THE LAW OF REAPING
The Law of Reaping Is Absolutely Valid
”The knowledge of the law of reaping shows us how we should face the trials of life and shape our future.”
The complete name of this law is “the law of sowing and reaping”. It is the law of cause and effect as it finds expression in the relations between all living beings. The law of reaping is a law subordinate to the fundamental law of restoration. Being ignorant of the laws of life we unfailingly make mistakes that violate the rights of other beings and disturb the harmony of the cosmos. The universal principle of responsibility says that since we are the authors of the disturbance, we must restore the harmony. Generally and at lower stages this is done when we are afflicted with the same kind of evil that we have caused. However, as our understanding of the laws awakens, possibilities open up for us to work off the debt, make it good through service.
The law of reaping is absolutely valid in all worlds and for all beings on all levels of development. It is valid for all activity. It is valid for the individual human being as well as for collectives of all kinds, for nations and for all mankind. Everything that happens are forces that become causes. These causes are woven together in immense numbers into an unsurveyable network of effects working changes that reach far into the future. Nobody escapes his responsibility. No kind of activity is free from responsibility: thoughts, feelings, manifestations of the will, motives, words, actions. Every consciousness expression is energy, therefore it is a cause.
The law of reaping is the manifestation of absolute and total justice. The justice of life is impersonal, matter-of-fact, incorruptible. Injustice of life is absolutely impossible. Only people are unjust to one another. Anyone who speaks about the “injustice of life” discloses his ignorance of the Law, unconsciously blasphemes the Law. Admittedly, the law of reaping appears to be cruel, hard, merciless to us. Then we have acted so ourselves in lives past. The law of reaping is hard to the hard and mild to the mild. However, nothing is unbearable if you just know the cause and see the end. The cause lies in the past and is bad sowing. And what is one short earthly existence compared to the millions of years of evolution? The law of reaping may wait however long. But the sowing must be reaped some time.
Lars Adelskogh, The Explanation, Section Eight, The Law of Reaping, www.hylozoik.se
The Law of Sowing and Reaping
”The Law of Reaping – Our Teacher in Life.”
”Be careful with what you think, with what you wish, with what you do.”
If man lives in accordance with the laws of life, his development will progress as rapidly as possible, without friction, harmoniously, with the highest possible degree of happiness. But every mistake as to the laws of life entails consequences calculated eventually to teach the individual to discover the laws and apply them right.
The law of reaping applies to thoughts, feelings, various kinds of motives, as well as to words and actions. The implacable law of justice rules life. It is us who have made life what it is. We have to incarnate until we have restored everything to what it was. We reap only what we in previous lives have thought, felt, said, and done. And we must experience that this has consequences. What you think that you become. What you wish that you receive. Everything you do to others is returned to you.
In the most profound sense, the law of reaping is an expression of the unity of life. Whatever we do for or against others we do for or against ourselves. Everything good or evil we have done in lives past is returned to us with the same effect. Whatever I complain about could not possibly have happened if I had not deserved it. All joy and happiness, pain and suffering that others have experienced through our doings ties us to them.
Until we have reached a higher stage of development, acquired a sufficient fund of experience of life, and developed our reason, we, in our great ignorance of life and injudiciousness, make hardly anything but mistakes in life, we inflict sufferings of all kinds on living beings, mostly by our thoughts.
According to the law of cause and effect, of sowing and reaping, we must ourselves experience everything good and evil we have done to unity (that is: all living beings) during thousands of incarnations. [PhS 2.39, The Involvations of the Causal Envelope] That will mostly be discomforts and sufferings, until we have learnt to live in harmony with the unyielding laws of life. Nobody may suffer without a just cause or more than what he has inflicted on unity himself.
Everything that happens is the result of past causes. What we have sown in the past is largely just the sowing of hatred. It is good for us that we must not immediately reap the evil we have thought, felt, said, and done in past lives. We generally reap in small portions. The further we develop, the more suffering we can stand. It is important to realize that suffering is not just an instalment but also has its immensely great compensation. For suffering hardens the individual to steel, gives him a deeper insight and power over his envelopes and circumstances.
Reaction according to the law of reaping may come in several ways. It may work mechanically, measure for measure. It may come with lightning speed or wait eons. It may be adapted so that we can learn from our mistakes. The evil we have done we may make good positively through service instead of negatively through suffering. If there is a possibility, we may reap in the mildest possible manner. Reaping is always teaching and test at the same time. Anyone who has entered unity and incarnates only to serve life will not sow any sowing for reaping. He instead contributes to blotting out collective reaping.
Our destiny is to a great extent due to the ways in which we reap our old bad sowing. Having a negative attitude to life we increase the inevitable discomforts of life and reap in the worst possible manner, namely negatively by suffering. Having a positive attitude to life we serve life, we further development, we make it easier for everybody to live, we receive possibilities to work positively, making good the evil we have done.
Anyone who has discovered the law of reaping, has no difficulty in subsequently finding the laws of freedom, unity, and self-realization. By sowing and reaping the individual acquires necessary experiences of life. He develops in life upon life, acquiring qualities and abilities. At the stage of culture his causal super-conscious becomes an instinct of life. Then he makes rapid progress.
Henry T. Laurency, Knowledge of Life One, The Law, The Law of Reaping,
Henry T. Laurency, The Philosopher’s Stone, Esoteric Life View, The Law of Reaping
www.laurency.com
The Law of Reaping and Suffering
”Whoever has attained the stage of culture has most of his suffering behind him. Whoever has definitively placed himself under the law of unity, can in future incarnations never more be put in insuperable difficulties.”
It is because of this ignorance of reality, life, and the laws of life that man in each new incarnation runs the risk of making any mistake whatsoever. Knowledge dispels ignorance but does not liberate us from bad reaping. The law of unity, the law of freedom, and the law of activation are the three laws that men must understand and apply. Anyone who does not want to apply the Law must take the consequences. Suffering arises when the self does not live in harmony with the laws of nature and laws of life. Suffering consists in the fact that we identify ourselves with whatever causes suffering. Suffering is the negative way of reaping a bad sowing. The positive way is making good by service.
Many people wonder what ill deeds they might have done, since they have to suffer so much. We have all, during tens of thousands of incarnations, committed all manner of infamies, countless misdeeds out of hatred. We have lived on the toil of others. We have helped to idiotize mankind. And then we believe ourselves free from responsibility of life? It is we that were world history! Besides, we need not study history. We need just look at the state of the world, all parts of the world, today: lying and hatred of all forms, inhumanity and irrationality, life ignorance and stupidity and deceit in everything.
The tendency to repulsion, tendency to separation, is hatred. It abolishes freedom, counteracts unity and development, sows a bad sowing. During our development at lower stages we have acquired countless qualities of repulsion. They must be replaced with those of attraction. Any division counteracts consciousness development.
Suffering is unavoidable in so far as it is reaping meted out from bad sowing. However, we can use our reason to lessen suffering considerably, and suffering also has its compensations. Suffering liberates and reveals, ennobles and raises, deepens and clarifies, rouses the power of understanding and sympathy. Suffering develops qualities such as patience, self-control, impassivity, endurance, heroism. “Be grateful that it is not worse.” So says the planetary hierarchy. And it means that the law of reaping is applied with the greatest possible leniency, even when it appears as bad as bad can be. It is a charitable deed that we are made oblivious to all the infamies we have done during our tens of thousands of incarnations at the lower stages of development. It may be that most of it has been reaped. But there is much remaining still, since the powers of reaping reckon with the fact that we, having reached the stages of culture, humanity, and ideality, shall voluntarily make good the evil we have done by serving all in all respects and so be spared suffering for it.
Only with love can the world be “saved”.
Some of the qualities of attraction that can be acquired at the higher emotional stage are enumerated below. Everyone may complete the list himself: admiration, affection, sympathy, simplicity, spontaneity, tolerance, kindness, gratitude, uprightness, sincerity, trustworthiness, courage, purposiveness, decision, staying power, trust in life, obedience to law, invulnerability, magnanimity. These enter into the twelve essential qualities, which the causal self must have acquired one hundred per cent before he can become an essential (46) self. Some of the qualities enumerated are described in classical literature and have been considered to characterize the humanist.
Having a knowledge of the laws of life we shall be able to arrange our future incarnations rationally so that we develop in the best way.
Henry T. Laurency, Knowledge of Life One, The Law, The Law of Reaping,
Henry T. Laurency, The Way of Man, The Second Self, The Law of Reaping
www.laurency.com
Collective Sowing and Reaping
”The law of reaping teaches us the common responsibility for all. The universal brotherhood of life appears in this, too.”
Not everything affecting the individual need be his personal reaping but may be part of collective reaping. We are responsible for the various collectives to which we belong. We have undeserved advantages from conditions over which we have no power. The same is true of disadvantages. We derive advantages from the wealth, culture, etc., of a nation. We must share the responsibility for the mistakes of our nation, class, family. Also mankind makes up a collective, and we must share in its good and bad sowing and reaping. Those individuals who are present when collective sowing is reaped always have their own sowing to reap.
As long as we have bad sowing to reap, the taking on of the sufferings of others will just be atonement for our own bad sowing. Anyone who has reaped his final individual reaping participates in the destruction of a gigantic thought-form, which has been built by the negative consciousness expressions of all during millions of years and which is daily reinforced with new elementals, potential forces, which will be discharged when opportunities present themselves.
We all share in the collective, are jointly responsible for all. Nobody exists for his own sake. “One for all and all for one” is the law of collective responsibility. We are all and always jointly responsible for what happens when we know of it. Mankind makes up a unity and each individual part is responsible for the totality.
One example of our common participation in human collective and individual reaping is the shortage of natural resources that will sooner or later be unavoidable when these riches have been wasted. Natural resources are not inexhaustible. The sowing of waste must become the reaping of shortage some time.
We are jointly responsible for allowing power to be abused, ignorance and incompetence to rule, people to be trodden underfoot, living beings to suffer unnecessarily, lies to be preached unchallengedly, wrong judgements to be passed, any kind of injustice to prevail without being criticized and corrected. Those who neglect to fight for truth and justice contribute by their passivity to the resignation of power to the enemies of truth, justice, evolution, and unity.
But anyone who applies all his energy to righting what is wrong counteracts the effects of the law of reaping. Omission becomes complicity, and life accepts no excuses. Nobody can “wash his hands of it” and disavow himself.
It is a serious mistake to allow evil to rule. It is man’s duty to resist evil. If we have not done everything to combat evil with all lawful means, then we are accessary to the rule of evil. What mankind can do it must do. And this in all respects.
As long as mankind is found at such a low stage of development that war has not been outlawed internationally, the state may demand of the individual that he participate in the defence of culture against the attacks of barbarism. If he refuses to do his share, he makes the collective burden heavier, not lighter. Instead of paying off a bad sowing, he sows a new bad sowing.
A man’s true greatness lies in his understanding of shared responsibility for everything that happens. Lack of responsibility is a proof of ignorance of the meaning and goal of life.
Henry T. Laurency, Knowledge of Life One, The Law, The Law of Reaping, www.laurency.com
Good Sowing
”He who gives will receive. That is a law of life. And the more lavishly we give our kindness and consideration, the richer our lives will be. In what manner we get back what we give is of minor importance.”
Good sowing is to apply the laws of life without friction. Good sowing is to cultivate the tendency to unity; to work at acquiring noble feelings and qualities, insight and understanding; to strive after self-realization.
Good sowing is to work to abolish social evils, to enhance understanding between people, to spread knowledge of the laws of life, to lessen suffering in the world, to defend freedom and right and the just cause of the weaker man. Good sowing is to bring children up in love, is to bear suffering heroically, is indifference to other people’s expressions of hatred, is to counteract the cult of appearances, lie, and hatred.
Very good sowing and the quickest liberation from egoism is to do what is right simply because it is right, without any thought of your own advantage or disadvantage, of gratitude or reaping; and also to assist those on higher levels instead of, as hitherto, counteracting them.
By systematically cultivating the feelings of joy, happiness, by being like sunbeams for other people, we increase happiness in the world and especially for those around us. “Nothing can brighten a grey and irritating life as much as just kindness.”
By thinking good of all people, on principle and without exceptions, we strengthen the best tendencies in everybody, and make life easier to live for all. This also has the result that we become invulnerable and find refuge with all. Only the speech that is true, benevolent, and helpful is good sowing.
By letting feelings of admiration, affection, sympathy reach out to more and more people you acquire the ability of always acting with love.
Good Reaping
”Having a knowledge of the laws of life we shall be able to arrange our future incarnations rationally so that we develop in the best way.”
It is a proof of our ignorance of the laws of life that we do not comprehend that the advantages that life affords us are good reaping. We think they are our natural rights. Then we accuse life when losing them. It is bad sowing not to use the good reaping according to the laws of life.
Good reaping is health, beauty, intelligence, talents, understanding, good friends, helpers, success: everything that life affords us without our efforts.
Good reaping includes the benefit of belonging to a civilized nation. There is a veritable competition for the places in the cultural families, for a suitable milieu to grow up in, for ennobling company (teachers, superiors, friends), for chances of acquiring knowledge and abilities, insight and understanding.
The best reaping can be said to include opportunities offered of rapid development through experiences promoting unity, and of being together with geniuses of life, artists in living, and self-realizers.
Power, glory, and wealth are good reaping only at higher stages. At lower stages, man in his ignorance and impotence can hardly avoid abusing these illusory advantages and thereby sow fresh bad sowing.
The amends of love can make good reaping out of bad sowing. Without a good reaping we shall never find happiness, however much we pursue it. We are happy in so far as we have made others happy.
Henry T. Laurency, The Philosopher’s Stone, Esoteric Life View, The Law of Reaping
Henry T. Laurency, Knowledge of Life One, The Law, The Law of Reaping,
www.laurency.com
Lars Adelskogh, The Explanation, Section Eight, The Law of Reaping,
www.hylozoik.seBad Sowing
”Bad sowing (individual and collective) is the greatest obstacle to development.”
All mistakes as to the laws of life are bad sowing which yields bad reaping. Bad sowings are, above all, expressions of hatred and egoism. All gossip, all moralism, all curiosity about the private lives of others belong there. We hurt with our thoughts and feelings, if we in an unkindly manner attend to other people’s faults, failings, defects, personal problems. “Energy follows thought” is a hylozoic axiom. Everything that consciousness observes is affected. And the energy involved reaches its defenceless target.
Abuse of power is a serious mistake as to the law of freedom and the law of unity. The law of reaping regulates this, too. The consequence is that you will be the victim of the humiliation and injustice of impotence. Knowledge is power, too. Abuse of knowledge leads to the loss of knowledge. If in this life you have received knowledge that has afforded a sovereign explanation of the riddle of life so that you may rest from your seeking, then you have a duty to spread the knowledge to others in a similar situation. Otherwise the knowledge will be lost to you in future lives
To speak and act against your better judgement, to side with the majority when you see that it is in the wrong, to be silent when you should speak out, is all very common in the age of mass man. The knowledge that this is wrong makes the bad sowing much worse.
Bad Reaping
”The way in which we bear our destiny in the present has a great effect on our character and our destiny for the future.”
Bad reaping is most things in life and everything that cannot be regarded as happiness; everything that harms us and displeases us and thus not just obvious misfortunes and sufferings. The law of reaping works individually, with extraordinary adaptation to everybody’s individual character and conditions. It takes the law of unity and the law of freedom into particular consideration. It works in everything and utilizes all opportunities to make it possible for us to pay off from the debt account. The higher the level a man reaches, the more the law considers the possibilities of modifying the effects of the law, dividing them overtime, allowing him to make good in other ways. However, all sowing must be reaped.
You are born into the race, nation, and family that you deserve. You have the school-fellows, teachers, later on work, colleagues and chiefs that you shall have according to the law of reaping. The same is true of your life partner and friends. If these influences work so as to lower your level, then they are the outcomes of bad reaping; in the opposite case, of good reaping. All kinds of sufferings, defects, sorrows, disappointments, adversities, hindrances, losses and so on ad infinitum are bad reaping as is the lack of possibilities of acquiring knowledge and understanding, qualities and abilities.
The blows that others deal us are reaping and set-off. We are liberated from as much bad reaping as we have reaped. It is indifferent to the individual who is the agent of bad reaping. That much is “paid off” for ever, and that is the main thing.
The way in which we bear our destiny in the present has a great effect on our character and our destiny for the future. We should use our difficulties to develop good qualities (patience, staying power, etc.).
Bad reaping is by no means, as expounded, merely settlement of an old debt but always also implies an opportunity of liberation or hardening or service, learning a lesson, passing a test. The greater his understanding of life, the more the individual can use these opportunities for his development.
Henry T. Laurency, Knowledge of Life One, The Law, The Law of Reaping, www.laurency.com
Lars Adelskogh, The Explanation, Section Eight, The Law of Reaping, www.hylozoik.seAtonement
”The greatest contribution a man can make is to rally and unite, the greatest harm is to split and disunite.”
There are two paths to choose between in the matter of bad reaping from the past. The one is to suffer involuntarily the same evil as you have inflicted on other living beings. The other is to walk the path of voluntary redress, to pay off one’s debt by acts of love and a life of service. We can to a large extent choose whichever path we will walk. Redress to the collective by proclaiming the truth (the knowledge of reality) and by all doings that benefit lifts mankind.
When mankind has acquired common sense, then it will apply the laws of life. That is the only way of making good the evil we have done, avoid new mistakes, and make physical life a paradise.
We can be happy only if we have a positive attitude to life. If we have that attitude our lives will be rich. Being happy we make ourselves enormously easier to live with for those around us. Joy vitalizes, dispels sorrows and worries, affords a richer personal life, a greater fitness for life. With a happy, cheerful, dashing, vigorous mind we make life more joyous and the world better.
By bearing our destiny as the best one for us, with willingness to learn, humility, gratitude, heroism, we have learnt one of the secrets of life: to convert everything negative into positive. Another secret is to let the powers of higher worlds stream forth unhindered through our unconscious to everything and everybody in life.
The secretary of the planetary hierarchy, 45-self D.K.: “Watch with care your thoughts anent each other, and kill out at once all suspicion, all criticism, and seek to hold each other unwaveringly in the light of love. You have no idea of the potency of such an effort.” You help people more with love and understanding than with your intellect.
Unity or love is the one essential thing. The law of unity is the law that is incomparably the most important for man’s development, harmony, and happiness.
The decisive importance of unity appears in all seven laws of life. For they are universal and aim at unity. They concern the collective more than the individual. In the law of freedom lies everything that helps others to liberation, in the law of unity everything that helps others to feel sympathy and loyalty, in the law of development everything that helps others to develop, in the law of self everything that helps others to realize themselves, in the law of activation everything that helps others to think and act on their own. If something does not benefit all, then it is a mistake as to the laws of life. Evil and good largely coincide with what separates and unites people.
Faults and failings disappear automatically when the laws of life are applied and the quickest way to make it good is to strive after unity.
Henry T. Laurency, The Way of Man, The Second Self, The Law of Reaping
Henry T. Laurency, Knowledge of Life One, The Law, The Law of Reaping,
Henry T. Laurency, Knowledge of Life Five, Efficient Philosophy,
www.laurency.com
Lars Adelskogh, The Explanation, Section Eight, The Law of Reaping,
www.hylozoik.se