Grace and the Law of Karma (HH 199)

There is a law of Karma that seems to chase us beyond the pyre and the grave. Our temporary release from an earthly body is not the end of release from the law of Karma. We are as it were, caught up in a wheel that moves incessantly and carries us in its whirl. And yet there is Grace. This is our hope of redemption from the Law that is binding even upon the gods. Today we share the Mother’s revelations on this aspect of death and after-life.

Words of the Mother

But people are so ignorant! They make such a fuss over death, as if it were the end – this word ‘death’ is so absurd! I see it as simply passing from one house into another or from one room to another; you take one simple step, you cross the threshold, and there you are on the other side – and then you come back….

But it’s simply that – you take a step, and you enter another room. And when you live in your soul there is a continuity, because the soul remembers, it keeps the whole memory; it remembers all occurrences, even outer occurrences, all the outer movements it has been associated with. So it’s a continuous, uninterrupted movement, here and there, from one room to another, from one house to another, from one life to another.

People are so ignorant! That’s what irritates those who have passed to the other side – people don’t understand, they shoo them away: ‘What does he want? Why does he bother me? He’s DEAD!’

June 24, 1961

* * *

Last time you said, “They are burned, or shut up in a box without air and light – fully conscious….”  But what should be done then? Should people wait, or what?

I have looked at this a great deal, but … socially, conventionally, it’s impossible – there’s nothing else to do. The living take their stand with the living, naturally. So the only thing I’ve seen is that, as always, there must be a grace associated with that state, and probably people see ONLY what they are able to see without being upset.

I know this because when the body became like that – it was more than three-quarters dead – and people were taking care of me, doing everything for me, I was fully conscious, FULLY, but I couldn’t…. I was like a dead person. And it wasn’t that I couldn’t move, but I couldn’t manifest anything – I didn’t want to! I was in a state of total bliss, and couldn’t have cared less about what was going to happen. Well, that’s what I think must happen to those who … who die in a state of grace – it’s true, some people die well and others don’t. It all depends on one’s state of consciousness.

If at death you withdraw from physical circumstances, from ordinary physical consciousness, and unite with the great universal Force, or the divine Presence, then all these little things…. It’s not that you’re not conscious of them – you are very conscious: conscious of what others are doing, conscious of everything, but … it’s not important.

But for those who are attached to people and things when they die, it must be a hellish torment.

October 16, 1962

* * *

The other morning I saw, and I was told very clearly that it was a karma’ to be worked out; so then I told you, but at the time I didn’t know what it was.

And I saw that with the new Power, the supramental power … That is something absolutely new … It used to be thought that nothing had the power to eliminate the consequences of karma and that only by exhausting it through a series of actions could its consequences be transformed … exhausted, eliminated. But I KNOW that with the supramental power it can be done without following all the steps of the process.

In any event, one point is clear: it is something that happened in India, and the origin of the karma and the remedy of the karma go together. And it has to do with this initiation you received in Rameswaram….

But what had I done in that life? … What did I do? WHAT?!?

Yes, that’s the point. I think I know, but I don’t want to say anything without being sure.
(silence)
It is good that it comes in stages.
(silence)
What is needed – what is needed is simply endurance, the capacity to hold on, which means to stay still within. Not to yield to … not to yield when you feel within yourself, ‘I can’t bear it.’

And it seems to me that it’s relatively easier than when you have to confront the thing all alone.

If you can … when the attack comes, if you can cling to something that knows, or to something in you that has had the experience, and if you can hold onto that memory, even if it is only a memory, and cling to that in spite of all that denies and revolts … Above all not … To keep your head as still as possible. And not follow the movement, not succumb to the vibration.

Because from what I have seen and from what I was told, I am sure that it is decisive, that what is offered to you is the possibility of a decisive victory, which means that it will no longer recur in the same way.

There is such an abyss between what one truly is and what we are that at times it is dizzying. But one must not let oneself become dizzy. One must not yield. One must remain like a rock until it passes.

November 20, 1958

* * *

This is how it works: the psychic being passes from one life to another, but there are cases in which the psychic incarnates in order to … to work out2 … to pass through a certain experience, to learn a certain thing, to develop a certain thing through a certain experience. And so in this life, in the life where the experience is to be made, it can happen (there may be more than one reason) that the soul does not come down accurately in the place it should have, some shift or other may occur, a set of contrary circumstances – this happens sometimes – and then the incarnation miscarries entirely and the soul leaves. But in other cases, the soul is simply placed in the impossibility of doing exactly what it wants and it finds itself swept away by … unfortunate circumstances. Not only unfortunate from an objective standpoint, but unfortunate for its own development, and then that creates in it the necessity to begin the experience all over again, and in much more difficult conditions.

And if – it can happen – if the second attempt also miscarries, if the conditions make the experience the soul is seeking still more difficult … for example, if one is in a body with an inadequate will or some distortion in the thought, or an egoism too … too hardened, and it ends in suicide, it is dreadful. I have seen this many times, it creates a dreadful karma that can be repeated for lifetimes on end before the soul can conquer it and manage to do what it wants. And each time, the conditions become more difficult, each time it requires a still greater effort. And people who know this say, ‘You cannot get out!’ In fact, it is this kind of desire to escape which pushes you into more foolish things3 that result in a still greater accumulation of difficulty. There are moments – moments and circumstances – when no one is there to help you, and then things become so … horrible, the circumstances become so abominable.

But if the soul has had but ONE call, but ONE contact with the Grace, then in your next life you are put in the conditions, once, whereby EVERYTHING can be swept away at one stroke. And at this present moment on earth, you cannot imagine the number of people I have met – that is, the number of souls – who had reached out towards this possibility with such an intensity – and they have all found themselves on my path.

At that point, sometimes a great courage is needed, sometimes a great endurance is needed, sometimes a true love is enough, sometimes, oh! if only faith were there, one thing, one tiny little thing is enough, and … everything can be swept away. I have done it often; there are times when I have failed. But more often than not I have been able to remove it. But then, what is needed is a great, stoical courage or a capacity to endure and to SEE IT THROUGH. The resistance (especially in cases of former suicide), the resistance to the temptation of renewing this stupidity creates a terrible formation. Or else this habit of fleeing when suffering comes: flee, flee, instead of … absorbing the difficulty, holding on.

But just this, a faith in the Grace, or an awareness of the Grace, or the intensity of the call, or else naturally the response – the response, the thing that opens, that breaks – the response to this marvelous love of the Grace.

It is difficult without a strong will; and above all, above all the capacity to resist the temptation, which was the fatal temptation throughout all one’s lives – because its power builds up. Each defeat gives it renewed force. But a tiny victory can dissolve it.

Oh, the most terrible of all is when one does not have the strength, the courage, something indomitable! How many times do they come to tell me, ‘I want to die, I want to flee, I want to die.’ – I say, ‘But die, then, die to yourself! No one is asking you to let your ego survive! Die to yourself since you want to die! Have that courage, the true courage, to die to your egoism.’

But because it is karma, one must, one must DO something oneself. Karma is the construction of the ego; the ego MUST DO something, everything cannot be done for it. This is it, THIS is the thing: karma is the result of the ego’s actions, and only when the ego abdicates is the karma dissolved. One can help it along, one can assist it, give it strength, bestow courage upon it, but the ego must then make use of it….

Generally, when the hour has come for a karma to be overcome and absorbed in the Grace, the image or the knowledge or the experience of the exact facts that are the origin of the karma come to me, and I can then perform … the cleansing action.

For the time being, it is not yet there.

Only, and this is what I wrote to you the other day which you did not understand: it is precisely at the most painful point, at the time when the suggestions are strongest, that one must hold on. Otherwise, it has always to be done all over again, always to be reconfronted. There comes a day, a moment, when it has to be done. And now, there is truly an opportunity on earth that is offered only once in thousands of years, a conscious help, with the necessary Power …

November 22, 1958

* * *

But there’s no more problem when the error no longer recurs! Isn’t it when the error recurs that it needs to be effaced?

When one does not repeat one’s past mistakes, the divine power, the power of the divine Grace, abolishes their consequences – their karma – in the being. But as long as mistakes are repeated nothing can be abolished, because one re-creates them at every minute. When a person has made a serious error, say, a serious mistake (it can be serious or not, but we are concerned primarily with the serious ones), such mistakes have their consequences in life, a karma which has to be exhausted. The divine Grace, if you call upon it, has the power to abolish that karma, to cut short the consequences – but the Grace can only do this when you, within yourself, don’t begin all over again, when the mistake committed is not renewed. The past can be completely purified and abolished, on condition that one does not keep making it into a perpetual present.

I have said it there in one sentence, but I didn’t want people to believe that they can continue making the same stupid blunder indefinitely and have the Grace indefinitely annul all the consequences. It isn’t like that! The past can be cleansed to the point where it has no effect of any kind on the future, but only on condition that you stop the wrong vibration in yourself, that you don’t reproduce the same vibration indefinitely.

June 2, 1961

* * *

(A visitor has written to Mother about her difficulties, saying she is the victim of a “collective karma.”)

Those karma stories….

I often wonder, very often, whether it helps people to know their karma. I don’t think it does.

I mean, if they themselves discover the experiences they had in their past life, then it’s part of a whole inner, psychic awakening, and very useful. But if some guru or other comes along and tells you, “Here, this was your karma….” I don’t think it’s useful, to put it mildly!

If you discover the line of a former life on your own, that’s different; it’s part of an inner, psychic awakening, and it’s very good. But I don’t think it’s helpful when someone sees something and comes and tells you, “You know, you have been this, you have done that….” I feel it makes things worse instead of better – it puts you back in touch with things you were in the process of eliminating.
 (silence)
This woman … a “collective karma”! What rubbish – absolute humbug.

It may be true for some people, but not for her. If I hadn’t seen her I might have been intrigued and tried to find out, but…. A collective karma…. Of course, there are all the links you have with people you’ve known in past lives; in that sense, yes, there is a collective karma! But really, people use such big words and big ideas for things that are actually quite natural.

Yet I found it helpful to have some understanding of what happened in my other lives.

Because you were here.

Because before you were told about your karma, I had already seen certain things about you and was trying to set you free – not from the thing itself, but from the tendency that remained in your nature. That, yes.

But S, for example, was completely, COMPLETELY free of the whole … (what shall I say?) what could be called the unhappy aspect of her karma – completely free. For I know the people around me and what they carry with them very well, and there was nothing – just one thing remained, the one part that was rather constructive, so I had left that totally intact. And when the events of her past life were revealed to her, I took the greatest care to destroy the revelation as it was being given. And I did it ruthlessly. You see, it was like dumping a load of mud on someone completely unsullied, and I didn’t let it happen (I couldn’t stop what entered through her physical brain, but inwardly … I utterly annihilated it). The only thing I left untouched was the constructive part of the bond that had existed between you two, and so when she met you, she…. That’s all I left, because it was good, pure, lovely – it was good. But all the rest…. And you saw how strongly I protested when I was told she had committed suicide. “No, no, no!” I said; even if somebody with perfect knowledge were to tell me so, I’d still say NO.

She is untainted by all that – pure – and I won’t stand for someone pure to be soiled. She was so much my child that after her death everything was carefully cleansed, arranged, put back in place, organized, purified. So she returned unblemished and pure, and I don’t want her soiled.

You see, a grace is actually working to drive those karmas away – sometimes far, far away – and it’s no good to call them back.

I have had dozens of similar examples.

In some instances, my work has been thoroughly mucked up, and I don’t like that. It happened again recently: K.’s sister came because she had lost her son – it had just occurred and he was still here (he hadn’t left yet). So I arranged everything, saw to the mother’s condition and so forth; I arranged it all nicely, very carefully keeping the son here and telling his mother he would shortly return in some family member. Everything was well organized.

But naturally that was against “the rules” – I make a habit of doing everything against the rules, otherwise there would be no point in my being here; the rules could just go on and on! So they went to see X. They shouldn’t have said anything, but they did. And that was that – all sorts of things were said and my work was completely mucked up.

So now it’s all going according to “rule,” because that’s the way it “has to” be…. I am not bothering with it any more.

Myself, I have learned a lot of rules I didn’t know before (thank God!) – the divine Grace saved me from that whole hodgepodge of rules about how this happens and how that can’t happen and how that must happen and how…. Oh, good Lord!… I saw things very simply, without a single rule in my brain, and so I did them just as simply, with no rules in my head – it worked very, very well, I didn’t run into any trouble. Things worked out quite naturally and simply. And if I was told, “That can’t be” – “Well, sorry,” I would say, “but it’s already done.”

That “can’t be”…. Sometimes it can!

Besides, if you remember the beginning of Savitri (I read it only recently, I hadn’t known it), in the second canto, speaking of Savitri, he says she has come (he puts it poetically, of course!) to (laughing) kick out all the rules – all the taboos, the rules, the fixed laws, all the closed doors, all the impossibilities – to undo it all.

I went one better; I didn’t even know the rules so I didn’t need to fight them! All I had to do was ignore them, so they didn’t exist – that was even better.

But now I have first to undo and then redo – a sheer waste of time.

In the lower mind there was a whole world of difficulties I was unaware of. In the vital I knew, because I’d had to do battle there – which was fine with me! Just imagine, this time I have been given a warrior as my vital being. A magnificent warrior, neither male nor female, and as tall as this room – he is splendid. I was so happy when I first saw him. “Well,” I thought, “that’s worth my while!”

Yes, there are battles galore there

February 3, 1962