Thursday 4 April 2013

Every individual inherits karmic patterns


Karma is not merely a law of inheriting previous impressions or of self reproduction or of moral retributive justice but is also something much larger. It is an eternal law which tends to adjust the individual operation to the universal operation. It works for the universe as a whole to keep its innumerable units in harmony with its own integral balance. Retribution merely falls inside this activity as a small concentric circle falls inside a larger one. The results of each individual’s existence, his storehouse of thoughts and actions have to be controlled so that they shall in the end be in accordance with the cosmos itself. Every part is bound to the whole. Everything thus tends to ultimate rightness. It is indeed comforting to perceive that the universe has such significant equilibrium at its secret core.
A person’s freedom from or imprisonment in matter, therefore is dependent on one’s motivating ideas. Within the framework of the Law of Cause and Effect one creates one’s own destiny, works out in time one’s own salvation and wins one’s way to the freedom of immortality.
The karmic pattern that is inherited by each individual, therefore is the governing factor in the process of rebirth. It determines when one will be born, in what kind of a body, under what circumstances, who the parents will be, with whom there will be close relationships, what teachers, friends there will be a possibility of meeting.
Each condition brings further self-knowledge, releasing some fragment of the divine potential. No single life of an individual is isolated from his other lives. Each life is the child of all the preceding lives on earth and the parent of those that follow it.
Realms of life after death
If one were to study the human body and desire to understand the working of its various systems, one needs to classify each system into the various organs it is composed of and study in detail the structure and functions of each organ to come to a full understanding of the system.
Only by such an analysis can the complicated phenomenon of life activity in the human body be understood. Similarly to gain a comprehensive knowledge of the regions or realms of life after death one needs to study in detail the nature and activity of each of these planes of life after death. There are seven such planes or realms of life - Adi, Anupadic, atmic, buddhic, mental (consisting of causal and lower mental), astral and the physical plane.
Planes of life after death
In the life on the other side, there are no tears, no sighs and one gets the opportunity to realise oneself to one’s full perfection. Adi means first; the Adi plane refers to the first cause, the divine light, the Father or the Creator. It is from this plane that the forming of the other realms and further creative activity takes place.
Next come the Monads or units of consciousness, for whose evolution in matter the field of a universe is prepared. These units of consciousness are generated within the divine life on the Adi Plane before the field for their evolution is formed. Thus many arise in the one by that act of will of the divine life, the first cause or God on the Adi plane.
The Monads are described as sparks of the Supreme Flame. As is written in the Scriptures - ‘I sense one Flame, O Gurudeva (or Master/Spiritual Guide); I see countless undetached sparks shining in it.
The Flame is the Lord or Ishwara in His manifestation as the first cause on the Adi plane and the undetached sparks are the Monads. A Monad may thus be defined as a fragment of the divine life, separated off as an individual entity by the rarest film of matter. The matter is so rare that, while it gives a separate form to each, it offers no obstacle to the free intercommunication of a life with surrounding similar lives.
The article is taken from the book, “Life Beyond Death” by Anil Sharma

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