by Gina Cerminara

Karma operates in such a way, it seems, that our every act and thought is exactly repaid in its own coin and in its own realm. If we do harm to another, physically or psychologically, we later suffer exactly the same kind of pain that we caused; if we haughtily feel ourselves superior to other people and treat them condescendingly, we may later find this attitude objectified by the humiliation of a body that is too tall or abnormally short—or we may find ourselves one day the member of a minority group that is despised by the majority; if we do injustices to groups of people, we are likely to suffer injustices later through the agency of comparable groups of people. Christ’s command to do unto others as you would have others do unto you is not merely a sentimental exhortation, but actually the elliptical statement of a mathematical equation and a law of psychodynamics.

Let us consider, for example, the Cayce reading on an investment counselor of New York City, who was born in a town in southern France. It reads in part as follows:

“The entity was in the land . . . when the children of promise passed through the lands that they were forbidden to pass through, except with permission. The entity was among the descendants of Esau. . . . The name was Jared. The entity took advantage of a group. Hence expect a group to take advantage of you! For what you measure must be measured to you again; you must pay every whit of what you measure to others. And this applies in the future as well as in the past. Do you wonder that your life is such a mess?”

It is not specifically indicated here that there was any racial element in the situation, though there might well have been. But the case is instructive and highly relevant to the present discussion nonetheless. The entity took advantage of a group. Hence expect a group to take advantage of you! For what you measure must be measured to you again. . . .

Another dramatic case of the same type is that of a Jewish woman of Hungarian origin, aged fifty-five, who was, at the time of her Cayce reading, working in a shop in New York City. She was very unhappy in her job; the hours were long; the pay inadequate to her need; the work distasteful to her; yet there seemed no escape from it. An interesting explanation for this relentless situation appears in the account of her preceding incarnation, in an early period of American history.

“Then the entity, in the name of Rachel Fould, was engaged in activities with groups who prepared and preserved furs, and was the companion of one in authority.

“In this experience the entity used her position not wisely or too well. Though she had material blessings, she did not show any consideration to those who labored long hours, as to their surroundings. It brought material satisfaction. But did it bring contentment or joy?

“You are reaping in the present experience this phase of what was sown. Do not think that the Lord has brought it upon you. For what you sow, you reap.”

Once again there would seem to be no element of race prejudice or injustice in this situation. But once again we see an illustration of the fact that if an individual manifests grasping, callous, heartless qualities with respect to groups of people, he will someday receive exactly the same treatment in return.

The moral for all of us is clear. If we discriminate against a man because of the pigmentation of his skin, if we refuse to give him an equal wage or equal opportunities for education, travel, beauty, and mere decent living standards, if we refuse to sit next to him on a public vehicle, if we humiliate him in a thousand subtle and obvious ways so that he comes to cringe before us in our presence and loathe us for our smug arrogance in our absence, if we exploit or humiliate others who, by accident of history or the working out of karmic law belong to a racial group that is in a vulnerable position, the tables will be exactly turned on us someday. We likely shall someday, in some future civilization, find ourselves the member of some minority group, humiliated, rejected, ostracized, and despised. We shall likely bear the stigmata of our spiritual ugliness in some visible and unmistakable way, even as a black skin is today regarded in some places on the planet as the badge of exile.

It is entirely possible, of course, that some blacks of present-day America and South Africa are paying some karmic debt for their own intolerance or enslavement of others in the long-distant past. They may have been among those Atlanteans, for example, who, Cayce said, made slaves of large groups of people. This possibility is a plausible one, though it may not necessarily cover all cases.

We should remember that even though former mistreatment is likely to lead to future incarnation in troubled circumstances, the logic doesn’t necessarily work in reverse. Some souls may choose out of love to incarnate into a persecuted race in order to serve and help in the midst of trouble.

But it does seem highly inferable that many present-day blacks, and in fact members of other minority and persecuted races, are paying the price for their own intolerance, cruelty, and exploitation in past eras, whether in the black race or in some other. Yet we cannot assume that present difficulties are always a direct result of past life misdeeds, and thus cannot pass judgment or condemnation on any individual, race or group. The Cayce readings repeatedly stress the need for forgiveness and reconciliation.

A white southerner who violently detested blacks to the point of founding a society for the supremacy of the white race, was told in his life reading that this hatred stemmed from a lifetime when, as a captive oarsman, he was so brutally treated by a black overseer on one of Hannibal’s slave ships that he died of the brutality.

This is only one case, to be sure; yet it is quite conceivable that many another rabid anti-black agitator has suffered comparable experiences. But this is hardly a good excuse for such behavior and certainly does nothing toward healing the karmic memory.

Reincarnation may offer to members of persecuted groups and races of today one way of further understanding the difficulty they face. The key is to understand that we each build for ourselves, as souls, the experiences of a lifetime. A soul who now is persecuted may have been a persecutor in a previous lifetime. The current conditions serve to teach in a dramatic way, not to punish.

It is resentment and hatred directed toward those who exert supremacy that can keep this soul lesson from being learned. Surely an individual or a race which bears the burden of discrimination can work persistently and courageously for social justice. Real healing of these ancient human wrongs is possible when the victimized individuals combine a sense of soul responsibility for helping create the problem with an equally strong sense of determination to lovingly bring change. What a powerful force for change it would be if resentment against those who ignorantly exert supremacy were dissolved in the sudden realization that outer things serve inner purposes.

On the other hand, the possibility that the situation of the blacks or other minority groups is a karmic one does not justify those of us who belong to a dominant race in pursuing a flagrant course of injustice and discrimination. “For it must needs be that offenses come,” as quoted from the bible, “but woe to that man by whom offense cometh!” And again: “’Vengeance is mine!’ saith the Lord.”

If we substitute the word “Law” for “Lord” we find that the sentence even more clearly indicates how man cannot justify ill treatment to others on the grounds that they “deserve” it, karmically or otherwise. Ignorant men in their ignorance may become the instruments of the Law; wise men seek to function rather on the level of love and of the wisdom, letting life itself take care of the offenders.

There is an interesting anecdote about a man who took the ticket the ticket agent gave him, picked up his change, and walked away from the window. A few minutes later he returned and said to the clerk, “You gave me the wrong change.”

The clerk snapped, irritable: “It can’t be rectified now. You should have called my attention to it at the time you bought the ticket. Next, please.”

“Well,” replied the man, with a shrug and a faint smile. “I won’t worry about it then. You gave me ten dollars too much.” And he disappeared into the crowd.

The clerk’s rudeness, based on a sharp awareness only of his own convenience and self-interest, rebounded to his own disadvantage, and with embarrassing immediacy. Usually the rebound is not so immediate; but it is clear by the karmic principle that spiritual rudeness on the basis of race conceit and race prejudice must have a similar result. In race injustice, as in any other injustice, we ultimately shortchange only ourselves.

But there would seem to be another kind of karmic penalty for racial animosity, of an even more intimate kind than the painful one of outer circumstance. This penalty is psychosomatic, and it results from the fact that no constrictive emotion can be long entertained without having its constrictive effect upon the body. This has been clearly demonstrated by psychosomatic specialists. Hatred, bitterness, resentment can result in a wide gamut of bodily consequences: heart disease, hardening of the arteries, diseases of circulation to name but a few.

Though bodily consequences immediately accompany every emotion, their cumulative effect does not become visible sometimes until the lapse of considerable time. Ordinarily we see the consequences in one lifetime. But if, as we have seen, the body of the present is in intimate relationship with the past; if it projects certain elements of the unconscious, it becomes clear that the body we are born with can pay the penalty in lack of health and beauty for the hates and resentments of past lives. “All illness comes from sin,” Cayce remarks, uncompromisingly; and in cases as diverse as gallstones, arthritis, failing eyesight, tuberculosis, heart conditions, etc., etc, he has traced the origins to an emotional state such as resentment, hate, malice, jealousy, spite, selfishness.

“Those who hold animosities and grudges,” he remarks elsewhere, “are building for themselves that which they must later meet in confusion.”

It becomes clear then that a racial animosity, even if it results in no flagrant act of aggression, can ultimately damage its entertainer in a very serious way. Both the overdog and the underdog need to remember this. Smoldering resentment and hate against injustice can have just as serious consequences as the bullying fury of the unjust aggressor.

There is nothing more humanly natural than to hate another human being who has brutally raped our sister or wantonly destroyed our home and savings, all in the name of his racial superiority. Yet even this natural hatred is, in the long run, uneconomical. To hate a man because he has been stupid, cruel, wanton, and brutal is in a sense no more intelligent than for a high school student to hate a second grader because he does not understand algebra. We do not hate a stone for being a stone; we accept it as being in its appointed place in the hierarchy of nature. Similarly, it is wise, when suffering injustice at the hands of the callow, the shallow, and the brutish to remember that they, too, are stones—and on a rudimentary level of understanding on the evolutionary scale.

Still another consideration enters into the picture. Cayce clearly indicates that not only the thing we fear comes upon us, but also the thing we hate. Apparently hate is as powerful a magnetic force as love. One of two cases in point from the files concerns a man who in a past life, as a Mohammedan, hated the Catholic church, and in this life found himself very intimately involved both by birth and by marriage with Catholicism. The other case is that of a woman who in a previous lifetime bitterly hated drinking—and this time finds herself faced with alcoholism in the family.

Do you hate the blacks? Or the British? Or the Irish? Or the Puerto Ricans? Or the Jews? It would behoove you not to! Because if you do, you may find yourself one day either one of them, by birth, or intimately in their midst . . . dependent upon them . . . involved with them in such a way that you will come to see their virtues and their beauty, and to love them. Ultimately, you will have to achieve the capacity to love the beauty and the good in all peoples, in all races, in all species.

For in realty we are One. The mind may differentiate; but the mind is the slayer of the real. With the eyes of the spirit there is only Oneness, unspeakably beautiful, unspeakably a thing of wonder.

Excerpt from The World Within