The Christening of Karma
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The Christening of Karma The Secret of Evolution By Geddes MacGregor © Copyright by Geddes MacGregor, 1984. Published in 1984 by The Theosophical Publishing House Wheaton, III. U.S.A. Contents 1 Evolution and Karma 1 2 Evolution as Universal 9 3 The Moral Dimension of Evolution 25 4 Grace Surprises 40 5 The Christening of Karma 52 6 Karma and Freedom 63 7 Evolution, Karma, and Rebirth 70 8 Human Sexuality and Evolution 80 9 Stages in Spiritual Development 93 10 Our Kinship with All Forms of Life 104 11 Evolution and God 115 12 Evolution and the ʺBlessed Assuranceʺ 125 13 Karma, Evolution, and Destiny 134 Chapter One Evolution and Karma Evolution is not a force but a process: not a cause but a law. John Morley. On Compromise What avails it to fight with the eternal laws of mind, which adjust the relation of all persons to each other, by the mathematical measure of their havings and beings? Emerson. Spiritual Laws In the course of my teaching and lecturing in universities and other institutions, I have discovered during the past decade or more an increasing interest in the concept of karma. It comes out in discussion at the slightest provocation and indeed sometimes with no detectable provocation at all. It is not always well understood. Too often it is so ill understood as to be taken for a kind of fatalism, which it certainly is not, being on the contrary a freewill doctrine, although it is much else besides. Yet, understood well or badly, it commands a lively interest, not least on the part of young people who twenty years ago would not have generally found it so challenging to their outlook on life. The connection of karma with evolutionary thought is not by any means always immediately apparent to those whom the concept of karma so fascinates. Yet the connection is crucial if karma is to be seen as a deeply spiritual principle at the heart of all things. To those who understand and accept the karmic principle, biological evolution, as Darwin and others have expounded it, is only a pointer to a far more fundamental evolutionary principle in the very mind of God. Most Christians, though by no means all, have come to see no incompatibility between biological evolution and the Bible. Many, however, see the karmic principle as alien to both the Bible and the Church. True, the Sanskrit word karma is unfamiliar, but the concept, as we shall abundantly see, is at the root of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. I wish to argue, in this book that evolution and karma can be christened at the same font. Nor will they have been the first heretical-sounding ideas to have been so received. The Christian Church’s debt to heretics is incalculably great. The theory of Nicholas Copernicus (1473–1543), the father of modern astronomy, that the sun does not move round the earth but the earth round the sun, was supported by the investigations of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). In February 1616 the consulting theologians of Rome’s Holy 1 Office condemned the Copernican theory as heretical, since it appeared to be incompatible with certain biblical passages that refer to the sun’s rising and setting and even to the sun’s having stood still for a brief period at Joshua’s command (Joshua 10.12–14). Shortly after this ecclesiastical condemnation, Galileo was ordered not “to hold teach or defend” the condemned proposition that the earth moves round the sun. For some years Galileo remained silent on the subject, but eventually the publication of his now famous Dialogo in 1630 led to his being handed over to the Inquisition in 1633 and, under threat of torture, forced to recant. He was condemned to imprisonment but released after some months and allowed to return home to Florence. The ban on the Copernican theory, which had caused the work of Copernicus to be put on the Index of Prohibited Books (that is, books that the faithful are not permitted to read without specific permission) was not removed till 1787, eleven years after the American Declaration of Independence. Surely, no one today would see the now well-established view that the sun is at the center of the solar system and that the earth moves in orbit round it as in any way irreconcilable to the Bible, or in any sense detrimental either to the Christian or to any other religious faith. Not even the most literalistic of Bible readers would find any ground for resisting the acceptance of this basic tenet of modern astronomy or indeed see any need to oppose it in the interest of protecting or defending religious faith. On the contrary it is a view that is taken for granted as much by believers as by unbelievers. I know of no one with even the most elementary knowledge of astronomy who would feel the slightest need to disown this basic astronomical view as incompatible with anything in the Bible. Most educated believers, indeed, would see this along with much else in modern astronomy as intensifying and enriching their religious faith rather than in any way threatening or impoverishing it. The “natural” sciences (physics, chemistry, and biology, for example) are by no means a threat to religious truth. In the Middle Ages, when the Arab world was the focus of much scientific and mathematical inquiry and discovery, the truths disclosed seemed at first sight incompatible with the teaching of Islam as set forth in the Qur’ān. When, in the twelfth century, the discovery of Aristotle who represented “science” to the medieval Christian mind, alarmed churchmen, the prospect of reconciling him with the Bible looked at first dim indeed. In the following century, however, Thomas Aquinas not only reconciled much of Aristotle’s science with the Bible and the teaching of the Church but showed with skill and brilliance that Aristotelianism enhanced rather than diminished the spirituality of the Church’s treasure house. The marriage of “science and religion” in Thomas’s work was eminently successful in terms of his day. Although enormous advances have been made since then, both in scientific investigation and in understanding and appreciation of the message of the Bible and the 2 teaching of the Church, scholars now recognize the immense philosophical and theological acumen of Thomas and other medieval schoolmen and the light they shed on the intellectual problems of their time. They are no more to be despised for it (as for some centuries they were) than Christopher Columbus is to be disdained for having used the Santa Maria rather than a fast liner or a jumbo jet to cross the Atlantic. From the standpoint of a modern scientist, one of the most obvious handicaps of medieval thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus is that they knew nothing about biological evolution. This did not merely obscure to them one or another aspect of the range of the knowledge we have today; it distorted their knowledge at a level so radical that their ignorance of it affected virtually everything in their thought. When we go on to reflect that until the speculations of Kant in his General Natural History of the Heavens published in 1755, not only religious people but scientists with no religious axe to grind, took a very static view of the universe around them. Archbishop James Ussher (1581–1656), as is well known, fixed the date of the creation of the world at the year 4004 B.C. John Lightfoot (1602–1675) improved on this dating, having worked out not only the exact day but the hour. Friday, October 23, at 9 a.m. Even the great Isaac Newton (1642–1727), however, although he did propose in a private letter that the solar system could have evolved from a more primitive distribution of matter, seemed to see no need to pursue any such hypothesis. Kant was the first thinker to take the idea of cosmic evolution seriously; but his work on this subject attracted little attention. Pierre Simon. Marquis de Laplace, in his Exposition du système du monde, published in 1796, proposed the nebular hypothesis, and other scientists suggested various theories that also implied some sort of evolutionary notion. The Scottish Lord Monboddo (1714–1799) in his The Origin and Progress of Language, published in 1773, entertained a remarkably interesting evolutionary speculation that brought man into the same species as the orang-outang; but his work on this subject found little or no acceptance among his contemporaries. Among biologists, Jean-Baptiste de Monet the Chevalier de Lamarck (1744–1829), may be accounted the first to take a clearly evolutionary view of the origin of man. His work was overshadowed by that of Charles Darwin, whose extremely influential book, The Origin of Species, published in 1859, soon revolutionized biological thought throughout the civilized world. Opposition to Darwin came swiftly and bearing a religious banner. At a meeting of the British Association on June 30, 1860, the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, whose persuasive oratory had earned for him the nickname “Soapy Sam,” attacked it in the name of Christianity. That now notorious incident occurred some sixty-five years before the now even more notorious Scopes trial in Tennessee. 3 As time went on, however, thoughtful believers began to see that evolution could mean far more than having a simian ancestry and repudiating the literal interpretation of the Genesis account of creation as a six-day opus. They saw, too, that although Darwin, as a scientist, simply reported his findings and that these findings suggested the lack of any divine activity in the process of evolution, there was no more reason to repudiate religious belief on account of Darwin than there had been to reject it some centuries earlier on account of Galileo.