KARMIC LAW

Tonight we have a subject which most of our western world doesn’t know too much about. And it has the name Karmic Law. In our Bible we meet it as “Sowing and Reaping.” And there are many other names you can give it: Action and Reaction, Plus and Minus, Merit and Demerit, Cause and Effect.

It has its origin long before Jesus. And actually in the Sanskrit the meaning of Karma is conduct, deed or conduct. And the meaning is that there is a personal responsibility that each of us has for his or her conduct. Now the Hindus and the Buddhist’s introduced the idea that for every deed you commit, there is a corresponding reaction; and that there is an invisible chart kept, you might say, of your activities and your deeds follow you from one incarnation to the next. So that you may have committed some kind of irresponsible deed at one time; and lo and behold five centuries later, you get an abscess in the ear and you say, “What hit me and why?” And you cannot, of course, trace it to the original cause which was five centuries ago.

This is not an exaggerated statement because the idea of Karma is, that as you progress you are building up at the same time, a series of debts or trespasses against the truth. And every debt must be cancelled out or you must be reborn again. And therefore, the cause of rebirth into a human incarnation is that our Karma has not been cancelled out. We still have debts that we haven’t paid.

Now if you have seen the movie, “The Space Odyssey” in the year 2001, or even if you haven’t there is a basic idea, a theme in this movie, about a spaceship going off into the year 2001 controlled by a robot. And the robot gets so important that it is practically the brains of the ship, except for the man who converses now and then with the robot and gives it his orders on what to do.

And then this spaceman goes out of the ship and while he is out, the robot decides this is a good time to get rid of mankind in general, and leaves him out there and starts the ship away. And, of course, what they are showing us in this science fiction story of the future is that man has created a robot, which will be smarter and more powerful than man himself.

And the thing that strikes me about it is that this is already true and has been true for some ten thousand years and more. The robot which is more powerful than man already exists, and that is the universal mind which does control man. And it is because of this universal mind which controls man that we built our karmic debt from incarnation to the next.

Now to get an idea then of a power which controls our human activities even though it’s invisible, and forces us while we are ignorant of it to commit error after error after error and then to suffer the penalty of those errors and never know while we are doing it that we are committing an error. And this is how karmic effects come into being. Now you’re in an automobile and you drive past a red light and the policeman gives you a ticket. And you say, “I didn’t see it,” and he says, “Sorry.” Or, you commit another minor crime of some sort and then your excuse is, “I didn’t know there was such a law.” And you are told, “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.”

But on a much vaster scale by being a human being, you are breaking the law of God; just by being a human being. Karma begins when you depart from Divine Law. And if we do not know Divine Law, we must depart from it because ignorant of it, we certainly cannot fulfill it. And so humanhood being a departure from Divine Law, the human is constantly building a string of karmic debts to which he is always reborn again as an infant to begin anew, another parade of ignorance of Divine Law. And so we see that although we may have sincere intentions, a desire to worship God, a dedicated way of life, we may be good to our neighbors, we may be fine upstanding citizens who desire to support their communities and their countries and the world at large, and in spite of all our good intentions, we’re building up the karmic debt.

Now the Will of God in you must fulfill itself or else you are not fulfilling God’s Will in your life. And therefore, we have to take stock of ourselves; come out of the clouds and say, “How am I breaking Divine Law? How am I living outside of the Will of God? How am I through omission or commission permitting myself to move in an orbit that is not the Divine orbit?”

And so we see that within you is the Divine Image of your being. And unless you bring this Divine Image into expression, unless you permit it to express through you, the Will of the Father is not expressing; and instead there is a human being out here separated from his own Self, his own Divine Image; and in that separation it is impossible for you to move in the rhythm of God.

All of the qualities in the Divine Image remain there functioning but never in your human experience. And so every time you fear, you are building your Karma for tomorrow, you are sending out what is called bad Karma. Every time you worry, every time you doubt, every time you do anything that does not recognize the invisible presence of God you are sending out bad Karma.

Every time you condemn, every time you assume that imperfection is reality, every time you do something of discordant, dishonest, condemnatory, fearful or hateful nature, you are refusing to acknowledge the Presence of God invisible. You are piercing the Christ. Not because you want to or know you’re doing it, but because you have not fulfilled the invisible law that God is your Self. God, the invisible Self of the universe, must be acknowledged as your Self. And to the degree that you do not acknowledge God as your Self, by your deeds, by your conduct, to that degree you are personally responsible and your karmic bad debt is increasing and must be cancelled out at some future date. Your next incarnation or the five ones after that but that is the law. It is
inflexible, it is inexorable; it cannot be changed, because the Will of God must be expressed.

Now when we are concerned with sixty or eighty years of a human span, we are completely oblivious to the fact that these sixty or eighty years are being lived merely to pay out a debt that we created a hundred or two or five hundred years ago. It’s an accumulated debt of all of our past human lives. All accumulated to be paid off now and in the future of this time segment.

And this is quite a different teaching, of course, than
Orthodoxy has given us. And yet this is the nature of tonight’s chapter. Now you can call it Cause and Effect. You can see that Jesus introduced it when he said, “As ye sow so shall ye reap,” and you’re talking about the same thing and so we have to look at ourselves very carefully. I have here an invisible force so working that unless I can understand it I’m going to be building up karmic debts forever.

I didn’t realize that when I just sat down to dinner and discussed politics that I was building up a karmic debt, but I was. And when I went out to that little party at such and such a place, and we discussed the racial inequalities, when we discussed overpopulation, when we discussed the various levels of poverty throughout the world, and lack of food in certain places—we were building karmic debts because that was not true. We were expressing a humanistic point of view about human appearances.

And it isn’t too long before we begin to see how in a Spiritual way we are truly backward, almost obsolete. Because once we begin to realize that Karmic Law is going to be here forever until it’s broken, we will not try too seriously to change our ways. We will continue to be hurt, to suffer for our acts without knowing we have committed these acts. Things that to us were seemingly innocuous, and yet in spite of it every human attitude, which does not acknowledge the invisible Father, is a deed for which we must pay.

Now then, you can go back behind that and see that the world’s idea of punishment is mistaken. Orthodoxy will teach that God punishes and that God rewards. And such statements in the Bible as, “Your Father who seeth in secret will reward thee openly,” has been interpreted to mean that there is a God who rewards you.

Now as you know, the order of the sun and the stars and the moon, the various forces of nature were not given to us as a reward. And they are not withheld from us as a punishment. They simply are here. And there is no God to punish and there is no God to reward. What has happened is that man is being charged for his karmic debts!

●●● CONTINUED ●●●

It’s as if you left your house tonight, and you traveled so many miles. Now there’s only, there’s nothing can change the fact that in order to get back you must travel the same amount of miles. And if you had gone twice as far to get back you would have to go twice as far. And the distance that we move away from God is the distance we must
move back. And that is not punishment that is Karmic Law.

Now when Jesus said to the adulteress, “Neither do I condemn thee.” He did not punish her; and if you examine his complete ministry you will discover that no where at no time did he punish a single individual. And if He were here as the representative of God to fulfill the Law of God, if punishment were a part of that Law you would have seen much punishment. But forgiveness was part of that Law, not punishment. And so we as we
look back at his teaching can see that much of it was directed to teach us how first to be aware that unknowingly we are sending out bad Karma by departing from the Consciousness of God and all of that distance that we depart, we must re-traverse to come back to it.

While we are departing from the Consciousness of God, we are building our debts, the bad Karma, then we must learn to send out good Karma. And many people would be very anxious to stop at that point. But His teaching went further and said, after you have broken the direction of your bad Karma and are now sending out good Karma, by such deeds as: forgiveness, love, integrity, justice, awareness that God is the source of all things, making peace with your enemies—He gave us a long list in The Sermon on the Mount, and the purpose of these was to teach us how to break the bad Karma we were sending out so that we could send out good Karma. But that was not enough. We then had to go beyond sending out good Karma, and we had to rise into the Law of Grace in which we discover that the Law of Karma only applies in the world of matter. And this takes you beyond the eastern philosophies where complete families live in the realization of their Karma without trying to break it,
not knowing it can be broken. Thinking that they are bound by laws of heredity, laws of Karma and they have them interwoven.

There are mothers who check their children’s karma going back for centuries and centuries under the mistaken belief that that child will have to continue living and paying for the karmic debts of centuries back.

Now it is true that we wear modern clothes today but we are paying karmic debts of many accumulated centuries, each of us individually and collectively, but, and that’s the point of the true Christian teaching and that’s the importance of the Christian teaching in all religions. It teaches and demonstrates that your karmic debts are totally nullified now this minute when you locate the Divine center of your Being and live there. Then your ignorance of all of the Law that you have been breaking is of no consequence any more because at that point where you touch your Divine center, the Father within, He liveth your life. And He is not ignorant of the Divine Will.

Now someone gets headaches, and someone else gets earaches, and someone else gets eye aches and someone else has this wrong and that wrong and there’s always
that big question why? Why me? We are living in a universe of “thought.” And the thought that you entertain, the beliefs that you entertain in your thought, the things and persons that you give power in your thought, these represent the manner in which you build up your tomorrows full of debts that must be paid.
This very day we are building our tomorrows. And when we came into human birth, we inherited our complete past.

Never think that you have given your children their Karma. They have their own. They have inherited their complete past just as you have inherited yours. You can never give your Karma to someone else. The law of inheritance is not true. The only Karma you work out is your own. And the only Karma anyone else works out is their own. It is a completely individual experience. You cannot borrow, you cannot influence, you can in no way exchange Karma with any one. They cannot receive it from you through heredity. Nor could you from your parents.

Your experience, your debts, your permanent record are the degree to which you have strayed from the One
Consciousness, the One Self, must be worked out and by you alone. And so we are faced with this that we have a total responsibility for every word, every deed, every idea, every belief, every thought; and the Will of the Father in us, will be done.

Now punishment then does not come from God. It is the direct effect of our straying from Truth. And the only way we can nullify it is to return to Truth. “Ye shall know the
truth and the truth will make you free,” of your Karma. “I have overcome the world,” meaning, I have overcome all of my past incarnations and the Karma that I had built up
in this world. Once we start to look at our experience with this word, it throws a rather interesting light on the degree of ignorance, which we have manifested and for which we have paid and are paying.

Now to start sending out good Karma there must be an alertness, a willingness to throw away your past. There must be a willingness to know that what I have done in the past is done. I am no longer responsible for that past if I can go within, and enter into a state of oneness with my Source. In this state of oneness, I will be nourished from within. I will live in the House of the Father. And I will be not in time or space. The I, which has overcome the Karma of this world is ever functioning at the center of my Being and it will now reveal the Divine pattern of my life, canceling out all of my sins of omission and commission of the past.

Now if I were to fear God in that instant, I would be departing from the Consciousness of God because I couldn’t fear God if I were living in the Consciousness of God. If I am to believe in a lack or a limitation, in that instant I know I have left the Consciousness of God and now once more I’m building my debts.

Now you must come then to a very high pinnacle of Consciousness where you are standing in a light aware of the complete total Presence where you are of every Divine quality, acknowledging each Divine quality as present where you are. And knowing that in the kingdom of God there is no Karma because there are no opposites to be
entertained in Consciousness. This is the altitude from which we must work to break
Karma.
For instance, you would stand at this moment in Vietnam watching the shells burst,
watching your friends around you in a state of fear, or shell- shocked, or retreat, or pain;
and you, if you too entered into this hysteria, whether or not you came home alive;
someday in another lifetime, you would pay for the fact that at that moment you did not
find your safety, your strength, your security in the Presence of God where you stood.
If when you read tomorrow morning’s newspaper, you unconsciously let yourself feel
that those in Biafra [Nigeria, 1967-1970] are starving, even though you see pictures of
their little distended stomachs—if you let yourself feel that the crime wave is on the
upswing and something else is on the downswing— no matter how your heart beats for
these people, you are building your Karma. And it isn’t good!
Now in this kind of a teaching then, you are not to repeat the errors of the world, or the
inability of the world to live in the Father’s House, it is a coming forth and being
separate. And when Paul said that he too was teaching us how to cancel out the Karma
of our many incarnations. “To pray in secret” was to teach us that we had to find “the
secret place of the most high.” We had to find this inner communion. And when Jesus
said, “I of mine own self can do nothing,” He was teaching us that the high point, when
Karma is completely broken and out of your life forever, is when you have reached that
altitude of Consciousness where you know that God is the only activity in the universe.
No other activity exists. Then you’re into total Oneness and the shadow of Karma is forever gone. “I of mine own self can do nothing.” Is the realization that God is present, active, fulfilling, Itself and all is well, in spite of every appearance in the universe to the
contrary—otherwise, Karma! Now there’s a word then you’ve got to take and work with.
We don’t start out with it very big. We start out on a mundane level. Look around and
find out who you think is unfriendly to you, and for every evil they give to you give them
a good in exchange. Why? Because you are recognizing the law of Divinity, which says,
there stands the invisible Christ. And you are not sowing to the visible appearance.
Now sowing to the flesh is not so simple that we can say, that this man is a sex pervert,
he is sowing to the flesh and that is about what it covers. No you can be taking LSD and sowing to the flesh. You can be an alcoholic and sowing to the flesh. Or you can “be
laying up treasures on this earth which moth and rust will corrupt,” and that’s “sowing to
the flesh.” You can be hoarding today’s manna, you can be spending your life trying to
receive without giving and that is sowing to the flesh.
Sowing to the flesh is sowing to all that which is not Spirit. Sowing to this world is
sowing to the flesh. The nature of your conversation is sowing to the flesh if that
conversation is about this world. And it would seem almost impossible then to live in this
world without sowing to the flesh. And it is, it is almost impossible to live in this world
without sowing to the flesh. And so we have an impossible task to perform. And when
you realize its impossibility, you will realize that you cannot perform it. And that’s precisely why it is an impossible task to make you come to the conclusion that, “I cannot do it, so Father you do it for me.” “I cannot love this neighbor,” said Joel, “but Father will you love him for me, I simply can’t do it.” And therefore, we have to go above the human mind, which cannot do it. And that’s why when you look out and see things that you cannot overcome, your next step must be, but the Father within He doeth the works not I. And because you have been alerted to the fact that unless you sow to the Spirit and stop sowing to this world, your karmic debt of good and evil must continue, there comes that final moment of transcending your own human selfhood in order to wipe out your karmic debt, in order to sow to the spirit; and you’re lifted above your human self.
Ah, but that’s the rebirth. To overcome the world you must overcome your own human
self, first. Now how can we do this if to us God is still someone we fear, or someone we
seek a reward from, or someone who we think might punish us in some way if we did
something wrong? Do you see only a human mind can feel that fear that sense of
possible punishment? In fact, the moment we fear God, we have lost God.
Now as we rest in the Presence of God within, we have come to that place where there
is an inner-knower who knows all that is in the Spiritual universe. And if we are not in
that Spiritual universe, we are separated from that inner-knower. And this is the only
punishment we will ever find. The punishment of separation, of apartness in which Spirit
cannot flow in us!
Now you will find that your consciousness is your experience. You cannot go further
than your consciousness. And if you are conscious not of the Spiritual reality, then your
consciousness is your Karma and not God. Your consciousness punishes you. “Go and
sin no more.” Why? That was the revelation that God doesn’t punish you, your sin
punishes you. The degree to which you are not sowing to the Spirit is your sin. And
that’s the only sin. And when you’re sowing to the Spirit you’re sinning no more.
Now these are all little pieces. This isn’t a great grandiose sweeping way of life at this point; it’s all of the little pieces that have to be done correctly. The neighbor down the street! The associates in the office! The beggar on the corner! The man crawling out of
a pub down the street! You must see through all this to the Divine Image. You must
always be in a “State of Grace” where you can look out at the material world and
recognize the non-power of all that you see. And the Power of the Invisible which is ever
present!
Now we’re living in the Infinite Invisible of our own Being; in the “I”. And this I, will take
you above all those who through Buddhism and Hinduism, there are billions, millions
now, and there have been billions, who are committed into the prison of belief that
Karma is their permanent dispensation on this earth. And we, unless we break this
Karma, we are under their Karma as well as our own to the degree that the Collective
Karma of the universe is the universal mind. The universal mortal mind is the cause of
the Collective Karma of the universe. When you break it for yourself, you break it for
ten, twenty, thirty, five hundred more. You leaven the Consciousness of the universe.
Now if there were a cosmic bookkeeper keeping a perfect continuous record of your life,
you would see so many entries on the liabilities side that you would think you have to
live another five hundred human lives before you could ever break even. Because every
human breath is another liability! We have not been aware of the staggering impact,
which world thought plays upon us. We are ever responding to world thought. And world
thought is the anti-Christ. World thought is the biggest and only builder of Karma that
there is. Your independence of world thought removes you from this increasing liability.
And so you’ll find in the same Sermon on the Mount, where we’re told to “Turn the other
cheek and walk twain and be hid in our closet and pray for our enemies who despitefully
use us.” We’re also taught: to break the Karma of this world, “Take no thought.” The
thought you take is the anti-Christ. The no-thought you do not take, is the release from
the anti-Christ. You break the pyramid of anti-Christ human thought which keeps
entering liabilities for you in this cosmic bookkeeping book, in this cosmic ledger,
making you forever a slave to laws you are breaking unaware.
It’s important to see the vast staggering impact of what has been happening to us while
we blithely have been saying I believe in God. God is good! God is love! In our total
ignorance while desiring to worship God we have turned away from God. While desiring
to worship God we have walked right by God, not recognizing God. And in our desire to
fulfill ourselves we have failed to find out even who we were.
Now take a moment and put the brain to rest and take this human I which has already
traveled far beyond this point in anticipation and of the mind which is moving out right
now somewhere five hundred light years from here in anticipation and bring that I back, bring that mind back. Bring everything back to one little point called the center. A little point of rest. Where you’re not anticipating a single thing. You’re not anticipating the next moment or the next hour. Your memory isn’t sliding back into yesterday. And your anticipation is not sliding back into the future. You’re not concerned about anything
happening anywhere in this world whether it’s here or there. You’re recognizing that all
that exists at this moment is the essence of God and you’re at peace. That’s all there is
anywhere in this universe, the essence of God.And as you stay there for ten seconds
you become white as snow, for you are abiding in the Father. Now to take that with you
wherever you go and never lose it, whatever you do, wherever you are, whatever you
are saying to hold that center of rest is to abide in the Father; and then to behold
through that center of rest, the law of Infinity guiding your every activity so that the law
of Karma has no place to act. You’re not in action so you’re not in reaction. You’re not
sowing to the flesh so you’re not going to reap corruption; you are sowing to the spirit by
the simple act of holding to that point of rest within you. And practice is what does it.
Then every thing that Buddhism ever taught and Hinduism ever taught, every thing,
every act of commission, of omission and commission, every degree to which you have
ever in the last five million years inadvertently walked as an individual instead of as the
Divine Self—this is readjusted in those ten seconds. And you start fresh! New! White as
snow! Karma is broken that instant. “I of mine own self can do nothing.” This Divine rest,
this center through which God alone functions, destroys Karma, destroys all my debts;
my Father forgives all my debts, all my trespasses. The prodigal is no longer a prodigal.
Now if we are to escape from the Parenthesis into Eternity, we have to destroy the Law
of Karma in our experience. Because that alone is what is maintaining us in the
Parenthesis. It drags us back every time we depart. And sometimes it kicks us out of
here a little sooner than we want to go. And sometimes it brings back a deformed baby.
Sometimes it strikes a man and cripples him. Sometimes it makes you deaf, or dumb, or
blind. Why? You know the answer. It isn’t something you did! It isn’t some evil you
committed! It’s the distance between Spirit and the flesh. It’s the distance between
material consciousness and Spiritual Consciousness. And as your Spiritual
Consciousness increases, as you become more conscious of the Spirit and thus less
conscious of the material appearances, the book is being rewritten– just as invisibly as
it was written. That bookkeeper keeps working.
And ultimately you pay off a debt, and the problem that you have here now disappears.
Oh, there’s a quicker way! There’s a quicker way! The quicker way is not to work at this on a ten-percent basis. You can give it so much time
and say, “Well ten percent ought to be right,” and later on as Joel says, twenty percent
and someday fifty percent. And you’re beginning to say, “Well how can I do it I have
obligations?” Well how about fulfilling those obligations and doing this a hundred
percent? Because “praying without ceasing” is a hundred percent! And while you’re
doing this a hundred percent, you’re still in the world. And you’re still doing things in the
world. But through the ten, twenty, thirty, fifty percent, you’ve learned how to maintain
the inner rest while you maintain the outer activity. And then you’re working while you
are in the spirit! And an eight-hour day doesn’t take eight hours anymore.
You find Spirit is working in your sleep, in your experience. If necessary, it will wake you
up at three A.M. and say, “Get down to the drawing board. Here’s that idea you’ve been
looking for. I picked it up for you because you’re ready for it. There it is!” Or, “Here is
that composition that you couldn’t quite make while you were struggling and striving
through a human brain. Here’s that invention!” Or, “Here’s the way to handle this
present situation.” Yes, once you find that as you hold this point of rest wherever you
are, your outer activities in the world are graced, then you realize that it isn’t a question
of sacrificing your outer world activities in order to do more of the inner Spiritual work at
all. No! They go hand in hand! The Spiritual functions in such a way that the struggle
and the labor of the outer world activities lessen. It’s not a substitute! It’s a complement!
Now we are given this Infinite Way, and the alternate to it is the karmic way. The way of
superstition, of imprisonment, of a limited finite mentality! And every time you see
somebody who says, “Oh, I’m sowing to the Spirit,” take a second look and be sure that
they’re not doing it externally, because you cannot sow to the Spirit externally. Never
can you sow to the Spirit except within your Consciousness; that’s where it is done!
Now when you’re not sowing within, you’re sowing without. When you’re not thinking
truth what are you thinking? You can’t think of two things at the same time. When you’re
not thinking in terms of truth, you’re not thinking Spiritually at all. And so you have to
look at the world of matter and think about it Spiritually. You have to see the Invisible
Dimension that the eye doesn’t see. And then you’re sowing to the Spirit and not the
flesh. And as you train yourself to do this, you will be feeling that Invisible Dimension
behind the material object; and that Invisible Dimension will enable you to understand
the material object. How does an artist see new beauty? Because, he sees beyond the
mere three-dimensional form. He sees into the Soul of what he’s
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working with. And when you work in your professions, when you are seeing the
additional Dimension that is Invisible; you’re seeing through the material substance to its
Soul and its Soul in you will enable you to see that in a new relationship.
And so you see even in your human thought, you begin to Spiritualize it you might say, and look into the depth of things—but not out there. You don’t look at an object and try to see the Soul of it. You look from your own Soul at the object. For your Soul is the
Soul of the object. You’re really looking from within that object at its outer self. You look at the Soul of you, which is within that object as its Soul. For the One Soul of the
universe is your Soul. When you find it, and touch it, and live in it, in this point of rest; it is within everything else that you’re looking at.
When you see the I of your neighbor you’re seeing the I of your Self. And that’s why
hidden in Jesus’ teaching is the “One Self” idea. Always to remind you that whenever
you do not see the one invisible Self you are violating Divine Law. To the murderer a
pardon instantly, to the thief on the cross a pardon instantly, to everyone on the face of
the globe a pardon instantly—a total state of forgiveness because you must
acknowledge the “One Self.”
And as you acknowledge the “One Self,” then you have forgiven those who despitefully
use you, those who persecute you in My name. You have opened your Self to the “One
Self,” you have recognized your Self. He teaches us that in giving, we are not dividing
our income with somebody else. If we have a dollar and we give fifty cents we are not
dividing. If we recognize the “One Self,” we are multiplying. Now you’ll find it hard to
think you’re giving that to yourself unless you have already sat down with that problem
and asked for inner guidance to explain it to you.
The Law of the “One Self” means that you are omnipresent—there is no place where
you are not. You’re the soldiers who are fighting our army in Vietnam as well as “our
army” in Vietnam. Because the “One Self” is all there is. And that is why you pray for
your enemies. Your enemy is as much your Self as your friend. Your father and your
mother are your Self. Your children are your Self. And this is the Law of God. And
whenever you violate it, by condemning another; the reason it comes back to you as a
karmic debt is because you have condemned your Self. When you in any way fear
another, you are fearing your Self. When you despise another, it is your Self you
despise. The “judgment you meet out to others is measured unto you,” because there is
only “One Self.” And maybe you don’t see it on this level, but go up a Dimension and you will see the “One” invisible Essence which through the glass darkly of human vision becomes the many, the multitudes that appear to be starving in this dimension; but are the “One Self” in the Infinite Dimension of Reality. The mind will just go so far and say, “I can’t go any further.” That’s fine! Put that mind to rest! Give it a Sabbath! And let the “One Self”
within you, and all over this universe; let It communicate Itself as you live in ”That secret
place of the most high.”

Herb Fitch
A Parenthesis In Eternity 1969
Class 2: Karmic Law