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 – P – DE

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

A man may sit alone in his solitary room and stir but little from it, yet the wisdom of strange lands and stranger ages will float into his mind. Such a one has received a high inheritance down through the turnings of Time, a goodly power that is the testament to his strenuous efforts in search of knowledge in former lives. Some men are such natural mystics that they are born, as it were, with the thaumaturge's wand in their hands.

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

#11847 – 6.9.2.119

BN – Z

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 – P – D

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 – P – D

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

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

UR_1 – 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 – P – D

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 – DEK

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

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 – P – DE

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

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 – K

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 – ZZ – 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 – P – D

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

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 – P – D

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 – P – D

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 – DEK

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

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, 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.

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

#12076E – 6.9.3.111

BSG_4 – ZZZ – DEK

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 – Z – 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 – X – K

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

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

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

#12136 – 6.9.3.171

UR_1 – 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 – DK

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

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 – X – 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

#12213D – 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

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 – DEK

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 – DK

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 – DK

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

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. 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 – ZZ – 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

UR_1 – 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 – DK

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

Tao, in its secondary meaning, is the divinely fixed order of things.

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

#12531E – 6.9.3.566

UR_3.2 – Z – K

Knowing the truth above of the ebb and flow of destiny, the sage acts always in conformity with this inner understanding. Sometimes he will be fiercely active, other times completely quiescent, sometimes fighting tragedy to the utmost, but at other times resigned and surrendered. Everything has its special time and he does not follow any course of action at the wrong time. To initiate the correct change in his activities at the incorrect time and amid wrong environing circumstances would be rash and lead to failure; to start a new and necessary enterprise at the wrong moment and amid the wrong situation of life, would also lead to failure. The same changes, however, if begun at another time and amid other conditions, will lead to success. The sage consults his innermost prompting, which, being in harmony with truth, guides him to correct action in particular situations accordingly. We can neither dictate to him as to what he should do, nor prescribe principles for his guidance, nor even predict how he is going to respond to any set of circumstances.

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

#12531E – 6.9.3.566

BN – ZEL1/4 – K1

Knowing the truth above of the ebb and flow of destiny, the sage acts always in conformity with this inner understanding. Sometimes he will be fiercely active, other times completely quiescent, sometimes fighting tragedy to the utmost, but at other times resigned and surrendered. Everything has its special time and he does not follow any course of action at the wrong time. To initiate the correct change in his activities at the incorrect time and amid wrong environing circumstances would be rash and lead to failure; to start a new and necessary enterprise at the wrong moment and amid the wrong situation of life, would also lead to failure. The same changes, however, if begun at another time and amid other conditions, will lead to success. The sage consults his innermost prompting, which, being in harmony with truth, guides him to correct action in particular situations accordingly. We can neither dictate to him as to what he should do, nor prescribe principles for his guidance, nor even predict how he is going to respond to any set of circumstances.

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

#12531E – 6.9.3.566

BN – ZEL2/4 – K1

The sage seeks to do the right thing at the right moment, for automatic adjustment to these varying fortunes. The proper course of action which anyone should adopt depends ultimately upon his time and place both materially and spiritually. In short, human wisdom must always be related to the cosmic currents of destiny and the divine goal. Man must be adaptable to circumstances, flexible to destiny, if his life is to be both wise and content. Unfortunately, the ordinary man does not perceive this, and creates much of his own unhappiness, works much of his own ruin. It is only the sage who, having surrendered the personal Ego, can create his own harmony with Nature and fate and thus remain spiritually undisturbed and at peace. The wise man defers action and waits if necessary for the opportune and auspicious moment; he will not indulge in senseless struggles or untimely efforts. He knows how and when to wait and by his waiting render success certain.

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

#12531E – 6.9.3.566

BN – ZEL3/4 – K1

The sage seeks to do the right thing at the right moment, for automatic adjustment to these varying fortunes. The wise man defers action and waits if necessary for the opportune and auspicious moment; he will not indulge in senseless struggles or untimely efforts. He knows how and when to wait and by his waiting render success certain. No matter how talented he be, if his circumstances are unfavourable and the time inopportune to express them, he will resign himself for the while and devote his time to self-preparation and self-cultivation and thus be ready for the opportunity which he knows the turn of time's wheel must bring him. He puts himself into alignment with the hidden principle which runs through man and matter, striking effectively when the iron is hot, refraining cautiously when it is cold. He knows the proper limits of his activity even in success and does not go beyond them. He knows when to advance and when to retreat, when to be incessantly active and when to lie as still as a sleeping mouse. Thus he escapes from committing serious errors.

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

#12531E – 6.9.3.566

BN – ZEL4/4 – K1

Your karma led you into this horror but your cleared sight can now lead you out of it. This will act as a healing. The conjunction of your character, temperament, and qualities with the time, surroundings, and history being what they were, the result was what it was. Now the more you can displace the so-called freedom of the ego, submit to the call of Overself, the more you will share the greater possibility which it hides.

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

#12532 – 6.9.3.567

BN – Z – K

Karma comes into play only if the karmic impression is strong enough to survive. In the case of the sage, because he treats life like a dream, because he sees through it as appearance, all his experiences are on the surface only. His deep inner mind remains untouched by them. Therefore he makes no karma from them, therefore he is able when passing out of the body at death to be finished with the round of birth and death forever.

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

#12534 – 6.9.3.569

BN – Z – DK

The view that karma operates like an automatic machine is not a wholly true one; this is because it is not a wholly complete one. The missing element is grace.

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

#12535 – 6.9.3.570

BN – Z – DK

The privileges of enlightenment can only be justified on the basis of karma—"My own, my own, shall come to me," as the poet intuited.

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

#12536 – 6.9.3.571

BN – X – K

There is no other judge of your deeds than the law of recompense, whose agent is your own Overself.

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

#12540 – 6.9.3.575

BA11 – ZZ – DK

Even if human karma were rigidly implacable and against it human will sadly impotent, divine Grace is still available and divine Mercy is yet accessible.

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

#12541 – 6.9.3.576

BN – X – DK

Do your best to mend matters, the best you can, then leave the results to destiny and the Overself. You can't do more anyway. You can modify your destiny, but certain events are unchangeable because the world is not yours but God's. You may not know at first what events these are, therefore you must act intelligently and intuitively: later you can find out and accept. Whatever happens, the Overself is still there and will bring you through and out of your troubles. Whatever happens to your material affairs happens to your body, not the real YOU. The hardest part is when you have others dependent on you. Even then you must learn how to commend them to the kindly care of the Overself, and not try to carry all the burden on your own shoulders. If it can take care of you, it can take care of them, too.

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

#12542 – 6.9.3.577

BN – ZZZ – DEK

The working of a man's karma would never come to an end if his egoism never came to an end. It would be a vicious circle from which there would be no escape. But when the sense of personal selfhood, which is its cause and core, is abandoned, the unfulfilled karma is abandoned too.

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

#12543 – 6.9.3.578

BN – ZZ – DMK

The law of recompense has no jurisdiction over the eternal and undivided Overself, the real being, only over the body and mind, the transitory ego.

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

#12544 – 6.9.3.579

BA11 – ZZ – DK

If a man comes into alignment with the Overself-consciousness, he is compelled to give up his earlier position of free will and free choice—for he no longer exists to please the ego alone. The regulating factor is now the Overself itself.

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

#12546 – 6.9.3.581

BN – ZZ – DK

What we have yet to learn is that destiny makes its chesslike moves according to our thinking and doing. Whoever will offer himself unto the Overself, and will be blessed by its benediction so that he becomes as one inspired, may then perceive this strange figure at his side working for the good of man.

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

#12548 – 6.9.3.583

BN – ZZ – DEMK

Whether we are in bondage to the body or to the intellect, we are still prisoners.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The limitations of free will

#12563 – 6.9.4.15

BN – Z – K

Out of his own nature and in conformity with the universal plan, a stream of influences flows over him out of the past and forces his acts and thoughts to take a certain direction. He may believe that he is following this direction quite independently and freely. In this incapacity to see how limited is his present freedom lies his subtlest illusion.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The limitations of free will

#12566 – 6.9.4.18

BN – ZZZ – DK

It is often not easy—but the sooner we do so, the sooner our mind will become less resentful and more tranquil—to recognize that this happening, this position, or this person is part of our fate, that our only freedom in such a case is a moral one. We can select our mental attitude.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The limitations of free will

#12571 – 6.9.4.23

BSG_5 – ZZZ – DK

A person’s moral response to a happening, as also their mental attitude toward it and emotional bearing under it, are largely free. It is in this realm, moreover, that important possibilities of further spiritual growth or else materialistic hardening are available. They may renew inner strength or fall back into sensual weakness.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The limitations of free will

#12572 – 6.9.4.24

BSG_5 – Z – DK

Such is the power of suggestion, tradition, and environment that the average European and American does have a feeling of being free to make his own decisions and of being able to act in the world as he wishes, whereas the average Indian has no such feeling; the latter believes that he acts according to some unknown preordained pattern. Although these two feelings are so contradictory, there is a solid basis of fact beneath each of them. The contradiction arises because they are not sufficiently understood. In the Westerner's case, it is from the Overself's freedom that his feeling is originally derived. In the Indian's, it is from the Overself's allotment of karma that his own is derived.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The limitations of free will

#12575 – 6.9.4.27

BN – X – K

Hemmed in as he is by inheritances not only from his personal past history but also from society's, it would be futile to talk of having complete freedom of choice. But it would be an error in thought and conduct to behave as if he had no freedom at all. Some measure of it does exist, since in most of his situations, if not in all, he is always faced with at least two possible lines of choice—a higher and a lower one.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The limitations of free will

#12576 – 6.9.4.28

BN – Z – DK

A single decision may entirely shape the next fifty years of a young man’s future.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The limitations of free will

#12577 – 6.9.4.29

BN – Z – DK

The circumstances in which he finds himself and the events which happen to him are not more to a man than what he thinks and does about them. For his reaction, his attitude are more often within his control than they may be.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The limitations of free will

#12578 – 6.9.4.30

BN – Z – DK

No man has free will if he is enslaved by things or affected by events outside of himself. He has it only when he is inwardly detached from them.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The freedom we have to evolve

#12606 – 6.9.4.58

BSG_5 – ZZ – DK

"We ought to exert our efforts in all (things) as though they were absolutely free, and God will do as he sees fit." —Maimonides

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The freedom we have to evolve

#12608 – 6.9.4.60

BN – Z – K1

If freedom of will is utter illusion we have to ask ourselves why the Buddha, greatest of all advocates of the truth of inexorable karma, and whose enlightenment is incontestable, gave as his dying legacy to disciples the words, "Work out your own salvation." If this is not a call to the use of will, of a free will, what is? It is hard for Westerners to accept a doctrine of complete fatalism, and the difficulty is not wholly due to their ignorance of spiritual facts which are elementary to Indians. It is also due to their instinctive refusal to be robbed of their initiative, and to their insistence on moral responsibility for ethical decisions and actions.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The freedom we have to evolve

#12612 – 6.9.4.64

BN – X – K

The man whose weakness when confronted by temptation is so great that his yielding is plainly predictable, can not be said to have the same freedom of choice that the man of strong self-mastery has.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The freedom we have to evolve

#12614 – 6.9.4.66

BN – Z – DK

Most people experience events brought about by a mixture of heredity, environment, other people's influence, and karma; not many exert their will determinedly, use their thinking power correctly, and control their energy and time to create chosen results.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The freedom we have to evolve

#12615 – 6.9.4.67

BN – Z – K

Freedom is not in itself a good or bad thing; the way it is used, whether wisely or recklessly, will determine its value.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The freedom we have to evolve

#12616 – 6.9.4.68

BN – ZZZ – DK

If you demand freedom you must accept the responsibility which accompanies it. This is not only a human and social law but also a divine and karmic law.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The freedom we have to evolve

#12620 – 6.9.4.72

BA11 – ZZ – DK

The really determined spiritual man has more powers of free will than others—powers to mold his life and to offset his karma and to create good karma to wipe out threatening or existing bad karma.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The freedom we have to evolve

#12629 – 6.9.4.81

BN – Z – DK

Man is forced in the end by life itself to undertake disciplines he resents or resists. The neophyte in philosophy, for the sake of his own personal development, anticipates them, accepts them, and co-operates with them.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The freedom we have to evolve

#12634 – 6.9.4.86

BN – Z – DK

Who possesses complete independence? Who has all the freedom he wants? Who is able to make his choices freely, unaffected by his circumstances, by social pressure, by events, or by heredity? The answer, of course, is no one. But, to the extent that anyone learns to control his thoughts, to become master of himself, he begins to control his fate.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The freedom we have to evolve

#12636 – 6.9.4.88

BN – ZZZ – DK

The destiny of an entire lifetime may be set by a single mistake, itself the consequence of ungoverned emotion or passion.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The freedom we have to evolve

#12638 – 6.9.4.90

BN – Z – DK

Fate hands him the opportunities and the difficulties: what he does with them is his choice, for which he is responsible.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The freedom we have to evolve

#12640 – 6.9.4.92

BA11 – ZZ – DK

Coaxed by pleasure in some incarnations and driven by pain in others, man slowly learns to use his faculties and powers aright.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The freedom we have to evolve

#12642 – 6.9.4.94

UR_5 – ZZZ – DK

The saying that “experience is the best teacher” is one I often thought should be altered to “experience is most often the only teacher.” It is surely better to be taught by reflection and intuition.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The freedom we have to evolve

#12644 – 6.9.4.96

BN – ZZZ – DMK

There is a shorter and better way to practical wisdom. What the ordinary man arrives at only after the several events of long years, the wiser one will arrive at earlier by intuition and reflection.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The freedom we have to evolve

#12646 – 6.9.4.98

BN – ZZ – DK

A man may move to a given point by crawling or walking, running or swimming, driving or diving; it is largely his free choice in the matter. But karma dictates where the point shall be and here his freedom ends.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The freedom we have to evolve

#12652 – 6.9.4.104

BN – ZZZ – K

The whole debate of fate versus free will for which has continued since centuries and is just as active in our own, would be dropped if the debaters knew and understood where both forces had their habitat. They are in time, relative to it: what they bring about lies in the past, present, or future, whereas they take their rise out of an eternal NOW. Time is in the mind and to assume its complete and ultimate reality is to falsify the experiences and the happenings in it.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The freedom we have to evolve

#12654 – 6.9.4.106

BSG_5 – ZZ – K

He is free to identify his own purposes with the pattern of the World-Idea, or to disregard it. In both cases he must take the consequences. In the one case he will have again and again, voluntarily if reluctantly, to subordinate his ego. In the other, he will seek to satisfy it and may at times succeed in doing so. But then he will meet those consequences because the law of karma has to give him back his own.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The freedom we have to evolve

#12659 – 6.9.4.111

BN – ZZ – K

Law rules the universe: the latter could not have been conceived as it is, so mathematically, so orderly in numerical values, unless all things were in conformity with and obedient to the World-Idea. Functioning as part of this cosmic necessity is karma. But within this condition there is some freedom to choose and to act—very limited but there.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The freedom we have to evolve

#12660 – 6.9.4.112

BN – Z – K

Where is man’s free will? He is free to choose whether he will conform to the pattern of the World-Idea, whether he will obey or not obey the higher laws.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The freedom we have to evolve

#12662 – 6.9.4.114

BA11 – ZZZ – DK

The structure of the physical brain contributes largely to the way a man acts. This leaves him less room for free will than he thinks he has. But the brain (and the whole body) structure is itself the product of past self-made karma now functioning.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The freedom we have to evolve

#12664 – 6.9.4.116

BN – ZZZ – K

The activities of the present life necessarily make their contribution towards the results now being experienced as destiny from previous lives. They may even go farther than this and may influence, modify, or altogether offset a destined experience which is reserved for the future and has still to materialize. Thus, there is no room for a hopeless fatalism in this teaching. Destiny is alterable. It is made more pleasurable by our good deeds, more bearable by our wise decisions, more painful by our bad deeds, and more unbearable by our foolish decisions.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The freedom we have to evolve

#12665 – 6.9.4.117

BN – Z – DEK

The man who wins is the man whose dice are loaded with invincible optimism, with unfailing effort, and with creative thought.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The freedom we have to evolve

#12667 – 6.9.4.119

BN – ZZ – DK

Since the gift of creativity belongs to all of us and is usable in all spheres of a man's life, he can do much to mold that life if he exerts strength and holds to determination.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The freedom we have to evolve

#12669 – 6.9.4.121

BN – Z – DK

The truth is that both are present in life, the destiny ordained by karma and the freedom towards which we are struggling. Both are present in each human existence, but it is only the advanced soul who has created that fine equilibrium between them which unites them both in harmony.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The freedom we have to evolve

#12676 – 6.9.4.128

BN – ZZ – K

The power of karma is matched by the power of personal effort, and out of the balancing of the two supported by wisdom a better result will always be obtained.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > The freedom we have to evolve

#12677 – 6.9.4.129

BN – X – K

If the man in you is held down by his body, his surroundings, his karma, the godlike in you is not: it is free. But through this freedom it chooses to be in harmony with God.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > Human will in the World-Idea

#12682 – 6.9.4.134

BN – Z – DK

Oriental fatalism, which makes God's power and will the only power and will, leaves man's power useless and renders his will superfluous. This is somewhat disheartening to the Occidental's mind and enervating to his hand. But he need not accept it; it is also the unbalanced half-dangerous fatalism of half-knowledge. Man is intended to grow up into consciousness of his Godlike essence, and through that into joyful co-operation with God and deliberate participation with God's World-Idea.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > Human will in the World-Idea

#12684 – 6.9.4.136

BN – ZZ – DK

Man is intended to grow up into consciousness of his Godlike essence, and through that into joyful co-operation with God and deliberate participation with God's World-Idea.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > Human will in the World-Idea

#12684E – 6.9.4.136

BT1008 – ZZ – DEK

No man is really and fully free since all men are carrying out the World-Idea. The feeling which he usually possesses that he is acting under his own power and making his own choices is due to his ignorance.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > Human will in the World-Idea

#12685 – 6.9.4.137

BN – Z – DK

Life is presented to each individual in a pattern that is given by a higher power—call it karma or God, destiny or divinity. He may be able to put in the smaller details, but the larger outlines are preordained. The freedom he thinks he has is illusory. But where he does not suspect it, he does have freedom, and that is his higher self, his Overself.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > Human will in the World-Idea

#12687 – 6.9.4.139

BN – ZZ – DK

A man's attitude toward the question of free will changes after he has surrendered to the Overself. It has to change. For henceforth he is to be loyal not to the ego's desires but to the Overself's injunctions. If the two coincide, it is well and pleasant for him. If not, and he obeys his higher self as he must, then it can no longer be said that he has full freedom of will. But neither can it be said that he has not. For the Overself is in him, not outside, not something alien and apart; it is indeed himself at his best and highest level. Because the Overself is under no other law than that of its own being, which it always obeys, both freedom and fate are harmoniously united in it. Hence, the truly wise man will reconcile and unite the tenet of karma and the tenet of free will. He knows that only a limited vision will range them against each other.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > Human will in the World-Idea

#12688 – 6.9.4.140

BA11 – KKK – DEK

A man's attitude toward the question of free will changes after he has surrendered to the Overself. It has to change. For henceforth he is to be loyal not to the ego's desires but to the Overself's injunctions. If the two coincide, it is well and pleasant for him. If not, and he obeys his higher self as he must, then it can no longer be said that he has full freedom of will. But neither can it be said that he has not. For the Overself is in him, not outside, not something alien and apart; it is indeed himself at his best and highest level.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > Human will in the World-Idea

#12688E – 6.9.4.140

BSG_5 – KKK – DEK

In the end the only freedom we have is to conform to the order of the Universe and be what we have the possibility of being, and that is to move upward, transcend the little ego, and discover the hidden greatness of Overself.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > Human will in the World-Idea

#12690 – 6.9.4.142

BSG_5 – ZZZ – DK

Man's free will and God's preordained will are simultaneously coinciding, acting together. It does not matter what human being's freedom leads him to do: in the end it will be turned to the accomplishment of God's evolutionary purpose. His evil will even be turned, by God's laws of karma, to good. He will be forced to evolve ultimately.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > Human will in the World-Idea

#12691 – 6.9.4.143

BSG_5 – ZZZ – K

As I emerge from a trance of self-realization, the white sun sets in golden bars across the Thames. My body is seated in the half-Buddha posture on a grassy bank of the river. I find the solution of the problem which has weighed on my mind all day. I, hapless victim of a hard fate, I have communicated with myself! But now, I am conscious of the truth, for I have been lifted like a babe out of all anxiety for the future, all regret for the past. In the spiritual self, I feel a timeless life: I breathe the calm air of the Eternal. I feel safe and I could not worry even if I wanted to. To live in the true Self is to be released from all cares concerning what the morrow may bring. This is real 'freedom'. Even if fate is all-powerful, even if an unpleasant fate be in store for me, yet, if I cannot change it, I can change myself. I can enter into my inner self and therein take refuge from my fate.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > Human will in the World-Idea

#12692 – 6.9.4.144

BN – ZZZ – DEK

Jesus had a passion to urge every man to live up to his higher possibilities. The man who is living a lower level than his best is not performing his proper function in life. This attitude of Jesus was in direct contrast to the widespread fatalism of the Orientals.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > Human will in the World-Idea

#12695 – 6.9.4.147

B_12 – ZZ – DK

The infinite wisdom of the World-Mind is behind the world and rules its course, which is not left to the accidents of chance.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > Human will in the World-Idea

#12700 – 6.9.4.152

BN – ZZ – DK

Regarding fate and free will, ordinarily man is subject to fate simultaneously with the fact that he is also operating his will. The two factors are ever present. But as the same fate was made by him in former lives, and he had the freedom to make it as he wished, ultimately there is freedom.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > Human will in the World-Idea

#12705E – 6.9.4.157

BSG_5 – ZZ – K

The truth is that we are both free and not free. The one is illusion because the hidden factors, the karma in the situation, shape its history. The other is actuality because knowing that, you demean yourself unnecessarily. The ego is surrounded by truth and goodness. Why not reach out and up to the Overself?

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > Human will in the World-Idea

#12706 – 6.9.4.158

BN – ZZ – DEK

There are some actions a man does not for a moment include in his planning, yet when the time comes he does them. Why? Is he driven by a higher power? Is it in fulfilment of the World-Idea?

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > Human will in the World-Idea

#12707 – 6.9.4.159

BN – ZZZ – K

The power which operates the World-Idea is the same power which operates the processes of what the Asiatics call karma. The law of karma, or come-back of consequences, of causes and effects, is inseparable from the World-Idea. Behind the World-Idea is the World-Mind. Behind karma is God.

From Birth to Rebirth > Free Will, Responsibility, and The World-Idea > Human will in the World-Idea

#12710 – 6.9.4.162

BN – ZZZ – K

It comes to this—that much of human disease and sickness is traceable to the faulty functioning of the human self. Learn how to use that self correctly in its physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual aspects and you learn how to prevent or cure part, or most, or even all of your ill health.

Healing of the Self > Healing of the Self > Healing of the Self

#12712 – 7.10.0.1

ME_01 – Z – DMK2

Most of the individual's health troubles are the result of karma. The body is a source of pleasure and misery to nearly all; but both being temporary, the one balances the other. He should do his utmost to keep his body in good health by following the best program of physical living, diet, and so on, that his own experience and expert advice can suggest. He should try the most reasonable treatment for illness which both the Indian (including hatha yoga) and Western medical systems can offer. After he has done these things then there is nothing more he can do except to take his sufferings as a constant reminder of the necessity of seeking happiness in a spiritual self above the body self.

Healing of the Self > The Laws of Nature > The spiritual importance of health

#12719 – 7.10.1.7

B_17 – ZZZ – K

Diseased conditions in the human body are often traceable, by a subtle and penetrating analysis, to diseased conditions in the human soul. Medical science deals chiefly with the physical organism, and so long as it persists in regarding only that part of the being of man, so long will it continue to find its theories falsified, its carefully prepared experiments turned into blind guesses, and its high percentage of failures maintained. I might make my point clearer, perhaps, by stating that the body is after all only a sensitive machine, and that if the thinking and feeling man who uses that machine in self-expression is distorted, unbalanced, or discordant in any way, then these undesirable qualities will reproduce themselves in the physical organism as appropriate disease or functional derangements.

Healing of the Self > The Laws of Nature > Disease has hidden causes

#12721 – 7.10.1.9

ME_01 – ZZ – K2

When plague broke like a wave over the heads of mankind in the fifteenth century and spread with startling rapidity through the nations of Europe, the obvious physical causes were in themselves but agents of the less obvious soul-causes, defects in the very character of humanity. Insomnia and cancer, to take but two of the representative illnesses of our own epoch, are no less plaguelike in their menace to people of today, no less the products of causes inherent in imperfect human character, habit, or environment.

Healing of the Self > The Laws of Nature > Disease has hidden causes

#12723 – 7.10.1.11

BN – Z – K1

Although we can often find the physical causes of physical ailments, behind these physical causes there are quite often maladies of the soul. Heal the soul and the bodily healing may follow. Obviously there are many cases where no success would result.

Healing of the Self > The Laws of Nature > Disease has hidden causes

#12724 – 7.10.1.12

ME_01 – Z – K2

If the change begins in the body’s behaviour it may influence the mind to a very limited extent, but if it begins in the mind’s thinking it will influence the body to a very large extent. That is the difference.

Healing of the Self > The Laws of Nature > Disease has hidden causes

#12732 – 7.10.1.20

ME_01 – ZZ – K2

The psychological causes of disease have only recently come under investigation by the strict methods of modern science, but the general fact of their existence was known thousands of years ago. Plato, for instance, said: This is the great error of our day, that physicians separate the inner being from the body.”

Healing of the Self > The Laws of Nature > Disease has hidden causes

#12735 – 7.10.1.23

BN – Z – DK1

The treatment of unpleasant realities by not including them in his picture of the world comforts but at the same time befools a man. None of the great prophets like Jesus and Buddha denied the existence of sickness, the reality of pain, or the significance of suffering in the cosmos. No—they acknowledged them as being inseparable from human life but pitied the victims and offered them an inward comfort which was based on Truth and Reality.

Healing of the Self > The Laws of Nature > Physical mortality

#12747 – 7.10.1.35

B_01 – ZZZ – K

The animal part of us is doomed to oblivion, the spiritual part is ageless and deathless. The physical body belongs to the animal part. All attempts to perpetuate it must fail and arise from confusing the two levels of being, the transient and the eternal.

Healing of the Self > The Laws of Nature > Physical mortality

#12748 – 7.10.1.36

B_01 – ZZZ – DMK

You cannot have a single desire and yet enter the Kingdom of Heaven, as Jesus pointed out. So good health, the care of your painful diseases, the healing of your disturbed organs—right, necessary, and desirable as they undoubtedly are—are nevertheless matters which you must try to effect in a desireless way; you may try to cure them, but you must leave the result to the higher will. If you insist that the body must yield to your desires of a cure, to your personal desires, then your ego, not the real universal self, has got the upper hand and is directing you. In that case you will be no better off, for you have no guarantee of success even then.

Healing of the Self > The Laws of Nature > Physical mortality

#12749E – 7.10.1.37

B_11 – ZEL1/2 – K

Most Christian Scientists experience a score of failures for every cure. Whereas if you do your best mentally and physically to put your body right, but do it impersonally—accepting failure, if it comes, with as much equanimity as you can—you will certainly be no worse off than the Christian Scientist so far as the possibilities of cure are concerned, and you will be infinitely better off so far as realizing truth is concerned, with all the wonderful peace that will bring in its train. This is one meaning of the words "Not my will but Thine be done" which Mrs. Eddy failed to learn.

Healing of the Self > The Laws of Nature > Physical mortality

#12749E – 7.10.1.37

B_11 – ZEL2/2 – K

Don't you think, having seen so much illness around you for so many years, that life is forever striving to instill into us through pain what Buddha learned through reflection—that both body and world are doomed to decay and die, being subject to the law of universal incessant change? The experiences of life are the lessons of a guru, for we get just the kind of karma whose silent instruction is needed at the time. The whole world, more or less, is having to learn this great truth at present but it is too blind and too ignorant to grasp the lesson in its clarity and entirety.

Healing of the Self > The Laws of Nature > Physical mortality

#12750 – 7.10.1.38

BN – ZZZ – DEK

We get just the kind of karma whose silent instruction is needed at the time.

Healing of the Self > The Laws of Nature > Physical mortality

#12750E – 7.10.1.38

BA11 – ZZZ – DEK

The fleshly body is but a temporary abiding place at best, and when human being has arrived at a state of perfect spirituality, he will abandon it and use a vehicle more consonant with his high condition, an electromagnetic body that will more easily and more faithfully represent him.

Healing of the Self > The Laws of Nature > Physical mortality

#12757E – 7.10.1.45

BSG_4 – ZZ – K

Whereas Christian Science denies the reality of a diseased condition and doesn't deny the physical body altogether, philosophy denies only the materiality of the physical body and accepts the existence of the condition. Again, whereas Christian Science asserts that physical sickness was never given a place in God's scheme of things, philosophy says that it was given a place and fulfils a part of the divine purpose in our human evolution from a lower to a higher state of consciousness.

Healing of the Self > The Laws of Nature > Physical mortality

#12759 – 7.10.1.47

BN – ZZ – K

The truth is with Jesus, who said that flesh and blood will not inherit eternal life.

Healing of the Self > The Laws of Nature > Physical mortality

#12763 – 7.10.1.51

B_11 – Z – K

Life brings its sufferings to every quester, as to every nonquester, as to all beings who move on this earth. Successful completion of the quest may free him from some of them but could it ever free him from all of them? The happiness he may find cannot be an absolute; it must be qualified.

Healing of the Self > The Laws of Nature > Physical mortality

#12764 – 7.10.1.52

BN – ZZ – K

Out of this physical suffering he should have learned the lessons of a deep wisdom: first, that this earth is not his home but only a camp; second, that this body is not his true self but only a garment; third, that suffering, disappointment, or discontent is inseparable from earthly life, real happiness is to be found only in the super-earthly life; fourth, that the full force of the mind must be developed by renunciation, sacrifice, concentration, and aspiration so that it can even here to a large extent create an inner life that continues peacefully in whatever state the body may find itself.

Healing of the Self > The Laws of Nature > Physical mortality

#12766 – 7.10.1.54

ME_01 – ZZ – K2

The pains and maladies which accompany and punctuate physical existence are not taken away from the spiritually aware man. Their presence continues to act as a reminder—as much to him as to all other men—that just because they do accompany the body’s life, that life is an imperfect and unsatisfying one. His five senses are working like all other men’s and so must report the painful as well as pleasurable sensations. But what he does gain is a peace deeper than the body’s sensations, and unbreakable by their painful nature. One part of him—the lesser—may suffer; but the other part—the greater—remains undisturbed. In his higher and spiritual nature he is well fortified against these afflictions, sustained by heavenly forces denied to other people.

Healing of the Self > The Laws of Nature > The Philosopher's body

#12767 – 7.10.1.55

ME_01 – ZZ – K2

The Buddha was not immune from disease. The austerities he practised during his search for enlightenment permanently affected his health, and his ceaseless activity for forty-five years greatly weakened him towards the end of his life. He often suffered from a severe headache and in his old age he suffered from severe backache which sometimes forced him to stop a sermon halfway and ask one of his disciples to continue from where he left off. The unsuitable meals which he was sometimes forced to eat were responsible for a dyspepsia which persisted throughout his life, culminating in his last fatal illness of dysentery. But none of these ailments prevented him from being always ready with help for those who needed it.

Healing of the Self > The Laws of Nature > The Philosopher's body

#12768 – 7.10.1.56

BN – ZZZ – K

We need also to remember that the attitude of the advanced soul towards personal suffering is not the same as the common one. His standpoint is different. So far as we know human history on this globe, all the facts show that sickness, pain, disease, and death are parts of the conditions governing the physical body's experience because they are inescapable and inevitable parts of all physical-plane experience for highly organized forms, whether human or otherwise. That is, they are part of the divine plan for man. We humans resent such experiences, but it may be that they are necessary to our rounded development and that the Illuminated who have approached closer to the infinite wisdom perceive this and drop their resentment.

Healing of the Self > The Laws of Nature > The Philosopher's body

#12770E – 7.10.1.58

B_17 – ZEL1/2 – K1

We need also to remember that the attitude of the advanced soul towards personal suffering is not the same as the common one. His standpoint is different. Here we may recall Sri Ramakrishna's attitude towards the cancer in the throat from which he died, Saint Bernadette of Lourdes' attitude towards her painful lingering and fatal disease of consumption, Ramana Maharshi's fatalism about his bodily pains and ailments, and Sri Aurobindo's reply to the physician who attended him for a broken knee after a fall: "How is it that you, a Mahatma, could not foresee and prevent this accident?" "I still have to carry this human body about me and it is subject to ordinary human limitations and physical laws."

Healing of the Self > The Laws of Nature > The Philosopher's body

#12770E – 7.10.1.58

B_17 – ZEL2/2 – K1

If he can succeed in refusing to identify himself with the suffering body, he will not suffer with it.

Healing of the Self > The Laws of Nature > The Philosopher's body

#12774 – 7.10.1.62

BN – X – D

Even in the midst of bodily sufferings, he will still keep and not lose this beautiful serenity of mind. And he is able to do so precisely because he is able to differentiate the flesh from the mind. Inevitably, it must counteract, even though it may not obliterate, the body's pain.

Healing of the Self > The Laws of Nature > The Philosopher's body

#12789 – 7.10.1.77

B_17 – P – D

Pain and suffering, sin and evil, disease and death, exist only in the world of thoughts, not in the world of pure Thought itself. They are not illusions, however, but they are transient. Whoever attains to pure Thought will also attain in consciousness to a life that is painless, sorrow-free, sinless, undecaying, and undying. Being above desires and fears, it is necessarily above the miseries caused by unsatisfied desires and realized fears. But at the same time he will also have an accompanying consciousness of life in the body, which must obey the laws of its own being, natural laws which set limitations and imperfections upon it. This much can be said to be the element of truth contained in some theoretical doctrines of Vedantic Advaita and Christian Science.

Healing of the Self > The Laws of Nature > The Philosopher's body

#12790 – 7.10.1.78

B_17 – Z – K1

There is a single source of Life which envelops the universe and pervades man. By its presence in himself he is able to exist physically and function mentally.

Healing of the Self > The Universal Life Force > The Universal Life Force

#12791 – 7.10.2.1

UR_1 – ZZZ – DK

That Power which brought the body into existence originally maintains its involuntary functions, cures its diseases, and heals its wounds. It is within the body itself; it is the life-force aspect of the Soul, the Overself. Its curative virtue may express itself through various mediums—as herbs and foods, hot, cold, or mud baths, and deep breathings, exercise, and osteopathy—or it may express itself by their complete absence as in fasting, often the quickest and most effective medium. Or, disdaining physical methods entirely, it may act directly and almost miraculously as spiritual healing.

Healing of the Self > The Universal Life Force > The Universal Life Force

#12792 – 7.10.2.2

ME_01 – X – K1

The role of physical treatments of any kind is to supply favourable conditions for the action of the universal life-force which does the real healing work, just as food, water, and air supply materials to this same force for the repair of tissue and the regeneration of cells.

Healing of the Self > The Universal Life Force > The Universal Life Force

#12793 – 7.10.2.3

ME_01 – Z – K2

Nature is an expression of the Universal Mind. The plants are given to us for medicine or food. It is an insult to Nature to despise these remedies.

Healing of the Self > The Universal Life Force > The Universal Life Force

#12796 – 7.10.2.6

BN – X – D

After all and in the end, it is Nature which brought us to birth on this planet. Can we not therefore credit her with the power of restoring the health needful to maintain the lives she has taken the trouble to originate?

Healing of the Self > The Universal Life Force > The Universal Life Force

#12802 – 7.10.2.12

ME_01 – Z – K2

There are no miracles in Nature, but there are happenings to which science possesses no key. The human consciousness, for instance, is capable of manifesting powers which contradict psychological knowledge, just as the human body is capable of manifesting phenomena which contradict medical knowledge. Both powers and phenomena may seem miraculous, but they really issue forth from the hidden laws of man’s own being. The processes take place in the dark only to us.

Healing of the Self > The Universal Life Force > The Universal Life Force

#12809 – 7.10.2.19

ME_01 – Z – K1

This life-force, this invisible energy, is behind and within, around and above the physical body. Under certain circumstances its area can be seen and traced out and its recuperative healing power drawn upon. It forms an aura, the etheric or vital body of light, but not the still more elusive and subtle divine body of Light nor the aura of various colours, the astral body.

Healing of the Self > The Universal Life Force > The vital body

#12810 – 7.10.2.20

ME_01 – Z – K2

What are the "higher bodies"? Just as man has a physical body with which to operate in the physical world, so he has a vital body, an emotional body, and a mental body through which to express these other parts of his nature. This is the teaching of Theosophists, Hindus, and occultists. These bodies survive the death of the physical body, but are reduced to seed atoms when, between incarnations, man passes into a state of happy dreamless slumber. But from the philosophical viewpoint, the "higher bodies" are simply thought bodies, or, more correctly, states of consciousness.

Healing of the Self > The Universal Life Force > The vital body

#12812 – 7.10.2.22

ME_01 – ZZ – K2

The healing powers of Nature truly exist, quite apart from the medical powers evoked by physicians, but they exist like electricity. To benefit by them we must draw them, focus them, and concentrate them on ourselves. This is done by our strong and sufficient faith, by our own concentration of attention, and by our relaxing and stilling of the whole being.

Healing of the Self > The Universal Life Force > Nature's healing power

#12819 – 7.10.2.29

ME_01 – X – K2

The modern man suffers from a certain physical sickness and some mental ailments which are of his own making. This is because his thoughts are forever centering in his personal ego, his emotions forever revolving round his little self. He can help to free himself from the one and heal himself of the other if he will create an oasis in this desert by daily and purposely withdrawing into the impersonal atmosphere of the higher nature.

Healing of the Self > The Universal Life Force > Nature's healing power

#12822 – 7.10.2.32

BSG_5 – P – D

The first principle of healing is to stop the obstructive resistance of the little ego so carried away by the belief that it can successfully manage its own life. The method of doing this is to cast out all negative thoughts, all destructive feelings, and all excessive egoisms. The second principle is to attune the individual to the universal life-force. The method of doing this is to learn the art of relaxing body and mind.

Healing of the Self > The Universal Life Force > Nature's healing power

#12825 – 7.10.2.35

ME_01 – P – DK2

How few have learned that it is not the quantity of medicine they swallow but the degree of contact with Nature’s lifeforce that they establish which cures their diseases.

Healing of the Self > The Universal Life Force > Nature's healing power

#12828 – 7.10.2.38

ME_01 – Z – K2

The same power which can illuminate the seeking mind can also heal the suffering body.

Healing of the Self > The Universal Life Force > Nature's healing power

#12829 – 7.10.2.39

BSG_5 – P – D

It is possible to direct the healing power of the white light, in imagination and with deep breathing, to any part of the body where pain is felt or to any organ which is not functioning properly. This does not instantly remove the trouble, but it does make a contribution towards the healing process.

Healing of the Self > The Universal Life Force > Exercises and meditations

#12834 – 7.10.2.44

ME_01 – Z – DK2

If you want to heal a person do not concentrate upon the nature of their disease, or you may strengthen it. Concentrate rather upon the nature of their Overself, that its mighty grace may be released to them. Do not even pray that they will be cured. Pray rather that the power of the Overself’s grace may work within them, and do what it will.

Healing of the Self > The Universal Life Force > Exercises and meditations

#12836 – 7.10.2.46

ME_01 – ZZZ – DK2

After he has felt the divine power and presence within himself as the reward of his meditative search, he may turn it towards the healing of his body’s ailments. This would be impossible if he were less than relaxed, peaceful, assured, if either fear or desire introduced their negative presence and thus obstructed his receptivity to the healing-power’s penetration. When the contact is successfully made, he should draw the power to every atom of his body and let it be permeated. The cure could be had at a single treatment, if he could sit still and let the work go on to completion. But although the power is unlimited, his patience is not. And so he must treat himself day after day until the outer and physical result matches the inner and spiritual achievement.

Healing of the Self > The Universal Life Force > Exercises and meditations

#12839 – 7.10.2.49

ME_01 – X – K1

Healing Exercise: Inhale deeply but slowly and unhurriedly. With each breath fix the mind in the life-essence pouring in and permeating each part of the body until the whole of it is bathed and held by the stream.

Healing of the Self > The Universal Life Force > Exercises and meditations

#12841 – 7.10.2.51

ME_01 – X – K2

Healing Exercise: Hold the thought that all these countless cells which compose your anatomy shall receive this transmuted energy. Along with the concentration inhale deeply, hold the breath, and exhale for an equal amount of time.

Healing of the Self > The Universal Life Force > Exercises and meditations

#12842 – 7.10.2.52

ME_01 – X – K2

In the moment when you feel that actual contact with the One Infinite Life-Power has been made, draw it into the body and let it permeate every part, every organ, and every atom. It will tend to dissolve sickness and drive out disease.

Healing of the Self > The Universal Life Force > Exercises and meditations

#12850 – 7.10.2.60

ME_01 – Z – K2

Hindu religion worships light in its intensest form—the sun. The Hindu holy men say that the sun-bath is good for the body; if taken when its rays are mild—that is, at dawn and at dusk—it can cure the body of many diseases. They further claim this practice will re-absorb the semen into the blood stream and thus strengthen the physical body.

Healing of the Self > The Universal Life Force > Exercises and meditations

#12858 – 7.10.2.68

BN – X – D

As he penetrates deeper and deeper into that subtle world of his inner being, he finds that thought, feeling, and even speech affect its condition as powerfully as outer conditions affect his physical being. A complete falsehood or a gross exaggeration, when conscious and deliberate, stuns or inflames the delicate psyche. If persisted in and made habitual, the psyche becomes diseased and falls sick. This may be followed, soon or late according to the sensitivity of the man, by physical sickness. If sickness does not come, then he will be exposed to it in the form of a karma shadowing some future incarnation.

Healing of the Self > The Origins of Illness > The karma of the body

#12865 – 7.10.3.3

BN – Z – K

Where there is no obvious transgression of the laws of bodily hygiene to account for a case of ill health, there may still be a hidden one not yet uncovered. Where there is no hidden one, the line of connection from a physical effect may be traced to a mental cause—that is, the sickness may be a psychosomatic one. Where this in turn is also not obvious, there may still be a hidden mental one. Where all these classes of cause do not exist, then the origin of the sickness must necessarily be derived from the karma of the previous reincarnation—sometimes even from a still earlier one, although that is less likely. Under the law of recompense, the very type of body with which the patient was born contains latently, and was predisposed to reveal eventually, the sickness itself. The cause may be any one of widely varying kinds, may even be a moral transgression in the earlier life which could not find any other way of expiation and so had to be expiated in this way. Therefore it would be an error to believe that all cases of ill health directly arise from the transgression of physical hygienic laws.

Healing of the Self > The Origins of Illness > The karma of the body

#12866 – 7.10.3.4

BN – ZZ – K

It is possible to be quite enlightened without being quite free from physical maladies. For the body's karma does not end until the body's life ends.

Healing of the Self > The Origins of Illness > The karma of the body

#12867 – 7.10.3.5

BN – ZZ – K

In a broad general division, philosophy finds three causes of sickness. They are wrong thinking, wrong living, and bad karma. But because karma merely brings back to us the results of the other two, we may even limit the causes of disease to them. And again because conduct is ultimately the expression of thought, we may limit the cause of disease finally to a single one of wrong thinking… But the thinking which produced the sickness may belong to the far past, to some earlier reincarnation, and not necessarily to the present one…

Healing of the Self > The Origins of Illness > The karma of the body

#12869E – 7.10.3.7

BSG_5 – Z – DEK

It might be said that most 'organic' physical disease is karmically caused and most functional physical sickness is mentally caused.

Healing of the Self > The Origins of Illness > The karma of the body

#12870 – 7.10.3.8

BN – ZZZ – K1

Deep hurts and bitter experiences from a former unknown incarnation throw their shadows on the present one.

Healing of the Self > The Origins of Illness > The karma of the body

#12873 – 7.10.3.11

BN – ZZ – DK

Another cause of illness is that God sends us tests and ordeals on this path, which may take the form of illness. But in that case we emerge spiritually stronger and wiser, if they are passed, and so benefit.

Healing of the Self > The Origins of Illness > The karma of the body

#12877 – 7.10.3.15

BN – ZZ

There is no inevitability of physical suffering on this path generally, but there is for certain individuals. Karma comes down more plentifully at certain times for certain aspirants, but as mind and body are highly interrelated, this is offset by the purification of body and emotions. Hence students need not be afraid of this. Again, spiritual healing is a real fact, but it works in a mysterious way dependent on divine grace; but here also it applies only to certain individuals.

Healing of the Self > The Origins of Illness > The karma of the body

#12878 – 7.10.3.16

BN – Z – K

It is a mistake to believe that because any art of healing—whether it be a material or a spiritual one—is able to heal a particular kind of sickness once, it is consequently able to heal all similar cases of sickness by its own merits. Forces outside it have something to do with the matter. There are some cases where failure by material methods is preordained by the higher power of destiny. There are others where failure by spiritual methods is also inevitable, because the heart of the sick man has not been touched. As elsewhere, there are limits to human effort set here by certain laws.

Healing of the Self > The Origins of Illness > The karma of the body

#12880 – 7.10.3.18

BN – Z

Disease may re-emerge again at some later time, or if it doesn't, it will do so in the next birth. We are not saying here however that all sickness and all disease are caused by wrong thinking in this present reincarnation but that some of them are. How great or how small that part is depends entirely upon the individuals concerned. With some, it is a very high proportion, with others it is a small one. In the former case, therefore, we must look back to anterior lives for the wrong thought or wrong conduct which produced the sickness of the present physical body as bad karma.

Healing of the Self > The Origins of Illness > The karma of the body

#12881 – 7.10.3.19

BN – ZZ – K

Although Mary Baker Eddy—of whom I am a great admirer—was quite correct in saying that the Real Self is free from sickness, pain, and suffering, the simple denial—by the individual—of these obviously present symptoms will often fail to banish them. Philosophy takes a broader view: it does not attempt to deny the undeniable. It recognizes that all prolonged or intense suffering, being karmically self-earned—whether in this lifetime or in a former one—carries with it a message. This message must be learned and actively taken to heart while, at the same time, every available means—physical, mental, and spiritual—within reason should also be applied in the hope of relieving the suffering and restoring normalcy. The practice of Christian Science is one part of these means, and a most valuable part, but still only a part.

Healing of the Self > The Origins of Illness > The karma of the body

#12882 – 7.10.3.20

B_17 – P – K

Metaphysical or faith cure is an oversimplification of the healing problem and consequently yields only a part-truth. Bodily healing is an occasional by-product of the healing of thought and feeling, or the re-education of moral character; it is not at all the invariable result of such processes. Sickness may come to advanced students for a variety of causes, some of which arise from outside the individual. Karma is the commonest, but one such cause might be the application of a test or ordeal from the divine soul to the human ego that aspires to evolve more rapidly.

Healing of the Self > The Origins of Illness > The karma of the body

#12886 – 7.10.3.24

BN – ZZZ – K

Certain maladies in the physical being may quite easily be directly traced to evil impulses in the mental being. It is not only man's diseases which are the consequence of his bad thinking, however, but also man's misfortunes. If he is healthy in body he may be unhealthy in fortune. Karma's retribution expresses itself in a variety of ways. It is a mistake to narrow this linking of wrong thinking and ill feeling with the body's sicknesses alone. They are to be linked with all forms of bad karma. Disease is only one form. Their effects may appear in other forms instead. Disease is merely one of them.

Healing of the Self > The Origins of Illness > The karma of the body

#12889 – 7.10.3.27

BN – ZZ – K

Wrong thinking expresses itself in the end in wrong functioning of some organ of the body. The nature of the thoughts and the nature of the malady correspond to each other.

Healing of the Self > The Origins of Illness > Mental states and physical conditions

#12891 – 7.10.3.29

ME_01 – ZZ – K

The body’s organs are affected by the mind’s states. Worry or fear, shock or excessive emotion may disturb, reduce, increase, or even paralyse their working for a time—in some cases for all time.

Healing of the Self > The Origins of Illness > Mental states and physical conditions

#12898 – 7.10.3.36

BN – ZZ – DK*

We know that a person can worry himself into a state of physical sickness, but there seems to be less acceptance for the opposite idea that emotions and thoughts can also produce healing and not injury.

Healing of the Self > The Origins of Illness > Mental states and physical conditions

#12905 – 7.10.3.43

ME_01 – P – DK

When fears and doubts, negative thoughts and pessimistic moods strongly dominate the inner life for long periods, or for a shorter one more strongly, they may provoke repercussions in the physical body and create disease.

Healing of the Self > The Origins of Illness > Mental states and physical conditions

#12906 – 7.10.3.44

BN – X – D

When a man is ever bitter, resentful, unkind, and critical; never gentle, constructive, praising, and compassionate; then poison trickles through his inner being and must in the end reappear in his bodily being.

Healing of the Self > The Origins of Illness > Mental states and physical conditions

#12908 – 7.10.3.46

BN – ZZ – DK

All negative states of mind and emotions are destructive. They work harm to some one of the body's organs or interfere with its functions. If those states are continuous, they sink into the subconscious and the results appear as disease. This is possible because the sympathetic nervous system, which controls the automatic functions of the body, is open to influence by the subconscious mind.

Healing of the Self > The Origins of Illness > Mental states and physical conditions

#12911 – 7.10.3.49

BN – X – D

To the extent that he can release himself by inner discipline from his negatives, to that extent will he release himself from many troubles which might otherwise descend upon him. As irritations fall away from his personal feelings, ills of body, circumstance, or relationship fall away from threatening his personal fortunes.

Healing of the Self > The Origins of Illness > Mental states and physical conditions

#12920 – 7.10.3.58

BN – X – D

If the mind of a spiritual healer can help to remove disease, it is equally true that the mind of some other person can contribute to cause it. If one’s own wrong thinking may be partly or wholly responsible for one’s diseases, others who are thinking constantly or powerfully about one may be partly or even wholly responsible for them too. This is the basis of sorcery in the Orient and of witchcraft in the medieval West.

Healing of the Self > The Origins of Illness > Mental states and physical conditions

#12921 – 7.10.3.59

ME_01 – P – K