The Library
...Those who understand the principle of karma aright, who do not misunderstand it as being an external independent fate but see it as a force originally set in motion by our actions, understand also the significant part played by suffering in the lives of men. It is educative rather than retributive...
6.9.3.1,The law of recompense may possibly be better named the law of reflection. This is because every act is reflected back to its doer, every thought is reflected back to its source, as if by a vast cosmic mirror…
6.9.3.15,Listen If life is a drama put on the stage of this planet for us (and others) to play in, then karma is the audience, the witness of it all.
6.9.3.18Listen Quite logically it is taught that some sort of a balance is struck between the two kinds of a person's karma, so that the bad may be mitigated or even outdone, but equally the good may be reduced or even offset.
6.9.3.19Listen … Our wrong-doing produces sorrows, not only for others but principally for ourselves. Our good action produces a rebound of good fortune. We may not escape from the operation of this subtle law of moral responsibility…
6.9.3.29,Listen He may deceive himself or others, but he cannot deceive the power of karma. Before it, he must stand responsible for his acts and receive their due effects. There is no other way he can go.
6.9.3.53Listen Those who will not learn from correct reflection about their experiences will have to learn from kicks delivered by the fresh karma they make.
6.9.3.54Listen From our study of the law of karma, we may deduce that a man must grow up, become adult, and learn to be responsible for his actions, decisions, emotions, and even thoughts…
6.9.3.56,Listen The man who imagines that he can go through life and manage his various affairs in independence of any alleged higher laws is following an illusion. Somewhere or at some time his awakening is inevitable.
6.9.3.59Listen A life that is not directed towards this higher goal, a mind that is entirely uninterested in becoming a participant in the Overself consciousness--these failures will silently censure a man both during his bodily tenancy and his post-mortem existence.
6.9.3.60Listen Men act out of self-interest; but through ignorance of the higher laws, especially that of karma, they may act against that interest.
6.9.3.61Listen We are seldom fair to fate. When events do not happen in the way we would like them to, we refuse to accept the idea that it is our own fault, so we blame our harsh fate. But when they do happen favourably, we personally take the credit for bringing them about.
6.9.3.70Listen Everyone has to feel and think and act and speak. But everyone does not perceive the consequences, near or remote, swift or slow, of these operations. Whoever chooses a wrong aim or an unworthy desire must endure the consequences of his choice. In every evil act, its painful recoil lies hidden. The process is a cumulative one. Each act begets a further one in the same downward direction. Each departure from righteousness makes return more difficult.
6.9.3.76Listen If men knew that the law of compensation was no less operative than the law of their country, they would unquestionably become more careful.
6.9.3.84Listen People should be warned that cause and effect rule in the moral realm no less than in the scientific realm. They should be trained from childhood to take this principle into their calculation. They should be made to feel responsible for setting causes into action that invite suffering or attract trouble or lead to frustration.
6.9.3.85When men come to understand that the law of compensation is not less real than the law of gravitation, they will profit immensely.
6.9.3.86Listen Sins of omission are just as important karmically as sins of commission. What we ought to have done but did not do counts also as a karma-maker.
6.9.3.89Listen Once a man really takes the law of consequences to heart, he will not willingly or knowingly injure another man. And this is so primarily because he will not want to injure himself.
6.9.3.94Listen When we thoroughly imbibe this great truth, when we humbly acknowledge that all human life is under the sway of the law of consequences, we begin to make a necessity of virtue.
6.9.3.96Listen It is absurd to treat the idea of karma as if it were some outlandish Oriental fancy. It is simply the law which makes each man responsible for his own actions and which puts him into the position of having to accept the results which flow from them. We may call it the law of self-responsibility…
6.9.3.98,Listen Men will moan about their unhappy past, and ache because they cannot undo it; but they forget to undo the unhappy future which they are now busy making.
6.9.3.106Listen So long as men love only the ephemeral and lose themselves in it, so long will they continue to suffer from that portion of their troubles which is avoidable. This was a chief element in the Buddha's message twenty-five hundred years ago and it is still as true today.
6.9.3.109Listen …Here and there a man emerges from the herd who is becoming an individual, creatively making himself into a fully human being. For him each day is a fresh experience, each experience is unique, each tomorrow no longer the completely inevitable and quite foreseeable inheritance of all its yesterdays…
6.9.3.112,Listen That which compels us to act in a certain way is in part the pressure of environment and in part the suggestion of our own past. Sometimes one is stronger, sometimes the other is stronger. But the root of the whole problem lies in our mind. Its proper cultivation frees us largely from both compulsions.
6.9.3.140Listen If you want to change your karma, begin by changing your attitude: first, toward outer events, people, things; second toward yourself.
6.9.3.141Listen ... The karma made in past births is like a shot from a gun; we cannot recall it and must endure the consequences. But once we have surrendered ourself to the Spiritual Preceptor, he guides our hands and prevents us from shooting out further bad karma.
6.9.3.146,Listen Although karma is clinched by what a man does in fact, it is built up also by what he long thinks and strongly feels.
6.9.3.147Listen He will then see that the ego is not his true self, that the evil and error which it spawns are the avoidable causes of avoidable distresses.
6.9.3.159Listen In the making of our future, a mixed result comes from the mixed and contradictory character of the thoughts feelings and desires we habitually hold. Therefore our very fears may contribute their quota in bringing about what we do not desire. Here lies one advantage of positive affirmations and clear-cut decisions in our attitude toward the future.
6.9.3.165Listen By watching our thought life, keeping out negatives, and cultivating positive ideas, full of trust in the higher laws, we actually start processes that eventually bring improvement to the outer life.
6.9.3.169Listen He must use his combined reason and intuition, that is, intelligence, to discern the handiwork of karma in the pattern of some of the external events of his own life.
6.9.3.171Listen Life is largely what we make it by our way of thinking about it. How important then to remove error from the mind and to put truth in its place! How different would our fortunes be if we recognized this need and always acted upon it!
6.9.3.173Listen Your karma is being speeded up; everything is being accelerated to a certain extent. This is necessary for a period to bring quicker progress through forcing different parts of mind and character into activity. Think how much has been accomplished since you took up these studies. Look back to your state of mind before that.
6.9.3.177Listen Only when he sees that he himself is the prime cause of his own troubles, and that other people have been not more than the secondary cause, does he see aright.
6.9.3.178Listen Even deliberate inaction does not escape the making of a karmic consequence. It contains a hidden decision not to act and is therefore a form of action!
6.9.3.181Listen Forces out of his own reincarnatory past come up and push him towards certain decisions, actions, and attitudes.
6.9.3.184Listen All through history we see men inflicting suffering upon other men. This shows their ignorance of the higher laws, for by their own sin they punish themselves.
6.9.3.194Listen If in the end—and sometimes well before—karma catches up with a man, it is not all painful; the term need not fill him with foreboding. For the good he has thought and done brings a good come-back too.
6.9.3.200Listen The web of karma tightens around a man as the lives increase with the centuries or thins away as the ego gets more and more detached.
6.9.3.203Listen Events and environments are attracted to man partly according to what he is and does (individual karma), partly according to what he needs and seeks (evolution), and partly according to what the society, race, or nation of which he is a member is, does, needs, and seeks (collective karma).
6.9.3.210Listen A man's sins are the outcome of the limitations of his experience, faculties, and knowledge.
6.9.3.215Listen A callous egotism is a bad-paying investment. For it means that in time of need, there will be none to help; in the hour of distress, none to console. What we give out we get back.
6.9.3.228Listen Karma expresses itself through events which may seem to be accidents. But they are so only on the surface.
6.9.3.231Listen If his evolutionary need should require it, he will be harassed by troubles to make him less attached to the world, or by sickness to make him less attached to the body. It is then not so much a matter of receiving self-earned destiny as of satisfying that need. Both coincide usually but not always and not necessarily. Nor does this happen with the ordinary man so much as it does with the questing man, for the latter has asked or prayed for speedier development.
6.9.3.247Listen The Law is relentless but it is flexible: it adjusts punishment to a man's evolutionary grade. The sinner who knows more and who sins with more awareness of what he is doing, has to suffer more.
6.9.3.251Listen Life is not trying to make people either happy or unhappy. It is trying to make them understand. Their happiness or unhappiness come as by-products of their success or failure in understanding.
6.9.3.260Listen I believe in love, not hate, as a motivating force for reform. At the same time, I see karma at work, punishing the selfish and the heartless … Unfortunately, suffering is one of its chief instruments of evolution and especially so where people will not learn from intuition, reason, and spiritual prophets.
6.9.3.267,Listen The wheel of life keeps turning and turning through diverse kinds of experiences and we are haplessly bound to it. But when at last we gain comprehension of what is happening and power over it, we are set free.
6.9.3.324Listen That our mortal destiny is made up of welcome and unwelcome circumstances or happenings is a certainty. There is no human being whose pattern fails to be so chequered--only the black and white squares are unequal in number, and the proportion differs from one person to another …
6.9.3.343,Listen Each of us lives at a certain time in history and occupies a certain place (or certain places) during that period. Why now and here? Look to the law of consequences for an answer, the law which connects one earthly lifetime with earlier ones.
6.9.3.367Listen Circumstances or other persons may be contributory but cannot be wholly responsible for a man's failures and misfortunes. If he will look within himself he will always find the ultimate causes there.
6.9.3.381Listen Karma is as active in the destiny of great powerful nations as in the destiny of poor insignificant men.
6.9.3.386Listen The people one meets, the events one confronts, and the places one visits may be highly important but they are, in the end, less important than one's thought about them.
6.9.3.388Listen Because the Mind at the back of the Universe's life is infinitely wise, there is always a reason for what happens to us. It is better therefore not to rail at adverse events but to try to find out why they are there. It may be consoling to blame others for them, but it will not be helpful. If we look within ourselves for the causes, we take the first step toward bringing adversity to an end; if we look outside, we may unnecessarily prolong it.
6.9.3.391… All are ultimately one big family. This is what reflection on experience teaches. When one reflects on Truth, he shall eventually learn that, as the Overself, all are one entity--like the arms and legs of a single body. The upshot of this is that he has to consider the welfare of others equally with his own…
6.9.3.395,Listen The study of recompense (karma) reveals that mankind have to pay not only for what they have wrongly done but also for what they have failed to do…
6.9.3.402,Listen It is a fundamental lesson of my world-wide observation that Heraclitus was completely right when he wrote: ”Man's character is his fate.”
6.9.3.407Listen A creative and original mind can undertake work for his own profit or benefit. If he undertakes it in addition for the benefit of others, he gains karmic merit. One refers, of course, to worthwhile work.
6.9.3.409Listen Although it is quite true that much of the vaunted free will of man is quite illusory, it is equally true that most of the events in his life, which consequently seem so predetermined, grow inescapably out of the kind of moral character and mental capacity which he possesses. They are neither merely accidental nor wholly arbitrary. Choice and reaction, attitude and decision depend ultimately on his psychological make-up and influence the course of events in a certain way. ”Character is fate”--this is the simplest statement of the greatest truth. Where is freedom for man when heredity and the history and state of his family and race prearrange so many physical factors for him?
6.9.3.426Listen However much we pry into the future we do not come a bit nearer real peace, whereas faithfully seeking and abiding in Overself gradually brings undying light and life.
6.9.3.473Listen It is more important to face the future equipped with right principles and strong character than with predictions concerning its details. If we establish good attitudes toward it, we cannot get bad results.
6.9.3.488Listen We all have to bear the consequences of our past deeds. This cannot be helped. But of course there are good deeds and bad deeds. We can, to a certain extent, offset those consequences by bringing in counter-forces through new deeds; but how far this will be true will necessarily vary from person to person. The one who has knowledge and power, who is able to practise deep meditation and to control his character, will necessarily affect those consequences much more strongly than the one who lacks these.
6.9.3.499Listen What man has more than partial freedom? All men have to receive the come-back of past activities, although the wise and disciplined ones may counter it to some extent by new actions.
6.9.3.515Listen The karma is a part of himself and he cannot get away from it. But just as he may bring some changes about in himself, so there may be a corresponding echo in the karma.
6.9.3.516Listen Karma does not wholly cancel freedom but limits it. If the present results of old causes set walls around him, through a better character and an improved intelligence new causes may be initiated and other results be attained.
6.9.3.531Listen Had his choice between roads been made differently, his life would certainly have been very different, too. But was his power of choice really as free as it seemed to be?
7.9.3.541Listen That which delays the expression of a man's dynamic thought in modifications of his environment or alterations of his character is the weight of his own past karma. But it only delays; if he keeps up the pressure of concentration and purpose, his efforts must eventually show their fruit.
6.9.3.544Listen The law of consequences is immutable and not whimsical but its effects may at times be modified or even neutralized by introducing new causes in the form of opposing thoughts and deeds. This of course involves in turn a sharp change in the direction of life-course. Such a change we call repentance.
6.9.3.545Listen Which of us has the power to change the consequences of his former actions? We may make amends, we may be penitent and perform penances. We may counter them by the opposite kinds of good deeds. But it is the business of karma to make us feel responsible for what we do and that responsibility cannot be evaded. In a certain sense, however, there is a measure of freedom, a power of creativity, both of which belong to the godlike Higher Self which each of us has.
6.9.3.550Listen What has happened has happened and there is nothing we can do about it… But if the past records cannot be changed, our present attitudes towards them can be changed. We can learn lessons from the past, we can apply wisdom to it, we can try to improve ourselves and our acts, we can create new and better karma. Best of all, having done all these things, we can let go of the past entirely and learn to live in the eternal now by escaping into true Being, the I am consciousness, not the I was.
6.9.3.551,Listen Karma comes into play only if the karmic impression is strong enough to survive. In the case of the sage, because he treats life like a dream, because he sees through it as appearance, all his experiences are on the surface only. His deep inner mind remains untouched by them. Therefore he makes no karma from them, therefore he is able when passing out of the body at death to be finished with the round of birth and death forever.
6.9.3.569Listen The view that karma operates like an automatic machine is not a wholly true one; this is because it is not a wholly complete one. The missing element is grace.
6.9.3.570Listen ... Whatever happens, the Overself is still there and will bring you through and out of your troubles. Whatever happens to your material affairs happens to your body, not the real YOU. The hardest part is when you have others dependent on you. Even then you must learn how to commend them to the kindly care of the Overself, and not try to carry all the burden on your own shoulders. If it can take care of you, it can take care of them, too.
6.9.3.577,Listen The working of a man's karma would never come to an end if his egoism never came to an end. It would be a vicious circle from which there would be no escape. But when the sense of personal selfhood, which is its cause and core, is abandoned, the unfulfilled karma is abandoned too.
6.9.3.578Listen … Whoever will offer himself unto the Overself, and will be blessed by its benediction so that he becomes as one inspired, may then perceive this strange figure at his side working for the good of man.
6.9.3.583,Listen
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