One is one’s own judge and executor, and one’s own bestower of rewards. A man’s conscience, when allowed to speak clearly and forcibly, is the most severe judge that exists. One finds oneself unable to escape from the judgement of conscience, and one leads oneself to one’s rewards or punishments. Such is the poetic justice of nature, which far exceeds any concept of man in his religious speculations.
There are two great principles at work in the matter of karmic law, affecting the conditions of rebirth. The first principle is that the prevailing desires, aspirations, likes and dislikes, love and hatred, attractions and repulsions etc press one into conditions in which these characteristics may have a favourable environment for development.
The second principle is the urge of the unfolding spirit, which urges forward towards fuller expression exerting a pressure upon the soul awaiting rebirth. This causes it to seek higher environments and conditions than its desires and aspirations. These two apparently conflicting (yet actually harmonious) principles, acting and reacting upon each other, determine the conditions of rebirth and have a very material effect upon the karmic law. One’s life is largely a conflict between these two forces, the one tending to hold one to the present conditions resulting from past lives, and the other ever at work to uplift and elevate one to greater heights. Like a bee collecting honey from every flower, one collects the nectar of moral qualities and consciousness from every terrestrial personality until one unites all these qualities in oneself and becomes a perfect being.
Every earth life is an opportunity, carefully calculated, for such development as is most needed by the individual; a failure to use that opportunity means the trouble and delay of another similar incarnation, and suffering probably aggravated by the additional karma incurred.
The coils of karma, which entwine themselves around the wrongdoer, are primarily there as a natural consequence of one’s own acts, not as a fate of punishment. Time is educating and developing one to perceive the right. When one has the humility to face the responsibility for one’s own past errors, one may see how many of one’s troubles are self-earned. Where one cannot trace the cause to one’s present personality, one must believe it to lie in one’s previous ones.