Dance of Destiny

KARMA is a beneficent and merciful law, relentlessly just, for true mercy is not a free lunch but impartial justice.

“My brothers! Each man’s life the outcome of his former living is,” said The Buddha.

Is Karma then only fate under another name, an already fixed formula from which no escape is possible?

They are unwise, the chorus tells Prometheus, who believe that the goddess Nemesis may be propitiated by sacrifices and prayers, or have her wheels diverted from the paths she has taken.

“Those paths are of our own making,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote, “for it is we, collectively or individually, who prepare them — an Occultist or a philosopher will not speak of the goodness or cruelty of Providence.”

“The only immutable decree of Karma,” she insisted, “is absolute Harmony in the world of matter as it is in the world of Spirit. It is not, therefore, Karma that rewards or punishes, but it is we, who reward or punish ourselves according to whether we work with, through and along with nature, abiding by the laws on which that Harmony depends, or break them.”

“Were no man to hurt his brother, two-thirds of the World’s evil would vanish into thin air. Karma-Nemesis would have neither cause to work for, nor weapons to act through. It is the constant presence in our midst of every element of strife and opposition, and

the division of races, nations, tribes, societies and individuals into Cains and Abels, wolves and lambs, that is the chief cause of the ‘ways of Providence.'”

“We cut these numerous windings in our destinies daily with our own hands, while we imagine that we are pursuing a track on the royal high road of respectability and duty, and then complain of those ways being so intricate and so dark.” Given this historical worldview, we need a fresh start. The roots of empathy and compassion must to be fostered in our children if there is to be any hope for the future of humanity.

Youth Day Song

“We Will Change Everything” is a song inspired by TEDxYouthDay, which takes place on November 20th, International Children’s Day. The video you see has been crowdsourced from the members of the TED and TEDx community. On TEDxYouthDay, 59 TEDx events globally will be hosting events for (and by) young people. These events will vary widely in size, format and theme, but they will share a common vision: inspiring curiosity, igniting new ideas and empowering young leaders.

 A Sane System

The Roots of Empathy educational system as presented below, is an evidence-based classroom program that has proved to have a significant effect in reducing levels of aggression among schoolchildren while raising social/emotional competence and increasing empathy.

H. P. Blavatsky also maintained that “a proper and sane system of education should produce the most vigorous and liberal mind,” [Key to Theosophy, Sect. 13], “strictly trained in logical and accurate thought, and not in blind faith. Children should above all 

be taught self-reliance, love for all men, altruism, mutual charity, and more than anything else, to think and reason for themselves.”

Roots of Empathy

The Dalai Lama has expressed that programs like Roots of Empathy will build world peace. Mary Gordon introduces us to the wisdom of babies and shows us how they can teach us – and our children – what it is to be human. Click here: Roots of Empathy – for more information about this program. “Over a lifetime, I have learned that the human capacities for empathy and respect must be fostered from earliest childhood to reduce violence in the world and build a truly civil society,” writes the founder Mary Gordon.

Karmic Continuity

Karmic threads are embedded in the body, brain, and mind in each new reincarnation. Each cause is directly connected to the person from which it came, “the results of our own acts and thoughts in this or some prior life,” wrote W. Q. Judge in Ch. 11 of The Ocean of Theosophy.

We perform our acts in company with others — through national, racial, social and family groups — which are the building blocks of shared ‘genetic’ traits.

The important key to understanding how causes from the past can be carried into the present, lies is understanding that the future is not, as Light on the Path teaches, “arbitrarily formed by any separate acts of the present, but that

the whole of the future is in unbroken continuity with the present as the present is with the past.”

The Sphinx

“We stand bewildered before the mystery of our own making, and the riddles of life that we will not solve,” Mme. Blavatsky wrote in The Secret Doctrine, “and then accuse the great Sphinx of devouring us. But verily

there is not an accident in our lives, not a misshapen day, or a misfortune, that could not be traced back to our own doings in this or in another life.”

“Mankind has ever shut its eyes to the great truth that man is himself his own saviour as his own destroyer. That he need not accuse Heaven and the gods, Fates and Providence, of the apparent injustice that reigns in the midst of humanity.”

Charter for Compassion

Learn more about The Charter here: Charter for Compassion, and join the global movement for worldwide brotherhood — the First Object established by the original Theosophical Society: “A Universal Brotherhood of Humanity.”

Theosophy holds that the mind is the inexorable binding force insuring the unresolved influences are preserved in our bodies, and those of our ancestors — These are what Blavatsky called The Life Atoms — that “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 revived science of epigenetics is a biological game changer for understanding the how roots of human behavior are formed and transmitted into the future. The principles are being promoted by biologist Bruce Lipton, an “internationally recognized leader in bridging science and spirit.” Dr. Lipton discovered that environmental factors (which include mental and emotional states) –

“…can alter the way the same genes are expressed, making even identical twins different.”

Human interdependence is a spiritual law, and as such was never on any geneticist’s radar. These scientists should be getting the message, but are still limited by the standard model of gene theory.

“The failures of science and its arbitrary assumptions,” Blavatsky says in The Secret Doctrine (2:670), “are far greater on the whole than any ‘extravagant’ esoteric doctrine.” The traditional view of evolution “is from the animal,” she notes, and “mind in its various phases” is viewed as unrelated to forms.

This is only the beginning of an explosion in a new understanding of how biological systems really work. Transcending the standard mechanical gene theory, epigenetics proves the significance of thoughts and feelings, and how they imprint influences into each new lifetime.

Who Are We?

This is Part 1 of “Mind, Genes, Neuroplasticity & Enlightenment,” Deepak Chopra’s discussion with Rudolph Tanzi, Ph. D. Professor of Neurology and holder of the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Endowed Chair in Neurology and Mental Retardation at Harvard University.

Fields of Influence

In his articles “Aphorisms on Karma,” and “Karma,” W. Q. Judge details the “who, what, why, and where,” but admittedly, little of the scientific ‘how’ our present Karma embeds itself in future lives.

In Karma, without providing a scientific rationale,  Judge nonetheless sounds almost like a modern quantum physicist, stating that “Karma only produces the manifestation of that which already exists:-

—being action it has its operation in time, and Karma may therefore be said to be the same action from another point of time.”

ö

Again, without giving the occult ‘how’ this works, in Aphorisms, Judge broadly outlines the teaching: “Karma may be of three sorts,” he writes:

“(a) Presently operative in this life through the appropriate instruments;
(b) that which is being made or stored up to be exhausted in the future;
(c) Karma held over from past life or lives…”

These behind-the-scenes karmic influences, he admits, are: “visible only to the Yogi, to the Sage, or the perfect Seer—there is therefore no stoppage, but only a hiding from view,” noting

“Karma is not subject to time, and therefore he who knows what is the ultimate division of time in this Universe knows Karma.”

∞