the key to theosophy…

“Mr. B. Keightley:  How far is that the Karma of the reincarnating egos in those diseased and unhealthy bodies – how far does their Karma attract?

 
Mme. Blavatsky:  I suppose it does attract them, but sometimes it does not. It is very difficult to come and tell you of these workings of Karma.

 
Mr. B. Keightley:  It is one of the very great points.

 
Mr. Old:  I want to know if it is any good alleviating suffering.

 
Mme. Blavatsky:  It is good if you distribute suffering, so that you will have a little today and a little tomorrow. When you suffer terribly, you lose your head; but on the other hand, you get accustomed to suffering. Now, I don’t remark my pains and aches, but if I had them all at once, I don’t know what I would be.

 
Mr. Kingsland:  Is there not all along the tendency to refer Karma too much to the physical plane? All we are making that mistake, I think.

 
Mme. Blavatsky:  Surely.

 
Mr. Kingsland:  People are apt to imagine that you do an act, and that that act produces a certain effect in the next incarnation. Well that act, as an act on the physical plane, can only produce a physical result on the physical plane. What is carried over in the next incarnation, which becomes your Karma, is the effect which is produced in you. The state of consciousness, so to speak, in doing that act; it is not the act itself. The mere act of killing a man is a physical act on the physical plane, and won’t result in Karma on the physical plane.

 
Mme. Blavatsky:  But see the moral effect it produces – and that goes for a thousand times more than the physical act. The man that dies today, dies instead of dying two or three days later, but he may leave orphans. By the act of killing, the generations will be thrown entirely in a new track. They will be scattered, every one of them will go into other creations they never thought about; others will go into other parts. Physically it is nothing; only, the physical produces moral effects and results.

 
Mr. Sneyd:  Supposing we say there is a man that is blind, and he runs in the way of a railway train, that train runs over him. Is not that the result of a sort of ignorance, or absence of knowledge and perceptions?

 
Mme. Blavatsky:  Again this may be merited or unmerited, as the case may be.

 
Mr. Sneyd:  Supposing we say that the driver stopped the train in time?

 
Mr. B. Keightley:  The driver saw him and stopped the train?

 
Mr. Sneyd:  How would it be then?

 
Mr. B. Keightley:  It was the man’s Karma to be saved.

 
Mr. Sneyd:  You could not say that he was ignorant, then, to a certain extent?

 
Mr. B. Keightley:  Oh yes. He was not saved by his own act, but by the act of somebody else.”

 
H. P. Blavatsky