The Secret Doctrine on Karma and Rebirths

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's Second Proposition Series · 7 pages

Seven pages reproducing The Secret Doctrine, volume II pages 302-6, under the running heading "immutable is the law of Karma and rebirths."

The passage answers a question it says is asked constantly and answered confusedly. Those raised in the Christian belief that God creates a new soul for every newborn infant ask whether the number of incarnating monads on earth must then be limited — and are answered in the affirmative. The reasoning is worked out rather than asserted: however countless the monads seem, and even allowing for several births and deaths every second of time in the aeons since the second race, there must still be a limit, because Karma-Nemesis adjusts everything harmoniously and the arrival of new monads therefore ceased as soon as humanity reached its full physical development. The date given for that is specific — no fresh monads have incarnated since the middle point of the Atlanteans. Two further considerations are offered as confirmation. Except in the case of young children and of lives violently cut short by accident, no spiritual entity can reincarnate before a period of many centuries has elapsed, and those gaps alone show the number to be finite; and a reasonable time must be left to the other animals for their own evolutionary progress. From this the passage draws the conclusion that gives it its place in the section: that many of us are now working off the effects of evil karmic causes produced in Atlantean bodies, and that the law of karma is inextricably interwoven with that of reincarnation.

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