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1The reason, manas, or mind, is simply mental capacity, and like the WILL, is not a principle but a result. Intellect is the offspring of innumerable and constantly changing causes or combinations of force never repeated under exactly the same conditions, consequently, no two people are exactly alike. The seat or mainspring of reason, intellect, understanding, and mind, is consciousness; and whether it will be good or evil, will depend upon the respective activities of the animal and divine souls. The higher the soul evolves, the more spiritual the un¬ derstanding becomes, until perfect rapport with the divine spirit is attained. This is the true at-one-ment. Man made perfect. From the foregoing the student must perceive that a man may be a perfect intellectual genius upon the physical plane, and at the same time be a veritable idiot in a spiritual sense. Very many intellectuals are standing before the world today and being accepted as the grand repositories of absolute knowledge because most of mankind are wholly engrossed in worldly affairs and are spiritually asleep. iy Google * o CHAPTER III KARMA “If we are ever to know anything clearly, we must be released from the body, that the soul by itself may see things by themselves as they really are.” Socrates.
2We need scarcely say that we fully agree with the above remarks of Plato’s teacher. While in the body we are completely fenced in by delusive appearances, and had the Greek sage been alive today those prominent individuals who so loudly and glibly speak and write upon the subject of Karma would have been very greatly inconvenienced by the Athenian’s terrible logic.
3“Karma is the law of consequences,—of merit and demerit”, say the Buddhists. “It is that force which moulds our physical destiny in this world, and regulates our period of misery or happiness in the world to come.” We are also further informed that “Karma is the cold, in¬ flexible justice which metes out to each individual the exact same measure of good and evil at his next physical re-birth that he measured to his fellow-men in this.” Not only so, but this karma at death re¬ mains somewhere or other down upon the astral planes of the planet, like an avenging demon, waiting anxiously for the period of Devachanic happiness to come to an end, in order to re-project the poor unfortunate soul once more into the magnetic vortices of material in¬ carnation, where, with its load of bad karma hanging like a millstone round its neck, it will in all human probability generate a still greater load of this theological dogma, and consequently, at each re-birth it will sink deeper, unless the spiritual Ego can bring it to some con¬ sciousness of its fearfully sinful state. How this may transpire is not very satisfactorily explained. If the human soul only receives punish¬ ment for the sins and wrongs it inflicted upon others during a pre¬ vious life, then, surely, the soul when it first became incarnated must have started on its human journey without any karma to suffer for. One is naturally led to ask, then, how it first began to commit sin? For we are distinctly told that what we now suffer at the hands of others is only a just repayment for our own past sins. If, then, we had no past sins, we should be perfectly free from trouble. We are distinctly
The source text as printed, transcribed diplomatically. Where the source language uses a non-Latin script that reaches us only through a Victorian romanisation, this layer is labelled transliteration, because that is what we hold.
1The reason, manas, or mind, is simply mental capacity, and like the WILL, is not a principle but a result. Intellect is the offspring of innumerable and constantly changing causes or combinations of force never repeated under exactly the same conditions, consequently, no two people are exactly alike. The seat or mainspring of reason, intellect, understanding, and mind, is consciousness; and whether it will be good or evil, will depend upon the respective activities of the animal and divine souls. The higher the soul evolves, the more spiritual the un¬ derstanding becomes, until perfect rapport with the divine spirit is attained. This is the true at-one-ment. Man made perfect. From the foregoing the student must perceive that a man may be a perfect intellectual genius upon the physical plane, and at the same time be a veritable idiot in a spiritual sense. Very many intellectuals are standing before the world today and being accepted as the grand repositories of absolute knowledge because most of mankind are wholly engrossed in worldly affairs and are spiritually asleep. iy Google * o CHAPTER III KARMA “If we are ever to know anything clearly, we must be released from the body, that the soul by itself may see things by themselves as they really are.” Socrates.
2We need scarcely say that we fully agree with the above remarks of Plato’s teacher. While in the body we are completely fenced in by delusive appearances, and had the Greek sage been alive today those prominent individuals who so loudly and glibly speak and write upon the subject of Karma would have been very greatly inconvenienced by the Athenian’s terrible logic.
3“Karma is the law of consequences,—of merit and demerit”, say the Buddhists. “It is that force which moulds our physical destiny in this world, and regulates our period of misery or happiness in the world to come.” We are also further informed that “Karma is the cold, in¬ flexible justice which metes out to each individual the exact same measure of good and evil at his next physical re-birth that he measured to his fellow-men in this.” Not only so, but this karma at death re¬ mains somewhere or other down upon the astral planes of the planet, like an avenging demon, waiting anxiously for the period of Devachanic happiness to come to an end, in order to re-project the poor unfortunate soul once more into the magnetic vortices of material in¬ carnation, where, with its load of bad karma hanging like a millstone round its neck, it will in all human probability generate a still greater load of this theological dogma, and consequently, at each re-birth it will sink deeper, unless the spiritual Ego can bring it to some con¬ sciousness of its fearfully sinful state. How this may transpire is not very satisfactorily explained. If the human soul only receives punish¬ ment for the sins and wrongs it inflicted upon others during a pre¬ vious life, then, surely, the soul when it first became incarnated must have started on its human journey without any karma to suffer for. One is naturally led to ask, then, how it first began to commit sin? For we are distinctly told that what we now suffer at the hands of others is only a just repayment for our own past sins. If, then, we had no past sins, we should be perfectly free from trouble. We are distinctly
The source text as printed, transcribed diplomatically. Where the source language uses a non-Latin script that reaches us only through a Victorian romanisation, this layer is labelled transliteration, because that is what we hold.
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