Karma, Reincarnation and Christianity
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According to Eastern teachings, karma necessitates rebirth because you can’t reap all the effects of your karma in a single lifetime. This is true. There is simply not enough time in one lifetime to experience the return of, or the compensation for, all the good or the bad you have done in that life.
There is a misunderstanding among some in the West that the Eastern concept of karma is fatalistic. People say to me, “Oh, you believe in karma and reincarnation. You’ll be taking another million years before you get to God!”
And I say, “Oh no, that is not my concept of karma. I also believe in the grace of my Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and I expect to balance my karma in this life with his help.”
So some people think that Hindus believe that there’s no way out of your karma and that you’ll be embodying here for so long that it might as well be forever. But that’s really not the pure teaching of Hinduism or Buddhism. The Hindu teaching on karma, as described in the Ramakrishna-Vedanta Wordbook, is that
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| the fruits of karma are reaped in the form of happiness or misery, according to the nature of each thought or act. Although each person imposes upon himself the limitation of his own character as determined by his past thoughts and actions, at the same time he can choose to follow the tendency he has formed or to struggle against it. The area of choice or free will in each individual reflects the freedom of the Atman, the indwelling Spirit. Devotion to God, enhancing good karmas and mitigating evil ones, begins to loosen the bonds of karma. When a man achieves illumination, his acts cease to produce karmas. <1> |
For once he is illumined, he no longer engages in acts that produce negative karma!
We are endowed by God with the gift of free will and a divine spark. This is what makes us different from all other species. Yes, you have a tiny flame in your heart, a spiritual flame. It is sealed there. It is a threefold flame of Power, Wisdom and Love. It focuses the consciousness of the Trinity–of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
The Divine Mother resides in your temple in the sacred fire that rises on the spinal altar from the base-of-the-spine chakra to the crown chakra. Sometimes you feel it in meditation. Some of you have practiced forms of yoga to achieve the raising of this Kundalini fire.
We are the temple of the living God and the scriptures say so: “What? Know ye not that your body is the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?...And ye are not your own, for ye are bought with a price....As God hath said: ‘I will dwell in them and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.’” <2>
So Paul speaks. Why, then, do some men of the cloth right here in New Orleans deny that the Spirit of the living God lives in us?
If we are the children of God, then we must be born of the essence of God, and that essence is the spiritual fire. The spiritual fire gives us the freedom to obey the voice of God, who speaks to us from the precincts of the heart. This is the voice of conscience. And that conscience we acknowledge and adore as our Holy Christ Self. The Spirit’s prophecy to Paul of these latter times speaks of some “having their conscience seared with a hot iron” <3>–neutralizing their sensitivity to the right and wrong that is revealed by the inner voice. But the voice is always there, guiding us, if we will listen and obey.
And so free will allows us to look at a terrible karma that has descended upon us and decide how we will respond to it. We wake up one morning and find that our wife has left with our children or our husband has disappeared or our house has burned down or our business is destroyed.
Calamities come upon people. But because we have free will we can say: “I will not be moved by this karma! I understand it as a blessing and as a teaching. I will overcome it. I will get beyond it. I will contact my God. He has never failed me. He will not fail me now.”
When you meet adversity with joy and the understanding that it is a challenge–just as a racehorse meets the challenge to set a new record, just as you excel in sports or beat your own past record–when you decide that you are going to deal with that karma and you make up your mind that with God all things are possible, you will join the ranks of the overcomers.
The scriptures affirm that God will not give you any temptation that you are not capable of withstanding. Paul wrote to the Corinthians: “There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.” <4>
So whatever you have to deal with, you can deal with it if you harness your soul and your spirit, your will and all your forces to the Mighty I AM Presence and take the initiative to deal step by step with calamity. You have to get into the mind-set that you can deal with it and you have to get out of the mind-set that you can’t.
Let that Mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus <5>–which is the Universal Mind of God to which we all have continuous access, waking and sleeping. Armed with the all-power of the Light, Energy and Consciousness of God, you roll up your sleeves and you put your life on course with God’s divine plan for you (which is perfect, joyous, healing and brimming with unlimited possibilities) and you make it happen!
Take, for example, the people that suffered from Hurricane Hugo. Their houses were destroyed. The government waited two years to give them money to rebuild. When the money finally came, the houses were beyond repair so they all got new houses. And so now their property values have gone way up–doubled and tripled. And they’re all happy that Hugo came along because they received such a blessing! But it was a karma. It was a karma that had a merciful element to it.
Hurricanes are man-made. They are vortices of negative human creation that must be expiated. They are the planetary karma of man’s inhumanity to man and to beast and to the earth body itself. This karma descends upon us–those of us who are culpable and those of us who stood by and didn’t challenge the culpable. And yet when calamity fell upon certain Galileans, Jesus said:
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| Suppose ye that these Galileans were sinners above all the Galileans, because they suffered such things? I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish. Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish. <6> |
So we should never point the finger at people and say, “Aha! His karma has descended. He must be a bad person.” Watch out because on the morrow you may be dealing with a karma far worse than your neighbor’s.
Professor Ninian Smart writes on the Buddha’s view: “The Buddha...was clearly impressed by the principle that knowledge of causes gives one the opportunity to determine the future, so that a proper understanding of karma and its causality should in no way involve fatalistic conclusions. [Gautama Buddha] attacked Makkhali Gosala, a contemporary teacher, for holding a fatalistic predestinationism,” <7> which denied that man’s actions had any influence in determining his future.
Now, this is a very important teaching because it brings up the subject of prophecy.
What is prophecy? Prophecy is the word of God–in my case, delivered to me through the Holy Spirit–that tells us what will happen in the future if we don’t obey the laws of God, if we don’t change our ways, if we don’t do something to avert that calamity, whether it be war or economic collapse or earth changes or whatever the Four Horsemen may be delivering upon us as the karma of the centuries.
Astrology is a map of individual and world karma. Your astrological birth chart tells you what momentums of the past you’re bringing with you, both positive and negative. This returning karma is the “tide in the affairs of men.” The good karma, when “taken at the flood, leads on to fortune,” as Francis Bacon wrote, and the good “omitted,” overtaken by the bad karma, leaves “all the voyage of men’s life bound in shallows and in miseries.” <8>
So when you see negative portents in your astrology, you say to yourself, “This is a path of initiation and soul testing. This is karma. These are lessons I have to learn. I am going to take my strengths and I am going to conquer my weaknesses and I am going to win in this life!”
So we’re not superstitious about astrology. It corroborates prophecy for those who can read God’s handwriting in the skies. It gives us a foretelling of the future, of blessing and bane that may come upon us, of what good or bad character traits we might have a propensity to develop, of what could get us in trouble and what could get us out of it. It shows us our spiritual powers and our human fallibilities.
When we see what we have been, what we are and what we can be and we become enlightened through our Higher Self, we can call upon the Lord and he will answer us. Without fail, he will lead us in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake <9>–the name I AM THAT I AM, by which he unlocks the power of the Godhead to save us from ourselves. We can also call to Jesus and the saints and the Archangels to help us. We can pray for divine intercession and receive it.
So, prophecy plus our enlightened exercise of free will plus calling upon the Lord enables us to become masters of our lives and our destiny.
How, then, are you going to break the chain of rebirth?
How many people here would rather attain union with God and ascend in the glory of the resurrection than return in another lifetime? A lot of people. I don’t know if there’s a hand that didn’t go up.
A few of you probably have the sense that you have a mission to accomplish beyond the year 2000 and you’d like to come back and tackle it, and that’s fine. But you should know that with Saint Germain’s teaching (he is the Ascended Master who was embodied as Saint Joseph) you can make your ascension in this life.
The ascension is your soul’s permanent reunion with God. When you attain that goal you will have broken the chain of rebirth. I can tell you, though, that it’s hard work. And if you are going to accomplish it in this life, you are going to have to, as I said, roll up your sleeves, starting tonight, and put your shoulder to the plow and really get on with balancing your negative karma through service to life and through invoking the violet flame.
So in every age men have asked the question: How do I break the chain of rebirth? The saints and sages of the Eastern religions have answered that question in many different ways.
The Jains believe that you can destroy karma through purification, penance and austerity. Hindu theologians teach that you achieve liberation from the round of rebirth through the realization that the individual soul is one with the Absolute, or Ultimate Reality, called Brahman. Hindu texts advocate the practice of different yogas as ways to attain union with Brahman. They teach that surrender to God, the dissolution of bad karma and the creation of good karma can help free the individual from the bondage of karma and rebirth.
Throughout this weekend I am going to be teaching you the very techniques you can use to start the process of breaking the chains of rebirth that you yourself have forged and that only you can undo. That’s why we are here–to show you how to balance karma in many different ways, how to recognize your tests and how to pass them, how to achieve oneness with God, with Brahman.
And ultimately you are going to learn how you can walk and talk with Jesus Christ and not only with Jesus but with the Spirit of that Christ, who is also within you–your very own beloved Holy Christ Self.
Gautama Buddha taught that in order to be liberated from the cycle of rebirth, called samsara, you must extinguish craving, or desire. He said inordinate desire is what causes all suffering and negative karma and results in rebirth.
Take an example: You want something that somebody else has so bad that you start coveting it. You start getting upset that somebody has something that you don’t. You start getting upset with God that he didn’t give you what that other person has. You can get so upset about it that you devise a masterful plot of deceit to steal it from that person. Or, in the extreme, you can get so blinded by your lust, under the influence of alcohol or drugs, that you may even commit murder to gain your ends. Surely this is inordinate desire, which if undetected will cause you to lose your soul and, as Paul said, become “a castaway.” <10>
Why do you need all those things when God is inside of you, when the riches and the abundance of God are with you?
When you have inordinate desires that cause you to break the commandments of God in order to fulfill them, that cause you to violate the rights of others and the peace of others, you know that you are making karma. So you have to watch your thoughts and feelings and bring your life into alignment with the circumstances of your karma.
You need to accept your lot–your karmic lot! Whether it’s to be poor or rich, what does it matter? We don’t take our poverty or our riches with us into the kingdom of heaven in any case. What’s important is that whatever our karmic circumstance, we express love to all in our circle of life, that we share with others when we have and we depend on God when we have not. To experience the joy and the beauty of life, then, we must not have inordinate desires about anything, since inordinate desires inevitably cause us to sin.
Because Gautama Buddha saw that the cause of suffering is inordinate desire, he taught the Eightfold Path as the antidote to inordinate desire and as the means to salvation. If you embody these eight precepts in your life, you will find that you will be on the road to sowing positive karma. And one day you will discover that in the practice of the precepts you have transcended inordinate desire.
The first precept of the Eightfold Path is Right Understanding, or Right Knowledge. If we are ignorant of the laws of God and the laws of man, we will break those laws. So we seek understanding in our hearts. We begin with communion with God but we also get ourselves educated for our purpose and mission–because we know that ignorance of divine or human laws is never an excuse and we will be held karmically accountable if we break those laws.
The second precept is Right Aspiration. Do you want to win the lottery or win in Las Vegas, or do you want to receive the riches of God because you are a servant of God and riches come to you as a reward for your good works? Aspiring to the highest should be your goal and then you will not err.
The third precept is Right Speech. The tongue is an evil thing. So the apostle James has written: “Even so the tongue is a little member, and boasteth great things. Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth! And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire of hell.” <11>
We all know the tongue can be very evil and it can come forth with fire to the hurt of many. And so right speech is the control of the tongue, what we say and how we say it. We can say something with joy and love or with sarcasm, degrading others.
Watch your speech. Listen to what you say to people and then ask yourself, “Would I like to be on the receiving end of what I have just said?” And if you wouldn’t, remember that sooner or later you will be, for those words will come back to you. And you can see that when people talk a lot, it could take many lifetimes for all that useless chatter to return to be transmuted by the violet flame. That’s why they say silence is golden!
The fourth precept is Right Action, or Right Behavior. This is the practical application of the Law. Right action can be prompted only by right motive, which necessitates that we reflect upon our motives in terms of selflessness and charity.
The fifth precept is Right Livelihood. If your livelihood contributes to the degradation of others or the enslavement of others, you are making negative karma.
If you earn your livelihood by serving liquor to people on a daily basis, you are most surely contributing to their alcohol problem and you are going to have to balance that karma. Being a bartender is not a right livelihood for the devotee of God. If you are trafficking in drugs and causing others to get the drug habit, think of the karma that will be upon you for each person who gets addicted to drugs through each dealer or user you have sold to.
There are many types of livelihood that cause others suffering. You need to be careful about how you earn a living and be satisfied with less income for the sake of being right with God.
The sixth precept is Right Effort. Our effort needs to be for excellence and not mediocrity. We have to give our best to our employers, to our spouses, to our children, to ourselves and to our God. “Fair to middlin’” isn’t good enough. Wherever you are assigned to a task, you must do the very best that you can do. And make every day exceed your yesterday.
The seventh precept is Right Mindfulness, which means keeping our thoughts pure, meditating on the laws of God, using the mind as a chalice for the sacred mysteries and for whatever work God has called us to do in this embodiment.
The eighth precept is Right Concentration. If you can’t concentrate on anything for more than a split second, then you really can’t meditate on God. Try meditating on God or Jesus for fifteen minutes at the point of the brow. This is the place of the third eye, where your inner sight is opened. Monitor your thoughts and see if they stray and if you think about something else while you are trying to think about Jesus. It’s not easy but it helps to have your favorite portrait of Jesus in front of you to bring your attention back to him through your devotion. Some Westerners find it difficult to focus their attention on God for any length of time. But practice, and cooking and eating the right macrobiotic diet for you, will greatly increase your power of concentration.
So following the Eightfold Path is how you make good karma and balance bad karma and free yourself from the round of rebirth.
Now I’d like to talk to you about karma in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The law of cause and effect, which is the law of karma, is firmly rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition. I intend to prove that to you right now. The Old Testament is filled with stories of the hammer of karmic law exacting penalties for bad actions and rewards for good actions.
You can’t miss karma in the Old Testament, starting with the sinking of Atlantis, which is called the flood of Noah. The karma of Atlantis descended for the misuse of God’s sacred fire, for the genetic engineering of creatures that were half human and half animal, and for the misqualification of science and the light on the altar of the temple.
The karma descended horrendously. The entire continent sank for that karma. And it was coming for thousands upon thousands of years, as the people had been warned by their prophets and their great teachers of that which would come.
So we begin with Genesis and the flood of Noah. After that flood and the sinking of that continent, God enjoined Noah and his sons. He said: “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.” <12>
Some Bible commentators, including Scofield, say that this statement shows the beginning of the institution of human government for the protection of human life. It also states the law of karma. Jesus said the same: “All who draw the sword will die by the sword.” <13>
So according to scripture, the taking of life requires capital punishment. Many of us today are against capital punishment. I will tell you what the Ascended Masters say. First, they teach us that for the crime of premeditated murder it is better for the soul to learn the lesson quickly through capital punishment than to rot in jail for fifty or sixty years.
When the murderer passes from the screen of life through the electric chair, he is free from the embodiment in which he committed that murder. He passes before the Lords of Karma. He reviews what he has done. And where there is remorse and absolute determination to atone, he may be given a new embodiment within a period of a year, perhaps ten years, and an opportunity to balance that karma after having studied and learned the lessons of divine vs. human justice in schools of Light.
The soul could come back, balance the karma for that murder, go on, pay debts to society–serving the particular individuals he has harmed as well as society in general–and live a full life. But if he had remained in jail, he could still be in jail instead of having been born again with the opportunity to make things right.
The second reason why capital punishment is so important is because it gives the soul the instantaneous awareness “If you kill, life will be taken from you.” That message to the soul is deep and it is learned. The soul carries that memory and the next time the situation comes along where he is tempted to solve a problem by committing murder, the memory of the law–“kill and be killed”–will be a lever of restraint: “This time I will resolve this peaceably. This time I will not commit murder and incur the karma of having to go to the electric chair all over again and be born again, etc., etc.”
In Exodus God details the law-code for Israel, which includes the command: “He that smiteth a man so that he die shall be surely put to death....If any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.” <14>
This shows that the law of karma was codified in the laws of the nations to protect human life. In the Book of Obadiah the LORD God warns: “The day of the LORD is near for all the nations. As you have done, so will it be done to you: your deeds will recoil on your own head.” <15>
When I was a child my father said to me as he pondered his own life: “It all comes back to you. It all comes back to you, the good and the bad.” And he repeated this saying throughout my growing-up years: “It all comes back to you.” And it is true, and I am certain that if you look at your own life, and you are honest with yourself, you will see that life is a boomerang: whatever you put out you get back.
“Karma, Reincarnation and Christianity” is based on a lecture given by Elizabeth Clare Prophet on Friday, October 11, 1991, during the four-day Class of the Golden Cycle held at the New Orleans Airport Hilton.
2. I Cor. 3:16, 17; 6:19, 20; II Cor. 6:16.
5. Phil. 2:5.
6. Luke 13:2-5.
8. Attributed to William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, act 4, scene 3, lines 218-21.
9. Ps. 23:3.
13. Matt. 26:52 (Jerusalem Bible, hereafter cited as JB).
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