A grievous marriage situation may itself change completely for the better or else a second marriage may prove a happier one, if there is sufficient improvement in thinking to affect the karma involved.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12191 – 6.9.3.226

BN – X – DK

A callous egotism is a bad-paying investment. For it means that in time of need, there will be none to help; in the hour of distress, none to console. What we give out we get back.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12193 – 6.9.3.228

BN – ZZZ – DK

The karma of a thought-habit or a deed becomes effective only when it reaches maturity. The time this takes is variable.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12195 – 6.9.3.230

BN – X – K

Karma expresses itself through events which may seem to be accidents. But they are so only on the surface.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12196 – 6.9.3.231

BA11 – ZZZ – DK

The moral fallacy which leads a man to think that he can build his own happiness out of the misery of other men, can be shattered only by a knowledge of the truth of karma.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12197 – 6.9.3.232

BN – ZZZ – DK

Each period of a life has its own evaluation, and opinions differ about them. Some say the early years are best, others the middle years, and so on. But the truth is that it depends on a person's karma more than on his age as to which shall prove best for him and from which he shall extract the most satisfaction.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12203 – 6.9.3.238

BN – Z – K

Failure to act at the right time in the right way may bring its own karmic consequences.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12204 – 6.9.3.239

BN – ZZZ – DK

Here are facts which are vital to our conduct of life, primal to our search for happiness, yet which he leaves ignored or, worse, deliberately sneers at. Karma is one of them.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12206 – 6.9.3.241

BN – ZZZ – K

It is a fact in many people’s lives that some of the troubles which befall them have no origin in the karma of former lives but belong solely to causes started in the present life.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12207 – 6.9.3.242

BN – ZZ – DK

If his evolutionary need should require it, he will be harassed by troubles to make him less attached to the world, or by sickness to make him less attached to the body. It is then not so much a matter of receiving self-earned destiny as of satisfying that need. Both coincide usually but not always and not necessarily. Nor does this happen with the ordinary man so much as it does with the questing man, for the latter "has asked or prayed" for speedier development.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12212 – 6.9.3.247

BN – ZZ – DK

The wisdom which he has the chance to gain from his sufferings should lead not only to some self-renunciation, but also to some self-resignation to destiny's will when it reveals itself as inexorable. Once he brings himself to this submission, time will then more quickly heal up its own wounds and inner peace will more easily be obtained. So destiny shows itself also as a teacher.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12213Ds – 6.9.3.248

B_17 – ZZ – K

The Law is relentless but it is flexible: it adjusts punishment to a man's evolutionary grade. The sinner who knows more and who sins with more awareness of what he is doing, has to suffer more.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12216 – 6.9.3.251

BN – Z – DK

The subconscious connection between wrongs done and sufferings incurred leads him to feel more uncertain and more uncomfortable the more he engages in such acts.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12219 – 6.9.3.254

B_17 – Z – K

The spiritual inertia which keeps most men uninterested in the quest is something which they will not seek to overcome by their own initiative. Life therefore must do this for them. Its chief method is to afflict them with pain, loss, disappointment, sickness, and death. But such afflictions are under karma and not arbitrary, are intermittent and not continuous, are inlaid with joys and not overwhelming. Therefore their result is slow to appear.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12221 – 6.9.3.256

BN – ZZZ – K

Life is not trying to make people either happy or unhappy. It is trying to make them understand. Their happiness or unhappiness come as by-products of their success or failure in understanding.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12225 – 6.9.3.260

UR_0 – ZZZ – DK

The modern struggle for existence is nothing new. It is the same sky and the same world of pre-historic times. The scenes have been changed only in details; the actors, men and women, remain the same but they are now more experienced. Incessant struggle has ever been the lot of the human race.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12226 – 6.9.3.261

BN – X – DK

There is peace 'behind' the tumult, goodness 'behind' the evil, happiness 'behind' the agony.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12229 – 6.9.3.264

BN – ZZ – DK

Despite its insistence that suffering is always close to life, it tries to charge its message with the flavour of hopefulness, and to inspire men to make efforts and be daring in their inner lives. When suffering stimulates a man to re-adjust his life on sounder philosophical lines, it can hardly be called an evil.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12231 – 6.9.3.266

B_17 – ZZZ – K

I believe in love, not hate, as a motivating force for reform. At the same time, I see karma at work, punishing the selfish and the heartless, and I know that it will inexorably do its work whatever anyone says. God never makes a mistake and this universe is run on perfect laws. Unfortunately, suffering is one of its chief instruments of evolution and especially so where people will not learn from intuition, reason, and spiritual prophets.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12232 – 6.9.3.267

B_17 – ZZZ – DEMK

Everyone has his burden of bad karma. What kind and how heavy it is are important, but more important is how the man carries it.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12234 – 6.9.3.269

BN – Z – K

While fulfilling its own purpose, karma cannot help fulfilling another and higher one; it brings us what is essential to our development.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12235 – 6.9.3.270

BA11 – ZZ – DMK

When his life does not develop along the line he has planned, his mind will become confused and self-doubt will creep in. It is then that the ambitious man is taken in hand by his higher self, to learn through frustration and disappointment released by the new cycle of bad karma those lessons he could not receive through success and triumph.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12236 – 6.9.3.271

BN – Z – K

All relative truths are fluctuating truths. They may become only partially true or even wholly falsified from a higher standpoint. The case of evil is a noteworthy instance of this change. A karma (recompense) which is outwardly evil may be inwardly spiritually beneficial.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12238 – 6.9.3.273

BN – ZZ – K

When justice is done to a man for the injuries he has done to others, when his wrong actions end in suffering for himself, he may begin to learn this truth—that only the Good is really able to triumph.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12241 – 6.9.3.276

B_17 – ZZZ – DMK

People bound by their littleness, uninterested in Truth and unable to see it, dominated by puerile aims and petty desires—their way is long and slow, it is the way of instruction by karma.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12244 – 6.9.3.279

BN – Z – K

We do not easily grow from the worse to the better or from the better to the best. We struggle out of our imperfections at the price of toil sacrifice and trouble. The evil of these things is not only apparent nor, in essence, in any ultimate conflict with divine love. Whatever helps us in the end towards the realization of our diviner nature, even if it be painful, is good and whatever hinders, even if it be pleasant, is bad. If a personal sorrow tends towards this result it is really good and if a personal happiness retards it, then it is really bad. It is because we do not believe this that we complain at the presence of suffering and sorrow in the divine plan and at the absence of mercy in the divine will. We do not know where our true good lies, and blindly following ego, desire, emotion, or passion, displace it by a fancied delusive good.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12246E – 6.9.3.281

B_17 – ZEL1/2 – K

We do not know where our true good lies, and blindly following ego, desire, emotion, or passion, displace it by a fancied delusive good. Consequently, we lose faith in God's wisdom at the very time when it is being manifested and we become most bitter about God's indifference just when God's consideration is being most shown to us. Until we summon enough courage to desert our habitual egoistic and unreflective attitude, with the wrong ideas of good and evil, happiness and misery which flow out of it, we shall continue to prolong and multiply our troubles unnecessarily.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma's role in human development

#12246E – 6.9.3.281

B_17 – ZEL2/2 – K

A man’s whole destiny may hang upon one event, one decision, one circumstance. That single cause may be significant for all the years to follow.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Destiny turns the wheel

#12253 – 6.9.3.288

BN – Z – DK

Some events in the future are inevitable, either because they follow from the actions of men who fail to amend character or improve capacity or deepen knowledge, or because they follow from the basic pattern of the World-Idea and the laws it sets to govern physical life.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Destiny turns the wheel

#12259 – 6.9.3.294

BA11 – ZZZ – DK

We meet our destined experiences, for we have been given sealed orders at the beginning of our incarnation.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Destiny turns the wheel

#12279 – 6.9.3.314

BT1008 – ZZ – DMK

The wheel of life keeps turning and turning through diverse kinds of experiences and we are haplessly bound to it. But when at last, we gain comprehension of what is happening and power over it, we are set free.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Destiny turns the wheel

#12289 – 6.9.3.324

UR_4map – ZZZ – DK

Destiny may bring them together for the purpose of the spiritual birth of the younger one of them, may confront them so that the elder may pass his living vision and enlarged understanding to the other.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Destiny turns the wheel

#12296 – 6.9.3.331

BN – ZZZ – DK

Envy not those with good fortune. The gods have allotted them a portion of good karma, but when this is exhausted they will be stripped of many things, except those inner spiritual possessions.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Destiny turns the wheel

#12302 – 6.9.3.337

BN – X – DK

That our mortal destiny is made up of welcome and unwelcome circumstances or happenings is a certainty. There is no human being whose pattern fails to be so chequered—only the black and white squares are unequal in number, and the proportion differs from one person to another. It hurts to confess this duality of pain with joy, this temporality which threatens every happiness; but this truth is unassailable, as Buddha knew and taught.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Destiny turns the wheel

#12308 – 6.9.3.343

BA11 – ZZZ – DEK

Our lives are like a jigsaw puzzle; we collect our little queerly shaped pieces and then one day the pattern is seen.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Destiny turns the wheel

#12313 – 6.9.3.348

BN – Z – DK

In the story of life there is misfortune and suffering, frustration and calamity; but it is not completed by them alone. It usually includes other chapters which bring out some of its positive, attractive, and happier sides and even its potential glory.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Destiny turns the wheel

#12318 – 6.9.3.353

B_17 – ZZ – K

Whether he enters birth in penurious squalor or in palatial grandeur, he will come to his own SPIRITUAL level again in the end. Environment is admittedly powerful to help or hinder, but the Spirit's antecedents are still more powerful and finally INDEPENDENT OF IT.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Destiny turns the wheel

#12321 – 6.9.3.356

BN – ZZ – K1

Many individuals may be caught in the wave of a common destiny, may have to share a group karma.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Destiny turns the wheel

#12331 – 6.9.3.366

BN – Z – K

Each of us lives at a certain time in history and occupies a certain place (or certain places) during that period. Why now and here? Look to the law of consequences for an answer, the law which connects one earthly lifetime with earlier ones.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Destiny turns the wheel

#12332 – 6.9.3.367

BA11 – ZZZ – DK

The ability or cupidity, the opportunity or inheritance, which brings a man into the possession of riches, is itself the product of his karma.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Destiny turns the wheel

#12333 – 6.9.3.368

BN – Z – K

If a man can come up out of the squalor, discomfort, and ignorance of the slums into cleanliness, culture, and refined living, we may read into it either the favourable working of karma and rebirth or the power of the person to conquer his environment. But others who fail to do so may read into it the belief that luck is against them or else their lack of capacity to overcome environment. Thus we see that some glean a message of hope from reading the biography of such a man while others glean only frustration, if not despair. In both views there may be an element of truth but how much will differ from one person to another.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Destiny turns the wheel

#12334 – 6.9.3.369

BN – X – K

He has unconsciously taken a decision. It lies there, implicit, within his obedience to, and faith in, the credo or the party he follows. He is still responsible, still making personal karma.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Destiny turns the wheel

#12335 – 6.9.3.370

BN – Z – K

Circumstances or other persons may be contributory but cannot be wholly responsible for a man's failures and misfortunes. If he will look within himself he will always find the ultimate causes there.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Destiny turns the wheel

#12346 – 6.9.3.381

BN – Z – DK

He may be predestined to live in certain surroundings but the way in which he allows them to affect him is not predestined.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Destiny turns the wheel

#12349 – 6.9.3.384

BA11 – ZZZ – K

Man's body and mind inherit his past, and the body can move freely only within the limits imposed by this past karma, just as a goldfish can move freely only within the limits of its globe of water.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Destiny turns the wheel

#12350 – 6.9.3.385

BN – ZZ – K

Karma is as active in the destiny of great powerful nations as in the destiny of poor insignificant men.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Destiny turns the wheel

#12351 – 6.9.3.386

BN – ZZ – DK

In a rough kind of way, and after sufficient periods of time have matured, a man’s outward conditions will keep in some sort of step with his inward development.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Destiny turns the wheel

#12352 – 6.9.3.387

BN – Z – DK

The people one meets, the events one confronts, and the places one visits may be highly important but they are, in the end, less important than one's thought about them.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Destiny turns the wheel

#12353 – 6.9.3.388

BN – ZZ – DK

A lesson which the multitude has to learn is that acquiescence in brutality and aggressiveness does not pay in the end any more than the perpetration of such crimes themselves. Nevertheless, although a people which acquiesces in the deeds of its rulers has to share the karma of those deeds, it need not necessarily share all the karma.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Destiny turns the wheel

#12354 – 6.9.3.389

BN – Z – K

Because the mind at the back of the universe's life is infinitely wise, there is always a reason for what happens to us. It is better therefore not to rail at adverse events but to try to find out why they are there. It may be consoling to blame others for them, but it will not be helpful. If we look within ourselves for the causes, we take the first step toward bringing adversity to an end; if we look outside, we may unnecessarily prolong it.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Destiny turns the wheel

#12356 – 6.9.3.391

B_01 – ZZZ – DK

We come normally into higher-class surroundings if our tendencies pull us to them, or if our actions (karma) justify them. But in an age of transition such as ours, where social ranks are thrown into confusion, where democratic levelling of all alike creates ethical and social chaos, where religion is losing its meaning and materialism prevails, no one is to be judged by the old rule of appropriate birth, of being in the station to which God has called him. In any case, neither lower nor higher class escapes the alternations of suffering and joy, misery and happiness in some way. That is the human lot.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Destiny turns the wheel

#12357 – 6.9.3.392

B_17 – Z – K

All are ultimately one big family. This is what reflection on experience teaches. When one reflects on Truth, he shall eventually learn that, as the Overself, all are one entity—like the arms and legs of a single body. The upshot of this is that he has to consider the welfare of others equally with his own…

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Destiny turns the wheel

#12360E – 6.9.3.395

BA11 – ZZZ – DEK

What tradition, family, society, and surroundings have bequeathed to him, consisting of beliefs, ideas, customs, culture, and manners, may need revision, examination, sifting, and sometimes even scrapping.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Destiny turns the wheel

#12363 – 6.9.3.398

B_03 – ZZZ – K

The study of recompense (karma) reveals that mankind have to pay not only for what they have wrongly done but also for what they have failed to do. Such neglect is largely due to this, that man's intensely personal outlook makes him estimate the character of events primarily by the way in which they affect his own existence and only secondarily by the way in which they affect the larger human family to which he belongs. We are all workers in a common task. This is the inevitable conclusion which shares itself as soon as the truth of humanity as an organic unity is understood.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Destiny turns the wheel

#12367 – 6.9.3.402

BN – ZZ – DEK

It is a fundamental lesson of my world-wide observation that Heraclitus was completely right when he wrote: ”Man's character is his fate.”

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Destiny turns the wheel

#12372 – 6.9.3.407

BN – Z – DK

A creative and original mind can undertake work for his own profit or benefit. If he undertakes it in addition for the benefit of others, he gains karmic merit. One refers, of course, to worthwhile work.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Destiny turns the wheel

#12374 – 6.9.3.409

BA11 – ZZZ – DK

Karma may use a person as the unwilling agent for its decrees.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Destiny turns the wheel

#12387 – 6.9.3.422

BN – ZZ – K

Although it is quite true that much of the vaunted free will of man is quite illusory, it is equally true that most of the events in his life, which consequently seem so predetermined, grow inescapably out of the kind of moral character and mental capacity which he possesses. They are neither merely accidental nor wholly arbitrary. Choice and reaction, attitude and decision depend ultimately on his psychological make-up and influence the course of events in a certain way. "Character is fate"—this is the simplest statement of the greatest truth. Where is freedom for man when heredity and the history and state of his family and race prearrange so many physical factors for him?

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Destiny turns the wheel

#12391 – 6.9.3.426

BA11 – ZZ – DMK

The present comes to us out of the past and the future is being made in the present. All three are linked together and a horoscope is simply their map. This is one of the oldest ideas to be found in human culture, this idea that man's life is subject to a higher power, that he is personally responsible to a higher law for his actions and that he cannot escape its retribution for wrong-doing or its reward for righteousness. The Stoics of ancient Rome had this idea and called it Fate. The Platonists of ancient Greece had it and called it Destiny. And the Indians, mostly Buddhists and Hindus, had it and have it and call it Karma.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Astrology, fate, and free will

#12393 – 6.9.3.428

BN – ZZZ – K

Is one of the oldest ideas to be found in human culture, this idea that man's life is subject to a higher power, that he is personally responsible to a higher law for his actions and that he cannot escape its retribution for wrong-doing or its reward for righteousness. The Stoics of ancient Rome had this idea and called it Fate. The Platonists of ancient Greece had it and called it Destiny. And the Indians, mostly Buddhists and Hindus, had it and have it and call it Karma.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Astrology, fate, and free will

#12393E – 6.9.3.428

UR_1 – ZZZ – K

The planets do not control your individual destiny, but their movements determine the times when the latent karma which you have earned shall become active and operative. Hence the sky is like a gigantic clock whose hands point to the fateful hours of human life but it is not a storehouse of forces influencing or dominating that life.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Astrology, fate, and free will

#12394 – 6.9.3.429

BN – Z – K

Astrology was given by the primeval sages as a revelation to early mankind. No human being on earth could have created out of his own head this mysterious science of astrology. It was given to help human beings who still were far from spiritual attainment, as a concession to their human nature. But when man has come by spiritual advancement, under the grace of God, directly, or through a teacher, it is not possible to construct a horoscope that will perfectly fit him because his testimony will always be liable to modification and alteration.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Astrology, fate, and free will

#12399 – 6.9.3.434

BN – Z – K1

Overstress of such beliefs as astrology may cause him to understress or even forget entirely his creative possibilities. They are both extreme swings of the pendulum. Astrology rests on the ground of karma in tendencies and deeds. Freedom of decision rests on the evolutionary need to let man express the creativeness he gets from the Overself. He must put both factors together to find truth.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Astrology, fate, and free will

#12401 – 6.9.3.436

BN – Z – K

In the horoscopes of ordinary people, in which a concatenation of several planets called the Gurukula does not appear, the expert can with reasonable accuracy plot the course of their future life because their characters are not likely to change very much. But, in the horoscopes of those few people in which the Gurukula does appear, it is not possible to prognosticate the future. Usually such persons have a great mission to perform, whether public or hidden. The individual karma from past lifetimes, even of the present one, may be changed during the fulfilment of such a mission. Ramana Maharshi had the Gurukula in his chart, as did Gandhi, and all Masters have it. > >Philosophy agrees that karma can be changed, modified or counteracted for the most part, but there are certain limits beyond which one cannot go.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Astrology, fate, and free will

#12419 – 6.9.3.454

BN – ZZ – DEK

The horoscope indicates the future only for ordinary people and can never become a fixed certainty for the spiritually awakened. For wherever an individual has come under Divine Grace, he directly or indirectly through a teacher can be rendered independent of his past karma at any moment that the Divine wills it to be so. The will is free because Man is Divine and the Divine Self is free.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Astrology, fate, and free will

#12424 – 6.9.3.459

BN – Z – K

One important use of an astrological horoscope is principally to detect the presence of new opportunity, and to warn against the presence of dangerous tests, snares, and pitfalls. It is often hard to make a decision, when an important crossroad presents itself, if one of the roads leads to disaster and the other to good fortune. At such a time a correct horoscope will be helpful in arriving at a right decision.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Astrology, fate, and free will

#12426 – 6.9.3.461

BN – Z – K1

The receipt of a proposition or the beginning of a new undertaking or the making of a momentous decision, the founding of an enterprise or the occurrence of a grave crisis may offer signs which show the future destiny of the affair or advice as to the course to be taken. Such signs could be given by a particular phenomenon in Nature or the character of a particular event. These signals omens auguries and auspices need interpretation or divination; they may be favourable or unfavourable. It is as if Nature herself or Karma itself cast a kind of horary horoscope to direct those who are uncertain about the future or undecided about the present.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Astrology, fate, and free will

#12428 – 6.9.3.463

BN – Z – K

However much we pry into the future we do not come a bit nearer real peace, whereas faithfully seeking and abiding in Overself gradually brings undying light and life.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Astrology, fate, and free will

#12438 – 6.9.3.473

BN – Z – DK

Although the ancients were much addicted to divination, Socrates counseled the use of one's own reason and judgement in solving problems, and only when these failed should one resort to divination.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Astrology, fate, and free will

#12445 – 6.9.3.480

A241129 – X – K

There are no lucky house-numbers and no unlucky ones. If a man has had a series of misfortunes in a certain house, it is not the fault of its number but the fault of his karma. His evil karma fell due during that period and would have ripened into sorrowful experiences even if he had occupied a totally different house with a totally different number. Now karma arises ultimately out of character for the better and thus ultimately changes his karma to some extent. Then let him move back into the same house which once brought him sorrow. He will find that this time it will not do so. Its so-called unlucky number will no longer harm him.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Astrology, fate, and free will

#12446 – 6.9.3.481

BN – X – K

The "lucky gem" which can thwart the power of karma and bring a man to the high position which he does not deserve has not been found; the "unlucky stone" which can deprive a man of the fruits of his endeavour has not been formed.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Astrology, fate, and free will

#12449 – 6.9.3.484

BN – ZZ – K

It is more important to face the future equipped with right principles and strong character than with predictions concerning its details. If we establish good attitudes toward it, we cannot get bad results.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Astrology, fate, and free will

#12453 – 6.9.3.488

BN – Z – DK

What man really dominates his destiny? The great person may succeed in modifying it, but the psychological and physical factors with which the ordinary person starts the course of life are already in his genes and predicate both character and fortune. He is at the mercy of events until he learns this secret of modifying and influencing them.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma, free will, and the Overself

#12463 – 6.9.3.498

BN – Z – K1

We all have to bear the consequences of our past deeds. This cannot be helped. But of course there are good deeds and bad deeds. We can, to a certain extent, offset those consequences by bringing in counter-forces through new deeds; but how far this will be true will necessarily vary from person to person. The one who has knowledge and power, who is able to practise deep meditation and to control his character, will necessarily affect those consequences much more strongly than the one who lacks these.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma, free will, and the Overself

#12464 – 6.9.3.499

BN – X – DK

Karma gives a man what he has largely made himself; it does not give him what he prefers: but it is quite possible at times that the two coincide. If he is partially the author of his own troubles, he is also drawing to himself by mental power his good fortune.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma, free will, and the Overself

#12465 – 6.9.3.500

BN – Z – DK

Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof say the apathetic, the sluggish, the inert, and they refuse to look forward. They experience the evil alright. If time is simultaneous and the future already exists, what is the use of making any effort? This despairing but plausible objection overlooks the parallel fact that the future is not fixed for all eternity; it is always fluctuating because it is always liable to modification by the intrusion of new factors, such as an intense effort to alter it or an intense interference by another person. The future exists, but the future changes at the same time.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma, free will, and the Overself

#12467 – 6.9.3.502

BN – ZZ – K1

Both the benign and the malefic are already concealed in destiny's decrees for the child at its birth. To the extent that outer fortunes are directly traceable to inner tendencies, to that extent they are controllable and alterable. How large or how small a part of its life is quite beyond its free choice and direction is itself a matter of fate.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma, free will, and the Overself

#12468 – 6.9.3.503

BN – Z – K1

Just as threads are crossed and laced to make textiles on a loom, so destiny and free will are interwoven to make a man's life. In other words, what is destined to happen, paradoxically comes to pass through the exercise of our free will.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma, free will, and the Overself

#12473M – 6.9.3.508

BSG_5 – ZZZ – K

What man has more than partial freedom? All men have to receive the come-back of past activities, although the wise and disciplined ones may counter it to some extent by new actions.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma, free will, and the Overself

#12480 – 6.9.3.515

BN – ZZ – DK

The karma is a part of himself and he cannot get away from it. But just as he may bring some changes about in himself, so there may be a corresponding echo in the karma.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma, free will, and the Overself

#12481 – 6.9.3.516

BA11 – ZZ – DK

Karma brings us the results of our own doing, but these are fitted in the World-Idea, which is the supreme law and shapes the course of things.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma, free will, and the Overself

#12484 – 6.9.3.519

BN – ZZ – K

There are occasions when it is either prudent or wise to practise Stoic submission. But there are other occasions when it is needful to do battle with the event or the environment.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma, free will, and the Overself

#12485 – 6.9.3.520

BN – ZZZ – K

The old arguments about fate and free will are in the end quite useless. It is possible to show that human being has the full freedom to improve himself and his surroundings, but it is also possible to show that he is helpless. This is so because both sides of the matter are present and must be included in any account of the human situation. The World-Idea renders certain events and circumstances inevitable.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma, free will, and the Overself

#12486 – 6.9.3.521

BSG_5 – ZZZ – K

To strive hard for a worthwhile aim but to resign oneself to its abandonment if destiny is adverse to its realization, is not the same as to do nothing for it at all but to leave that aim entirely to fate. To eliminate within oneself the avoidable causes of misfortune and trouble but to endure understandingly those which are the unavoidable lot of man is not the same as to let those causes remain untouched whilst blindly accepting their effects as fate.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma, free will, and the Overself

#12487 – 6.9.3.522

B_17 – ZZZ – K

Socrates: "Uncouth, uncivilized, unkind—destiny decreed all those things for me, but I, through perseverance, managed to change a little."

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma, free will, and the Overself

#12489 – 6.9.3.524

A241129 – Z – K

Karma does not wholly cancel freedom but limits it. If the present results of old causes set walls around him, through a better character and an improved intelligence new causes may be initiated and other results be attained.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma, free will, and the Overself

#12496 – 6.9.3.531

BN – ZZ – DK

What is the use of fooling oneself with stirring phrases about our freedom to mold life or with resounding sentences about our capacity to create fortune? The fact remains that karma holds us in its grip, that the past hems us in all around, and that the older we grow the smaller becomes the area of what little freedom is left. Let us certainly do all we can to shape the future and amend the past, but let us also be resigned to reflective endurance of so much that will come to us or remain with us, do what we may.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma, free will, and the Overself

#12500 – 6.9.3.535

BN – ZZZ – K

Whoever imagines that all his actions are entirely the result of his own personal choice, whoever suffers from the illusion of possessing complete free will, is blinded and infatuated with his ego. He does not see that at certain times it was impossible for him to act in any other way because there was no alternative. And such impossibility arose because there is a law which arranges circumstances or introduces a momentum according to an intelligible pattern. Karma, evolution, and the individual's trend of thought are the principal features of this pattern.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma, free will, and the Overself

#12501 – 6.9.3.536

BN – ZZZ – K

The human will's freedom has its limits. It must in the end conform to the evolutionary purposes of the World-Idea. If, by a certain time, it fails to do so voluntarily, then these purposes invoke the forces of suffering and force the human entity to conform.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma, free will, and the Overself

#12502 – 6.9.3.537

B_17 – ZZ – K

That which delays the expression of a man's dynamic thought in modifications of his environment or alterations of his character is the weight of his own past karma. But it only delays; if he keeps up the pressure of concentration and purpose, his efforts must eventually show their fruit.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma, free will, and the Overself

#12509 – 6.9.3.544

BA11 – Z – DK

The law of consequences is immutable and not whimsical but its effects may at times be modified or even neutralized by introducing new causes in the form of opposing thoughts and deeds. This of course involves in turn a sharp change in the direction of life-course. Such a change we call repentance.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma, free will, and the Overself

#12510 – 6.9.3.545

BA11 – ZZ – DK

Many men unwittingly break the higher laws of life. Others, either knowing of them or believing in them, fail to understand them well enough to apply them personally.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma, free will, and the Overself

#12512 – 6.9.3.547

BN – Z – DK

Which of us has the power to change the consequences of his former actions? We may make amends, we may be penitent and perform penances. We may counter them by the opposite kinds of good deeds. But it is the business of karma to make us feel responsible for what we do and that responsibility cannot be evaded. In a certain sense, however, there is a measure of freedom, a power of creativity, both of which belong to the godlike Higher Self which each of us has.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma, free will, and the Overself

#12515 – 6.9.3.550

BN – ZZ – DEK

What has happened has happened and there is nothing we can do about it. We cannot rewrite the past, we cannot repair our wrong actions, we cannot put right the wrongs we have done, the hurts we have given, or the miseries we have caused both to others and to ourselves. But if the past records cannot be changed, our present attitudes towards them can be changed. We can learn lessons from the past, we can apply wisdom to it, we can try to improve ourselves and our acts, we can create new and better karma. Best of all, having done all these things, we can let go of the past entirely and learn to live in the eternal now by escaping into true Being, the I am consciousness, not the I was.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma, free will, and the Overself

#12516 – 6.9.3.551

BN – ZZ – DEK

He submits himself to karma as mutely and as will-less-ly as a sheep to the slaughterer's knife.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma, free will, and the Overself

#12517 – 6.9.3.552

BN – X – K

Must fate (karma) always take its course? Are we helpless automatons? It seems a chilling thought.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma, free will, and the Overself

#12523 – 6.9.3.558

BN – X – K

There is a certain amount of destiny in each life as the result of past karma, but there is also an amount of free will if it is exercised. Every happening in our lives is not karmic, for it may be created by our present actions.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma, free will, and the Overself

#12526 – 6.9.3.561

BN – Z – K

This deadly doctrine of karma seems to leave us no loophole. It catches us like animals in the iron trap of fate.

From Birth to Rebirth > Laws and Patterns of Experience > Karma, free will, and the Overself

#12527 – 6.9.3.562

BN – Z – K