2
But let us return to our great Initiates. They are, it appears, reputed to be the guardians of the irresistible and incommensurable sidereal force, the force which supports and directs the worlds and which is capable, if it were misused, of destroying in a moment the whole human species, all that lives upon the earth and this very earth itself; but it is also capable, if it were wisely tamed, of ensuring man an ultimate royalty, perhaps access to other heavenly bodies and, in any case, a power so great that the Golden Age which existed of old, thanks to the subjection of this force, might flourish once more upon our planet.
All this is possible; and, for the moment, we need not go into the matter. But that, possessing the secret of this force and of many others, transmitted from Hierophant to Candidate, or, as they say “from mouth to ear,” the experts in occult science do not divulge it and place it at the service of humanity: this is the great reproach brought against them; and for all those who are not aware that the end of Initiation is not power and material happiness but wisdom, development and the uplifting of the inner being it is the best proof that they are cheats and impostors. It may be that, driven into a corner, they are silent because they have nothing to tell us; but the argument is not so unanswerable as those who avail themselves of it are inclined to think. We shall perhaps see this before long. It is indeed not impossible that one day some accident of knowledge will place one or other of our scientists in a position analogous to that of these Masters or Initiates. To him also the terrible question of the necessary silence will then present itself. We have but lately witnessed in this war the insensate and demoniacal use which man has made of certain inventions. What will happen if other energies are placed in his hands, energies far more formidable, which we seem to be on the point of discovering and releasing?
Man is not ready to know more of such matters than he now knows. The safety of the species is at stake. Humanity, which is hardly emerging from its infancy, or has only just attained the dangerous period of adolescence (it would be about sixteen or seventeen years of age, according to Dr. Jaworski’s well-supported and striking historic parallel), has already passed the limit of the inventions which it is able to assimilate or endure without incurring the risk of death. Almost all of them, from the subjection of steam and the still dubious taming of electricity, have done it incomparably more harm than good. Explosives, for example, which have helped it to build a few roads—a work which the Romans, for that matter, did quite as well as we do—to open up a few mines, to pierce a few tunnels, have cost it millions of young lives.
Perhaps it is time, not to check the investigations of science, but to control its discoveries and to reserve, as the occultists wisely did, for a select circle of Initiates, rigorously tested and bound by inviolable oaths, the secret of those too perilous energies around which we are feeling our way and which are on the point of revealing themselves and becoming public property. Our moral evolution is several centuries behind our scientific evolution; and it is more than probable that the latter, being too swift and too intensive, may disastrously impede the former. It will profit no one to travel in three hours from Paris to Pekin, from Pekin to New York and from New York to Calcutta, if these repeated and miraculous journeys leave those who take them in the same frame of mind on their arrival as on their departure. We are more or less in the same position as Russia, whose heart and spirit were not steadfast enough, not resolute enough, to bear what the head had too quickly and too artificially stored up. Nothing is more quickly disseminated or more readily assimilated than the results of science; nothing, on the other hand, is more slow, more painful or more precarious than moral evolution; and yet it is upon this alone, as we are realizing more and more clearly, that man’s happiness and future depend.
KARMA
XVIII
KARMA
1
STRIPPED of its innumerable and inextricable oriental complications, which may possibly correspond with realities but which cannot be verified, Karma, the infallible Law of Retribution, is, when all is said, what we, speaking more vaguely and without believing in it unduly, call Immanent Justice. Our Immanent Justice is a somewhat idle shadow. True, it often manifests itself after monstrous actions, great vices, sins or iniquities; but we rarely have the opportunity of seeing it intervene in the thousand petty acts of injustice, cruelty, weakness, dishonesty and baseness of ordinary life, though the aggregate of these paltry but incessant misdeeds may weigh heavier than the most notorious crime. In any case, its action being more dispersed, more diffuse, slower and more often moral than material, nearly always escapes our observation; and, as, on the other hand, it appears to cease at the moment of death, it hardly ever has time to demand its due and usually arrives too late at the bedside of a sick or dying man, who has lost consciousness or no longer has the time to expiate his offences.
Karma then, if you will, is Immanent Justice; only, it is no longer an inconstant goddess, inconsistent, incoherent, impotent, erratic, capricious, inexact, forgetful, timid, inattentive, sluggish, evasive, intangible and bounded by the tomb, but a god, vast and inevitable as Destiny, a god who fills up each outlet, each horizon, each crevice of every existence and who is omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, infallible, impassible and incorruptible. He is in us, as we are in him. He is ourselves. He is more than we: he is what we are, while he is still what we were and is already what we shall become. We are small, evanescent and ephemeral; he is great, imperturbable, immovable, eternal. Nothing escapes him of that which escapes us and no doubt will escape us even beyond the tomb. Not an action, not a wish, not a thought, not the shadow of an intention but is weighed more strictly than it was weighed by the forty-two posthumous judges who awaited the soul on that further shore of which we are told in one of the most ancient texts in the world, the Egyptian Book of the Dead. All is set down, dated, valued, verified, classified, entered as debit or credit, as reward or expiation, in the immense and eternal index of the astral records. There can be nothing that he does not know, because he has taken part in all that he judges; and he judges us not from the depth of our present ignorance, but from the height of all that we shall learn much later. He is not only our intelligence and our consciousness of to-day, which are hardly waking and no longer count their errors; he is even now, for they already dwell within us, though they be inactive, impotent, dumb and blind, our intelligence and our consciousness to come, when they shall have attained, in the course of the ages and of the innumerable developments, expiations and ascents, the loftiest summits of Wisdom and Discernment.