“Mr. Burrows: Is there such a thing as unmerited suffering?
Mme. Blavatsky: If you suffer from causes you produce, it is merited; but very often you have sufferings through causes generated by other persons, of which you are not guilty at all.
Mrs. Besant: For instance, national Karma.
Mme. Blavatsky: Very often you suffer for things you have never committed, but you simply happen to fall under this current, and there you are. You suffer tremendously, and you suffer that which is not merited, and then you have to have an adequate bliss and reward for it.
Mr. B. Keightley: That is the personal Karma. The suffering man has a conscious personality – Mr. Smith or Mr. Brown, who is not aware he has committed any of these crimes, how shall we say?
Take for instance now, this accident in America (The Johnstown Flood in Pennsylvania, May 31, 1889, killing over 2000 in a matter of hours when the dam broke); it will be a very good instance.
Now, you could suppose that all the people that have been drowned or have suffered in various ways, and all the children in that catastrophe, were all, as it were, brought under its influence by their personal Karma, so to speak, would you, HPB?
Mme. Blavatsky: No. It is just that, you know.
Mr. B. Keightley: There a dam bursts and these people are swept away.
Mr. Sneyd: Would you not say that it is the result of a sort of ignorance on the part of those people being there and not knowing the train would come to smash?
Mr. B. Keightley: Of course it is, in one sense.
Mr. Old: This is what you call diffused Karma. A person comes under it by virtue of being an atom of a body. He cannot have a law separate from the body to which he belongs.
Mr. B. Keightley: The distinction I drew between the personality and individuality of a man is of special importance, because as a personality he has not perhaps a responsibility for that; he is one of a race, and he suffers the Karma of the race.
Mr. Burrows: And then the justice comes in afterwards.
Mr. B. Keightley: Because he has suffered personally more than he has merited, he receives his reward in Devachan in the shape of a personal reward. Is not that so, HPB?
Mr. Old: Then our third question is: How far can this law of Karma be diverted, deferred, or prevented – diverted in the sense of turning off one track, onto another?
Mme. Blavatsky: You meddle with Karma, and then it will be just a thousand times worse. You can defer it and you can stop it for a while, but it will come always.
Mr. Old: You cannot prevent it, then?
Mme. Blavatsky: You cannot; it will become worse.”
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 