One species of karma may act on the three specified planes of our
nature at the same time to the same degree, or there may be a mixture
of the causes, some on one plane and some on another. Take a deformed
person who has a fine mind and a deficiency in his soul nature. Here
punitive or unpleasant karma is operating on his body while in his
mental and intellectual nature good karma is being experienced, but
psychically the karma, or cause, being of an indifferent sort the
result is indifferent. In another person other combinations appear.
He has a fine body and favorable circumstances, but the character is
morose, peevish, irritable, revengeful, morbid, and disagreeable to
himself and others. Here good physical karma is at work with very bad
mental, intellectual, and psychical karma. Cases will occur to readers
of persons born in high station having every opportunity and power, yet
being imbecile or suddenly becoming insane.
And just as all these phases of the law of karma have sway over the
individual man, so they similarly operate upon races, nations, and
families. Each race has its karma as a whole. If it be good that race
goes forward. If bad it goes out—annihilated as a race—though the
souls concerned take up their karma in other races and bodies. Nations
cannot escape their national karma, and any nation that has acted in
a wicked manner must suffer some day, be it soon or late. The karma of
the nineteenth century in the West is the karma of Israel, for even the
merest tyro can see that the Mosaic influence is the strongest in the
European and American nations. The old Aztec and other ancient American
peoples died out because their own karma—the result of their own life
as nations in the far past—fell upon and destroyed them. With nations
this heavy operation of karma is always through famine, war, convulsion
of nature, and the sterility of the women of the nation. The latter
cause comes near the end and sweeps the whole remnant away. And the
individual in race or nation is warned by this great doctrine that if
he falls into indifference of thought and act, thus moulding himself
into the general average karma of his race or nation, that national and
race karma will at last carry him off in the general destiny. This is
why teachers of old cried, “Come ye out and be ye separate.”
With reïncarnation the doctrine of karma explains the misery and
suffering of the world, and no room is left to accuse Nature of
injustice.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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