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(July 1891)
Publications:
- The Path, vol. VI, no. 4, July 1891, pp. 97-101
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CTD entry in Russian: Безант, Анни - Карма и свобода воли
DATA
Title for references: Besant A - Karma and Free-Will
Short description: Signed "Annie Besant." Reconciles Karmic law with free will by tracing how the freedom of the Higher...
97 Never yet has there been a student of any philosophy who has not sooner or later found his feet entangled in the web of Determinism and Free-will. The law of causation, the endless chain of causes and effects stretching backwards into the "infinite azure of the past" and, by analogy, into the darkness of the future, seems to rend from man every shred of free-will, and to leave him a mere link in the chain, effect of past causes, cause of new effects. The "instinctual feeling" that "I am free to choose" goes for nothing, for the question is not "Am I free to choose?", but "Why do I choose?"; not "Can I do as I like?", but "Why do I like?" When two ways lie before me, I can choose—barring external compulsion—along which of the twain I will walk, and in so far I am free: this fact of freedom impresses itself on the surface of consciousness, and, being constantly repeated, gives rise to the habitual or "instinctive" feeling of freedom. This feeling does not go beyond the first layer, so to speak, of consciousness,98but since very few people do more than float about on the surface of this first layer, the problems concerned with the deeper strata trouble them not at all. The student, however, digging deeper into himself, into the mysteries of his own being, soon discovers the very superficial nature of the vaunted freedom, and realizing that his choice is determined by motives, that he "chooses" to walk along this road or the other because determined by a preference, i. e. by the strongest of the motives drawing him in different directions, the victorious desire becoming the volition, he gives up the "fiction of free-will" and embraces determinism. His further study leads him into a settled belief in the invariable sequence of cause and effect in the mental as in the physical world; he observes how racial and family characteristics color the currents of men's thoughts and limit the range of their thinking, until he gradually crystallizes into a fixed belief that each volition is the inevitable outcome of previous conditions, these conditions, in their turn, being the results of still earlier ones, and so on, backwards and backwards ever, link after link in an infrangible chain. Arrived at this point, there is but a step to fatalism, to a feeling that all is pre-determined and cannot be otherwise, that every apparent effort is illusive as effort and is merely inevitable impulse, as supineness is inevitable stagnation. Let the philosophic theory be translated into popular belief, and paralysis sets in, to be followed by death and putrefaction.
Now Karma is the enunciation of the law of causation in its fullest meaning, including in its sweep alike the Kosmos and the atom. Every cause must flower into effect after its kind, and every effect must ripen into new cause. As in the physical, so on every other plane, the seen being but the mere reflection of the Unseen, the one law ruling everywhere and everywhen, in all worlds, through all times. Yet by what sounds like a paradox, the very philosophy that enunciates Karmic law restores to man his free-will, reconciling the superficial contradiction by leading man through the depths of his own being, by teaching him to know himself.
Let us, in order to clarify our thinking, start from above and work downwards, and then return upwards yet again, thus tracing an outline to which further meditation may add strength and detail.
Unconditioned will alone can be absolutely free: the unconditioned and the absolute are one: all that is conditioned must, by virtue of that conditioning, be relative and therefore partially bound. As that Will evolves the universe, it becomes conditioned by the laws of its own manifestation. The Manasic entities are differentiations of that Will, each conditioned by the nature of its manifesting potency; but, while conditioned without, it is free within its own sphere of activity, so being the image in its own world of the Universal Will in the universe. Now as this Will, acting on each successive plane, crystallizes itself more and more densely as matter,99the manifestation is conditioned by the material in which it works, while, relatively to the material, it is itself free. So, at each stage, the inner freedom appears in consciousness, while yet investigation shows that that freedom works within the limits of the plane of manifestation on which it is acting, free to work upon the lower, yet hindered as to manifestation by the responsiveness of the lower to its impulse. Thus the Higher Manas, in whom resides Free-will, so far as the Lower Quaternary is concerned—being the offspring of Mahat, the third Logos, the Word, i. e. the Will in manifestation—is limited in its manifestation in our lower nature by the sluggishness of the response of the personality to its impulses; in the Lower Manas—itself, as immersed in that personality—resides the will with which we are familiar, swayed by passions, by appetites, by desires, by impressions coming from without, yet able to assert itself against them all, by virtue of its essential nature, one with that Higher Ego of which it is the Ray. It is free, as regards all below it, able to act on Kama and on the physical body, however much its full expression may be thwarted and hindered by the crudeness of the material in which it is working. Were the will the mere outcome of the physical body, of the desires and passions, whence could arise the sense of the "I" that can judge, can decide, can overcome? It acts from a higher plane, is royal as touching the lower whenever it claims the royalty of birthright, and the very struggle of its self-assertion is the best testimony to the fact that in its nature it is free. And so, passing to lower planes, we find in each grade this freedom of the higher as ruling the lower, yet, on the plane of the lower, hindered in manifestation. Reversing the process and starting from the lower, the same truth becomes manifest. Let a man's limbs be loaded with fetters, and the crude material iron will prevent the manifestation of the muscular and nervous force with which they are instinct: none the less is that force present, though hindered for the moment in its activity. Its strength may be shown in its very efforts to break the chains that bind it; there is no power in the iron to prevent the free giving out of the muscular energy, though the phenomena of motion may be hindered. But while this energy cannot be ruled by the physical nature below it, its expenditure is determined by the Kamic principle; passions and desires can set it going, can direct and control it. The muscular and nervous energy cannot rule the passions and desires, they are free as regards it, it is determined by their interposition. Yet again, Kama may be ruled, controlled, determined, by the will; as touching the Manasic principle it is bound, not free, and hence the sense of freedom in choosing which desire shall be gratified, which act performed. As the Lower Manas rules Kama, the Lower Quaternary takes its rightful position of subserviency to the Higher Triad, and is determined by a will it recognizes as above itself, and, as regards itself, a will that is free. Here100in many a mind will spring the question, "And what of the will of the Higher Manas; is that in turn determined by what is above it, while it is free to all below?" But we have reached a point where the intellect fails us, and where language may not easily utter that which the spirit senses in those higher realms. Dimly only can we feel that there, as everywhere else, the truest freedom must lie in harmony with law, and that voluntary acceptance of the function of acting as channel of the Universal Will must unite into one perfect Liberty and perfect Obedience.
Let us now see how this view of Free-will adapts itself to the conception of Karmic law. Our bodies, our minds, our circumstances, all are, we are told, Karmic effects, and it is within these conditions that we have to act. It becomes, then, important to understand how these came to be what they are, and how far they can be modified, if at all, by our will. Now the position presents itself to my mind in the following fashion (it being understood, of course, that I am not speaking with any kind of authority, but only as student to fellow-students, if haply I may throw out any suggestion useful to others and gain any correction useful to myself). At the end of any incarnation the harvest of life is reaped and garnered; gradually, during the Devachanic interval, all the personal details fall out, and by a purifying alchemy all is evaporated save the essence of the experiences, remaining as Thought-matrices on the Manasic plane. When the period for rebirth is approaching, the Ego passes to the plane of Reincarnation, bringing with it these thought-matrices, or "mental deposits" as Patanjali has it, and these, projected to the astral plane, become there the astral brain and mould the astral body, into which during prenatal earth-life the physical body is builded, molecule by molecule. Thus does the essence of past experiences appear on this plane in brain-formations ready to respond to the impulses of the Manasic principle, formations which as effects, under Karmic law, cannot be altered, and limit the manifestation of the Ego on the physical plane, but effects which spring from causes set going by the very will which, as effects, they limit, and for which the individual is, in a very real sense, responsible.
So again are the circumstances amid which we live and which condition our freedom, circumstances largely of our own creation. They are the results, in manifestation, of the causes set going by us in the world of thought: we create there, and here our creations assume objective shapes. It may be said that social conditions are not the result of any one person's thoughts, and that is so: but, first, we cannot separate our lives from those of our race or refuse to bear our share of the common burden; and secondly, if we had had nothing in us answering to the conditions, we should not have been attracted towards them to be born among them. These effects, as effects, are fixed and must condition our activity; but we can101mould them as causes while they limit us as effects, and so create a better future. For see how our Free-will can alter the effect as cause: a terrible grief comes on us, and cannot be avoided; it is an effect, and must be endured. But we can bear it bravely, patiently, learning from it every lesson it can teach, or we can rebel furiously against it, setting up a vortex of disharmony, strengthening the evil within us and weakening the good. In the first case the effect becomes, as cause, parent of good Karma and hereafter will bear fruit of good to ourselves and the world; in the second it will breed new misery and evil in the days to come. If our will can thus mould the future, are we puppets, slaves of Destiny? Nay, but we create our Destiny, and if the Destiny seem evil, blame him who wrought so badly that he is appalled by the work of his own hands.
It is in our present acting that lies our freedom; to each, at each moment, comes this god-like liberty of choice. "Choose well, for thy choice is brief and yet endless", said Goethe; the brief choice is ours, the endless outcome is under Karmic law. The choice once made is made for ever, and we have of our free will set a-going a cause the effects of which are our Karma, and will limit us in days to come. "God himself cannot undo the past", and our past contains our present, which cannot therefore be changed.
Truly I have written but a sentence of a vast theme; but Karma is an exhaustless subject, and patience in readers but a finite quantity.
Annie Besant.
Footnotes