One of the seven cardinal sins of Christian theology is pride. Like many another theological tenet, this one is intellectually interesting but seems remote from the practical, medical problems of human affliction. Yet if we are to accept the testimony of the Cayce readings, the sin of pride can result karmically in very tangible physical suffering—and particularly so when this pride has expressed itself in mockery or scorn. Cruel laughter and disparaging words seem to be the equivalent of a physical act of aggression, and thus set in motion boomerang karma which results in the same physical affliction as that suffered by the person mocked at.
There are seven cases of severe physical disability in the Cayce files in which the affliction is attributed to a cause of this kind. Curiously enough, six of them are traced to the era of the Christian persecutions in Rome; here again we see how groups of souls of one era of history apparently return to earth as contemporaries in another era of history.
Three instances are cases of polio. The first one is that of a woman of forty-five, wife of a professional man and mother of three children, who at the age of thirty-six was stricken with infantile paralysis and has not walked since. Her life is lived in a wheelchair; she is completely dependent on others for transportation to any point outside the home. The karmic cause is attributed by the reading to the entity’s behavior in ancient Rome. She had been among the royalty of the time, and was closely associated with Nero in his persecution of the Christians. “And the entity laughed at those who were crippled in the arena–” says the reading– “and lo! that selfsame thing returns to you!” The second case—and perhaps no more pathetic case is to be found in all the Cayce files than this one—is that of a woman of thirty-four who was stricken with infantile paralysis at the age of six months, which resulted in spinal curvature and a limping walk. Her father, a farmer, regarded her condition with indifference, and callously appropriated for purposes of his own, money she had painstakingly earned through raising chickens. Destiny ill-served her twice again in two unfortunate love affairs. Her first lover was killed in World War I. Afterward she became engaged to another. He fell dangerously sick; when he recovered, he married the trained nurse who had attended him. Add to all these physical and emotional disasters the picture of quarreling parents, a lonely farm life, and a fall from cement steps which confined the girl to bed with an additional spinal injury and you have a picture of misery hard to surpass.
Here again the karmic cause—for the physical condition at least—is seen to have been two lifetimes back in Rome. The reading says: “The entity was then a member of Palatius’ household, and often sat in the boxes viewing the struggles of man with man and man with beast. In the present, much of the physical struggle arises from the entity’s scornful laughter then at the weakness of those who fought for a cause.”
The third case is that of a motion-picture producer who was stricken with polio at the age of seventeen and still limps slightly, though he can ride horseback and engage in some active sports. Rome in the early Christian era is again the scene of the transgression. “The entity was among soldiery, and jeered at those that became afraid, or those that submitted without outward show of resistance. The entity lost through this experience—not from doing his duty, but from jeering at those who held to an ideal. The breaking of the body this time was an experience necessary for the awakening of the inner self, and the development of spiritual forces.”
There are four interesting cases of afflictions other than polio whose karmic cause is shown to have been mockery. One is that of a girl lamed by tuberculosis of the hip joint. A life as an early American settler preceded the present one; the karmic cause, however, arose in the second life back, in Rome. Here the entity had been one of the aristocrats in Nero’s court and had found it amusing to watch the persecution of Christians in the arena. She had laughed in particular at the girl whose side was ripped open by the claws of a lion.
Another is the case of an eighteen-year old girl who would have been attractive had it not been for her very overweight body. Doctors diagnosed the condition as over-activity of the pituitary gland. The Cayce reading concurred in calling it a glandular condition, but elsewhere in the readings the information is given that the glands themselves are focal points for the expression of the heredity of the psyche, or its karma. We would expect, then, that this girl’s glandular condition and her consequent excess weight were karmic in origin; and the life reading bears out this supposition.
Two lifetimes ago she had been an athlete in Rome; she excelled both in beauty and in athletic prowess, but frequently ridiculed those who were less nimble than herself because of their heaviness of body.
The third case in this group is that of a young man of twenty-one, a Catholic, whose parents wished him to become a priest. He did not feel the call, however, and did not accede to their wishes. The central problem of his life was a marked homosexual urge. The life reading taken on this young man at his request shows him to have been in a previous life a satirist and gossipmonger in the French court who took particular delight in exposing the homosexual scandals of the court with his cartoonist skill. “Condemn not, then,” concludes the reading, “that you be not condemned. For indeed, with what measure you mete it shall be measured to you again. And what you condemn in another, that you become in yourself.”
The fourth case is that of a boy who at the age of sixteen was in an automobile accident in which his spinal cord was severed. Specialists doubted he would live, but he pulled through. Below the fifth vertebra he was completely paralyzed, and his life has been confined to a wheelchair ever since. Seven and a half years after the accident when he was twenty-three, his mother obtained a reading for him from Cayce. The life reading gave the boy two past incarnations, one at the time of the American Revolution, when he was a military officer of much determination and courage. From that experience he brought over to the present “the characteristics of orderliness, cheerfulness, the ability to make the best of a bad situation and to use what is in hand.”
The incarnation before this was the crucial one, so far as his affliction was concerned. He had been a Roman soldier in the early Christian era, “and one given to self-indulgence. He gloried in seeing the suffering of those who held to the principles of the Nazarene. He fought in the arena and later watched many whom he had met in combat fight again with beasts. The entity saw much suffering and made light of it. Hence the entity sees suffering in himself in the present, and must again make light of it—but for a different purpose. That same purposefulness that he mocked at then must arise within himself in order to meet what he has created.”
It is interesting to note that in these seven afflictions—which included three cases of polio, and one each of tuberculosis of the hip joint; overweight; homosexuality; and spino-muscular paralysis from a fracture—none of the persons was born with the affliction. In every case the condition arose some time after birth, ranging from the age of six months to that of thirty-six years, and in one case it was “caused” by an automobile accident. Behind the veil of ostensible causation, however, there would appear to be another and deeper cause. The strange fatality of accidents wherein one person is killed and another is not, one goes without a scratch and another is cruelly disfigured, seems to man to be a matter of chance. Cases such as those just cited, however, would seem to indicate that some inner imperceptible line of force is operative even in the sudden chaos of accident such that karmic dues are accurately apportioned. Even susceptibility to the polio germ would appear to be similarly induced.
Though at first glance the penalties may appear disproportionate to so trifling a matter as laughter, on deeper consideration the justice becomes more apparent. He who laughs at the affliction of another is condemning a set of circumstances for which he does not understand the inner necessity; he is despising the right of every man to evolve through even the meanest form of folly; he is deprecating the dignity and worth and divinity which inhere in every soul, no matter how low or ridiculous the estate to which it may have fallen. He is, moreover, asserting his selfhood as being superior to the selfhood of those he laughed at. The act of mockery is an act of self-assertion in the most ignoble sense of the term.
These considerations remind us forcibly of certain phrases of an ancient book of wisdom. We begin to see that blessed indeed is he who does not sit in the seat of the scorner, and right indeed was the instinct of the psalmist when he resolved: “I shall keep my lips with bridle, that I sin not with my tongue.” Judge not that ye be not judged! suddenly stands out like an apocalyptic commandment, written in tongues of flame; for with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged.
Excerpt from Many Mansions