Karma is that self-adjusting force in human affairs which restores
harmony disturbed by action. It is the moral law of compensation,
and by its operation produces all conditions of life, misery and
happiness, birth, death, and re-birth; itself being both the cause
and the effect of action. Its operation is indicated in the phrase,
"Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."
The essential idea of reincarnation is indicated in the following
quotation from the Upanishads: "And as a goldsmith, taking a piece
of gold, turns it into another, newer, and more beautiful shape, so
does this Self, having thrown off this body and dispelled all
ignorance, make unto himself another and more beautiful shape."
Reincarnation is the periodic "dip" of an immortal individual into
materiality for the working out of karma, after an interval, long or
short, spent under other conditions of existence. These alternations
constitute the broader and deeper diapason of human life, of which
the change from waking to sleeping represents the lesser, and the
momentary awareness and unawareness of the sense mechanism to
stimulation, the least.
Thus a physical incarnation, in the broadest sense of the term, is
the interval, long or short, of the immersion of consciousness in
materiality. Under fatigue, the cell life withdraws; that is, it
ceases to respond to physical stimuli, and so passes out of
incarnation. When this occurs _en masse_ there transpires that
hiatus of the personal consciousness called sleep, and while sleep
lasts the personality is out of incarnation. After death--in the
interval between one life and the next--the specific memories of the
personality fade out as in sleep, or rather, become latent, leaving
the soul, the permanent life-center, clear and colorless, a
mysterious focus of spiritual forces and affinities (the seeds of
karma) ready for another sowing in the world of men. This center
of consciousness is thereupon drawn to the newly forming body,
the life environment of which will rightly and justly--perhaps
retributively--bring the tendencies and characteristics of the
conscious center into objectivity again. Character is destiny, and
character is self-created. "All that we are is the result of what we
have thought." But in the vast complexity and volume of human life
there is a constant production of forms, with all the varieties of
characteristics and capacities requisite to meet the needs of every
soul, thirsty for the destiny that awaits it; and here heredity
plays its part. Beyond the individual soul is the world-soul, which
periodically incarnates in the humanity of a planet, and beyond the
worlds of a single system, suns and congeries of suns.
The profound and pregnant doctrines of karma and reincarnation, here
so sketchily outlined, are but expansions of one of the fundamental
propositions of all Eastern philosophical systems, that the effect is
the unfolding of the cause in time.
To omit a consideration of karma and reincarnation in connection
with higher time would be to force a passage and then not follow
where it leads. The idea of time curvature is implicit in the ideas
of karma and reincarnation. For what is karma but the return of time,
the flowering in the present of some seed sown elsewhere and long ago?
And what is reincarnation but the major cycle of that sweep into
objective existence and out again, of which the alternation between
waking and sleeping is the lesser counterpart?