At the hour of our death the account seems closed; but he is simply asleep and will resume his hold of us again. He will slumber perhaps for hundreds, nay, thousands of years in “Devachan,” that is to say, in the state of unconsciousness which prepares us for a new incarnation; but, when we awake, we shall find the assets and liabilities added up beyond recall; and our Karma will merely continue the life which we have laid aside. It will continue to be ourselves in that life and to see the consequences of our faults and our deserts burst into flower and afterwards to see other causes bear fruit in other effects, until the consummation of the ages when every thought born upon this earth ends by losing sight of it.
2
Karma, as we see, is, when all is said, the immortal entity which man fashions by his deeds and thoughts and which follows him, or rather envelops and absorbs him, through his successive lives and changes, even as he incessantly changes, while preserving every previous impress. Man’s thoughts, as this doctrine very truly says, build up his character; his deeds make his environment. What man has thought, that he has become; his qualities and natural gifts adhere to him as the results of his ideas. He is, in all truth, created by himself. He is in the fullest sense of the word responsible for all that he is. He is contained in the net of all that he has done. He can neither undo nor destroy the past; but, so long as the effects of the past are yet to come, it is possible for him to alter them or to divert them by fresh exertions. Nothing can affect him that he has not set in movement; no evil can befall him that he has not deserved. In the infinite evolution of the eternities he will never find himself in the presence of any judge other than himself.
3
It is certain that the idea of this supreme judge, who is our consciousness uninterrupted throughout the centuries and the millenaries, who is each one of us grown more and more enlightened, more and more incorruptible and infallible, leads to the highest, sincerest and purest system of morals that it is possible to conceive or to justify here below. The judge and the defendant are no longer face to face; they are one within the other and form but one and the same person. They can hide nothing from each other; and both have the same urgent interest in discovering the least fault, the slightest shadow and in purifying themselves as quickly and as completely as possible, in order to put an end to the reincarnations and to live at last in the One Being. The best, the saintliest are near doing so from the moment when they quit this life; but, detached from all things, they do not cease to act for the good of all men, for already they know all things. They go farther than the mystic Christian who expects a reward from without: they are their own reward. They go farther than Marcus Aurelius, the great type of the man without illusions, who continues to act without hoping that his action can profit others: they know that nothing is useless, that nothing can be wasted; it is when they no longer need anything whatever that they work with the greatest ardour.
Contrary to what is too generally believed, this system of morals which leads to absolute repose extols activity. Hear, in this connection, the great teachings of the Bhagavad-Gita, the Lord’s Song, which is perhaps, as its translators, not without good reason, think, the most beautiful, that is to say, the most exalted book known up to the present time:
“Thy business is with the action only, never with its fruits; so let not the fruit of action be thy motive.... Perform action ... dwelling in union with the divine, renouncing attachments and balanced evenly in success and failure.... Pitiable are they who work for fruit.... Man winneth not freedom from action by abstaining from activity, nor by mere renunciation doth he rise to perfection.... Perform thou right action, for action is superior to inaction; and, inactive, even the maintenance of thy body would not be possible. The world is bound by action, unless performed for the sake of sacrifice....
“He who seeth inaction in action and action in inaction, he is wise among men, he is harmonious, even while performing all action. Whose works are all free from the moulding of desire, whose actions are burned up by the fire of wisdom, him the wise have called a sage. Having abandoned attachment to the fruit of action, always content, nowhere seeking refuge, he is not doing anything, although doing actions.... He should be known as a perpetual ascetic, who neither hateth nor desireth; free from the pairs of opposites ... he is easily set free from bondage....”
And remember that this, which forms part of the Mahabharata, the greatest epic on earth, was written four or five thousand years ago.