The Sacred Word
5. THE WHEEL OF THE LAW: THE EAST AND THE WEST
The following are the two consequences of the law of free will:
1. A man has a right to use the Light of God in accordance with his own will;
2. He is fully responsible for the results of such use.
He is totally responsible for every particle of energy received by him as the material for the construction of his life, and each particle that he has ever misused and perverted must sooner or later be purified and returned to its original perfect state.
And here comes the law of karma.
Orthodox Christians consider this concept to be heretical, while to the common consciousness the words “karmic reward” sound frightening, inasmuch as they are commonly taken to mean the manifestation of an angry God punishing his creation for their sins.
However, in reality the law of karma is simply a manifestation of the universal law of cause and effect. The Sanskrit word «karma» means “deed”, or “action”, and karmic records are the records of our deeds. Good deeds create positive karma that constitutes our “treasures in heaven” (do you see how the Christian concept blends harmonically with the concepts typical of the Eastern religious tradition?), and negative deeds cause negative records that are waiting for the moment to be paid.
The Great Law is exact and passionless, and all that we send into the world sooner or later returns to our threshold providing an opportunity for redemption. Suppose at a certain point in time you did something that offended or harmed a certain part of Life. The cosmic cycles are continually turning, and their rotating movement takes this record away from you, so that you may forget it completely and not be aware of it for a long time, even in the course of several incarnations. However, sooner or later the Wheel of Law will make its full turn, and you will find
yourself face to face with the problem that you once failed to resolve. And it is entirely up to you to make a different choice this time and not make the same mistake again. If you manage to do so, the karmic problem is resolved and the record erased, and the energies imprisoned in the perverted matrix of the negative record ascend back to their divine source; but if you fail, a new record is created to await resolution in its turn.
So we see that the law of karma is the evidence of the infinite grace of God and is in no way a manifestation of His inexplicable cruelty. Really, it would be extremely unfair to give the gift of free will to a man, thereby exposing him to the danger of incorrect actions, and then punish him for his mistakes without providing an opportunity for atonement! Each karmic situation, however upsetting and difficult it is, is in fact a happy opportunity to free ourselves from a certain amount of karmic burden that often makes our life so different from what we would like it to be.
It happens sometimes that a disaster that occurs in someone’s life seems not to be a result of his deeds or the circumstances of his life. In such cases we usually say, “He is such a nice person, why did it happen to him? He definitely deserves a better lot”. Well, it is quite possible that in his present life he does. But the point is that we live more than once.
There is another manifestation of the grace of God: the law of reincarnation. According to this law, each human being embodies on earth as many times as required for the full resolution of all his karmic problems and for his return to the original state of the perfect unity with God.
The Christian Church rejects this principle categorically, but let us consider: is it possible that the merciful God might give a man only one chance, and then send him—FOREVER!—to the blossoming gardens of paradise or to the burning fires of hell?
Really, that would be too primitive for an omniscient and omnipotent being.
And it is not so. The book “The Lost Years of Jesus” written by the Messenger Elizabeth Clare Prophet contains evidence of the fact that a considerable part of Jesus’ life preceding his Galilean mission was spent in Egypt and Tibet where he studied under the great Eastern adepts. Mrs. Prophet’s other book, “Reincarnation”, shows that the concepts of karma and reincarnation originally were present in Jesus’ teaching
as an integral part thereof, but the orthodox church pursuing its earthly interests excluded these concepts from its official doctrine. By doing so, it hid from mankind that which was the main purpose of Jesus’ mission and that which he demonstrated during his last incarnation on earth.
So what was it?
