Religious Philosophy

"Helena Roerich, Letters II, 7 May 1938 »"

"Things don't just happen in this world of arising and passing away. We don't live in some kind of crazy, accidental universe. Things happen according to certain laws, laws of nature. Laws such as the law of karma, which teaches us that as a certain seed gets planted, so will that fruit be."

"Indeed in a certain sense two "I"s are identical namely when one disregards all special contents-their Karma. The goal of man is to preserve his karma and to develop it further when man dies his Karma lives and creates for itself another carrier."

"Sikhism, like most religions, does accept the postulate of soul. Soul is considered from two angles –the Supreme, Universal, Ultimate or Transcendental soul, paramatma, and individual soul, jivaatma. It is the latter that is said to suffer transmigration according to the merits and demerits of the jiva’s, or person’s, Karma or actions, in its temporal spans."

"Sikhs believe that human beings spend their time in a cycle of birth, life, and rebirth. They share this belief with followers of other Indian religious traditions such as Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. The quality of each particular life depends on the law of Karma. Karma sets the quality of a life according to how well or badly a person behaved in their previous life. The only way out of this cycle, which all faiths regard as painful, is to achieve a total knowledge of and union with God."

"If you oppress a man you will suffer oppression in this or another life and reap the fruit of the seed you have sown in this life. If you feed the poor, you will have plenty of food in this or another life. There is no power on this earth, which can stop the action from yielding their fruits. Such is the Law of Karma."

"Prarabdha is that portion of the past karma which is responsible for the present body. That portion of the sanchita karma which influences human life in the present incarnation is called prarabdha. It is ripe for reaping. It cannot be avoided or changed. It is only exhausted by being experienced. You pay your past debts. Prarabdha karma is that which has begun and is actually bearing fruit. It is selected out of the mass of the sanchita karma."

"There's a natural law of karma that vindictive people, who go out of their way to hurt others, will end up broke and alone."

"The inflexibility of karma is more than poor mortal can endure."

"Taoism tries to dissuade people from killing with the notion of Karma. According to Taoism, if people are kind of everything, they will have good karma, and bad karma, if they are not."

"The Masters are, in a sense, the Higher Self of humanity and watch over, protect, and guide its unfoldment. They cannot interfere with karmic law, but have the power, at crises, to hold back to some extent the action of accumulated karma that otherwise might destroy civilization or shatter the planet itself. But in the end every iota of karmic law must be fulfilled. Devastating epidemics, great wars, destruction of cities in past or present times with their toll of death, the sudden breaking up and submergence of continents, as in the case of Atlantis, are instances of karmic forces operating on a large scale, and where such forces could be held back no longer by the administrators of nature's laws, the Masters of Wisdom, lest a greater spiritual damage be done to the people of those cities, nations, or continents affected. Where spirituality and morality have departed beyond a certain measure, humanity can only be brought back to a recognition of its spiritual foundations by some great shock or series of shocks driving the personal consciousness inward to the eternal verities, to its inherent divinity, and so preventing a further descent into the lure and glitter of outer falsities and sense illusions."

"The conscious process is reflected in the imagination; the unconscious process is expressed as karma, the generation of actions divorced from thinking and alienated from feeling."

"'There's a huge difference between being arrested and being guilty … the law changes and I don't. How I stand vis-à-vis the law at any given moment depends on the law. The law can change from state to state, from nation to nation, from city to city. I guess I have to go by a higher law. How's that? Yeah, I consider myself a road man for the lords of karma."

"Karma is the eternal assertion of human freedom. If we can bring ourselves down by our karma, surely it is in our power to raise ourselves by our own karma."

"The Law of Karma is a constant reminder that it is never too late to mend. All we need to do is to reflect upon our own innate purity and divinity, and follow the laws of nature, of which the Law of Karma is the law of divine goodwill and justice."

"The misery which is not yet come is to be avoided. Some Karma we have worked out already, some we are working out now in the present, and some is waiting to bear fruit in the future. That which we have worked out already is past and gone. That which we are experiencing now we will have to work out, and it is only that which is waiting to bear fruit in the future that we can conquer and control, so all our forces should be directed towards the control of that Karma which has not yet borne fruit. Chapter 2, Sutra 16."

"The theory of Karma is that we suffer for our good or bad deeds, and the whole scope of philosophy is to approach the glory of man. All the Scriptures sing the glory of man, of the soul, and then, with the same breath, they preach this Karma. A good deed brings such a result, and a bad deed such a result, but, if the soul can be acted upon by a good or a bad deed it amounts to nothing. Bad deeds put a bart to the manifestation of our nature, of the Purusa (soul), and good deeds take the obstacles off, and its glory becomes manifest. But the Purusa itself is never changed. Whatever you do never destroys your own glory, your own nature, because the soul cannot be acted upon by anything, only a veil is spread before it, hiding its perfection. Chapter 4, Sutra 4."

"Karma is of two kinds, soon to be fructified, and late to be fructified. By making Samyama on that, or by the signs called Aristha, portents, the Yogis know the exact time of separation from their bodies. When the Yogi makes a Samyama on his own Karma, upon those impressions in his mind which are now working, and those which are just waiting to work, he knows exactly by those that are waiting... when he will die, at what hour, even at what minute. Chapter 3, Sutra 23."

"One of the benefits of the prayer wheel is that it embodies all the actions of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas of the 10 directions. To benefit sentient beings, the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas manifest in the prayer wheel to purify all our negative karmas and obscurations, and to cause us to actualize the realizations of the path to enlightenment."

"For those who want to purify negative karma, they can turn the Prayer Wheel and recite these mantras – Mitrugpa, Kunrig, Namgyalma, the Lotus Pinnacle or Amogapasha (wish granting wheel mantra) and the Stainless Pinnacle mantra."

"May anyone who hears, sees, touches, or talks about this [Prayer Wheel] be able to spread the practice of turning the Dharma wheel to numberless sentient beings, so that they will never be reborn in the three lower realms. May they be liberated from disease, spirit harms, negative karma, and obscurations, generate bodhichitta, and achieve enlightenment. May they then liberate numberless sentient beings."

"There are many types of wheels – from the traditional ones turned by hand, to those turned by water or wind, even electric wheels are used. Another, though rare type of Tibetan Prayer Wheel is one that is turned by a candle. It is believed that the light emitted from the candle removes negative karmas from those who touch it."

"As a nation, we have slithered like snakes across the floor to whatever hole where money lay, sacrificing the depths of our own humanity as we did so. And we are surprised now at the various crises among us? What should surprise us is that this didn't happen sooner. Just as the face of a fascistic president could have belonged to anyone, so the consequences of our spiritual malfeasance could have come in any form. Am I saying that America is reaping its karma? You bet I am, but that is never the end of the story. For just as the law of cause-and-effect is inviolable, so is God's mercy. When we come clean with the God of our own understanding—atoning, owning, admitting, all those words that ultimately mean the same thing—the darkest storm clouds are dissolved by light. But not immediately, and not until then. America is down on its knees this time. But that's not the bad news; it's the good news."

"Karma [represents] intentional actions that affect one’s circumstances in this and future lives. The Buddha’s insistence that the effect depends on volition marks the Buddhist treatment of karma as different from the Hindu understanding of karma."

"Buddhists believe that the rebirths that arise are a result of the karma we have. Karma is the idea that every action has a reaction. If people do good then good will follow. If people choose to do evil, then evil will follow or as you sow so will you reap. The results of the karma can be experienced in the present lifetime, even day by day."

"In Buddhism, karma can go from one life time to another and therefore it is vital that people try to live the best life they can, as they will often have the bad karma of previous lifetimes to deal with. Karma will determine whether people reach enlightenment or have to live 1000 lifetimes of a lesser animal in order to get to the truth."

"Karma just does not work for individuals but can also have an effect on the whole nation or the whole planet. Buddhists talk about collective karma, when the consequences of action taken by whole countries can often change things. For example, Buddhists would argue that the way rich nations treat the poor nations of the world may well affect the karma of a whole country or a group a such as the United Nations."

"You will be both worshiped and reviled, elevated and denigrated, honored and crucified."

"Problems or successes, they all are the results of our own actions. Karma. The philosophy of action is that no one else is the giver of peace or happiness. One's own karma, one's own actions are responsible to come to bring either happiness or success or whatever."

"It is the philosophy of Siddhartha-Buddha again that Pythagoras expounded, when asserting that the ego was eternal with God, and that the soul only passed through various stages to arrive at the divine excellence; meanwhile the thumos returned to the earth, and even the phren was eliminated. Thus the metempsychosis was only a succession of disciplines through refuge-heavens to work off the exterior mind, to rid the nous of the phren, or soul, the Buddhist... principle that lives from Karma and the Skandhas (groups). p. 287, Part II, Religion"

"It is the latter, the metaphysical personations of the “deeds” of man, whether good or bad, which, after the death of his (physical) body, incarnate themselves, so to say, and form their many invisible but never-dying compounds into a new body, or rather into an ethereal being, the double of what man was morally. p. 287, Part II, Religion"

"Thus the disembodied Ego (Soul), through this sole undying desire in him, unconsciously furnishes the conditions of his successive self procreations in various forms, which depend on his mental state and Karma, the good or bad deeds of his preceding existence, commonly called merit and demerit. p. 320, Part II, Religion"

"Thus, like the revolutions of a wheel, there is a regular succession of death and birth, the moral cause of which is the cleaving to existing objects, while the instrumental cause is karma (the power which controls the universe, prompting it to activity), merit and demerit. “It is, therefore, the great desire of all beings who would be released from the sorrows of successive births to seek the destruction of the moral cause, the cleaving to existing objects, or evil desire.” p. 346, Part II, Religion"

"Both of the Mimansas, treating of the most abstruse questions, explain Karma as merit, or the efficacy of works; Isvara-Parasada, as grace; and Sradha, as faith. p. 591, Part II, Religion"

"That word which all the Vedas record, which all penances proclaim, which men desire when they live as religious disciples, that word I tell thee briefly, it is OM."

"Om Mani Padme Hum, the sunrise comes! The Dewdrop Slips Into The Shining Sea!"

"Let love embrace the ten thousand things; Heaven and earth are a single body." With sayings such as these, Hui Shih tried to introduce a more magnanimous view of the world and to enlighten the rhetoricians."

"If those who despise us stone us as prophets, they must listen to us as prophets. If they curse us as sorcerers, they must learn to curse from us, as sorcerers. Let us enlighten the young, and let us be condemned for corrupting the young, like Socrates. Let us awaken the old before they sleep forever, though they must read us in secret like the Kabbalah."

"We are indomitable in our power of independent action and can in no circumstances consent to live in a world governed by intrigue and force. We believe that our own desire for a new international order under which reason and justice and the common interests of mankind shall prevail is the desire of enlightened men everywhere. Without that new order the world will be without peace and human life will lack tolerable conditions of existence and development. Having set our hand to the task of achieving it, we shall not turn back."

"The object of education is not merely to draw out the powers of the individual mind: it is rather its right object to draw all minds to a proper adjustment to the physical and social world in which they are to have their life and their development: to enlighten, strengthen and make fit."

"Harvey appears to have possessed, in a remarkable degree, the power of persuading and conciliating those with whom he came in contact. In the whole course of his long life we hear nothing either of personal enemies or personal enmities … one of the great men whom God, in virtue of his eternal laws, bids to appear on earth from time to time to enlighten, and to ennoble mankind."

"We have never intended to enlighten shoemakers and servants — this is up to apostles."

"The Art of Peace begins with you. Work on yourself and your appointed task in the Art of Peace. Everyone has a spirit that can be refined, a body that can be trained in some manner, a suitable path to follow. You are here to realize your inner divinity and manifest your innate enlightenment. Foster peace in your own life and then apply the Art to all than you encounter."

"The meek are the egoless. They are those who have awakened to their essential true nature as consciousness and recognize that essence in all “others,” all lifeforms. They live in the surrendered state and so feel their oneness with the whole and the Source. They embody the awakened consciousness that is changing all aspects of life on our planet, including nature, because life on earth is inseparable from the human consciousness that perceives and interacts with it. That is the sense in which the meek will inherit the Earth."

"The outward movement into form does not express itself with equal intensity in all people. Some feel a strong urge to build, create, become involved, achieve, make an impact upon the world.... Others, after the natural expansion that comes with growing up has run its course, lead an outwardly unremarkable, seemingly more passive and relatively uneventful existence. They are more inward looking by nature, and for them the outward movement into form is minimal. They would rather return home than go out. They have no desire to get strongly involved in or change the world... Some may feel drawn toward living in a spiritual community or monastery. Others may become dropouts and live on the margins of society they feel they have little in common with. Some turn to drugs because they find living in this world too painful. Others eventually become healers or spiritual teachers, that is to say, teachers of Being... On the arising new earth, however, their role is just as vital as that of the creators, the doers, the reformers. Their function is to anchor the frequency of the new consciousness on his planet. I call them the frequency holders. They are here to generate consciousness through the activities of daily life, through their interactions with others as well as through “just being.”"

"To sum up: Enjoyment of what you are doing, combined with a goal or vision that you work toward, becomes enthusiasm. Even though you have a goal, what you are doing in the present moment needs to remain the focal point of your attention; otherwise, you will fall out of alignment with universal purpose. Make sure your vision or goal is not an inflated image of yourself and therefore a concealed form of ego, such as wanting to become a movie star, a famous writer, or a wealthy entrepreneur. Also make sure your goal is not focused on having this or that, such as a mansion by the sea, your own company, or ten million dollars in the bank. An enlarged image of yourself or a vision of yourself having this or that are all static goals and therefore don't empower you. Instead, make sure your goals are dynamic, that is to say, point toward an activity that you are engaged in and through which you are connected to other human beings as well as to the whole. Instead of seeing yourself as a famous actor and writer and so on, see yourself inspiring countless people with your work and enriching their lives. Feel how that activity enriches or deepens not only your life but that of countless others. Feel yourself being an opening through which energy flows from the unmanifested Source of all life through you for the benefit of all."

"“And I saw a new heaven and a new earth,” writes the biblical prophet (Revelation 21:1). The foundation for a new earth is a new heaven – the awakened consciousness. The earth – external reality – is only its outer reflection. The arising of a new heaven and by implication a new earth are not future events that are going to make us free. Nothing is going to make us free because only the present moment can make us free. That realization is the awakening."

"The new earth arises as more and more people discover that their main purpose in life is to bring the light of consciousness into this world and so use whatever they do as a vehicle for consciousness... Awakened consciousness then takes over from ego and begins to run your life. You may then find that an activity that you have been engaged in for a long time naturally begins to expand into something much bigger when it becomes empowered by consciousness."

"Until very recently, the transformation of human consciousness – also pointed to by the ancient teachers – was no more than a possibility, realized by a few rare individuals here and there, irrespective of cultural or religious background. A widespread flowering of human consciousness did not happen because it was not yet imperative. A significant portion of the earth’s population will soon recognize, if they haven’t already done so, that humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die."

"Most ancient religions and spiritual traditions share the common insight – that our “normal” state of mind is marred by a fundamental defect. However, out of this insight into the nature of the human condition – we may call it the bad news – arises a second insight: the good news of the possibility of a radical transformation of human consciousness. In Hindu teachings (and sometimes in Buddhism also), this transformation is called enlightenment. In the teachings of Jesus, it is salvation, and in Buddhism, it is the end of suffering. Liberation and awakening are other terms used to describe this transformation."