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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