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XVIII
KARMA
I
STRIPPED of its innumerable and inextricable
oriental complications, which may possibly correspond with realities but which
cannot be verified, Karma, the infallible Law of Retribution, is, when all is
said, what we, speaking more vaguely and without believing in it unduly, call
Immanent Justice. Our Immanent justice is a somewhat idle shadow. True, it
often manifests itself after monstrous actions, great vices, sins or
iniquities; but we rarely have the opportunity of seeing it intervene in the
thousand petty acts of injustice, cruelty, weakness, dishonesty and baseness of
ordinary life, though the aggregate of these paltry but incessant misdeeds may
weigh heavier than the most notorious crime. In any case, its action being more
dispersed, more diffuse, slower and more often moral than material, nearly
always escapes our observation; and, as, on the other hand, it appears to cease
at the moment of death, it hardly ever has time to demand its due and usually
arrives too late at the bedside of a sick or dying man, who has lost
consciousness or no longer has the time to expiate his offences.
Karma then, if you will, is
Immanent Justice; only, it is no longer an inconstant goddess, inconsistent,
incoherent, impotent, erratic, capricious, inexact, forgetful, timid,
inattentive, sluggish, evasive, intangible and bounded by the tomb, but a god,
vast and inevitable as Destiny, a god who fills up each outlet, each horizon,
each crevice of every existence and who is omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent,
infallible, impassible and incorruptible. He is in us, as we are in him. He is
ourselves. He is more than we: he is what we are, while he is still what we
were and is already what we shall become. We are small, evanescent and
ephemeral; he is great, imperturbable, immovable, eternal. Nothing escapes him
of that which escapes us and no doubt will escape us even beyond the tomb. Not
an action, not a wish, not a thought, not the shadow of an intention but is
weighed more strictly than it was weighed by the forty-two posthumous judges
who awaited the soul on that further shore of which we are told in one of the
most ancient texts in the world, the Egyptian Book of the Dead. All is set down, dated, valued, verified,
classified, entered as debit or credit, as reward or expiation, in the immense
and eternal index of the astral records. There can be nothing that he does not
know, because he has taken part in all that he judges; and he judges us not
from the depth of our present ignorance, but from the height of all that we
shall learn much later. He is not only our intelligence and our consciousness
of to-day, which are hardly waking and no longer count their errors; he is even
now, for they already dwell within us, though they be inactive, impotent, dumb
and blind, our intelligence and our consciousness to come, when they shall have
attained, in the course of the ages and of the innumerable developments,
expiations and ascents, the loftiest summits of Wisdom and Discernment.
At the hour of our death the
account seems closed; but he is simply asleep and will resume his hold of us
again. He will slumber perhaps for hundreds, nay, thousands of years in
"Devachan," that is to say, in the state of unconsciousness which
prepares us for a new incarnation; but, when we awake, we shall find the assets
and liabilities added up beyond recall; and our Karma will merely continue the
life which we have laid aside. It will continue to be ourselves in that life
and to see the consequences of our faults and our deserts burst into flower and
afterwards to see other causes bear fruit in other effects, until the
consummation of the ages when every thought born upon this earth ends by losing
sight of it.
2
Karma, as we see, is, when
all is said, the immortal entity which man fashions by his deeds and thoughts
and which follows him, or rather envelops and absorbs him, through his successive
lives and changes, even as he incessantly changes, while preserving every
previous impress. Man's thoughts, as this doctrine very truly says, build up
his character; his deeds make his environment. What man has thought, that he
has become; his qualities and natural gifts adhere to him as the results of his
ideas. He is, in all truth, created by himself. He is in the fullest sense of
the word responsible for all that he is. He is contained in the net of all that
he has done. He can neither undo nor destroy the past; but, so long as the
effects of the past are yet to come, it is possible for him to alter them or to
divert them by fresh exertions. Nothing can affect him that he has not set in
movement; no evil can befall him that he has not deserved. In the infinite
evolution of the eternities he will never find himself in the presence of any
judge other than himself.
3
It is certain that the idea
of this supreme judge, who is our consciousness uninterrupted throughout the
centuries and the millenaries, who is each one of us grown more and more
enlightened, more and more incorruptible and infallible, leads to the highest,
sincerest and purest system of morals that it is possible to conceive or to
justify here below. The judge and the defendant are no longer face to face;
they are one within the other and form but one and the same person. They can
hide nothing from each other; and both have the same urgent interest in
discovering the least fault, the slightest shadow and in purifying themselves
as quickly and as completely as possible, in order to put an end to the
reincarnations and to live at last in the One Being. The best, the saintliest
are near doing so from the moment when they quit this life; but, detached from
all things, they do not cease to act for the good of all men, for already they
know all things. They go farther than the mystic Christian who expects a reward
from without: they are their own reward. They go farther than Marcus Aurelius,
the great type of the man without illusions, who continues to act without
hoping that his action can profit others: they know that nothing is useless,
that nothing can be wasted; it is when they no longer need anything whatever
that they work with the greatest ardour.
Contrary to what is too
generally believed, this system of morals which leads to absolute repose extols
activity. Hear, in this connection, the great teachings of the Bhagavad-Gita, the Lord's Song, which is
perhaps, as its translators, not without good reason, think, the most
beautiful, that is to say, the most exalted book known up to the present time:
"Thy business is with
the action only, never with its fruits; so let not the fruit of action be thy
motive. . . . Perform action . . . dwelling in union with the divine,
renouncing attachments and balanced evenly in success and failure. . . .
Pitiable are they who work for fruit. . . . Man winneth not freedom from action
by abstaining from activity, nor by mere renunciation doth he rise to
perfection. . . . Perform thou right action, for action is superior to
inaction; and, inactive, even the maintenance of thy body would not be
possible. The world is bound by action, unless performed for the sake of
sacrifice....
"He who seeth inaction
in action and action in inaction, he is wise among men, he is harmonious, even
while performing all action. Whose works are all free from the moulding of
desire, whose actions are burned up by the fire of wisdom, him the wise have
called a sage. Having abandoned attachment to the fruit of action, always
content, nowhere seeking refuge, he is not doing anything, although doing
actions. . . . He should be known as a perpetual ascetic, who neither hateth
nor desireth; free from the pairs of opposites . . , he is easily set free from
bondage. . . ."
And remember that this, which
forms part of the Mahabharata, the
greatest epic on earth, was written four or five thousand years ago.
4
Whatever we may think of the
plausibility of the doctrine or revelation, we cannot dispute that this
morality and this justification of justice are the most ancient and at the same
time the most beautiful and reassuring that the mind of man has imagined. But
they are based upon a postulate which we are perhaps too much inclined to
refuse blindly. It asks us in fact to admit that our existence does not end at
the hour of our death and that the spirit, or the vital spark, which does not
perish, seeks an asylum and reappears in other bodies. At first the postulate
seems monstrous and unacceptable; but on closer examination its aspect becomes
much less strange, less arbitrary and less unreasonable. It is, to begin with,
certain that, if all things undergo transformation, nothing perishes or is
annihilated in a universe which knows no nothingness and in which nothingness
alone remains absolutely inconceivable. What we call nothingness could
therefore be only another mode of existence, of persistence and of life; and,
if we cannot admit that the body, which is only matter, is annihilated in its
substance, it is no less difficult to admit that, if it were animated by a
spirit -which it is hardly possible to dispute -- this spirit should disappear
without leaving a trace of any kind.
So the first point of the
postulate and the most important is of necessity granted. There remains the
second point, that of the successive reincarnations. Here, it is true, we have
only hypotheses and probabilities. It is necessary that this spirit, this soul,
this vital spark or principle, this idea, this immaterial substance -- it
matters little what name we give it -- must go or reside somewhere, must do or
become something. It may wander in the infinity of space and time, dissolve,
lose itself and disappear, or at least mingle and become confused with what it
encounters there, and finally become absorbed in that boundless spiritual or
vital energy which appears to animate the universe. But, of all hypotheses, the
least probable is not that which tells us that, on leaving a body which has
become uninhabitable, instead of escaping and wandering through the illimitable
vast that fills it with terror, it looks about it for a lodging resembling that
which it has lately quitted. Obviously this is only an hypothesis; but in our
complete and terrible ignorance it presents itself before any other. We have
nothing to support it save the most ancient tradition of humanity, a tradition
perhaps prehuman and in any case absolutely general; and experience tends to
show that at the base of these traditions and these instances of universal
assent there is nearly always a great truth and that they must be accorded a
greater importance and a greater value than have hitherto been attributed to
them.
5
As regards evidence, or
rather premonitory suggestions of evidence, we have scarcely anything beyond
the experiments of Colonel de Rochas, who, by means of hypnotic passes,
succeeded in making a few exceptional mediums retrace not only the whole course
of their present lives, back to their earliest childhood, but also that of a
certain number of previous existences. It cannot be denied that these extremely
serious experiments, which were very scientifically conducted, are most
bewildering; but the danger of unconscious suggestion or telepathy is not and
doubtless will never be sufficiently remote to allow them to become really
conclusive.
We find further, on pursuing
the same train of ideas, certain cases of reincarnation, like that of one of
Dr. Samson's little daughters, as related in the Annales des sciences psychiques for July, 1913. This case, which is
almost undisputed, is exceedingly curious; but, though it is not unique, those
which resemble it are too rare to allow us to rely upon them.
There remains what are known
as prenatal reminiscences. It happens fairly often that a man who finds himself
in an unfamiliar country, in a city, a palace, a church, a house, or a garden,
which he is visiting for the first time, is conscious of a strange and very
definite impression that he "has seen it before." It suddenly seems
to him that this landscape, these vaulted ceilings, these rooms and the very furniture
and pictures which he finds in them are quite well-known to him and that he
recollects every nook and corner and every detail. Which of us but has, at
least once in his life, vaguely experienced some such impression? But the
recollections are often so definite that the person in whom they occur is able
to act as a guide through the house or park which he has never explored and to
describe beforehand what his party will
find in this or that room or at the turn of this or that avenue. Is it really a
recollection of previous existences, a telepathic phenomenon or an ancestral
and hereditary memory? The same question suggests itself touching certain
innate aptitudes or faculties, by virtue of which we see children of genius,
musicians, painters, mathematicians or simple artisans, who know from the
outset, without learning them, nearly all the secrets of their art or craft.
Who will venture to decide?
This is about all that we
can cite in favour of the doctrine of reincarnation. It is not enough to weigh
down the scales. But all the other suppositions, theories or religions,
excepting spiritualism, which for the rest is perfectly consistent with
successive existences, have less solid foundations and are even, to be
truthful, devoid of any. It would therefore be ungracious on their part to
reproach the supposition which we are considering with the instability of the
arguments whereon it is based.
Once again, how desirable it
would be that all this were true! There would be no more moral uncertainties,
no more uneasiness in respect of justice. And it is so beautiful, so complete,
that it is perhaps real. It is difficult indeed to admit that such a dream is
untrue from first to last, a dream which has been dreamed so long, since the
beginning of the world, by so many thousands of millions of men and which,
despite numerous and far-reaching distortions, has, when all is said, been the
one dream of humanity. It is not possible to prove that it is based upon truth;
but, unlike most of the religions derived from it, it is not possible either to
demonstrate that it is imaginary and fabricated throughout; and, there being
this doubt, why should not reason, which it never offends, be allowed to accept
it and at heart to hope and act as though it were true, while waiting for science
to confirm it completely, or to invalidate it, or to give us another hypothesis
which it will perhaps never be able to elaborate?
What at first repels many of
those who investigate it is the unduly assured and arbitrary insistence upon a
thousand petty details, probably interpolated, as in all religions, by inferior
minds, animated by a narrow and maladroit zeal. But these details, viewed from
a certain elevation, do not in any way alter the great outlines, which remain
immeasurable, admirable and unspoiled.
6
For the rest, whether
reincarnation be accepted or rejected, there is surely such a thing as
survival, since death and nothingness cannot be conceived; and the whole matter
is once more reduced to the problem of continued identity. Even in reincarnation
this identity, from our present, limited point of view, would possess only a
relative interest, seeing that, all memory of previous existences being
abolished, it would necessarily evade us. Let us ask ourselves, moreover,
whether this question of personality without solution of continuity does really
possess the importance which we attach to it and whether this importance is not
a delusion, a temporary blindness of our egoism, of our terrestrial
intelligence. For the fact remains that we interrupt it and lose it every night
without disquieting ourselves. It is enough for us to be certain that we shall
recover it on awaking; and we are reassured. But suppose that this were not the
case and that one evening we were warned that we should not recover it, that on
the following morning we should have forgotten all our past existence and
should begin a new life, without any memory to connect us with the old. Should
we feel the same terror, the same despair, as if we had been told that we
should never wake again and that we should be hurled into our death? I do not
believe it, I even think that we should accept our lot fairly cheerfully. It
would not greatly matter to us that we should have to lose the memory of a
past, consisting, like the past of all of us, of more evil than good, provided
that life continued. It would no longer be our life, it would no longer have
anything in common with the life of the day before; nevertheless we should not
believe that we were losing it and we should retain a vague hope of recovering
or recognizing something of ourselves in the existence before us. We should
take pains to prepare for this existence, to insure it against misfortune and
distress, to make it, in advance, as pleasant and as happy as possible. It
might and ought to be so, not only if we believe in reincarnation, because the
case would be almost identical, but also if we do not believe in it, since a
survival of some sort is almost certain and absolute annihilation is actually
inconceivable.
7
Perhaps with a little courage
and goodwill it would be possible for us, even in this life, to look higher and
farther, to shed for an instant that narrow and dismal egoism which refers all
things to self, to tell ourselves that the intelligence or the good which our
thoughts and efforts diffuse in the spiritual spheres are not wholly lost, even
when it is not certain that the little nucleus of trivial habits and
commonplace recollections that we are possesses them exclusively. If the good
actions which we have performed, the noble or merely honest intentions or
thoughts which we have experienced attach themselves and give value to a life
in which we shall not recognize our own, this is not a sufficient reason to
regard them as useless or to deny them all merit. It is well to remind
ourselves at times that we are nothing if we are not everything and to learn
from now onwards to interest ourselves in something that is not solely
ourselves and already to live the ampler, less personal, less egotistical life
which presently, without any doubt, whatever may be our creed, will be our
eternal life, the only life that matters and the only life for which it is wise
to prepare ourselves.
8
If we do not accept
reincarnation, Karma none the less exists: a mutilated Karma, it is true; a
diminished Karma, devoid of spaciousness, with an horizon limited by death,
beginning its work and doing its best in the brief spell of time which it has before it, but less negligible, less
impotent, less inactive and ineffective than is supposed. Acting within its
narrow sphere, it gives us a fairly accurate albeit very incomplete idea of
what it would accomplish in the wider sphere which we deny it. But this would
lead us back to the, highly debatable question of mundane justice. It is almost
insoluble, because its decisive operations, being inward and secret, escape
observation. Following many others, who, for the rest, have explained it better
than I, I have spoken of it elsewhere, particularly in Wisdom and Destiny and in
The Mystery o f Justice;1 but, as Queen Scheherazade might say,
it would serve no useful purpose to repeat it.
9
Let us then return to Karma
properly so-called, the ideal Karma. It rewards goodness and punishes evil in
the infinite sequence of our lives. But first of all, some will ask, what is
this goodness, what is this evil, what is the best or the worst of our petty
thoughts, our petty intentions, our petty ephemeral actions, compared with the
boundless immensity of time and space? Is there not an absurd disproportion
between the hugeness of the reward or punishment and the pettiness of the fault
or merit? Why mix the worlds, the eternities and the gods with things which,
however monstrous or admirable at first, are not slow, even within the trivial
limits of our life, to lose gradually all the importance which we ascribed to
them, to vanish, to fade into oblivion? That is true; but we must needs speak
of human things in terms of human beings and on the human scale. What we call
good or evil is that which works us good or evil, that which benefits or harms
ourselves or others; and, so long as we live upon this earth and have not
disappeared, we must needs attach to good and evil an importance which in
themselves they do not possess. The noblest religions, the proudest
metaphysical speculations, so soon as they involve human morality, human
evolution and the human future, have always been obliged to reduce themselves
to human proportions, to become anthropomorphous. This is an invincible
necessity, by virtue of which, despite the horizons that tempt us on every
hand, it behoves us to limit our ideas and our outlook.
10
Let us then limit them and
once more ask ourselves, this time remaining within our sphere, what, after
all, is this evil which Karma punishes? If we go to the very root of the matter,
evil always arises from a lack of intelligence, from an erroneous and
incomplete judgment, obscured or restricted by our egoism, which allows us to
perceive only the proximate or immediate advantages of an action harmful to
ourselves or others, while concealing the remote but inevitable consequences
which such an action always ends by begetting. The whole science of ethics,
after all, is based only upon intelligence; and what we call heart, sentiments,
character is in fact nothing but accumulated and crystallized intelligence,
inherited or acquired, which has become more or less unconscious and is
transformed into habits or instincts. The evil which we do we do only because
of a mistaken egoism, which sees the limits of its being too near at hand. As soon
as intelligence raises the point of view of this egoism, the limits extend,
widen and end by disappearing. The terrible and insatiable ego loses its centre
of attraction and avidity and knows itself, finds itself and loves itself in
all things. Let us not believe blindly in the intelligence of the wicked who
succeed, or in the happiness of the criminal. We ought rather to see the
converse, that is to say, the often hideous reality of the success; moreover,
this intelligence, in the shape of skill, cunning or disloyalty, is a
specialized intelligence, confined within a narrow circuit and, like a
constricted jet of water, very effective when directed at a single point; but
it is not a true and general, spacious and generous intelligence. Wherever the
latter reveals itself, we necessarily find honesty, justice, forbearance, love
and kindness, because there is a lofty and full horizon and because there is an
instinctive or conscious knowledge of human proportions, of the eternity of
existence and the brevity of life, of man's position in the universe, of the
mysteries that compass him about and the secret bonds that unite him to all
things that we see as well as to all things that we do not see upon earth and
in the heavens.
11
Is Karma, then, supposed to
punish lack of intelligence? And, in the first place, why not? It is the only
real evil upon this earth; and, if all men were superlatively intelligent, none
would be unhappy. But where would the justice of it be? We possess the
intelligence which nature has bestowed upon us; it is she, not we, that should
be held responsible. Let us understand one another. Karma does not inflict
punishment, properly speaking; it simply places us, after our successive
existences and slumbers, on the plane on which our intelligence left us,
surrounded by our actions and our thoughts. It keeps a check and a record. It
takes us such as we have made ourselves and gives us the opportunity to make
ourselves anew, to acquire what we lack and to raise ourselves to the level of
the highest. We are bound to raise ourselves, but the slowness or rapidity of
our ascent depends only upon ourselves. When all is said, the apparent
injustice which grants more intelligence to some than to others is but a
question of date, a law of growth, of evolution, which is the fundamental law
of all the lives that we know, from the infusoria to the stars. We could at
most complain of coming later than the rest; but the rest, in their turn, might
with more reason complain of being called too soon, of being unable to profit
at once by all that has been acquired since their birth. To avoid
recrimination, therefore, we should all have been on the same plane from the
outset; we should all have been born at the same time. But then the world would
have been complete, perfect, immutable, immobile, from the first moment of its
existence and ours. This would perhaps have been preferable; but it is not so
and it is, no doubt, impossible that it should be so; in any case, no system of
metaphysics, no religion, not even the first, the greatest, the loftiest, the
mother of all the rest, ever thought of rejecting the indisputable and
indubitable law of endless movement, of the eternal Becoming; and it must be
admitted that everything appears to justify it. It is probable that there would
be nothing if it were otherwise and that there can only be something on
condition that it becomes better or worse, that it rises or falls, that it
constitutes itself in order to deconstitute and reconstitute itself and that
movement is more essential than being or substance. It is so because it is so.
There is nothing to be done, nothing to be said; we can but state the fact. We
are in a world in which matter would perish and disappear sooner than movement,
or rather in which matter, time, space, duration, existence and movement are
but one and the same thing.
12
But we also live in a world
in which our reason encounters only the impossible, the insoluble and the
incomprehensible. The supreme interpretations do no more than shift the riddle,
to permit us to obtain glimpses from a higher standpoint of the boundless
immensity in which we are striving. Therefore, apart from the puerile
explanations which, after successive changes of form, all the religions have
drawn from the original religion, three hypotheses and no more offer themselves
for our choice: on the one hand, nothingness, inertia and absolute death, which
are inconceivable; on the other hand, chance and its eternal renewals, which
are without change, hope, object or end, or which, if they led to anything,
would lead either to an inconceivable annihilation or to the third hypothesis, according to which the
best becomes infinite, even to total absorption in the imperfectible, the
immutable, the immovable, which, as I
have said elsewhere,2 must have occurred already in the eternity
that precedes us, since there is no reason why that which could not take place
in this eternity should take place in the eternity to come, which is no more
infinite, is no more extensive and offers no more chances than the past
eternity and which is not of a different nature.
The mother religion itself,
the only one which is still acceptable, which takes account of everything and
which has foreseen everything, does not escape this last dilemma by extending
to thousands of millions of years the duration of a year of Brahma, that is to
say, the period of evolution, of expiration, of externalization and activity,
and to an equal number of thousands of millions of years the duration of a
night of this god, that is to say, the period of involution, of inspiration, of
internalization, of slumber or inertia, during which all is reabsorbed into the
divinity or the sole absolute. It does not escape it either by next multiplying
these days and nights by a hundred years which form one life and this life by a
hundred lives which lead to figures that defy expression, after which another
universe begins.
Here, too, there would be
either an eternal recommencement without hope or object, or, if there be
progression, final perfection and immobility which ought already to be
attained. Let each draw from all this such conclusions as he please or can, or
bow once more, in silence, before the Unknowable.
______________________
1 The first essay in The Buried Temple.- A. T. de M.
2 In Our Eternity.- A. T. de M.
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