Compass Newsletter Summer 2013 No.21

 

Karma: Recorder, Awakener, Friend
Albedo 0.39
The Echo of Life
Dormit in Astris
Contacts

Karma: Recorder, Awakener, Friend

By Grace F. Knoche

 

How often we think of karma as a kind of nemesis or dread fate, falling upon us or our loved ones when we are least prepared, avenging some unknown deeds done, or left undone, in this life or in lives long past. Yet with the earliest Greeks, Nemesis was a goddess who personified our conscience, our inborn fear of committing wrong against the gods; or again, our reverence for the moral and spiritual law of harmony, of balance. Later, in the 5th century BC, Pindar, the poet, and the historian Herodotus, described her as directing human affairs in order to restore disturbed equilibrium, so that the “right proportions” of either happiness or unhappiness should be meted out. Always, the chaste and humble heart was considered the open doorway to the gods; and if one were overproud of Fortune’s “gifts,” then losses and suffering were administered; or vice versa, the modest were blessed in ways that would bring them peace and contentment. Still later, the goddess, because she was depicted as a check upon extravagances, became in the minds of many an avenging or punishing fate that would in due time overtake the reckless or wilful.

Seldom do we look upon the universal law of cause and effect as healing, merciful because of its restorative power for good. We forget that the gods are not separate from ourselves, but that we are an extension of their life-essence, their care for us being as intimate a part of our growing process as our protection is for the atomic lives evolving within the human hierarchy. It is this interrelationship that we need to understand and live with, and thereby to recognize that karma is not something inflicted upon us by god or devil or by any outside force, but is our very selves.

“Man is his own karma,” wrote G. de Purucker, meaning by this that there is not an instant in our lives when we are not impressing on our memory-cells — which are, incidentally, of many types — the quality of our thinking and feeling, lofty or base; and because of this, by the law of magnetic attraction, whatever comes to us we ourselves must sometime have desired, knowingly or not. It is we who have left those imprints on our atoms — our life-atoms, he calls them; and as the soul returns to earth life again and again, those very life-atoms return also, to form anew its several vehicles of expression, physical, psychical, mental and spiritual. It all seems quite logical, for how else would justice be assured? No one reaps a harvest that is not his or her own: in benefits and strength of character for good seed sown; in deprivations and weakness of will for tares.

To regard karma or nemesis as an avenging demon or a rewarding angel, as is often done, is to judge solely by externals, not by the inner purport of karmic reaction. Have we not all discovered, possibly only after years, that the most harrowing passages of our life-experience have yielded us lasting gifts? “Blessings in disguise” is the common phrase, indicating an intuitive recognition that pain and sorrow hold hidden beauties in the deepening love we feel for those in travail.

Marcus Aurelius, 2nd century Roman emperor, experienced more than the normal allotment of heartache, but was upheld throughout his tragic rule by his unshakable belief that whatever befell a man was prepared for him “from the beginning of time.” In his private admonitions “to himself,” called by later admirers his Meditations, he returned often to this theme:

In the woven tapestry of causation, the thread of your being had been inter-twined from all time with that particular incident. — x, 5

ove nothing but that which comes to you woven in the pattern of your destiny. For what could more aptly fit your needs? — vii, 57

To Marcus, a philosopher and Stoic by nature and education, man was the offspring of divinity, a particle of the primordial Mind-Fire, and therefore nothing could touch him except that which truly belonged to him. We may be selfish, greedy, cunning in our lesser self; but in our essential core, we have been registering “from the beginning of time” on the tablets of our soul untold strengths. Every aspiration born in the deepest recesses of our being, as well as every low and evil desire, have sown their seed, to be harvested in due course, with effect equal to cause. We, then, are our karma, the recorders of our character, our destiny, pleasant or unpleasant as the case may be.

So much for theory. It is relatively simple to philosophise when one has reasonably sound health and comfortable circumstances. But where is the justice for the poverty-ridden; what can philosophy do for the millions doomed to die of disease if not of starvation? Shall we say it is their karma and they will have to work it through, with better luck, hopefully, next life? Obviously, it is their karma or they wouldn’t have been born into those exceedingly difficult conditions; but how can we isolate their karma from our own? We are one family of man, and all of us have had a share in creating their tragic lot. Besides, is it not also our karma to be profoundly concerned, and where possible to seek to alleviate the awful misery that exists in so many parts of our globe? There is some comfort in the fact that the world conscience is awake, and becoming ever more sensitive and acute, so that an increasing number of self-sacrificing and knowledgeable laborers are already dedicating their lives in this field of service.

Most of us, however, can offer little if anything in the way of tangible relief, much as our hearts yearn to help. But there is not one of us who cannot work unceasingly to eradicate the causes of human suffering — deep-seated and long in the making — that have resulted in the present unconscionable plight. This is an enormously long-range goal, admittedly, but does this make it any the less urgent or worthy?

In this light we begin to grasp the inwardness of the story of the young Indian prince who, tired of the surfeit of pleasures his father had showered upon him, determined to move among his people and find out for himself what conditions were really like. On three successive occasions he went forth from the palace with Channa, his faithful charioteer; and even though the king had ordered that only beauty and magnificence should greet his son, the devas saw to it that one of their kind should afford him a “sign” — first, an old man, heavy with years; second, a man ill and parched with fever; third, a corpse being carried to the pyre. Profoundly shaken, they became for him “awakeners”; why, for what purpose, should these afflictions be visited upon innocent human beings? Why bring children into this world of sorrow — his lovely wife had just the night before given birth to a son — if all that awaited them is unhappiness, disease, old age, and death? So a fourth time he ventured out, and this day he met a holy man, serene and self-possessed. No longer could Gautama hold back his vow to learn the meaning of life. He knew that henceforth he would abandon all lesser things, all enticements of mind and body, until truth was his, until he could find the causes of pain, and the way to rout them from human lives.

The story is familiar to us all, and how at length the young mendicant-prince fought the hardest battle of all, the battle of the self, and became victor, attaining under the Bo tree the full glory of perfect wisdom. His renunciation — of all that he had struggled so ardently to achieve — is the ultimate in compassion, the ideal of those who would follow his path. So he returned among men and taught that change, growth, advancement was the way of nature; that all things of earth therefore are impermanent, subject to a succession of births and deaths and rebirths, and that the only way to end suffering was to do away with its cause, to cut the taproot of attachment to material concerns, for if man were master of his desires, then external influences would cease to trouble him.

But what has this to do with ourselves today? Few of us have the calm purposiveness of a Gautama, nor the equanimity of a Marcus Aurelius. We are ordinary men and women, striving to keep our equilibrium midst the daily karmic pulls and to grasp something of the why and wherefore of ourselves and our universe; yearning the while to assuage the longings of the soul and, not least, to better serve the greater good. How, then, do these “awakeners” that brought enlightenment to a young prince relate to us 2,500 years later?

There is so much awry in human relationships all over the world that we can’t help but feel that it will take many ages to set things right; no doubt we’ve tallied quite a karmic score against us that must be worked out. But we should not overlook the other, the positive side of the ledger, the nobler entries made by us in lives gone by. Could it be that this intensity of suffering and confusion of values is due as much to a karmic “awakening,” a stimulus from our higher selves, as it is to karmic debts still unpaid?

Surely we were meant to live our lives as a wholeness, with buoyancy of spirit, and not to be continually fractured by anguish or despair. Sorrow comes to us all, just as rain for the earth, to nourish and bring forth new growth. Yet how can parents plunged into the depths of grief from the accidental killing of their sons, or those facing terminal illness, or others helpless before the blasted psyches of loved ones. . . . how can they see karma as a friend? In the immediacy of their trauma, few words are called for. But love has its own wisdom, for “between hearts and hearts are ways.” Then later, when they seek to understand why, these ideas may be of help.

One day, in this life or in another, we will be able to look at all we have been through with the eyes of the seer we intrinsically are, as an eagle high above our earth-karma, and glimpse with panoramic vision our entire experience, past and present — not in detail, but in atmosphere. Then we shall know that all hindrances, all suffering, physical and mental, also death, are part of the unfolding pattern of growth, woven in the tapestry of our destiny kalpas ago, to etch into the soul the deeper perception, the truer love, the caring for all, not only for our own.

Karma — ultimate rectifier of disturbed equilibrium, recorder of ourselves, by ourselves, and for ourselves, from our radiant essence to those dark and foreboding corners — is indeed the stern but always beneficent reactor to previous action, the Lipika or “Scribe” of every movement of consciousness, not alone for man but for all entities. Yet even were nature a mathematician of cosmic dimension, how could she handle the input of karmic impressions from the incomputable number of living beings that range from the infinitesimal worlds to the macrocosmic ?

Decentralisation would appear to be the key. Each entity of every kingdom and of every evolutionary standing surely is his own Lipika, his own “Scribe” or Recorder, his own judge and comforter. And if we ourselves stamp our quality on every atom of our many-levelled constitution, every other hierarchy in nature must be doing likewise — one cosmic life-force, one cosmic stuff, one cosmic modus operandi.

Thinking along these lines is its own preparation, so that when the karmic onslaughts do come — as they will and must to us all if the soul is to awaken — there is a residue of calm, an inbuilt stamina, and a profound conviction, as Walt Whitman had to learn, that “what will be will be well, for what is is well.”

(From Sunrise magazine, February 1976. Copyright © 1976 by Theosophical University Press)

Albedo o.39

 

Maximum distance from the sun: 94 million 537 thousand miles Minimum distance from the sun: 91 million 377 thousand miles Mean distance from the sun: 92 million 957 thousand and 200 miles Mean Orbital velocity: 66000 miles per hour

Orbital eccentricity: 0.017
Obliquity of the ecliptic: 23 degrees 27 minutes 8.26 seconds
Length of the tropical year: equinox to equinox 365.24 days
Length of the sidereal year: fixed star to fixed star 365.26 days
Length of the mean solar day: 24 hours and 3 minutes and 56.5555 seconds at mean solar time Length of the mean sidereal day: 23 hours and 56 minutes and 4.091 seconds at mean sidereal time Mass: 6600 million million million tons
Equatorial diameter: 7927 miles
Polar diameter: 7900 miles
Oblateness: one 298th
Density: 5.41
Mean surface gravitational acceleration of the rotating earth: 32.174 feet per second per second Escape velocity: 7 miles per second

Lyrics to a song by Vangelis released in 1976. He explains that an Albedo Factor as “the reflecting power of a planet or other non-luminous body. A perfect reflector would have an Albedo of 100%. The Earth’s Albedo is 39%, or 0.39”.

This is our Earth. When we go for a stroll, on the way to our workplace or just enjoying the day, it’s humbling to realise that we are carrying out our life on this wonderful, extraordinary Globe. Yet this wonderful, extraordinary Globe is a tiny speck that is placed within this Universe, which is one of…who knows how many universes? All by chance? Let’s not believe that wonder is a childish emotion that we will grow out of. The sense of wonder can spring within us without any announcement. It is this spontaneity that makes it ‘wondrous’. It quickly bypasses our brain memory, which struggles to fit it with something rooted in our brains memory banks, it touches our soul memory. It feels like our heart swells with the stirring our wonderment. Is it something we see? Is it something we hear? Is it something we read? Is it someone we meet? Our inability to provide an explanation for the mystery of wonderment is what makes it so ‘wonderful’. Each day is filled with unknown possibilities of experiencing the wonder of Life. Let’s keep ourselves open, and allow it in.

****

Theosophy teaches self-abnegation, but does not teach rash and useless self-sacrifice, nor does it justify fanaticism. — (The Key to Theosophy, H P Blavatsky).
(Here, self-abnegation suggests a feeling of altruism. The putting aside of self interest for the sake of others -Editor)

In the same book we have an insight of how, through our own acts, we affect the whole of the thought world of which we are such an inseparable part, “It is an occult law, moreover, that no man can rise superior to his individual failings, without lifting, be it ever so little, the whole body of which he is an integral part.”

****

Is there a mystery of Theosophy? Is their a ‘secret chamber’ we enter that delivers ‘answers to mysteries’? H P Blavatsky suggested how we should approach studies. Asked by a young volunteer at The Blavatsky Lodge, London, she was asked:

“Madame…what is the most important thing necessary in the study of Theosophy?”
Came the reply, “Common sense, my dear.”
“And Madame, what would you place second?”
“A sense of humour.”
“And third Madame ?”
At this point, patience must have been wearing thin.
“Oh, just MORE common sense!”

(quoted in The Extraordinary Life and Influence of Helena Blavatsky, Founder of the Modern Theosophical Movement by Sylvia Cranston, pg.337)

The Echo of Life

 

A man and his son were walking in the forest. Suddenly the boy trips and feeling a sharp pain he screams, “Ahhhhhhhhh!”
Surprised, he hears a voice coming from the mountains,
“Ahhhhhhhhh!
Filled with curiosity, he screams: “Who are you?”
but the only answer he receives is: “Who are you?”
This makes him angry, so he screams: “You are a coward!”
and the voice answers:
“You are a coward!”
He looks at his father, asking, “Dad, what is going on?”
“Son,” the man replies, “pay attention!” Then he screams,
“I admire you!”
The voice answers,
“I admire you!”
The father shouts,
“You are wonderful!”
and the voice answers:
“You are wonderful!”
The boy is surprised, but still can’t understand what is going on. Then the father explains, “People call this ECHO, but truly it is LIFE!
Life always gives you back what you give out!
Life is a mirror of actions. If you want more love, give more love!
If you want more kindness, give more kindness!
If you want understanding and respect, give more understanding and respect!
If you want people to be patient and respectful to you, give patience and respect!
The rule of nature applies to every aspect of our lives.”
Life always gives you back what you give out.
Your life is not a coincidence, but a mirror of your own doings.
~Author Unkown…

Dormit in Astris

 

Earlier this year we bid farewell to Margaret Duncan-Miller. Well known to members of the London Branch, Margaret provided a valuable input to proceedings and also organised gatherings herself to talk Theosophy in an informal manner and many benefited because of these meetings. Her cheeriness and lightness of character brought a joy to all who met her. She passed away peacefully in January and our thoughts are with her family. We wish her well as she takes a well earned rest, before renewing a journey began in the mists of time.

Web Addresses

 

Our websites, both U.K. www.theosophical.org.uk and www.theosociety.org carry much information. If you are able, please visit them. They will be updated periodically or when necessary. Almost all TUP Publications are available to read online. Many of these titles are being made available in PDF for ease of viewing. Check the Headquarters website.

Newsletters from Abroad. Newsletters have been received from our colleagues overseas. America, Australia, Netherlands and South Africa. Copies are available from the Editors, contact details below.

UK Contact

 

Pat & Sandy Powell. National Secretaries P O Box 48
Penrhyndeudraeth
Gwynedd
LL49 0AQ
email: ts-uk@talktalk.net
Website: www.theosophical.org.uk

National Sections

America
John & Alex Rau. National Secretaries. PO Box 370, 180 W. Main.
Mecosta MI 49332.
(231) 867-3946.
Email: info@americansection.us
Website: www.americansection.us

Germany
Admin Zebrowski. National Secretary. Bohmreute 9, D-71735 Eberdingen.
Tel: +49 7042 78829, Fax: +49 7042 78939.
Email: zebrowski@theosophie.de
Website: www.theosophie.de

Netherlands
Het Theosofisch Genootschap
Contact: Bas Rijken van Olst and Coen Vonk. Daal en Bergselaan 68.
2565 AG Den Haag.
Tel: +31 70 323 1776.
Email: tupa@theosofie.net
Webpage: www.theosofie.net

South Africa
Alice Yetman. National Secretary. Tel +27 12 654 3193
Email: alice.yetman@gmail.com

Constantia (Cape Town) Contact- Dewald Bester
Tel: +27 21 434 2281
Email: besterdewald@gmail.com

Kwazula Natal(Greater Durban Area).Contact – Grant Halliday
Tel: +27 31702 3411
Email: halliday@absamail.co.za

Australia
Andrew Rooke. National Secretary 664 Glenhunty Rd. South Caulfield Melbourne, Vic. 3162
Tel: 0400942613
Email: andrewrooke@hotmail.com
Website: www.theosophydownunder.org

Austria
Contact – Elisabeth & Thijs Prent
53/13A A-2340 Moedling
+43 2236 28789
Email: et-prent@aon.net

Nigeria
The Theosophical Society Nigerian Section
I.C. Amakulo, Coordinator
Deans Office Faculty of Pharm. Science University of Nigeria
Nsukka, Enugu State

Sweden
Linda Lundberg. National Secretary
Email: teosam@glocal.net
Website: www.hem.fyristorg.com/teosofi