Solidarity
Must Be Practiced
With
Due Care and Discernment
Carlos Cardoso
Aveline
In many a situation injustice is systemic and justice seems powerless. Centuries-old
anti-Semitism in the Western world is an example of this. There are others.
Individual injustices are
frequent in numerous social groups. Persecution for political or ethnical
reasons is common. Hypocrisy often deceives students of esoteric philosophy,
and some of them quietly justify blind hatred against Israel and disdain for
black people or indigenous people.
A few individuals descend to
the point of using the Law of Karma itself as an excuse to blame the victims
for the injustice they suffer.
Such pseudoesotericists wish
to imagine that an evil action done today against anyone must necessarily be
the karmic reaction “to some mistake previously made by the victim”. They
pretend to justify cowardly inaction by misinterpreting the popular tradition
according to which “everything that
happens, takes place according to the Law.”
The actual meaning of the
axiom is:
“Everything that happens takes
place according to the Law or will be corrected in due time, since evolution
occurs by trial, error and correction”.
The point is clarified In the Mahatma Letters:
“Nature has an antidote for
every poison and her laws a reward for every suffering. The butterfly devoured
by a bird becomes that bird, and the little bird killed by an animal goes into
a higher form. It is the blind law of necessity and the eternal fitness of
things …” [1]
Revenge is forbidden by the
laws of nature.
Karma is about lessons, not
about punishment.
Whatever mistakes anyone may
have made in past lives according to present speculation, a new injustice, put
in practice in the opposite direction, will not correct previous failures. Errors
do no justify one another. Two wrongs never make a right.
There are fair and educational
ways to cure and compensate errors. Justifying any on-going cruelty is a form
of bad karma.
Besides, there is no reason to
suppose that someone now suffering injustice “did something wrong in previous
lives and is now paying the price for it”.
In fact, new negative karma is
being sown every day. Undeserved pain is being inflicted to innocent people all
the time.
While writing about the need
for a “celestial rest” between two incarnations, Helena Blavatsky mentioned the
great amount of unmerited sufferings human beings are subject to.
She wrote:
“We say that man suffers so
much unmerited misery during his life, through the fault of others with whom he
is associated, or because of his environment, that he is surely entitled to
perfect rest and quiet, if not bliss, before taking up again the burden of
life.” [2]
Unmerited pain indeed.
And according to Blavatsky,
everyone must do -
“…His duty; that which his
conscience and higher nature suggests to him; but only after mature
deliberation. Justice consists in doing no injury to any living being; but
justice commands us also never to allow injury to be done to the many, or even
to one innocent person, by allowing the guilty one to go unchecked.” [3]
It is not a good idea,
therefore, to justify anti-Semitism and other forms of ill-will or organized
hatred, by blaming the victims. Solidary action against injustice must be
practiced with due care and discernment. Cicero establishes three conditions
for effective acts of kindness:
1) our action should do no injustice to others;
2) it must not be beyond our
means;
3) it should be proportionate
to the worthiness of the recipient. He who will be helped must deserve and make
good use of the support received. [4]
When asked in “The Key to
Theosophy” if moral elevation is the principal thing insisted upon in the
theosophical movement, Blavatsky answered:
“Undoubtedly! He who would be
a true Theosophist must bring himself to live as one.” [5]
The citizen of good will is a brother of those who are unjustly attacked. Instead of making abusive speculations about the past karma of individuals or nations who suffer blind hate, he seeks to establish balanced human relations, built on the basis of mutual respect.
NOTES:
[1] From Letter 10,
page 56 in “The Mahatma Letters”.
[2] See in the
associated websites “The Key to Theosophy”, by Helena
Blavatsky, Section Two, p. 35.
[3] Section XII, p.
251 at “The Key to Theosophy”, by
Helena Blavatsky.
[4] “De Oficiis” (On Duty), Cicero,
translated by Walter Miller, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, first published in 1913, 2005
edition, 403 pp., see pp. 47-49.
[5] “The Key to Theosophy”, p. 52.
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The above text was
published as an independent item in the associated websites on 18 February
2020. An initial version of it is part of the July 2019 edition of “The
Aquarian Theosophist”, pp. 1-2.
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