When a person dies, it is not one thing that departs, but three, and each toward a different direction. The material form dissolves into the earth, the emotional decomposes at the astral level, the mental at the mental level. The Divine Spark departs, and this journey has already been described elsewhere. What has not been said with the necessary precision is what becomes of the three that remain behind, because that is where the whole matter is decided.
They do not vanish. They return to circulation.

At the material level this is so obvious that it has stopped making an impression. The calcium of the bones was made inside a star that exploded long before the planet formed, the nitrogen of the proteins has passed through countless organisms before reaching this body, and will pass through others afterward. No body was ever built from new material. There is no new material. There is only material in use, changing hands at a rate that biology measures and metaphysics must interpret.
The same holds for the other two levels, with the difference that no one can weigh the result there. The emotional form that decomposes at the astral level is not lost, it enriches or burdens the pool from which the next incarnation will borrow an emotional body. The mental form that dissolves at the mental level does not go out, it is added to the stock of mental structures through which someone not yet born will think. The three levels, in other words, are not a stage set. They are a warehouse of spare parts.

And here the question shifts. The issue is not where the Divine Spark comes from, that has been answered. The issue is what it finds when it arrives, and in what condition it finds it.
It finds used material. A vessel built from atoms that belonged to others, an emotional form borrowed from a pool in which every fear, every passion, and every distortion of humanity has been imprinted since its beginning, and a mental organ whose categories, language, and blind spots had been shaped long before it came to use them. There is no choice, because there is no other stock. Whatever incarnates on this planet incarnates within what those who came before left behind.

This, exactly, is karma, and nothing else. Not punishment, not a ledger, not a secret justice that remembers. The Law of Balance records every imbalance and holds it until it is balanced, but it does not record it against a person. It records it in the material.
The weight belongs first to the lineage, that is, to the immediate genealogical, geographical, and cultural stock into which one is born, and then, in a wider circle, to the whole of humanity. Two concentric circles of load, one denser and more personal in appearance, the other more diffuse and heavier in reality.
The distinction that must be held here is the only one that keeps the whole scheme from collapsing into original sin. The Divine Spark does not inherit guilt. It inherits working conditions. The weight belongs entirely to Essence, to the world of forms and order, while the Spark belongs to Hyperessence and does not carry, does not bring, and cannot bring debt from anywhere.
This is also the reason why personal karma, in the sense given to it by popular belief, does not exist. There is no successor who pays for his predecessor, because there is no predecessor. There is only raw material that was used, returned, and given back into use.

The problem is that it returns with residue.
Purity is not a given in any process of recycling, and biology shows this with a clarity that leaves no room for doubt. Every cell has mechanisms for breaking down and reusing its components, autophagy breaks down damaged proteins and returns the amino acids to circulation, and the system works with impressive efficiency. It does not, however, work perfectly.
A percentage always escapes, accumulates as lipofuscin and as insoluble aggregates, and what we call aging is nothing but the sum of what was not cleared to the degree it should have been. The same principle, expressed on a different scale, explains what people attribute to previous lives.
Because the forces responsible for processing forms after the death of the units do exactly this work, and they do it under the same constraints. They break down, purify, return to the stock. When the load exceeds the rate of processing, and human history has diligently seen to it that it does, the material returns to circulation half cleared.
Someone is then born with a fear he did not earn, with a familiarity toward places he never visited, with an ease at things he was never taught, with aversions justified by nothing in his biography. The easy explanation is that he remembers. He does not remember. He is using a piece of astral or mental matter that someone else shaped and that did not have time to be neutralized before being given out again.

This overturns the entire popular image of reincarnation, and rightly so. A Hyperessential Ego does not return, it is not even foreseen as a possibility to return, because it completes its cycle and reintegrates into its Spiritual Collective, bringing with it the knowledge of individuality. What continues is not the individual, it is the Collective, which continues to send Sparks into the same density.
The continuity sensed by those who speak of previous lives is real, it simply is not personal. It is the continuity of a collective undertaking that borrows the same materials across millennia.
And the clearing of the load, correspondingly, is not assigned to any individual. It makes no sense, and does not even have a physical possibility, to ask a human being to clear humanity’s astral stock within seventy years.
The work belongs to the collective Ego of the next level of consciousness, which works on it gradually, in timescales not measured by any human biological measure, and which asks for neither volunteers nor heroes. Whoever imagines himself the redeemer of humanity has confused the scale of the problem with the size of his own ambition.
What remains, then, as responsibility, if there is no personal debt and no personal redemption? What remains is the only thing that is truly in anyone’s hands, and it is smaller than he would like and more serious than he thinks. What remains is the quality of the material that will return.

Because the circuit does not run only inward. Every life does not simply receive, it deposits. What one cultivates for decades within his emotional form, resentment or measure, fear or balance, is not a private matter that closes with his death. It is the quality of a batch of material that will return to the common pool and be given to someone he never knew.
Inner work, seen this way, ceases to be spiritual hygiene and becomes something far more demanding, a contribution to the quality of the stock from which those who come next will live. The same holds in the mental, where every clarity attained and every lie that became belief are added to the structures through which children not yet conceived will think, just as language is handed to the newborn ready-made, with its distinctions and its blind spots, and obliges him to think through them before he has any chance to examine them.

Karma, then, is not something that happens within a life. It is the condition of every birth, without exception, without judgment, and without intention. It punishes no one, because it does not recognize persons. It exempts no one, because there is no clean material set aside for the privileged.
And it offers no comfort, because it was never asked to comfort. It simply describes the state of the warehouse at the moment a new Hyperessential Ego asks for its tools and begins the work for which it came down.