Theos-Talk Archives (April 1997 Message tl00104)

>OK, time for me to delurk,

Welcome, Lynn!  Boy, I sound like the AOL intro. when you first log in.

>no longer able to resist participating in such a
>fascinating thread. ;-D

Follow your impulses.

>Thus a highly evolved
>soul (e.g., Martin Luther King) could easily incarnate into one of the
><groan> "lesser evolved" races to perform a given task and this probably
>happens more often than we may think.

"Lesser evolved" races seem too harsh to describe a whole race.  Also, all
this talk about evolution, what does it mean?  Does it mean genetic coding.
Does it mean mental capacity?  Or does it mean culturally?  Even an
inclusion of a whole race is too general.  An Asian person in the
industrialized section of a country is different from an Asian person in a
tribal section of a country.  If you are referring to a specific group that
seem to be disadvantaged, maybe the best thing is to describe a specific
group of a specific society, and perhaps realize how they got that way
historically.

>I agree that the frequency of purely lust-driven unions is attracting a large
>number of lesser evolved souls prematurely into incarnation and that it does
>cause problems.

Maybe theosophists have this need to try to figure out everything in terms
of soul.  However, the answer is right in front of our face.  Suppose
you're in a group that was enslaved or immigrated from another country.
Suppose the only option for you is to live in the very poor section of
town, where there is a lot of violence and meanness.  Suppose you are
finally conditioned to realize that the safest route is to be cold to
others, since befriending a person may lead to trouble if that person is a
troublesome sort (and there are plenty of those in a bad neighborhood).
And suppose you see that humanity is evil, that nobody cares about you,
that no matter how hard you try, you will have days that you starve and
daily you will fear for your life, that the government or those that could
help you will not help, and that others look at you with disdain.  And
suppose this leads some of you to escape through drugs and alcohol, and
some of you to empower yourselves by joining gangs.  And suppose drugs and
alcohol lead you to violent behavior, to not care about promiscuity, to not
care about taking care of yourself, to not care about your children.
Suppose your children grows up knowing all of that.  Suppose your children
attends a school where promiscuity is a badge, where violence is the norm,
where teaching resources are not available, and where teachers are not
enthusiastic.  And suppose your children grows up not learning how to read
and write, not able to make much money, has pregnancies through teen
promiscuity, and addicted to drugs.  Suppose that cycle continues.  Add
that to every deviancy associated with despair.

I say all average human beings will not be able to transcend such an
environment without help.  Once in a while I hear of one who has.  However,
that is such a rarity that I see the same person on all the talk shows
telling his heart-wrenching story regarding his addicted mother, his jailed
father, his stepfather who stole all their belongings, and his being a
surrogate father to his own brother.  Maybe it has to do with very advanced
souls who can transcend such things.  But if you're going to talk about a
group of souls, I say most souls will not be able to overcome such
adversity.  We are all very average.  Just remember that all of us able to
read and write has the advantage over those who were never in an
environment to promote intellectual investigations.  Thus, if adversity
suddenly hits us, we can probably deal with it with some grace.

>I also feel that sexual promiscuity is a behavior that
>transcends races. However, I feel that humanity as a whole has a group karma
>and the AIDS epidemic may be a karmic effect of all of the manic coupling
>that had been going on and is tending to correct the situation by reducing
>the number of purely lust-driven unions occuring (not by the illness and
>death of those suffering from AIDS, but by the overall reduction in
>"thoughtless" sex and promiscuity.) I don't mean this statement to indicate
>any lack of compassion on my part or to make judgements about the karma of
>individual AIDS victims, BTW. I'm speaking only of humanity as a whole and
>group karma. Nor do I mean "punishment" by "karma", but simply "cause and
>effect".

What about the hemophiliacs, people with blood transfusions, etc.  What is
the meaning of karma to them?  What is their lesson?  I know you're saying
group karma.  But if you are going to say that lustful sex causes AIDS,
then you have to say that having a blood transfusion causes AIDS.  If we
shouldn't have lustful sex because of AIDS, then we shouldn't have blood
transfusions.

>I think the major source of the gnarliness of this whole issue is that we are
>trying to make sense of it at the level of the personality from where we
>cannot see of the relevant karmic relationships/necessities nor determine the
>actual point in evolution of all of the souls involved.

Since we can't see the unseen, but just theorize.  How about looking at
what we can see?  Seeing what we can see is a lot closer to the situation
than theorize something to pieces.  It's as I was taught in life drawing,
look at your subject, don't look at the paper.

Thoa