Chapter XIII (part 6)

These chains of events go on continuously, inter-weaving among themselves, entering one into another, sometimes hidden from our eyes, and sometimes visible. I find an admirable description of this idea in the chapter on "Karma" in Light on the Path by Mabel Collins. 1 Consider with me that the individual existence is a rope which stretches from the infinite to the infinite, and has no end and no commencement, neither is it capable of being broken. This rope is formed of innumerable fine threads, which, lying closely together, form its thickness. . . . and remember that the threads are living—are like electric wires; more, are like quivering nerves. . . . But eventually the long strands, the living threads which in their unbroken continuity form the individual, pass out of the shadow into the shine. . . . This illustration presents but a small portion—a single side of the truth: it is less than a fragment. Yet dwell on it; by its aid you may be led to perceive more. What it is necessary first to understand is not that the future is formed by any separate acts of the present, but that the whole of the future is in unbroken continuity with the present, as the present is with the past. In the plane, from one point of view, the illustration of the rope is correct. The passages quoted show us that the idea of karma, developed in remote antiquity by Hindu philosophy, embodies the idea of the unbroken consecutiveness of phenomena. Each phenomenon, no matter how insignificant, is a link of an infinite and unbroken chain, p. 152 extending from the past into the future , passing from one sphere into another, sometimes manifesting as physical phenomena, sometimes hiding in the phenomena of consciousness. If we regard karma from the standpoint of our theory of time and space of many dimensions, then the connection between distant events will cease to be wonderful and incomprehensible. If events most distant from one another in relation to time touch one another in the fourth dimension , this means that they are proceeding simultaneously as cause and effect, and the walls dividing them are just an illusion which our weak intellect cannot conquer. Things are united, not by time, but by an inner connection, an inner correlation. And time cannot separate those things which are inwardly near, following one from another. Certain other properties of these things force us to think of them as being separated by the ocean of time. But we know that this ocean does not exist in reality and we begin to understand how and why the events of one millennium can directly influence the events of another millennium. The hidden activity of events becomes comprehensible to us. We understand that the events must become hidden in order to preserve for us the illusion of time. We know this—know that the events of today were the ideas and feelings of yesterday—and that the events of tomorrow are lying in someone's irritation, in someone's hunger, in someone's suffering, and possibly still more in someone's imagination, in someone's fantasy, in someone's dreams. We know all this, yet nevertheless our "positive" science obstinately seeks to establish correlations between visible phenomena only, i.e., to regard each visible or physical phenomenon as the effect of some other physical phenomenon only , which is also visible. This tendency to regard everything upon one plane, the unwillingness to recognize anything outside of that plane, horribly narrows our view of life, prevents our grasping it in its entirety—and taken in conjunction with the materialistic attempts to account for the higher as a function of the lower , appears as the principal impediment to the development of our knowledge, the chief cause of the dissatisfaction with science, the complaints about the bankruptcy of science, and its actual bankruptcy in many of its relations. The dissatisfaction with science is perfectly well grounded, and the complaints about its insolvency are entirely just, because science p.