Book Description

At the first flutter of renascent life, the mutable radiance of the Immutable Darkness passes from an inactive state into one of intense activity, and then begins its work through continuous differentiation and individualisation —propelled and ushered by Karma. Cosmic Cycles are subservient to the effects produced by this activity. Radiating from the rootless root-essence, the One Cosmic Atom becomes seven atoms on the plane of matter. Each atom is then transformed into a centre of energy, and radiates seven rays on the plane of spirit and seven creative forces in nature. The spiritual septenary on the right path and the material counterpart on the left, though they evolve in close embrace, remain separate till the end of the Kalpa. The visible Kosmos consists of self-produced beings, creatures of Karma. The true Buddhist denies the creation of Patristic fancy and regards the anthropomorphic God as a gigantic shadow thrown upon the void of space by the imagination of ignorant men. The task of analysing and classifying the human being as a terrestrial animal may be left to Science. But man’s inner, spiritual, psychic, and moral nature cannot be left to the tender mercies of an ingrained materialism. Molecularists such as Huxley demean certainty to probability, and rush to announce firm conclusions while the premisses are still to collect. They had sown wind and reaped the whirlwind. Within the global cycles of material descend and spiritual ascend, there are perpetual racial, national, and individual cycles of time ever returning upon themselves, periodically and intelligently, in Space and Eternity. The continuity and unity of history are principles of scientific divination, by which alone the mind penetrates the sealed records of the past and the unopened pages of the future. The whole past of the Earth is nothing but an unfolding present. The chief features of one’s life are always in accordance with the “constellation” one is born under, i.e., with the characteristics of its animating principle or the deity that presides over it. The closer the approach to one’s prototype “in heaven,” the better for the mortal whose personality was chosen by his own personal deity as its terrestrial abode. Our destiny is written in the stars. The closer the union between the mortal reflection, man, and his celestial prototype, the less dangerous the external conditions and subsequent reincarnations, which neither Buddhas nor Christs can escape. When the last strand is woven and man is enwrapped in the network of his own doing, he finds himself completely under the empire of his self-made destiny. It then either throws him like the inert shell against the immovable rock, or carries him away like a feather in a whirlwind raised by his own actions. Reason governs the world, its history, and its destiny. All else is subordinate and subservient to it, and the means for its development. Those who seek to satisfy their own purposes, are instruments of a higher and broader purpose, of which they know nothing, though they may realise it unconsciously. The law of evolution is now carrying us along the ascending arc of our cycle, when discordant effects will once again merge into counterbalanced causes, and all things will have regained their original harmony. The great Racial Cycles affect all the nations and tribes; but there are minor and national as well as tribal cycles within those, which run independently of each other. In the East they are known as Karmic cycles. In the West, since Pagan Wisdom has been repudiated as having grown from by dark powers supposed to be at constant war (and in opposition to the little tribal Jehovah), the awful significance of Karma-Nemesis has been entirely forgotten. But, in truth, Karma is the creator of nations and mortals; and it is they who make of her either a fury or a rewarding angel. There is not a single accident in our lives, not a misshapen day, which could not be traced back to our own doings in this or in a previous life. Karma-Nemesis is the synonym of Divine Providence, minus design, goodness, and every other finite qualification, so unphilosophically attributed to her. An Occultist will not speak of the goodness or cruelty of Providence; but he will teach that she guards the virtuous and watches over them in this, as in future lives; and that it punishes the evil-doer — even to his seventh rebirth. Were no man to hurt his brother, Karma would have neither cause to work for, nor weapons to act through. Nor would the ways of Karma remain inscrutable, were men to work in union and harmony, instead of disunion and strife. For our ignorance of those ways — which one portion of mankind calls the ways of Providence, dark and intricate; while another sees in them the action of blind Fatalism; and a third, mere chance, with neither gods nor devils to guide them — would surely disappear, if we would but attribute all these to their correct cause and learn how to be kind to each other. Karma is a law of occult dynamics, governing life throughout the universe, whether visible or invisible. Only the sceptics will shut their eyes, ostrich-like, to their own fate. This state will last till we begin acting from within, instead of ever following impulses from without; namely, those produced by our physical senses and barefaced selfishness. Until then, the only palliative to the evils of life is union and harmony — brotherhood in action, not simply in name. The suppression of one single bad cause will suppress not one, but a variety of bad effects, and hold back additional causes in a world already full of woe and evil. Karma is the unerring law of truth and justice which makes empires rise and fall, and adjusts even laughter at the mutual expense of sects, learned societies, and individuals. Prognostication of future events is neither prevision, nor prophecy: it is simply occult knowledge and mathematically correct computations that enable the wise men of the East to foretell, for instance, that the British Isles are on the eve of being destroyed by submarine volcanos and water, followed by France and other European countries, led by their own cycles of racial Karma.