THOUSANDS of honest employees in the Enron scandal revealed in 2001, paid dearly for the misdeeds at the top of their corporate leadership.

Maybe most of the non-managerial staff were “innocent” — possibly, others knew what was going on and remained silent.

Either way the lesson is clear: No one is safe working for a company that has lost its moral compass. But, whether or not this is fair, is not the issue.

A Puzzle

Such crimes trigger broader questions: “who’s Karma is it anyway?” And: ” how can such behaviors be prevented in the future?”

If Exodus (34:6-7) was right, then “the children and the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations” will be revisiting the same transgression.

Can events suffered by one generation really affect future generations — is there no Karmic relief? Are we to be forever haunted by the specter of an Ebenezer Scrooge?

Marley’s Ghost

“Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends,
to which, if persevered in, they must lead;
but if the courses be departed from,
the ends will change.”

- Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol

Invoking Karma as a haunting that plagues us unforgivably through life, makes good theater. It is a also an apt metaphor for the wake-up call of conscience.

But, if Karma is to be defined as:

“…that unseen and unknown law which adjusts wisely, intelligently and equitably each effect to its cause”

— how does it explain the obvious injustice done to thousands who lost their jobs and billions in pensions because of the actions of a few selfish executives?

Karmic Energy

In The Key to Theosophy, H. P. Blavatsky uses the phrase “unmerited suffering” — a puzzle to many students because it seems opposed to Karma’s fundamental axiom that

“…the particular conditions of life in which each person finds himself, are nothing more than the retributive Karma which the individual generated in a previous life.”

This is explained further by W. Q. Judge in Echoes from the Orient that “when a being dies, he emits, as it were, a mass of force or energy, which goes to make up the new personality when he shall be reincarnated.”

A Shady Nook

Yet, every reincarnating person is compensated for his perceived ‘unmerited suffering’ during the period of between-life sleep known by the Tibetan word “Devachan” (place of the Gods), says Theosophy.

“We say that man suffers so much unmerited misery during his life, through the fault of others with whom he is associated, or because of his environment,” Blavatsky explains,

“that he is surely entitled to perfect rest and quiet, if not bliss, before taking up again the burden of life.”

“Electrical Waves of Life”

And she goes on to describe his compensation between lives on Earth — which we would compare to a long, sound sleep between hard days at work:

“As a man exhausted by one state of the life fluid seeks another — as, for example, when exhausted by the hot air he refreshes himself with cool water — so sleep is the shady nook in the sunlit valley of life.”

“The life current must be broken,” she says, “by changing the waking for the sleeping state.”

“Ask a good clairvoyant to describe the aura of a person just refreshed by sleep… [He]will be seen bathed in rhythmical vibrations of life currents — golden, blue, and rosy — these are the electrical waves of Life.”

As a Man Thinks

A man, caught up only in circumstances of his present life, may feel justified in resenting injustices. But personal suffering in any one life is almost invariably due to lack of information, we believe, stored in a universal field of mind.

Most of us are still unaware of this spiritual information, and lack insight into the entangled workings of karmic law — an inability to know ‘how things really are’ in the larger field of which we are a part.

Unfortunately, we tend to receive an abundance of unsolicited guidance from others — who doggedly reinforce their own, and our narrow, personal agendas.

Mind Field

Frontier thinker, biologist Bruce Lipton, PhD explains why the information in our belief system, our thoughts and behaviors, play such a critical role in every aspect of our life:

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Thoughts Rule

Inner self-knowing is what all the enlightened Teachers of humanity have acquired, through long lifetimes of struggle. Adepts are made, not born. All spiritually mature beings live and teach the same eternal ethic: non-separateness.

There is no Law that says we must endure continual suffering. Mostly these are placebo-nocebo effects, that we and others have churned into habits of thinking.

Thoughts rule the world, as the Buddha experienced, and taught in the Dhammapada: “All that we are is the result of what we have thought” he said— “all that we are is founded on our thoughts and formed of our thoughts.” Adding:

“If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain pursues him, as the wheel of the wagon follows the hoof of the ox that draws it.”

But, The Buddha didn’t share our notions of suffering. Instead, he taught a Karma-centered, optimistic, spiritual philosophy, beautifully depicted in The Light of Asia:

___________________

If ye lay bound upon the wheel of change,
And no way were of breaking from the chain,
The Heart of boundless Being is a curse,
The Soul of Things fell Pain.

Ye are not bound! the Soul of Things is sweet,
The Heart of Being is celestial rest;
Stronger than woe is will: that which was Good
Doth pass to Better — Best.

I, Buddh, who wept with all my brothers’ tears,
Whose heart was broken by a whole world’s woe,
Laugh and am glad, for there is Liberty!
Ho! ye who suffer! know

Ye suffer from yourselves. None else compels,
None other holds you that ye live and die,
And whirl upon the wheel, and hug and kiss
Its spokes of agony.

___________________

Eric Pearl, Lynn McTaggart, and Bruce Lipton explain how such a philosophy works in powerful ways to impact our health and well-being — and how what we think can even alter the structure of our DNA:

Power of Thought Fields

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But Karma as described in Theosophy is a Universal Law of Harmony, and in it this broadest sense, therefore, cannot be reduced in scope to one person or one life only. Its decrees must have the greater whole of Nature and the planetary well-being in view. Blavatsky wrote:

“We must not lose sight of the fact that every atom is subject to the general law governing the whole body to which it belongs, and here we come upon the wider track of the Karmic law.”

But how? What mechanisms are involved in the “wider track of the Karmic law,” or “distributive karma,” as taught in Theosophy — and how are these implemented? As Blavatsky pointedly wrote:

“The aggregate of individual Karma becomes that of the nation to which those individuals belong, and further, that the sum total of National Karma is that of the World.”

Larger fields of karma such as famines, and natural disasters are not “peculiar to the individual or even to the Nation, they are more or less universal,” Blavatsky writes,

“…and it is upon this broad line of Human interdependence that the law of Karma finds its legitimate and equable issue.”

A New Science of Inheritance

Completed in 2003, the Human Genome Project (HGP) was a 13-year project coordinated by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health.

“I am a scientist and a believer, and I find no conflict between those world views.”

- Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D.

(Dr. Collins is the director of the Human Genome Project. His most recent book is “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.”)

The project catalyzed the multibillion-dollar U.S. biotechnology industry and fostered the development of new medical applications.

Researcher’s were poised to use the knowledge about gene variations among individuals, to diagnose, treat and someday prevent the thousands of disorders that affect us.

But “life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,” John Lennon said. And, as we will see, a wiser Mother Nature had long ago made those other plans.

“Reality leaves a lot to the imagination”

- John Lennon

Because all organisms are related through similarities in DNA sequences, insights gained from nonhuman genomes would naturally lead to new knowledge about human biology.

Theosophy agrees, as H. P. Blavatsky explains:

“… every living creature and thing on earth, including man, evolved from one common primal form.”

Theosophy Already Knew

It follows, then, that the identical genes that were in our ancestor’s bodies, Blavatsky says (The Life Atoms) —

“…are transmitted through their descendants for generation after generation, so that we are literally ‘flesh of the flesh’ of the primeval creature who has developed into man in the later period.”

The Karmic law of Human Interdependence, a spiritual law, and was not on any geneticist’s radar.

This game-changer has only recently been rediscovered by the emerging science of “epigenetics.”

Geneticist Spencer Wells and a team of scientists are attempting to answer that question by collecting DNA samples from people all over the world.

The Ghost in Your Genes – Part 1

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Karma

It knows not wrath nor pardon; utter-true
Its measures mete, its faultless balance weighs;
Times are as nought, tomorrow it will judge,
Or after many days.

- Sir Edwin Arnold, Light of Asia

One Planet

And, since it is only the selfish and ignorant thoughts and actions of individual human beings that caused so much suffering and imbalance in the world, it seems only just and logical that any readjustment should be effected by and through those same creators.

That the many ’suffer for the sins of the few’ seems to be a given — since we are all One Being mutually interacting on One Planet together.

The polluted earth, air and water affects everyone indiscriminately. And everyone therefore owns, to greater or lesser degree, the burden of responsibility for the conditions which affect the whole.

In the end, ignorance of the laws of life is no excuse. Sooner or later we all have to wake up to the fact, and begin working in harmony to resolve the problems we have together created.

If we do not, Nature will step in and restore equilibrium in her own way. And Her way often results disease, pain and suffering, and is no respecter of persons.

The Ghost in Your Genes – Part 2

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The occult science of this process was explained by Mme. Blavatsky, in her Key to Theosophy:

“Let me briefly remind you what these principles are: universal Unity and Causation — Human Solidarity — the Law of Karma — Re-incarnation. These are the four links of the golden chain which should bind humanity into one family, one universal Brotherhood.”

This may be insufficient a philosophy to satisfy some. The “Four Links,” which should bind humanity into “one family,” are not yet the commonly accepted worldview.

So long as there is separateness and selfishness, Theosophy says, there will be suffering. And this is why we need to practice true Compassion, “the law of laws.”

The Ghost in Your Genes – Part 3

“Occultism teaches that the life-atoms [in the DNA?] of our (Prana) life-principle are never entirely lost when a man dies,” Blavatsky wrote:

“The atoms [in the genes?] impregnated with the life-principle (an independent, eternal, conscious factor) are partially transmitted from father to son by heredity, and partially are drawn once more together and become the animating principle of the new body in every new incarnation…”

There is a “Spiritual one life, a universal Vital principle independent of our matter, and manifesting as atomic energy only on our plane of consciousness,” Blavatsky concludes:

“It is that which, individualized in the human cycle, is transmitted from father to son.”

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Karma Science

H. P. Blavatsky
The Secret Doctrine 2:305

THIS LAW, whether conscious or unconscious, predestines nothing and no one. It exists from and in eternity truly, for it is eternity itself — and as such, since no act can be coequal with eternity, it cannot be said to act, for it is action itself.

It is not the wave which drowns the man, but the personal action of the wretch who goes deliberately and places himself under the impersonal action of the laws that govern the ocean’s motion. Karma creates nothing, nor does it design.

It is man who plants and creates causes, and Karmic law adjusts the effects, which adjustment is not an act but universal harmony, tending ever to resume its original position, like a bough, which, bent down too forcibly, rebounds with corresponding vigour.

If it happen to dislocate the arm that tried to bend it out of its natural position, shall we say it is the bough which broke our arm or that our own folly has brought us to grief?

“Come ye out and be ye separate”

Excerpt from Karma

by William Q. Judge

“The old Aztec and other ancient American peoples died out because their own karma — the result of their own life as nations in the far past — fell upon and destroyed them.

“And the individual in race or nation is warned by this great doctrine that if he falls into indifference of thought and act, thus molding himself into the general average karma of his race or nation, that national and race karma will at last carry him off in the general destiny.

“This is why teachers of old cried, ‘Come ye out and be ye separate.’

“With reincarnation, the doctrine of karma explains the misery and suffering of the world, and no room is left to accuse Nature of injustice.”