That is your conclusion drawn by looking at the lines from the lens of traditional understanding.
Read the full passage.
‘Traveller to a prefigured high event,
She seemed to her remembering witness soul
To trace again a journey often made.
A guidance turned the dumb revolving wheels
And in the eager body of their speed
The dim-masked hooded godheads rode who move
Assigned to man immutably from his birth,
Receivers of the inner and outer law,
At once the agents of his spirit’s will
And witnesses and executors of his fate.
Inexorably faithful to their task,
They hold his nature’s sequence in their guard
Carrying the unbroken thread old lives have spun.
Attendants on his destiny’s measured walk
Leading to joys he has won and pains he has called,
Even in his casual steps they intervene.
Nothing we think or do is void or vain;
Each is an energy loosed and holds its course.
The shadowy keepers of our deathless past
Have made our fate the child of our own acts,
And from the furrows laboured by our will
We reap the fruit of our forgotten deeds.
But since unseen the tree that bore this fruit
And we live in a present born from an unknown past,
They seem but parts of a mechanic Force
To a mechanic mind tied by earth’s laws;
Yet are they instruments of a Will supreme,
Watched by a still all-seeing Eye above.
A prescient architect of Fate and Chance
Who builds our lives on a foreseen design
The meaning knows and consequence of each step
And watches the inferior stumbling powers.
Upon her silent heights she was aware
Of a calm Presence throned above her brows
Who saw the goal and chose each fateful curve;
It used the body for its pedestal;
The eyes that wandered were its searchlight fires,
The hands that held the reins its living tools;
All was the working of an ancient plan,
A way proposed by an unerring Guide.’
What is described is that Karma operates at three levels.
First is that there is a Guidance in life, an inner and outer law that is carrying us towards a predestined event. Towards this end the keepers of the law, the guardians of Fate use the threads we have spun in the past. But there is also the Spirit’s consent in it. But most importantly it is the Divine Will who uses the machinery of karma to carry us towards a great goal marked out already for us.
In other words karma is neither a blind mechanical process nor a system of reward and punishment as the traditional theory concludes. It is rather a process of evolution from our state of ignorance to knowledge, from darkness to the Light. It is not just we whose action counts but the soul’s need to go through certain experiences and the inner Guidance prompted by the Divine Will.
One needs to read everything that Sri Aurobindo has written on a given subject to get the full picture. Hasty summary conclusions are always suspect.
Affectionately,
Alok Da
