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IN all
Oriental literature bearing on the constitution of all the cosmos,
frequent reference is made to the days and the nights of Brahma; the
in-breathings and the out-breathings of the creative principle, the
periods of manvantara1
and the periods of pralaya. This idea runs into various Eastern
mythologies, but in its symbolical aspects we need not follow it here.
The process in Nature to which it refers is of course the alternate
succession of activity and repose that is observable at every step of
the great ascent from the infinitely small to the infinitely great. Man
has a manvantara and pralaya every four-and-twenty hours, his periods of
waking and sleeping; vegetation follows the same rule from year to year
as it subsides and revives with the seasons. The world too has its
manvantaras and pralayas, when the tide-wave of humanity approaches its
shore, runs through the evolution of its seven races, and ebbs away
again; and such a manvantara has been treated by most exoteric religions
as the whole cycle of eternity.
The major manvantara of our planetary chain is that which comes to
an end when the last Dhyan Chohan of the seventh round of perfected
humanity passes into Nirvana. And the expression has thus to be regarded
as one of considerable elasticity. It may be said indeed to have
infinite elasticity, and that is one explanation of the confusion which
has reigned in all treatises on Eastern religions in their popular
aspects. All the root-words transferred to popular literature from the
secret doctrine have a seven-fold significance, at least for the
initiate., while the uninitiated reader, naturally supposing that one
word means one thing, and trying always to clear up its meaning by
collating its various applications, and striking an average, gets into
the most hopeless embarrassment.
The planetary chain with which we are concerned is not the only one
which has our sun as its centre. As there are other planets be-
sides the Earth in our chain, so there are other chains besides this in
our solar system. There are seven such, and there comes a time when all
these go into pralaya together. This is spoken of as a solar pralaya,
and within the interval between two such pralayas the vast solar
manvantara covers seven pralayas and manvantaras of our — and each other
— planetary chain. Thought is baffled, say even the adepts, in
speculating as to how many of our solar pralayas must come before the
great cosmic night in which the whole universe, in its collective
enormity, obeys what is manifestly the universal law of activity and
repose, and with all its myriad systems passes itself into pralaya. But
even that tremendous result, says esoteric science, must surely come.
After the pralaya of a single planetary chain there is no necessity
for a recommencement of evolutionary activity absolutely de novo.
There is only a resumption of arrested activity. The vegetable and
animal kingdoms, which at the end of the last corresponding manvantara
had reached only a partial development, are not destroyed. Their life or
vital energy passes through a night or period of rest; they also have,
so to speak, a Nirvana of their own, as why should they not, these fœtal
and infant entities? They are all like ourselves, begotten of the one
element. As we have our Dhyan Chohans, so have they, in their several
kingdoms, elemental guardians, and are as well taken care of in the mass
as humanity is in the mass. The one element not only fills space and
is space, but interpenetrates every atom of cosmic matter.
When, however, the hour of the solar pralaya strikes, though the
process of man’s advance on his last seventh round is precisely the same
as usual, each planet, instead of merely passing out of the visible into
the invisible, as he quits it in turn, is annihilated. With the
beginning of the seventh round of the seventh planetary chain manvantara,
every kingdom having now reached its last cycle, there remains on each
planet, after the exit of man, merely the maya of once living and
existing forms. With every step be takes on the descending and ascending
arcs, as he moves on from globe to globe the planet left behind becomes
an empty chrysaloidal case. At his departure there is an outflow from
every kingdom of its entities. Waiting to pass into higher forms in due
time, they are nevertheless liberated, and to the day of the next
evolution they will rest in their lethargic sleep in space, until
brought into life again at the new solar manvantara. The old elementals
will rest till they are called on to become in their turn the bodies of
mineral, vegetable, and animal entities on another and a higher chain of
globes on their way to become human entities while the germinal entities
of the lowest forms—and at that time there will remain but few of such —
will hang in space, like drops of water suddenly turned into icicles.
They will thaw at the first hot breath of the new solar manvantara, and
form the soul of the future globes. The slow development of the
vegetable kingdom, up to the period we are now dealing with, will have
been provided for by the longer interplanetary rest of man. When the
solar pralaya comes, the whole purified humanity merges into Nirvana,
and from that inter-solar Nirvana will be reborn in the higher systems.
The strings of worlds are destroyed, and vanish like a shadow from the
wall when the light is extinguished. “We have every indication,” say the
adepts, “that at this very moment such a solar pralaya is taking place,
while there are two minor ones ending somewhere.”
At the
beginning of the solar manvantara the hitherto subjective elements of
the material worlds, now scattered in cosmic dust, receiving their
impulse from the new Dhyan Chohans of the new solar system (the highest
of the old ones having gone higher) will form into primordial ripples of
life, and, separating into differentiating centres of activity, combine
in a graduated scale of seven stages of evolution. Like every other orb
of space, our earth has, before obtaining its ultimate materiality, to
pass through a gamut of seven stages of density. Nothing in this world
now can give us an idea of what an ultimate stage of materiality is
like. The French astronomer Flammarion, in a book called “La
Resurrection et la Fin des Mondes,” has approached a conception of this
ultimate materiality. The facts are, I am informed, with slight
modifications, much as he surmises. In consequence of what he treats as
secular refrigeration, but which more truly is old age and loss of vital
power, the solidification and desiccation of the earth at last reaches a
point when the whole globe becomes a relaxed conglomerate. Its period of
child-bearing has gone by; its progeny are all nurtured; its term of
life is finished. Hence its constituent masses cease to obey those laws
of cohesion and aggregation which held them together. And becoming like
a corpse, which, abandoned to the work of destruction, leaves each
molecule composing it free to separate itself from the body, and obey in
future the sway of new influences, “the attraction of the moon,”
suggests M. Flammarion, “would itself undertake the task of demolition
by producing a tidal wave of earth particles instead of an aqueous
tide.” This last idea must not be regarded as countenanced by occult
science except so far as it may serve to illustrate the loss of
molecular cohesion in the material of the earth.
Occult physics pass fairly into the region of metaphysics, if we
seek to obtain some indication of the way in which evolution recommences
after a universal pralaya.
The one eternal, imperishable thing in the universe, which universal
pralayas themselves pass over without destroying, is that which may be
regarded indifferently as space, duration, matter, or motion; not as
something having these four attributes, but as something which is
these four things at once, and always. And evolution takes its rise in
the atomic polarity which motion engenders. In cosmogony the positive
and the negative, or the active and passive, forces correspond to the
male and female principles. The spiritual efflux enters into the veil of
cosmic matter; the active is attracted by the passive principle, and if
we may here assist imagination by having recourse to old occult
symbology, the great Nag, the serpent emblem of eternity, attracts its
tail to its mouth, forming thereby the circle of eternity, or rather
cycles in eternity. The one and chief attribute of the universal
spiritual principle, the unconscious but ever active life-giver, is to
expand and shed; that of the universal material principle is to gather
in and fecundate. Unconscious and non-existing when separate, they
become consciousness and life when brought together. The word Brahma,
comes from the Sanskrit root brih, to expand, grow, or fructify,
esoteric cosmogony being but the vivifying expansive force of Nature in
its eternal revolution. No one expression can have contributed more to
mislead the human mind in basic speculation concerning the origin of
things than the word “creation.” Talk of creation and we are continually
butting against the facts. But once realize that our planet and
ourselves are no more creations than an iceberg, but states of being for
a given time, — that their present appearance, geological and
anthropological, are transitory and but a condition concomitant of that
stage of evolution at which they have arrived, — and the way has been
prepared for correct thinking. Then we are enabled to see what is meant
by the one and only principle or element in the universe, and by the
treatment of that element as androgynous; also by the proclamation of
Hindu philosophy that all things are but maya, transitory states,
except the one element which rests during the mahapralayas only, — the
nights of Brahma.
Perhaps we have now plunged deeply enough into the fathomless
mystery of the great First Cause: It is no paradox to say that
simply by reason of ignorance do ordinary theologians think they know so
much about God. And it is no exaggeration to say that the wondrously
endowed representatives of occult science, whose mortal nature has been
so far elevated and purified that their perceptions range over other
worlds and other states of existence, and commune directly with beings
as much greater than ordinary mankind as man is greater than the insects
of the field, — it is the mere truth, that they never occupy themselves
at all with any conception remotely resembling the God of churches and
creeds. Within the limits of the solar system, the mortal adept knows,
of his own knowledge, that all things are accounted for by law, working
on matter in its diverse forms, plus the guiding and modifying
influence of the highest intelligences associated with the solar system,
the Dhyan Chohans, the perfected humanity of the last preceding
manvantara. These Dhyan Chohans, or planetary spirits, on whose nature
it is almost fruitless to ponder until one can at least realize the
nature of disembodied existence in one’s own case, impart to the
reawakening worlds at the end of a planetary chain pralaya such impulses
that evolution feels them throughout its whole progress. The limits of
Nature’s great law restrain their action. They cannot say, Let there be
paradise throughout space, let all men be born supremely wise and good;
they can only work through the principle of evolution, and they cannot
deny to any man who is to be invested with the potentiality of
development himself into a Dhyan Chohan the right to do evil if he
prefers that to good. Nor can they prevent evil, if done, from producing
suffering. Objective life is the soil in which the life-germs are
planted; spiritual existence (the expression being used, remember, in
contrast merely to grossly material existence) is the flower to
be ultimately obtained. But the human germ is something more than a
flower-seed; it has liberty of choice in regard to growing up or growing
down, and it could not be developed without such liberty being exercised
by the plant. This is the necessity of evil. But within the limits
that logical necessity prescribes, the Dhyan Chohan impresses his
conceptions upon the evolutionary tide, and comprehends the origin of
all that he beholds.
Surely as
we ponder in this way over the magnitude of the cyclic evolution with
which esoteric science is in this way engaged, it seems reasonable to
postpone considerations as to the origin of the whole cosmos. The
ordinary man in this earth-life, with certainly some hundred many
earth-lives to come, and then very much many important inter-incarnation
periods (more important, that is, as regards duration and the prospect
of happiness or sorrow) also in prospect, may surely be most wisely
occupied with the inquiries whose issue will affect practical results
than with speculation in which he is practically quite uninterested. Of
course from the point of view of religious speculation resting on no
positive knowledge of anything beyond this life, nothing can be more
important or more highly practical than conjectures as to the attributes
and probable intentions of the personal, terrible Jehovah, pictured as
an omnipotent tribunal into whose presence the soul at its death is to
be introduced for judgment. But scientific knowledge of spiritual things
throws back the day of judgment into a very dim perspective, the
intervening period being filled with activity of all kinds. Moreover, it
shows mankind that certainly, for millions and millions of centuries to
come, it will not be confronted with any judge at all, other than that
all-pervading judge, that seventh principle, or universal spirit, which
exists everywhere, and, operating on matter, provokes the existence of
man himself, and the world in which be lives, and the future conditions
towards which he is pressing. The seventh principle, undefinable,
incomprehensible for us at our present stages of enlightenment, is of
course the only God recognized by esoteric knowledge, and no
personification of this can be otherwise than symbolical.
And yet in truth esoteric knowledge, giving life and reality to
ancient symbolism in one direction as often as it conflicts with modern
dogma in the other, shows us how far from absolutely fabulous are even
the most anthropomorphic notions of Deity associated by exoteric
tradition with the beginning of the world. The planetary spirit,
actually incarnated among men in the first round, was the prototype of
personal Deity in all subsequent developments of the idea. The mistake
made by uninstructed men in dealing with the idea is merely one of
degree. The personal God of an insignificant minor manvantara has been
taken for the Creator of the whole cosmos,— a most natural mistake for
people forced, by knowing no more of human destiny than was included in
one objective incarnation, to suppose that all beyond was a homogeneous
spiritual future. The God of this life, of course, for them, was the God
of all lives and worlds and periods.
The reader will not misunderstand me, I trust, to mean that esoteric
science regards the planetary spirit of the first round as a god. As I
say, it is concerned with the working of Nature in an immeasurable
space, from an immeasurable past, and all through immeasurable future.
The enormous areas of time and space in which our solar system operates
is explorable by the mortal adepts of esoteric science.
Within those limits they know all that takes place and how it takes
place, and they know that everything is accounted for by the
constructive will of the collective host of the planetary spirits,
operating under the law of evolution that pervades all Nature. They
commune with these planetary spirits, and learn from them that the law
of this is the law of other solar systems as well, into the regions of
which the perceptive faculties of the planetary spirits can plunge, as
the perceptive faculties of the adepts themselves can plunge into the
life of other planets of this chain. The law of alternating activity and
repose is operating universally; for the whole cosmos, even though at
unthinkable intervals, pralaya must succeed manvantara, and manvantara
pralaya.
Will any one
ask, To what end does this eternal succession work? It is better to
confine the question to a single system, and ask, To what end does the
original nebula arrange itself in planetary vortices of evolution, and
develop worlds in which the universal spirit, reverberating through
matter, produces form and life and those higher states of matter in
which that which we call subjective or spiritual existence is provided
for? Surely it is end enough to satisfy any reasonable mind that such
sublimely perfected beings as the planetary spirits themselves come thus
into existence, and live a conscious life of supreme knowledge and
felicity through vistas of time which are equivalent to all we can
imagine of eternity. Into this unutterable greatness every living thing
has the opportunity of passing ultimately. The spirit which is in every
animated form, and which has even worked up into these from forms we are
generally in the habit of calling inanimate, will slowly but certainly
progress onwards until the working of its untiring influence in matter
has evolved a human soul. It does not follow that the plants and animals
around us have any principle evolved in them as yet which will assume a
human form in the course of the present manvantara; but though the
course of an incomplete revolution may be suspended by a period of
natural repose, it is not rendered abortive. Eventually every spiritual
monad, itself a sinless unconscious principle, will work through
conscious forms on lower levels, until these, throwing off one after
another higher and higher forms, will produce that in which the God-like
consciousness may be fully evoked. Certainly it is not by reason of the
grandeur of any human conceptions as to what would be an adequate reason
for the existence of the universe that such a consummation can appear an
insufficient purpose, not even if the final destiny of the planetary
spirit himself, after periods to which his development from the mineral
forms of primeval worlds is but a childhood in the recollection of the
man, is to merge his glorified individuality into that sum total of all
consciousness, which esoteric metaphysics treat as absolute
consciousness, which is non-consciousness. These paradoxical expressions
are simply counters representing ideas that the human mind is not
qualified to apprehend, and it is waste of time to haggle over them.
These considerations supply the key to esoteric Buddhism, a more
direct outcome of the universal esoteric doctrine than any other popular
religion; for the effort in its construction has been to make men love
virtue for its own sake and for its good effect on their future
incarnations, not to keep them in subjection to any priestly system or
dogma by terrifying their fancy with the doctrine of a personal judge
waiting to try them for more than their lives at their death. Mr. Lillie
is mistaken, admirable as his intention has been, and sympathetic as his
mind evidently is with the beautiful morality and aspiration of
Buddhism, in deducing from its temple ritual the notion of a personal
God. No such conception enters into the great esoteric doctrine of
Nature, of which this volume has furnished an imperfect sketch. Nor even
in reference to the farthest regions of the immensity beyond our own
planetary system does the adept exponent of the esoteric doctrine
tolerate the adoption of an agnostic attitude it will not suffice for
him to say, “As far as the elevated senses of planetary spirits, whose
cognition extends to the outermost limits of the starry heavens, — as
far as their vision can extend Nature is self-sufficing; as to what may
lie beyond we offer no hypothesis.” What the adept really says on this
head is, “The universe is boundless, and it is a stultification of
thought to talk of any hypothesis setting in beyond the boundless, — on
the other side of the limits of the limitless.”
That which antedates every manifestation of the universe, and would
lie beyond the limit of manifestation, if such limit could ever be
found, is that which underlies the manifested universe within our own
purview, — matter animated by motion, its parabrahm, or spirit. Matter,
space, motion, and duration constitute one and the same eternal
substance of the universe. There is nothing else eternal absolutely.
That is the first state of matter, itself perfectly uncognizable by
physical senses, which deal with manifested matter, another state
altogether. But though thus, in one sense of the word, materialistic,
the esoteric doctrine, as any reader of the foregoing explanations will
have seen, is as far from resembling the gross narrow-minded conception
of Nature, which ordinarily goes by the name of materialism, as the
north pole looks away from the south. It stoops to materialism, as it
were, to link its methods with the logic of that system, and ascends to
the highest realms of idealism to embrace and expound the most exalted
aspirations of spirit. As it cannot be too frequently or earnestly
repeated, it is the union of science with Religion, — the bridge by
which the most acute and cautious pursuers of experimental knowledge may
cross over to the most enthusiastic devotee, by means of which the most
enthusiastic devotee may return to earth and yet keep heaven still
around him.
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Notes:
1
As
transliterated into English, this word may be written either
manwantara or manvantara; and the proper pronunciation is
something between the two, with the accent on the second syllable.
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