Theos-Talk Archives (March 1996 Message tl00041)

~THE OCEAN OF THEOSOPHY~

CHAPTER II

THE TEACHINGS OF THEOSOPHY deal for the present chiefly with our
earth, although its purview extends to all the worlds, since no
part of the manifested universe is outside the single body of
laws which operate upon us. Our globe being one of the solar
system is certainly connected with Venus, Jupiter, and other
planets, but as the great human family has to remain with its
material vehicle, the earth, until all the units of the race
which are ready are perfected, the evolution of that family is
of greater importance to the members of it. Some particulars
respecting the other planets may be given later on. First let us
take a general view of the laws governing all.

The universe evolves from the unknown, into which no man or
mind, however high, can inquire, on seven planes or in seven
ways or methods in all worlds, and this sevenfold
differentiation causes all the worlds of the universe and the
beings thereon to have a septenary constitution. As was taught
of old, the little worlds and the great are copies of the whole,
and the minutest insect as well as the most highly developed
being are replicas in little or in great of the vast inclusive
original. Hence sprang the saying, "as above so below" which the
Hermetic philosophers used.

The divisions of the sevenfold universe may be laid down roughly
as: The Absolute, Spirit, Mind, Matter, Will, Akasa or Aether,
and Life. In place of "the Absolute" we can use the word Space.
For Space is that which ever is, and in which all manifestation
must take place. The term Akasa, taken from the Sanskrit, is
used in place of Aether, because the English language has not
yet evolved a word to properly designate that tenuous state of
matter which is now sometimes called Ether by modern scientists.
As to the Absolute we can do no more than say IT IS. None of the
great teachers of the School ascribe qualities to the Absolute
although all the qualities exist in It. Our knowledge begins
with differentiation, and all manifested objects, beings, or
powers are only differentiations of the Great Unknown. The most
that can be said is that the Absolute periodically
differentiates itself, and periodically withdraws the
differentiated into itself.

The first differentiation, speaking metaphysically as to time,
is Spirit, with which appears Matter and Mind. Akasa is produced
from Matter and Spirit, Will is the force of Spirit in action
and Life is a resultant of the action of Akasa, moved by Spirit,
upon Matter.

But the Matter here spoken of is not that which is vulgarly
known as such. It is the real Matter which is always invisible,
and has sometimes been called Primordial Matter. In the
Brahmanical system it is denominated Mulaprakriti. The ancient
teaching always held, as is now admitted by Science, that we see
or perceive only the phenomena but not the essential nature,
body or being of matter.

Mind is the intelligent part of the Cosmos, and in the
collection of seven differentiations above roughly sketched,
Mind is that in which the plan of the Cosmos is fixed or
contained. This plan is brought over from a prior period of
manifestation which added to its ever-increasing perfectness,
and no limit can be set to its evolutionary possibilities in
perfectness, because there was never any beginning to the
periodical manifestations of the Absolute, there never will be
any end, but forever the going forth and withdrawing into the
Unknown will go on.

Wherever a world or system of worlds is evolving there the plan
has been laid down in universal mind, the original force comes
from spirit, the basis is matter, which is in fact invisible,
Life sustains all the forms requiring life, and Akasa is the
connecting link between matter on one side and spirit-mind on
the other.

When a world or a system comes to the end of certain great
cycles men record a cataclysm in history or tradition. These
traditions abound; among the Jews in their flood; with the
Babylonians in theirs; in Egyptian papyri; in the Hindu
cosmology; and none of them as merely confirmatory of the little
Jewish tradition, but all pointing to early teaching and dim
recollection also of the periodical destructions and
renovations. The Hebraic story is but a poor fragment torn from
the pavement of the Temple of Truth. Just as there are
periodical minor cataclysms or partial destructions, so, the
doctrine holds, there is the universal evolution and involution.
Forever the Great Breath goes forth and returns again. As it
proceeds outward, objects, worlds and men appear; as it recedes
all disappear into the original source.

This is the waking and the sleeping of the Great Being; the Day
and the Night of Brahma; the prototype of our waking days and
sleeping nights as men, of our disappearance from the scene at
the end of one little human life, and our return again to take
up the unfinished work in another life, in a new day.

The real age of the world has long been involved in doubt for
Western investigators, who up to the present have shown a
singular unwillingness to take instruction from the records of
Oriental people much older than the West. Yet with the Orientals
is the truth about the matter. It is admitted that Egyptian
civilization flourished many centuries ago, and as there are no
living Egyptian schools of ancient learning to offend modern
pride, and perhaps because the Jews "came out of Egypt" to
fasten the Mosaic misunderstood tradition upon modern progress,
the inscriptions cut in rocks and written on papyri obtain a
little more credit today than the living thought and record of
the Hindus. For the latter are still among us, and it would
never do to admit that a poor and conquered race possesses
knowledge respecting the age of man and his world which the
western flower of culture, war, and annexation knows nothing of.
Ever since the ignorant monks and theologians of Asia Minor and
Europe succeeded in imposing the Mosaic account of the genesis
of earth and man upon the coming western evolution, the most
learned even of our scientific men have stood in fear of the
years that elapsed since Adam, or have been warped in thought
and perception whenever their eyes turned to any chronology
different from that of a few tribes of the sons of Jacob. Even
the noble, aged, and silent pyramid of Gizeh, guarded by Sphinx
and Memnon made of stone, has been degraded by Piazzi Smyth and
others into a proof that the British inch must prevail and that
a "Continental Sunday" controverts the law of the Most High. Yet
in the Mosaic account, where one would expect to find a
reference to such a proof as the pyramid, we can discover not a
single hint of it and only a record of the building by King
Solomon of a temple of which there never was a trace.

But the Theosophist knows why the Hebraic tradition came to be
thus an apparent drag on the mind of the West; he knows the
connection between Jew and Egyptian; what is and is to be the
resurrection of the old pyramid builders of the Nile valley, and
where the plans of those ancient master masons have been hidden
from the profane eyes until the cycle should roll round again
for their bringing forth. The Jews preserved merely a part of
the learning of Egypt hidden under the letter of the books of
Moses, and it is there still to this day in what they call the
cabalistic or hidden meaning of the scriptures. But the Egyptian
souls who helped in planning the pyramid of Gizeh, who took part
in the Egyptian government, theology, science, and civilization,
departed from their old race, that race died out and the former
Egyptians took up their work in the oncoming races of the West,
especially in those which are now repeopling the American
continents. When Egypt and India were younger there was a
constant intercourse between them. They both, in the opinion of
the Theosophist, thought alike, but fate ruled that of the two
the Hindus only should preserve the old ideas among a living
people. I will therefore take from the Brahmanical records of
Hindustan their doctrine about the days, nights, years and life
of Brahma, who represents the universe and the worlds.

The doctrine at once upsets the interpretation so long given to
the Mosaic tradition, but fully accords with the evident account
in Genesis of other and former "creations," with the cabalistic
construction of the Old Testament verse about the kings of Edom,
who there represent former periods of evolution prior to that
started with Adam, and also coincides with the belief held by
some of the early Christian Fathers who told their brethren
about wonderful previous worlds and creations.

The Day of Brahma is said to last one thousand years, and his
night is of equal length. In the Christian Bible is a verse
saying that one day is as a thousand years to the Lord and a
thousand years as one day. This has generally been used to
magnify the power of Jehovah, but it has a suspicious
resemblance to the older doctrine of the length of Brahma's day
and night. It would be of more value if construed to be a
statement of the periodical coming forth for great days and
nights of equal length of the universe of manifested worlds.

A day of mortals is reckoned by the sun, and is but twelve hours
in length. On Mercury it would be different, and on Saturn or
Uranus still more so. But a day of Brahma is made up of what are
called Manvantaras, or period between two men, fourteen in
number. These include 4,320,000,000 mortal, or earth, years,
which is one day of Brahma.

When this day opens, cosmic evolution, so far as relates to this
solar system, begins and occupies between one and two billions
of years in evolving the very ethereal first matter before the
astral kingdoms of mineral, vegetable, animal and men are
possible. This second step takes some three hundred millions of
years, and then still more material processes go forward for the
production of the tangible kingdoms of nature, including man.
This covers over one and one-half billions of years. And the
number of solar years included in the present "human" period is
over eighteen millions of years.

This is exactly what Herbert Spencer designates as the gradual
coming forth of the known and heterogeneous from the unknown and
homogeneous. For the ancient Egyptian and Hindu Theosophists
never admitted a creation out of nothing, but ever strenuously
insisted upon evolution, by gradual stages, of the heterogeneous
and differentiated from the homogeneous and undifferentiated. No
mind can comprehend the infinite and absolute unknown, which is,
has no beginning and shall have no end; which is both last and
first, because, whether differentiated or withdrawn into itself,
it ever is. This is the God spoken of in the Christian Bible as
the one around whose pavilion there is darkness.

This cosmic and human chronology of the Hindus is laughed at by
western Orientalists, yet they can furnish nothing better and
are continually disagreeing with each other on the same subject.
In Wilson's translation of Vishnu Purana he calls it all fiction
based on nothing, and childish boasting. But the Free Masons,
who remain inactive hereupon, ought to know better. They could
find in the story of the building of Solomon's temple from the
heterogeneous materials brought from everywhere, and its
erection without the noise of a tool being heard, the agreement
with these ideas of their Egyptian and Hindu brothers. For
Solomon's Temple means man whose frame is built up, finished and
decorated without the least noise. But the materials had to be
found, gathered together and fashioned in other and distant
places. These are in the periods above spoken of, very distant
and very silent. Man could not have his bodily temple to live in
until all the matter in and about his world had been found by
the Master, who is the inner man, when found the plans for
working it required to be detailed. They then had to be carried
out in different detail until all the parts should be perfectly
ready and fit for placing in the final structure. So in the vast
stretch of time which began after the first almost intangible
matter had been gathered and kneaded, the material and vegetable
kingdoms had sole possession here with the Master, man, who
was hidden from sight within carrying forward the plans for the
foundations of the human temple. All of this requires many, many
ages, since we know that nature never leaps. And when the rough
work was completed, when the human temple was erected, many more
ages would be required for all the servants, the priests, and
the counsellors to learn their parts properly so that man, the
Master, might be able to use the temple for its best and highest
purposes.

The ancient doctrine is far nobler than the Christian religious
one or that of the purely scientific school. The religious gives
a theory which conflicts with reason and fact, while science can
give for the facts which it observes no reason which is in any
way noble or elevating. Theosophy alone, inclusive of all
systems and every experience, gives the key, the plan, the
doctrine, the truth.

The real age of the world is asserted by Theosophy to be almost
incalculable, and that of man as he is now formed is over
eighteen millions of years. What has become at last man is of
vastly greater age, for before the present two sexes appeared
the human creature was sometimes of one shape and sometimes of
another, until the whole plan had been fully worked out into our
present form, function, and capacity. This is found to be
referred to in the ancient books written for the profane where
man is said to have been at one time globular in shape. This was
at a time when the conditions favored such a form and of course
it was longer ago than eighteen millions of years. And when this
globular form was the rule the sexes as we know them had not
differentiated and hence there was but one sex, or if you like,
no sex at all.

During all these ages before our man came into being, evolution
was carrying on the work of perfecting various powers which are
now our possession. This was accomplished by the Ego or real man
going through experience in countless conditions of matter all
different one from the other, and the same plan in general was
and is pursued as prevails in respect to the general evolution
of the universe to which I have before adverted. That is,
details were first worked out in spheres of being very ethereal,
metaphysical in fact. Then the next step brought the same
details to be worked out on a plane of matter a little more
dense, until at last it could be done on our present plane of
what we miscall gross matter. In these anterior states the
senses existed in germ, as it were, or in idea, until the astral
plane which is next to this one was arrived at, and then they
were concentrated so as to be the actual senses we now use
through the agency of the different outer organs. These outer
organs of sight, touch and hearing, and tasting, are often
mistaken by the unlearned or the thoughtless for the real organs
and senses, but he who stops to think must see that the senses
are interior and that their outer organs are but mediators
between the visible universe and the real perceiver within. And
all these various powers and potentialities being well worked
out in this slow but sure process, at last man is put upon the
scene a sevenfold being just as the universe and earth itself
are sevenfold. Each of his seven principles is derived from one
of the great first seven divisions, and each relates to a planet
or scene of evolution, and to a race in which that evolution was
carried out. So the first sevenfold differentiation is important
to be borne in mind, since it is the basis of all that follows;
just as the universal evolution is septenary so the evolution of
humanity, sevenfold in its constitution, is carried on upon a
septenary Earth. This is spoken of in Theosophical literature as
the Sevenfold Planetary Chain, and is intimately connected with
Man's special evolution.

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Ancient Wisdom for a New Age