To Light a Thousand Lamps - The Theosophical Society

Karma / 67
may not be so at all. Is it not conceivable, for example, that
a returning entity — for we are primarily spirit-souls, not
bodies — could be far enough advanced interiorly to
‘‘choose’’ the karma of severe deprivation in order to gain a
profound empathy with all who su¤er? Is it not also possible
that a reincarnating ego, in need of temporary respite
from certain mental and emotional pressures, selects a ‘‘retarded’’
vehicle for an incarnation? Again, it could be that
cruelty or selfishness had been so ingrained in the character
that the surest means of removing the warp is to take birth
in an impaired body so that empathy and compassion might
be burned deep into the soul and the nature gentled.
‘‘Judge not that ye be not judged’’ — only one able to
read the spiritual history of an individual would be able to
determine just what lines of karma had been traced in lives
long gone that culminated in the precise conditions which
the reincarnating ego now finds itself handling — or not
handling — in this life. All of us have been weaving grandeur
and baseness into the tapestry of our soul; but when we
intuit, as many do, that we are linked with our divine parent
and that whatever we experience of joy or pain is an intrinsic
part of our destiny that we have been building for cycles
beyond number, we know that there is a fitness and a beauty
in even the most heartrending of circumstances.
A letter typewritten with a mouth-stick by a friend, who
from birth has weathered the trauma of severe disablement,
bears this out. Viola Henne earns her living as an artist,
and devotes what time and energy she can to working with
children and young adults who are more incapacitated than
she is. Viola is not concerned with what they can’t do; she