A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga: The Yoga of WisdomAtkinson, William Walker
Religion
A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga: The Yoga of Wisdom
Atkinson, William Walker
Yoga, Jñana
"Nor would the ways of Karma be 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 simple
Chance with neither gods nor devils to guide them--would
surely disappear if we would but attribute all these to their
correct cause. With right knowledge, or at any rate with a
confident conviction that our neighbors will no more work
harm to us than we would think of harming them, two-thirds of
the world's evil would vanish into thin air. Were no man to
hurt his brother, Karma-Nemesis would have neither cause to
work for, nor weapons to act through ... We cut these
numerous windings in our destinies daily with our own hands,
while we imagine that we are pursuing a track on the royal
road of respectability and duty, and then complain of those
ways being so intricate and so dark. We stand bewildered
before the mystery of our own making and the riddles of life
that we will not solve, and then accuse the great Sphinx of
devouring us. But verily there is not an accident in our
lives, not a misshapen day or a misfortune, that could not be
traced back to our own doings in this or another life ...
Knowledge of Karma gives the conviction that if--
'Virtue in distress and vice in triumph
Makes atheists of Mankind,'
it is only because that mankind has ever shut its eyes to the
great truth that man is himself his own savior as his own
destroyer; that he need not accuse heaven, and the gods,
fates and providence, of the apparent injustice that reigns
in the midst of humanity. But let him rather remember that
bit of Grecian wisdom which warns man to forbear accusing
THAT which 'Just though mysterious, leads us on unerring
Through ways unmarked from guilt to punishment'--which are
now the ways and the high road on which move onward the great
European nations. The Western Aryans have every nation and
tribe like their eastern brethren of the fifth race, their
Golden and their Iron ages, their period of comparative
irresponsibility, or the Satya age of purity, while now
several of them have reached their Iron Age, the _Kali Yuga_,
an age black with horrors. This state will last ... until we
begin acting from within instead of ever following impulses
from without. Until then the only palliative is union and
harmony--a Brotherhood in _actu_ and _altruism_ not simply in
name."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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