Karma does not crush

'It's my karma’, ‘it’s the way I am’, ‘it’s the story of my life’ and ‘you can’t escape your destiny’. We have all heard or even said these things, as if we were in the grip of some inevitable outside force. But karma is not inevitable and it is not an outside force. It is more like a law and its effect is dependent on us. Our karma is therefore always changing according to what we think, what we say and what we do. If we uplift our thoughts, our words and our acts we will inevitably uplift our karma. Here is a simple and clear exposition of karma from a book on my ‘rare book’ shelf, ‘A Study in Karma’ by Annie Besant (first published in 1912).

Karma does not crush

Now karma is the great law of nature, with all that that implies. As we are able to move in the physical universe with security, knowing its laws, so may we move in the mental and moral universes with security also, as we learn their laws. The majority of people, with regard to their mental and moral defects, are much in the position of a man who would decline to walk upstairs because of the law of gravity. They sit down helplessly and say: ‘That is my nature. I cannot help it’. True, it is the man’s nature, as he has made it in the past, and it is ‘his karma’. But by a knowledge of karma he can change his nature, making it other tomorrow than it is today. He is not in the grip of an inevitable destiny imposed upon him from outside; he is in a world of law, full of natural forces which he can utilize to bring about the state of things which he desires. Knowledge and will – that is what he needs. He must realize that karma is not a power which crushes but a statement of conditions out of which invariable results accrue. So long as he lives carelessly, in a happy-go-lucky way, so long will he be like a man floating on a stream, struck by any passing log, blown aside by any casual breeze, caught in any chance eddy. This spells failure, misfortune, unhappiness. The law enables him to compass his ends successfully and places within his reach forces which he can utilize. He can modify, change, remake on other lines the nature which is the inevitable outcome of his previous desires, thoughts and actions; that future nature is as inevitable as the present, the result of the conditions which he now deliberately makes. ‘Habit is second nature’, says the proverb, and thought creates habits. Where there is law, no achievement is impossible, and karma is the guarantee of man’s evolution into mental and moral perfection. .

Photo by Dimitar Janevski