Conceding this much, we must equally admit the possibility of moulding the future, of adjusting the will to the event which shall befall.  If the present moment can again intersect the stream of past conscious experience, it may equally do so with regard to the future.  This brings up the tremendous questions of free-will and fore-ordination.  Upon these the Oriental doctrines of karma and reincarnation cast the only light by which the reason consents to be guided.  As these doctrines are intimately related both to higher time and to trance revelations, some consideration of karma and reincarnation may appropriately find place here.

KARMA AND REINCARNATION

Karma is that self-adjusting force in human affairs which restores harmony disturbed by action.  It is the moral law of compensation, and by its operation produces all conditions of life, misery and happiness, birth, death, and re-birth; itself being both the cause and the effect of action.  Its operation is indicated in the phrase, “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

The essential idea of reincarnation is indicated in the following quotation from the Upanishads:  “And as a goldsmith, taking a piece of gold, turns it into another, newer, and more beautiful shape, so does this Self, having thrown off this body and dispelled all ignorance, make unto himself another and more beautiful shape.”

Reincarnation is the periodic “dip” of an immortal individual into materiality for the working out of karma, after an interval, long or short, spent under other conditions of existence.  These alternations constitute the broader and deeper diapason of human life, of which the change from waking to sleeping represents the lesser, and the momentary awareness and unawareness of the sense mechanism to stimulation, the least.

Thus a physical incarnation, in the broadest sense of the term, is the interval, long or short, of the immersion of consciousness in materiality.  Under fatigue, the cell life withdraws; that is, it ceases to respond to physical stimuli, and so passes out of incarnation.  When this occurs en masse there transpires that hiatus of the personal consciousness called sleep, and while sleep lasts the personality is out of incarnation.  After death—­in the interval between one life and the next—­the specific memories of the personality fade out as in sleep, or rather, become latent, leaving the soul, the permanent life-center, clear and colorless, a mysterious focus of spiritual forces and affinities (the seeds of karma) ready for another sowing in the world of men.  This center of consciousness is thereupon drawn to the newly forming body, the life environment of which will rightly and justly—­perhaps retributively—­bring the tendencies and characteristics of the conscious center into objectivity again.  Character is destiny, and character is self-created.  “All that we are is the result of what we have