A STUDY IN KARMA/PART 22

 

PERFECT JUSTICE

               From the physical agony inflicted results physical agony endured, for karma is the restoration of the equilibrium disturbed. Motive, in this region, does not mitigate, any more than the pain of a burn is mitigated because the injury has been sustained in saving a child from the fire. Where a good motive existed, however intellectually misdirected – as the saving of souls from the torture of hell, in the case of the inquisitor, or the saving of bodies from the torture of disease, in the case of the vivisector – it has its full result in the region of the character. Hence we may find a person born deformed, with a gentle and patient character, showing that in a past life he strove to see the right and did the wrong. The Angels of Judgment are utterly just, and the golden thread of completely misdirected love may gleam beside the black thread woven by cruelty; none the less will the black thread draw to the doer of cruelty a misshapen body. On the other hand, where lust of power and indifference to the pain of others have mingled their baleful influences with the infliction of cruelty, there will be found also a mental and emotional twist; a historical case is that of Marat, who, instead of expiating the cruelty of the past, intensified it by new cruelty in the very life in which he was reaping the harvest of previous evil. Hereditary and congenital diseases, again, are the reaction from past misdeeds. The drunkard of a previous life will be born into a family in which drunkenness has left diseases of the nerves – epilepsy and the like. The profligate will be born into a family tainted with diseases which spring from sexual vice. A “bad heredity” is the reaction from wrong activities in the past. Often the man who is reaping these sad harvests shows in his moral nature that he has purged himself from the evil, though the physical harvesting remains. A steadfast patience, a sweet enduring content, tell that the evil lies behind, that victory has been gained, though the wounds sustained in the conflict smart and sting. So may a soldier, sorely maimed in a fierce battle remain mutilated for the rest of his physical life, and yet not regret with any keenness the anguish and the loss which mark that he has gloriously discharged his duty to his Flag. And these warriors who have conquered in a greater battle need not lament too bitterly over the weakness or deformity of a body which tells of a strife which is past, but may wear patiently the badge of a struggle with an evil they have overcome, knowing that in another life no scar of that struggle shall remain.