In this
article, William Judge reflects on the advantages of adversity and the
disadvantages of comfort.
That view of one’s Karma which
leads to a bewailing of the unkind fate which has kept advantages in life away
from us, is a mistaken estimate of what is good and what is not good for the
soul. It is quite true that we may often find persons surrounded with great
advantages but who make no corresponding use of them or pay but little regard
to them. But this very fact in itself goes to show that the so-called
advantageous position in life is really not good nor fortunate in the true and
inner meaning of those words.
The fortunate one has money and
teachers, ability, and means to travel and fill the surroundings with works of
art, with music and with ease. But these are like the tropical airs that
enervate the body; these enervate the character instead of building it up. They
do not in themselves tend to the acquirement of any virtue whatever but rather
to the opposite by reason of the constant steeping of the senses in the subtile
essences of the sensuous world.
They are like sweet things which,
being swallowed in quantities, turn to acids in the inside of the body. Thus
they can be seen to be the opposite of good Karma.
What then is good Karma and what bad?
The all-embracing and sufficient
answer is this:
Good Karma is that kind which the
Ego desires and requires; bad, that which the Ego neither desires nor requires.
And in this the Ego, being guided
and controlled by law, by justice, by the necessities of upward evolution, and
not by fancy or selfishness or revenge or ambition, is sure to choose the earthly
habitation that is most likely, out of all possible of selection, to give a
Karma for the real advantage in the end. In this light then, even the lazy,
indifferent life of one born rich as well as that of one born low and wicked is
right.
(Cid's observation:
here I do not agree with William Judge because people also build what will be
their next reincarnation through their wishes, and if someone for example has
wanted very intensely and for a long time to be rich, there are strong
probabilities that in his next reincarnation he will be rich, although that may harm it in his evolution.)
When we, from this plane, inquire
into the matter, we see that the “advantages” which one would seek were he
looking for the strengthening of character, the unloosing of soul force and
energy, would be called by the selfish and personal world “disadvantages.”
Struggle is needed for the gaining of strength; buffeting adverse eras is for
the gaining of depth; meager opportunities may be used for acquiring fortitude;
poverty should breed generosity.
The middle ground in all this,
and not the extreme, is what we speak of. To be born with the disadvantage of
drunken, diseased parents, in the criminal portion of the community, is a
punishment which constitutes a wait on the road of evolution. It is a necessity
generally because the Ego has drawn about itself in a former life some
tendencies which can not be eliminated in any other way. But we should not
forget that sometimes, often in the grand total, a pure, powerful Ego incarnates
in just such awful surroundings, remaining good and pure all the time, and
staying there for the purpose of uplifting and helping others.
But to be born in extreme poverty
is not a disadvantage. Jesus said well when, repeating what many a sage had said
before, he described the difficulty experienced by the rich man in entering
heaven. If we look at life from the narrow point of view of those who say there
is but one earth and after it either eternal heaven or hell, then poverty will
be regarded as a great disadvantage and something to be avoided.
But seeing that we have many
lives to live, and that they will give us all needed opportunity for building
up character, we must admit that poverty is not, in itself, necessarily bad
Karma. Poverty has no natural tendency to engender selfishness, but wealth
requires it.
A sojourn for everyone in a body
born to all the pains, deprivations and miseries of modern poverty, is good and
just. Inasmuch as the present state of civilization with all its horrors of poverty,
of crime, of disease, of wrong relations almost everywhere, has grown out of
the past, in which we were workers, it is just that we should experience it all
at some point in our career. If some person who now pays no heed to the misery
of men and women should next life be plunged into one of the slums of our
cities for rebirth, it would imprint on the soul the misery of such a
situation.
This would lead later on to
compassion and care for others. For, unless we experience the effects of a
state of life we cannot understand or appreciate it from a mere description.
The personal part involved in this may not like it as a future prospect, but if
the Ego decides that the next personality shall be there then all will be an
advantage and not a disadvantage.
If we look at the field of
operation in us of the so-called advantages of opportunity, money, travel and
teachers, we see at once that it all has to do with the brain and nothing else.
Languages, archaeology, music, satiating sight with beauty, eating the finest
food, wearing the best clothes, traveling to many places and thus infinitely
varying impressions on ear and eye; all these begin and end in the brain and
not in the soul or character. As the brain is a portion of the unstable,
fleeting body, the whole phantasmagoria disappears from view and use when the
note of death sends its awful vibration through the physical form and drives
out the inhabitant.
The wonderful central
master-ganglion disintegrates, and nothing at all is left but some faint aromas
here and there depending on the actual love within for any one pursuit or image
or sensation. Nothing left of it all but a few tendencies — skandhas, not of the very best. The
advantages then turn out in the end to be disadvantages altogether. But imagine
the same brain and body not in places of ease, struggling for a good part of
life, doing their duty and not in a position to please the senses; this
experience will burn in, stamp upon, carve into the character, more energy,
more power and more fortitude. It is thus through the ages that great
characters are made.
The other mode is the mode of the
humdrum average which is nothing after all, as yet, but an animal.
(Path, July 1895, p.123-5; Echoes
I, p.482-5)
No comments:
Post a Comment