Karma Yoga: Karma Yoga - Lesson VII (of XI )

By Bhikshu

Karma Yoga: Lesson VII

We propose now to take up a section of Karma Yoga that has been rejected or rather misunderstood, namely the use of sacraments to the Karma Yogi. It had been an invariable statement by religious reformers that in spite of the inferiority of Vedic ritual still it had its uses. What the uses are to the Karma Yogi has not been explained but it has been taken that Karma Yoga (of the lower or inferior ( ? ) variety) consisted in the observance of the Vedic ritual and performances of the practices mentioned in the Vedas. For there is much in the Vedas that is of use in magic, in religion, in praxis, though great be the difficulty in cogent arrangement, and greater the worry on the part of the Teacher not to speak overmuch; lest in unlocking Pandora's box disease and devilment get out to work their havoc with simple minds anxious to use every good advice as a weapon against one's neighbour. Great indeed are our difficulties and nothing but the desire to help humanity on the part of the Latent Light Culture has compelled me to write down what little I am permitted to do. Alas, I am not complete; I would rather request that if difficulties crop up, and difficulties will crop up only to the evil-minded, aye, even if a single thought of evil be encouraged, the reader addresses the Latent Light Culture for remedy.

First then as to the rationale of the Karma Kanda, religious ritual. It is very necessary that the rationale be understood first before the subject is approached. To begin at the beginning we would draw attention to our original statement that the universe is a universe of Thought. Herein we venture to state that it is naught else. All objects are but thoughts, whether we see them as Behaviors or feel them as sensations or do not see them at all as thoughts. Thought is a constant function irrespective of the Ego, of you or I; the universe is a play of strands of thought working out among other strands of thought and what marks out each strand (guna) of Thought (Karma) is an Event of Time, the fourth dimension. Just as the geometrical point in space is a line or thread of event in space Time the 4th dimension, each event is but the occurrence of a Thought, a tick mark placed on thought which is matter of the 5th dimension for Thought transcends and is irrespective of Time. From the viewpoint of Time, Thought is Immortal, or rather beyond Time. Thought does not age, has neither Past, Present nor Future and always can be recalled-though not in the same form or vehicle in which it first appeared. This is the first Truth about Thought.

Secondly, from the viewpoint of the Thinker, the Mind or what emanates Thoughts, what is behind Thought, what of which Thought is but an Image or debased image, Thought is a sacrifice, Yajna. This is a most Sacred Truth. It is another way of stating that each Thought having been emanated returns (by the Law of Action and Reaction) back to the Thinker, Mind (Brahma). But the emanation and the return are not meaningless at all; a thought is not a waste; a Thought is a Purposeful emanation and returns with its Purpose fulfilled; this is not all assertion but a matter of experience (Anna). It is for the experience that Thought comes to be (Bhoota); it is from out of experience (Anna) that the Thought that has come to be, has been made, and gathering unto Itself the experience it gains, the Thought (Son) returns to his Father (Mind) which art in Heaven When therefore God created mankind, says Genesis I.28, "And God said unto them (and God blessed them) Be fruitful and multiply .... replenish the earth and subdue it": Exactly what the Bhagavad Gita says (Ill, 10): "God the Lord of Progeny having created Progeny (Praja) along with sacrifices (Yajna) said of old, before creation, Hereby do you multiply. These shall be the fulfillers of your desires," or words to that effect. Of course the progeny were thoughts and each thought was an Act of Sacrifice or an Act of Worship of God (or of God's command or Act). Mind you, they, the thoughts, were to be fulfillers of themselves, of their desires, their own milkmaids for themselves the milch cows. As says the proverb, why have of the Kingdom of the Mind half the kingdom; have the whole of course.

Each thought is of the Form of Light a Devata but yet each thought is still helpless, the phrase Deva conveys the idea of helplessness also. Each Devata (Thought) as created, when it goes to the make-up of your Being, has virtually all the qualities of the cell-life (in the human body). Just as you have to understand the capacity of the subconscious cell life in you, that builds and rebuilds your body, so must you understand the power of these Thoughts emanated by you or by mankind. Filling the atmosphere round about you are Thoughts, Intuitive messengers, Mr. Stillwell in his book "Grow and Live Young" calls them. "Expect them, command your intuitions to come to your aid when problems confront you; consider that intuition is a silent partner, that it desires to aid and will aid if called on for help." And the Bhagavad Gita says equally well: "Consider then each cell of your body, each psychomere (particle of your soul) has ears and be careful what is whispered by your Thoughts and Acts, into these ears, what you tell your subconscious, for whatever the order is, the cell will build you up accordingly. Have ye not noted that sudden psalms of fear or anger kill like lightning? We would go further and say: "Be careful what thought you add on to the world of thoughts for they both mar and make unerringly."

Very curious this our suggestion-it is Vedic that thought is a sacrifice, and as a sacrifice a rite whereby not only man gains divine help but the Gods themselves derive strength, a means by which man assists Gods against evil. This was the teaching in the ancient Parsi country. The existence of angels and devils has been part of the religious literature of almost all countries; in one form or another; and what are these angels or devils but the visions of Thoughts embodied ? All along has prevailed the idea that the function of men was to strengthen the Gods (Thoughts) by Prayer (persistent Thought) and Sacrifice (more Thought). Among the Parsis the teaching was that if Gods were not pleased or sacrificed to they hurt humanity; so too among the Hindus where the Pitris the manes of dead ancestors have similarly to be appeased; and in China and Japan where ancestor worship was the only worship the ancestor being ourselves! In Sanskrit Mata (Mother) was a synonym for Atma which meant father and son equally well being too reflexive a pronoun. indeed there is much in the ancestor worship of ancient nations to be understood and appreciated in the light of our philosophy today and only a portion of the entire truth need be considered now.

As said already, on the earth nearly a hundred thousand persons die every day, the great majority of which are unconscious, purposeless monads the atmosphere is full of them. They remain for some time in the atmosphere, disperse and form a cosmic environment of diffused consciousness which mingles with the "subconscious" at times and manifests in mediumistic and spiritistic phenomena. This leads us to a brief study of Death and what happens at "death" and in the state beyond Death. We of course do not take up the materialistic theory that Death is a mere disruption of the congregation of the cells called the body which congregation breaks up leaving the cells free to form other congregations somehow. Such a theory is not for thinkers, not for Karma Yogis to whom every Act in Nature has a meaning, to whom Death is a conscious, voluntary act and not an incident. Death is a "laying aside" of the outer-shell which has become independent of the directing Thought called "Soul" or Spirit death is the death of the shell, an act of anarchy on the part of the cells composing the shell, these cells having chalked out a course against or independently of the soul.

What happens at death then? Fournier D'Albe puts it in his excellent language: "A nucleus weighs about 1/1000th of the average cell body; its really vital and perhaps invisible portion may be 1/10000th part of the weight of the nucleus. In other words taking all the cells together, our real living matter, the vital portions of the body may have an aggregate weight of about 1/5th of an ounce. Could we eliminate all the rest of the cell material we should have a body consisting of all that is alive in every single cell. But (especially note this) that body would be quite invisible and would if it filled the outline of the body as before ascend some fifteen miles in the air before it found a position of equilibrium. It could indeed live in a new world, retaining all its social and organic memories and fulfilling all its essential conditions except that of acting on ponderable matter." It will be enough to say that at death, the soul, itself a "body" composed of all that is vital in every cell is "released" and soars to the upper atmosphere.

To us the soul is not a mere "cloud" of physical (albeit fine) inert matter. It is a Life, a Purpose, the unfulfilled portions of the Purposes that animated the late dead body; a Purpose all the more strong because it had been rid of the clog that was recently hampering it. And to confirm this comes in the statements of the earnest band of thinkers and workers who from messages, codified messages for which the vehicle-body was not responsible, which say that the invariable assertion from the realms beyond Death is that the conditions on the other side of Death are much like those here more than the communicators (the recent dead or disembodied) themselves had expected; that the character and personality are unchanged; but that they are freer from obstruction and difficulty and that the conditions are more conducive to progress than here; and at the same time they assure us that they know little more than we know, that they have not suddenly jumped into supernal or infernal regions at all. Indeed it would appear that the dead here around us, through us, in us (?), and that they are connected in their plane by links of affection and interest rather than space relation or bodily proximity. None the less the dead are barely cognisant of earth happenings, curiously.

Another and outstanding fact in early messages is the keen desire apparently felt to relieve the minds of survivors of some anxiety or misunderstanding which is casting a shadow over their lives; for the Dead are as we said, but unfulfilled Purposes and as such deserving of the sympathy and worship of those on this side of the veil. For the very best thinkers, like Mahomed Rasul Allah (Peace Be on Him), have opined that "the development of a man's faculties is really the starting point towards an immeasurable wider vista of the realms to be traversed opening out after death when the soul is liberated and assumes another body in Paradise in accordance with past deeds; similarly those who have wasted their opportunity in this life shall under the law which makes every man taste of what he has done be subjected to a course of treatment till the effect of their poisonings be nullified after which they are fit again to start on to the great goal, God's Mercy." This in the language of the spiritualists is expressed in the following quotation: "The same constructive ability as must in the long course of evolution have succeeded in producing the visible organism by arranging particles of matter seems able to continue its task under the new conditions and can construct another new body or mode of manifestation out of such substance as is there available; the ether it may hypothetically he supposed to be, a body not unlike the body it had here."

Writing on the exteriorisation of personality, Fournier D'Albe says that "the observed stability of our body, its constancy of outline, is due to the play of imponderable forces vast in comparison with the size of the particles on which they act. on this view this body is a kind of mist from which there is a possibility of extracting a finer kind of mist and doing so in a short time and repeatedly with a nearly permanent possibility of restoring it to its former place; and this is herein significant that the force of cohesion which keeps the body together is almost certainly of electrostatic origin."

We can understand this better when we recognise that man is but an aggregation of many thoughts each thought a mist; the dead are only the mist separated from the body, but the term mist must not be understood an unity but rather a multiplicity of very unstable composition, and, look you, a multiplicity that still grows, decays, reforms, continues to be of the same material, namely, of thoughts. Not all these thoughts are forms; many are inchoate, they are incomplete in form; others are mere velocities, powers, yearnings, what the Bhagavad Gita calls in its language, Fires, Flames, Radiances, smokes, nights, luminosities, months, days, blacknesses, to denote the denizens of the realms beyond death of the physical.

Free intercourse with the realms of the dead was possible and is still possible; experiments continually being made by spiritualists are proving the possibility. Whether such free intercourse and intermingling of the living with the dead is advisable is more than the Hindu scriptures can say. Writing on the reappearances of the forms of the dead, a gifted author says: "The subjective form created through the desires and thoughts in connection with things of matter survives the death of the body; the pale copy of the man that was, his eidola, vegetates for a period of time but will, if left to itself, gradually fade out and disintegrate. Occasionally, however, these reclothe themselves out of the materials at hand which are found in the air and in the emanations of those present at seances and then become objective; but ordinarily they do not perceive us nor we them. But it is sinful to recall them, sinful to retard their progress by worrying them to repeat their past here."

According to the Rg Veda the dead go to that joy that Yama the pioneer discovered for them; a passage in the Shatapatha Brahamana XI.4.iv.2 says that the dead live in intercourse with Brahma (God). How then arose the idea of the rites to the manes, the rites other than mere invocations or worship? On which states the Buddhist: "The unsatisfied desire of beings that belong to a state of personal existence in the material world has a force, has creative impulse in itself so strong that it attracts as center a new Purpose drawing God back again to mundane life." We here tread on the theory of reincarnation, a theory that has not been accepted in the earlier writings and even where accepted has been considered to be optional and never compulsory as in latter writings.

The suggestion herein is that Thought can become dominant, can survive death, can rebuild again a body, can after death affect the world that it got out of; the suggestion is that such thoughts have to be treated with by the Karma Yogi, for the teaching is that such dominant Thoughts of the dead do seek help and punish us in the world if neglected. Hence the rites to the dead, the Pitr Kriyas, to the Fravshi of the Parsis. Incidentally, reflection would lead to a greater understanding of the universe of thought as existing beyond Time and circumstance (body).

All worship, all sacrifice, all religion began as has been seen in the History of Religions with the worship of the dead, either as our ancestors or as heroes or as sages; in China worship has been and is offered only to the ancestors; in the Turanian countries to the dead who have been interred in Samadhi (tombs or temples) and who are still living; in Egypt to the "dead" Pharaohs whose mummies reposed in pyramids, in undisturbed peace; in among the Aryas to the Pitrs, the father and mother, chiefly; for, as has been stated, it is not only now but for ever so long a time that the dead have become immortal memories for the dying who remained.

In the Indian doctrine, the dead have to be pleased by what has now become a small offering of sesame seeds (thila) and rice (akshatah) along with water in an act called tarpana (for pleasing). Almost all adult-males are to be found after their fathers' death offering this every New Moon day, after mid-day, to the ancestors and this rite called Pitr Kriya, of all the ordained rites, still survives other rites and hence is taken up for explanation.

Thilah stand for all the best that is in man, the best of his good thoughts, the best of his yogaic practices; as has been said the dead are not merely the personalities that were, but only fragments thereof; they are the still-to-be-fructified purposes and thoughts, good, bad, and indifferent that were of a deceased personality but now are disintegrating, or are remaking, or getting along, in another world that is still linked to us by ties of affection, each one fragment a make-up of thoughts that do form our thought environment. It is still, in this age too, seen from messages from beyond the veil that there are desires, there too, to communicate with us here and to make us respond; and the only way to establish such communication is via the thought world; good thoughts (thila), undying memories (akshatas) are to be sent up along with the desire to please (Tarpana). The "form" for the act is the offer of the sesame seeds and rice grains along with water, of which a handful; if the dead are those who have become recluses, the offering was of pure milk alone; for such did not want solace but mere kind remembrance, if at all. Yet, the Karma Yogi ought, of course, to remember the dead who have fed, who have inspired, who have educated us and are still doing so. What form this ancestor worship, as you may call it, should take depends on the metaphysic of the worshipper; on his spirituality rather, for in the act he is outpouring his self on in sacrifice, in the sacrifice of what is called "Pitr Yajna." In India this outpouring consists in feeding all and sundry relations and poor of the same caste on the anniversary day of the death of the deceased object; and this is actually soliciting the good thoughts of the many fed towards what remains of the old personality of the dead. And the ritual combines also the offer to the ancestors of the oblations of cooked rice and ghee into the Fire, specially invoked and consecrated by magick, as per tradition-honored ritual. Thoughts here are offered in generous sacrifice, (ahuti) in their collective (pinda) to the ancestors; to the ancestors; fire and water the destroyers and solvents of all things (actually they are the transmuters of thoughts from the inchoate to the actual) are asked to help in a generous conveyance of the good thoughts from man to what was man.

We think that the West does require some sort of rites to the dead other than "in memorium" masses for the soul and the keeping up the anniversary day of great men. We think that especially in spiritualist circles there should be greater consideration shown to the dead. All invocations should be made of the dead with reverence; the spirits called up should be assured that they are called up for their own sake primarily; is there any purpose remaining unfulfilled for them, is there anything we, the living, can do to meet the unfulfilled wishes of the dead we invoke? As they sit in silent circles in the dark, this may be the attitude of the enquirers, and such an attitude will remove much of the stigma that is gradually sullying the good work done by the spiritualists.

Whether the Western Karma Yogin should adopt the entire Hindu rituals of the dead Srardhas (anniversary rituals) is another matter; what we can state is that the additional charity of the offer of free food to the poor on anniversary days will not be a wrong act anywhere in the world; nor will the Hindu injunction to regard anniversary days as holy like unto the Sabbath be without value for adoption. But the puzzle is that Occidentals (to whom the personality of the dead remains unchanged) have no rites for the dead of an anniversary ritual nature whereas the Orientals, who believe in the change of the personality after death, continue to behave as if the personality had been continuing on unchanged even after death.

This articles is from a series in eleven lesson in Karma Yoga, From "The Yoga Philosophy of Thought Use" and "The Yogin Doctrine of Work"

ÒThe kingdom of Thought is truly yours; you can select values, reject vanities, eliminate dross, live as the uncrowned and crowned Emperors have lived in the utmost independance, ordering for yourself Happiness, distributing the flowing surpluses thereof to all around you.Ó

Chicago, U.S.A., Yogi Publication Society, 1928

See - Yoga Lessons - for the other Yoga Lessons I - XI