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Title: The Ocean of Theosophy

Author: William Judge

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[Illustration: William Judge, July 1895]


                               THE OCEAN

                                  OF

                               THEOSOPHY

                                  BY

                           WILLIAM Q. JUDGE

                          TWENTIETH THOUSAND

                   THE UNITED LODGE OF THEOSOPHISTS
               METROPOLITAN BLDG., BROADWAY AT FIFTH ST.
                        LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
                                 1915




                           COPYRIGHT, 1893,

                                  BY
                           WILLIAM Q. JUDGE.
                         All rights reserved.

                           COPYRIGHT, 1915,

                                  BY
                   THE UNITED LODGE OF THEOSOPHISTS




PREFACE.


An attempt is made in the pages of this book to write of Theosophy
in such a manner as to be understood by the ordinary reader. Bold
statements are made in it upon the knowledge of the writer, but at
the same time it is distinctly to be understood that he alone is
responsible for what is therein written: the Theosophical Society is
not involved in nor bound by anything said in the book, nor are any
of its members any the less good Theosophists because they may not
accept what he has set down. The tone of settled conviction which may
be thought to pervade the chapters is not the result of dogmatism or
conceit, but flows from knowledge based upon evidence and experience.

Members of the Theosophical Society will notice that certain theories
or doctrines have not been gone into. That is because they could not
be treated without unduly extending the book and arousing needless
controversy.

The subject of the Will has received no treatment, inasmuch as that
power or faculty is hidden, subtle, undiscoverable as to essence,
and only visible in effect. As it is absolutely colorless and varies
in moral quality in accordance with the desire behind it, as also it
acts frequently without our knowledge, and as it operates in all the
kingdoms below man, there could be nothing gained by attempting to
enquire into it apart from the Spirit and the desire.

No originality is claimed for this book. The writer invented none of
it, discovered none of it, but has simply written that which he has
been taught and which has been proved to him. It therefore is only a
handing on of what has been known before.

  WILLIAM Q. JUDGE.




PREFACE TO NEW EDITION.


Some twenty-two years ago, the first edition of “The Ocean of
Theosophy” was published by its author, Wm. Q. Judge. Since that time
thousands of books dealing with Theosophy have been published by more
or less prominent students of Theosophy, but unfortunately for the
public, none of these show the knowledge, grasp and range which is
so evident in the present volume,—and still more unfortunately, the
methods pursued by these latter-day writers have served to obscure
the fact of the existence of an exposition of Theosophy written by a
Teacher of that Science of Life.

As the Author’s Preface shows, the book was written in such a manner
as to be understood by the ordinary reader; the simplicity of the
terms used, however, should not mislead the reader into thinking that
the work is an elementary one, for behind and within every statement
there is a depth of meaning that the careless and superficial fail
to perceive. It is really a simplified text-book of the fundamental
teachings of Theosophy, and is found by students of the “Secret
Doctrine” to be a true abridgment of that great work and a wonderful
aid in its comprehension; it was written with that end in view by the
only one competent to do so and is therefore earnestly recommended to
every student of Theosophy.

The passage of years has served to show, not only the value of this
little book, but the status of Mr. Judge as a Teacher. Everything
he has written bears impress of his deep knowledge to every real
student of Theosophy. Even the ordinary reader cannot fail to perceive
that only “One Who Knows” could have so applied Theosophy to the
circumstances and conditions of every-day human existence.

There are but few books whose issuance is due to Mr. Judge; these
few however, are most valuable aids to the student in living the
Theosophic life. “Letters That Have Helped Me,” are two small
volumes containing letters written to students, with comments by the
compiler; “Echoes From the Orient,” is a broad outline of Theosophical
doctrines, 64 pages; “The Bhagavad-Gita” is a rendition, much better
and clearer than any literal translation extant; “Patanjali’s Yoga
Aphorisms,” is an ancient treatise on the Soul and its powers, from
which modern psychology has much to learn. In addition Mr. Judge
wrote a great number of articles dealing with the philosophy in its
practical application to daily life; these can be found in the magazine
“Theosophy.”

The earnest student will do well to study conjointly the writings of
H. P. Blavatsky and Wm. Q. Judge; from them he will learn Theosophy
pure and simple; will recognize the community of knowledge and complete
accord that existed between them and will more fully appreciate the
mission and nature of those two Personages.




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER I.

  THEOSOPHY AND THE MASTERS.

  Theosophy generally defined. The existence of highly developed
  men in the Universe. These men are the Mahatmas,
  Initiates, Brothers, Adepts. How they work and why they
  remain now concealed. Their Lodge. They are perfected
  men from other periods of evolution. They have had various
  names in history. Apollonius, Moses, Solomon, and others
  were members of this fraternity. They had one single doctrine.
  They are possible because man may at last be as they
  are. They keep the true doctrine and cause it to reappear at
  the right time.                                       Pages 1 to 13.


  CHAPTER II.

  GENERAL PRINCIPLES.

  A view of the general laws governing the Cosmos. The
  sevenfold division in the system. Real Matter not visible and
  this always known to the Lodge. Mind the intelligent portion
  of the Cosmos. In the universal Mind the sevenfold plan of
  the Cosmos is contained. Evolution proceeds upon the plan
  in the universal Mind. Periods of Evolution come to an end;
  this is the Night of Brahma. The Mosaic account of cosmogenesis
  has dwarfed modern conceptions. The Jews had merely
  one part of the doctrine taken from the ancient Egyptians.
  The doctrine accords with the inner meaning of Genesis. The
  general length of periods of Evolution. Same doctrine as
  Herbert Spencer’s. The old Hindu chronology gives the details.
  The story of Solomon’s Temple is that of the evolution
  of man. The doctrine far older than the Christian one. The
  real age of the world. Man is over 18,000,000 years old. Evolution
  is accomplished solely by the Egos within that at last
  become the users of human forms. Each of the seven principles
  of man is derived from one of the seven great divisions of
  the Universe.                                        Pages 14 to 22.


  CHAPTER III.

  THE EARTH CHAIN.

  The doctrine respecting the Earth. It is sevenfold also. It
  is one of a chain of seven corresponding to man. The whole
  seven are not in a chain separated as to members, but they
  interpenetrate each other. The Earth chain is the reïncarnation
  of a former old and now dead chain. This old chain was
  one of which our moon is the visible representative. Moon
  now dead and contracting. Venus, Mars, etc., are living
  members of other similar chains to ours. A mass of Egos for
  each chain. The number, though incalculable, is definite.
  Their course of evolution through the seven globes. In each
  a certain part of our nature is developed. At the fourth globe
  the process of condensation is begun and reaches its limit.
                                                       Pages 23 to 28.


  CHAPTER IV.

  SEPTENARY CONSTITUTION OF MAN.

  The constitution of man. How the doctrine differs from the
  ordinary Christian one. The real doctrine known in the first
  centuries of this era, but purposely withdrawn from a nation
  not able to bear it. The danger if the doctrine had not been
  withdrawn. The sevenfold division. The principles classified.
  The divisions agree with the chain of seven globes. The lower
  man is a composite being. His higher trinity. The lower
  four principles transitory and perishable. Death leaves the
  trinity as the only persistent part of us. What the physical
  man is, and what the other unseen mortal man is. A second
  physical man not seen but still mortal. The senses pertain to
  the unseen man and not to the visible one.           Pages 29 to 34.


  CHAPTER V.

  BODY AND ASTRAL BODY.

  The body and life principle. The mystery of life. Sleep
  and death are due to excess of life not bearable by the organism.
  The body an illusion. What is the cell. Life is universal.
  It is not the result of the organism. The Astral Body.
  What it is made of. Its powers and functions. As a model
  for the body. It is possessed by all kingdoms of nature. Its
  power to travel. The real sense organs are in the astral body.
  The place the astral body has at spiritualistic _séances_. The
  astral body accounts for telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience,
  and all such psychical phenomena.                    Pages 35 to 44.


  CHAPTER VI.

  KAMA-DESIRE.

  The fourth principle. Kama Rupa. In English, the Passions
  and Desires. Kama Rupa is not produced by the body
  but is the cause for body. This is the balance principle of the
  seven. It is the basis of action and mover of the will. Right
  desire leads to right act. This principle has a higher and a
  lower aspect. The principle is in the astral body. At death
  it coalesces with the astral body and makes of it a shell of the
  man. It has powers of its own of an automatic nature. This
  shell is the so-called “spirit” of _séances_. It is a danger to the
  race. Elementals help this shell at _séances_. No soul or conscience
  present. Suicides and executed criminals leave very
  coherent shells. The principle of desire is common to all the
  organized kingdoms. It is the brute part of man. Man is
  now a fully developed quaternary with the higher principles
  partially developed.                                 Pages 45 to 51.


  CHAPTER VII.

  MANAS.

  Manas the fifth principle. The first of the real man. This
  is the thinking principle and is not the product of brain. Brain
  is only its instrument. How the light of mind was given to
  mindless men. Perfected men from older systems gave it to
  us as they got it from their predecessors. Manas is the storehouse
  of all thoughts. Manas is the seer. If the connection
  between Manas and brain is broken the person is not able to
  cognize. The organs of the body cognize nothing. Manas is
  divided into upper and lower. Its four peculiarities. Buddha,
  Jesus, and others had Manas fully developed. Atma the Divine
  Ego. The permanent individuality. This permanent individuality
  has been through every sort of experience in many bodies.
  Manas and matter have now a greater facility of action
  than in former times. Manas is bound by desire, and this
  makes reïncarnation a necessity.                     Pages 52 to 59.


  CHAPTER VIII.

  OF REINCARNATION.

  Why is man as he is, and how did he come. What the Universe
  is for. Spiritual and physical evolution demand reïncarnation.
  Reïncarnation on the physical plane is reëmbodiment
  or alteration of form. The whole mass of matter of the globe
  will one day be men in a period far distant. The doctrine ancient.
  Held by the early Christians. Taught by Jesus. What
  reïncarnates. Life’s mysteries arise from incomplete incarnation
  of the higher principles. It is not transmigration to lower
  forms. Explanation of Manu on this.                  Pages 60 to 69.


  CHAPTER IX.

  REINCARNATION CONTINUED.

  Objections urged. Desire cannot alter law. Early arrivals
  in heaven. Must they wait for us. Recognition of the soul not
  dependent on objectivity. Heredity not an objection. What
  heredity does. Divergences in heredity not recognized. History
  goes against heredity. Reïncarnation not unjust. What
  is justice. We do not suffer for another’s but for our own
  deeds. Memory. Why we do not remember other lives. Who
  does? How to account for increase of population.     Pages 70 to 78.


  CHAPTER X.

  ARGUMENTS SUPPORTING REINCARNATION.

  From the nature of the soul. From the laws of mind and
  soul. From differences in character. From the necessity for
  discipline and evolution. From differences of capacity and
  start in life at the cradle. Individual identity proves it. The
  probable object of life makes it necessary. One life not enough
  to carry out Nature’s purposes. Mere death confers no advance.
  A school after death is illogical. The persistence of
  savagery and decay of nations give support to it. The appearance
  of geniuses is due to reïncarnation. Inherent ideas
  common to man show it. Opposition to the doctrine based
  solely on prejudice.                                 Pages 79 to 88.


  CHAPTER XI.

  KARMA.

  Definition of the word. An unfamiliar term. A beneficent
  law. How present life is affected by past acts of other lives.
  Each act has a thought at its root. Through Manas they react
  on each personal life. Why people are born deformed or
  in bad circumstances. The three classes of Karma and its
  three fields of operation. National and Racial Karma. Individual
  un-happiness and happiness. The Master’s words on Karma.
                                                       Pages 89 to 98.


  CHAPTER XII.

  KAMA LOKA.

  The first state after death. Where and what are heaven and
  hell? Death of the body only the first step of death. A second
  death after that. Separation of the seven principles into
  three classes. What is _Kama Loka_? Origin of Christian purgatory.
  It is an astral sphere with numerous degrees. The
  _Skandhas_. The astral shell of man in _Kama Loka_. It is devoid
  of soul, mind, and conscience. It is the “spirit” of the
  _séance_ rooms. Classification of shells in _Kama Loka_. Black
  magicians there. Fate of suicides and others. Pre-devachanic
  unconsciousness.                                    Pages 99 to 108.


  CHAPTER XIII.

  DEVACHAN.

  The meaning of the term. A state of _Atma-Buddhi-Manas_.
  Operation of Karma on Devachan. The necessity for Devachan.
  It is another sort of thinking with no physical body to
  clog it. Only two fields for operation of causes—subjective
  and objective. Devachan is one. No time there for the soul.
  Length of stay therein. Mathematics of the soul. Average
  stay therein is 1500 mortal years. Depends on psychic impulses
  of life. Its use and purpose. On the last thoughts at death
  the devachanic state is fashioned. Devachan not meaningless.
  Do we see those left behind? We bring their images before
  us. Entities in Devachan have a power to help those they
  love. Mediums cannot go to those in Devachan except in rare
  cases and when the person is pure. Adepts only can help
  those in Devachan.                                 Pages 109 to 116.


  CHAPTER XIV.

  CYCLES.

  One of the most important doctrines. Corresponding words
  in the Sanskrit. Few cycles known to the West. They cause
  the reäppearance of former living personages. They affect
  life and evolution. When did the first moment come. The first
  rate of vibration determines the subsequent ones. When man
  leaves the globe the forces die. Convulsions and cataclysms.
  Reïncarnation and karma intermixed with cyclic law. Civilizations
  cycle back. The cycle of Avatars. Krishna, Buddha,
  and others come under cycles. Minor personages and great
  leaders. Intersection of cycles causes convulsions. The Moon,
  Sun, and Sidereal cycles. Individual cycles and that of reïncarnation.
  The motion through the constellations, and the
  meaning of the story of Jonah. The Zodiacal clock. How the
  ideas are impressed and preserved by nations. Cause for
  earthquakes, Cosmic Fire, Glaciation, and Floods. The Brahmanical
  Cycles.                                            Pages 117 to 126.


  CHAPTER XV.

  DIFFERENTIATION OF SPECIES—MISSING LINKS.

  Ultimate origin of man not discoverable. Man not derived
  from a single pair, nor from the animals. Seven races of men
  appeared simultaneously on the globe. They are now amalgamated
  and will differentiate. The Anthropoid Apes. Their
  origin. They came from man. They are the descendants of
  offspring from unnatural union in the third and fourth rounds.
  The Delayed Races. The secret books on the question. Human
  features of apes accounted for. The lower kingdoms
  from other planets. Their differentiation by intelligent interference
  by the Dhyanis. The midway point of evolution.
  Astral forms of old rounds solidified in physical rounds.
  Missing links, what they are and why Science cannot discover
  them. The aim of Nature in all this work.          Pages 127 to 134.


  CHAPTER XVI.

  PSYCHIC LAWS, FORCES, AND PHENOMENA.

  No true psychology in the West. It exists in the Orient.
  Man the mirror of all forces. Gravitation only a half law.
  Importance of polarity and cohesion. Rendering objects invisible.
  Imagination all powerful. Mental telegraphy. Reading
  minds is burglary. Apportation, clairvoyance, clairaudience,
  and second-sight. Pictures in the Astral Light. Dreams
  and visions. Apparitions. Real clairvoyance. Inner stimulus
  makes outer impression. Astral Light the Register of
  everything.                          Pages 135 to 146.


  CHAPTER XVII.

  PSYCHIC PHENOMENA AND SPIRITUALISM.

  Spiritualism wrongly named. Should be called necromancy
  and the worship of the dead. This cult did not originate in
  America. The practice long known in India. The facts recorded
  deserve examination. Theosophists admit the facts but
  interpret them differently from the “spiritualist.” The examination
  confined to the question of whether the dead return.
  The dead do not return thus. The mass of communications
  are from the astral shell of man. Objections stated to the
  claims made by mediums. The record justifies the ridicule of
  science. Materialization and what it is. A mass of electric
  magnetic matter with a picture upon it from the astral light.
  Or it is the astral body of the medium extruded from the
  living body. Analysis of the laws to be known before the
  phenomena can be understood. The _timbre_ of the “independent
  voice.” Importance of the astral realm. The Dangers of
  mediumship. Attempt to get these powers for money or
  selfish ends also dangerous. Cyclic law ordains the slackening
  of the force at this time. The purpose of the Lodge.
                                                     Pages 147 to 154.




THE OCEAN OF THEOSOPHY.




CHAPTER I.


Theosophy is that ocean of knowledge which spreads from shore to shore
of the evolution of sentient beings; unfathomable in its deepest
parts, it gives the greatest minds their fullest scope, yet, shallow
enough at its shores, it will not overwhelm the understanding of a
child. It is wisdom about God for those who believe that he is all
things and in all, and wisdom about nature for the man who accepts the
statement found in the Christian Bible that God cannot be measured
or discovered, and that darkness is around his pavilion. Although it
contains by derivation the name God and thus may seem at first sight
to embrace religion alone, it does not neglect science, for it is the
science of sciences and therefore has been called the wisdom religion.
For no science is complete which leaves out any department of nature,
whether visible or invisible, and that religion which, depending solely
on an assumed revelation, turns away from things and the laws which
govern them is nothing but a delusion, a foe to progress, an obstacle
in the way of man’s advancement toward happiness. Embracing both the
scientific and the religious, Theosophy is a scientific religion and a
religious science.

It is not a belief or dogma formulated or invented by man, but is a
knowledge of the laws which govern the evolution of the physical,
astral, psychical, and intellectual constituents of nature and of man.
The religion of the day is but a series of dogmas man-made and with no
scientific foundation for promulgated ethics; while our science as yet
ignores the unseen, and failing to admit the existence of a complete
set of inner faculties of perception in man, it is cut off from the
immense and real field of experience which lies within the visible and
tangible worlds. But Theosophy knows that the whole is constituted of
the visible and the invisible, and perceiving outer things and objects
to be but transitory it grasps the facts of nature, both without and
within. It is therefore complete in itself and sees no unsolvable
mystery anywhere; it throws the word coincidence out of its vocabulary
and hails the reign of law in everything and every circumstance.

That man possesses an immortal soul is the common belief of humanity;
to this Theosophy adds that he is a soul; and further that all nature
is sentient, that the vast array of objects and men are not mere
collections of atoms fortuitously thrown together and thus without law
evolving law, but down to the smallest atom all is soul and spirit
ever evolving under the rule of law which is inherent in the whole.
And just as the ancients taught, so does Theosophy; that the course of
evolution is the drama of the soul and that nature exists for no other
purpose than the soul’s experience. The Theosophist agrees with Prof.
Huxley in the assertion that there must be beings in the universe whose
intelligence is as much beyond ours as ours exceeds that of the black
beetle, and who take an active part in the government of the natural
order of things. Pushing further on by the light of the confidence had
in his teachers, the Theosophist adds that such intelligences were once
human and came like all of us from other and previous worlds, where
as varied experience had been gained as is possible on this one. We
are therefore not appearing for the first time when we come upon this
planet, but have pursued a long, an immeasurable course of activity
and intelligent perception on other systems of globes, some of which
were destroyed ages before the solar system condensed. This immense
reach of the evolutionary system means, then, that this planet on which
we now are is the result of the activity and the evolution of some
other one that died long ago, leaving its energy to be used in the
bringing into existence of the earth, and that the inhabitants of the
latter in their turn came from some older world to proceed here with
the destined work in matter. And the brighter planets, such as Venus,
are the habitation of still more progressed entities, once as low as
ourselves, but now raised up to a pitch of glory incomprehensible for
our intellects.

The most intelligent being in the universe, man, has never, then, been
without a friend, but has a line of elder brothers who continually
watch over the progress of the less progressed, preserve the knowledge
gained through aeons of trial and experience, and continually seek
for opportunities of drawing the developing intelligence of the race
on this or other globes to consider the great truths concerning the
destiny of the soul. These elder brothers also keep the knowledge they
have gained of the laws of nature in all departments, and are ready
when cyclic law permits to use it for the benefit of mankind. They have
always existed as a body, all knowing each other, no matter in what
part of the world they may be, and all working for the race in many
different ways. In some periods they are well known to the people and
move among ordinary men whenever the social organization, the virtue,
and the development of the nations permit it. For if they were to come
out openly and be heard of everywhere, they would be worshipped as gods
by some and hunted as devils by others. In those periods when they do
come out some of their number are rulers of men, some teachers, a few
great philosophers, while others remain still unknown except to the
most advanced of the body.

It would be subversive of the ends they have in view were they to make
themselves public in the present civilization, which is based almost
wholly on money, fame, glory, and personality. For this age, as one of
them has already said, “is an age of transition”, when every system
of thought, science, religion, government, and society is changing,
and men’s minds are only preparing for an alteration into that state
which will permit the race to advance to the point suitable for these
elder brothers to introduce their actual presence to our sight. They
may be truly called the bearers of the torch of truth across the ages;
they investigate all things and beings; they know what man is in his
innermost nature and what his powers and destiny, his state before
birth and the states into which he goes after the death of his body;
they have stood by the cradle of nations and seen the vast achievements
of the ancients, watched sadly the decay of those who had no power to
resist the cyclic law of rise and fall; and while cataclysms seemed
to show a universal destruction of art, architecture, religion, and
philosophy, they have preserved the records of it all in places
secure from the ravages of either men or time; they have made minute
observations, through trained psychics among their own order, into
the unseen realms of nature and of mind, recorded the observations
and preserved the record; they have mastered the mysteries of sound
and color through which alone the elemental beings behind the veil of
matter can be communicated with, and thus can tell why the rain falls
and what it falls for, whether the earth is hollow or not, what makes
the wind to blow and light to shine, and greater feat than all—one
which implies a knowledge of the very foundations of nature—they know
what the ultimate divisions of time are and what are the meaning and
the times of the cycles.

But, asks the busy man of the nineteenth century who reads the
newspapers and believes in “modern progress,” if these elder brothers
are all you claim them to be, why have they left no mark on history nor
gathered men around them? Their own reply, published some time ago by
Mr. A. P. Sinnett, is better than any I could write.

“We will first discuss, if you please, the one relating to the
presumed failure of the ‘Fraternity’ to leave any mark upon the
history of the world. They ought, you think, to have been able, with
their extraordinary advantages, to have gathered into their schools
a considerable portion of the more enlightened minds of every race.
How do you know they have made no such mark? Are you acquainted with
their efforts, successes, and failures? Have you any dock upon which
to arraign them? How could your world collect proofs of the doings of
men who have sedulously kept closed every possible door of approach by
which the inquisitive could spy upon them? The precise condition of
their success was that they should never be supervised or obstructed.
What they have done they know; all that those outside their circle
could perceive was the results, the causes of which were masked from
view. To account for these results, many have in different ages
invented theories of the interposition of gods, special providences,
fates, the benign or hostile influences of the stars. There never
was a time within or before the so-called historical period when our
predecessors were not moulding events and ‘making history,’ the facts
of which were subsequently and invariably distorted by historians to
suit contemporary prejudices. Are you quite sure that the visible
heroic figures in the successive dramas were not often but their
puppets? We never pretended to be able to draw nations in the mass
to this or that crisis in spite of the general drift of the world’s
cosmic relations. The cycles must run their rounds. Periods of mental
and moral light and darkness succeed each other as day does night. The
major and minor yugas must be accomplished according to the established
order of things. And we, borne along the mighty tide, can only modify
and direct some of its minor currents.”

It is under cyclic law, during a dark period in the history of mind,
that the true philosophy disappears for a time, but the same law
causes it to reappear as surely as the sun rises and the human mind is
present to see it. But some works can only be performed by the Master,
while other works require the assistance of the companions. It is the
Master’s work to preserve the true philosophy, but the help of the
companions is needed to rediscover and promulgate it. Once more the
elder brothers have indicated where the truth—Theosophy—could be found,
and the companions all over the world are engaged in bringing it forth
for wider currency and propagation.

The Elder Brothers of Humanity are men who were perfected in former
periods of evolution. These periods of manifestation are unknown to
modern evolutionists so far as their number are concerned, though
long ago understood by not only the older Hindus, but also by those
great minds and men who instituted and carried on the first pure and
undebased form of the Mysteries of Greece. The periods, when out of
the Great Unknown there come forth the visible universes, are eternal
in their coming and going, alternating with equal periods of silence
and rest again in the Unknown. The object of these mighty waves is
the production of perfect man, the evolution of soul, and they always
witness the increase of the number of Elder Brothers; the life of the
least of men pictures them in day and night, waking and sleeping, birth
and death, “for these two, light and dark, day and night, are the
world’s eternal ways.”

In every age and complete national history these men of power and
compassion are given different designations. They have been called
Initiates, Adepts, Magi, Hierophants, Kings of the East, Wise Men,
Brothers, and what not. But in the Sanscrit language there is a word
which, being applied to them, at once thoroughly identifies them with
humanity. It is Mahatma. This is composed of _Maha_ great, and _Atma_
soul; so it means great soul, and as all men are souls the distinction
of the Mahatma lies in greatness. The term Mahatma has come into
wide use through the Theosophical Society, as Mme. H. P. Blavatsky
constantly referred to them as her Masters who gave her the knowledge
she possessed. They were at first known only as the Brothers, but
afterwards, when many Hindus flocked to the Theosophical movement, the
name Mahatma was brought into use, inasmuch as it has behind it an
immense body of Indian tradition and literature. At different times
unscrupulous enemies of the Theosophical Society have said that even
this name had been invented and that such beings are not known of among
the Indians or in their literature. But these assertions are made
only to discredit if possible a philosophical movement that threatens
to completely upset prevailing erroneous theological dogmas. For all
through Hindu literature Mahatmas are often spoken of, and in parts of
the north of that country the term is common. In the very old poem the
_Bhagavad-Gîtâ_, revered by all Hindu sects and admitted by the western
critics to be noble as well as beautiful, there is a verse reading,
“Such a Mahatma is difficult to find.”

But irrespective of all disputes as to specific names, there is
sufficient argument and proof to show that a body of men having the
wonderful knowledge described above has always existed and probably
exists to-day. The older mysteries continually refer to them. Ancient
Egypt had them in her great king-Initiates, sons of the sun and
friends of great gods. There is a habit of belittling the ideas of the
ancients which is in itself belittling to the people of to-day. Even
the Christian who reverently speaks of Abraham as “the friend of God”,
will scornfully laugh at the idea of the claims of Egyptian rulers to
the same friendship being other than childish assumption of dignity
and title. But the truth is, these great Egyptians were Initiates,
members of the one great lodge which includes all others of whatever
degree or operation. The later and declining Egyptians, of course, must
have imitated their predecessors, but that was when the true doctrine
was beginning once more to be obscured upon the rise of dogma and
priesthood.

The story of Apollonius of Tyana is about a member of one of the same
ancient orders appearing among men at a descending cycle, and only for
the purpose of keeping a witness upon the scene for future generations.

Abraham and Moses of the Jews are two other Initiates, Adepts who had
their work to do with a certain people; and in the history of Abraham
we meet with Melchizedek, who was so much beyond Abraham that he had
the right to confer upon the latter a dignity, a privilege, or a
blessing. The same chapter of human history which contains the names
of Moses and Abraham is illuminated also by that of Solomon. And thus
these three make a great Triad of Adepts, the record of whose deeds can
not be brushed aside as folly and devoid of basis.

Moses was educated by the Egyptians and in Midian, from both of which
he gained much occult knowledge, and any clear-seeing student of
the great Universal Masonry can perceive all through his books the
hand, the plan, and the work of a master. Abraham again knew all the
arts and much of the power in psychical realms that were cultivated
in his day, or else he could not have consorted with kings nor have
been “the friend of God”, and the reference to his conversations with
the Almighty in respect to the destruction of cities alone shows him
to have been an Adept who had long ago passed beyond the need of
ceremonial or other adventitious aids. Solomon completes this triad and
stands out in characters of fire. Around him is clustered such a mass
of legend and story about his dealings with the elemental powers and of
his magic possessions that one must condemn the whole ancient world as
a collection of fools who made lies for amusement if a denial is made
of his being a great character, a wonderful example of the incarnation
among men of a powerful Adept. We do not have to accept the name
Solomon nor the pretense that he reigned over the Jews, but we must
admit the fact that somewhere in the misty time to which the Jewish
records refer there lived and moved among the people of the earth one
who was an Adept and given that name afterwards. Peripatetics and
microscopic critics may affect to see in the prevalence of universal
tradition naught but evidence of the gullibility of men and their
power to imitate, but the true student of human nature and life knows
that the universal tradition is true and arises from the facts in the
history of man.

Turning to India, so long forgotten and ignored by the lusty and
egotistical, the fighting and the trading West, we find her full of the
lore relating to these wonderful men of whom Noah, Abraham, Moses, and
Solomon are only examples. There the people are fitted by temperament
and climate to be the preservers of the philosophical, ethical, and
psychical jewels that would have been forever lost to us had they been
left to the ravages of such Goths and Vandals as western nations were
in the early days of their struggle for education and civilization.
If the men who wantonly burned up vast masses of historical and
ethnological treasures found by the minions of the Catholic rulers
of Spain, in Central and South America, could have known of and put
their hands upon the books and palm-leaf records of India before the
protecting shield of England was raised against them, they would
have destroyed them all as they did for the Americans, and as their
predecessors attempted to do for the Alexandrian library. Fortunately
events worked otherwise.

All along the stream of Indian literature we can find the names by
scores of great adepts who were well known to the people and who all
taught the same story—the great epic of the human soul. Their names are
unfamiliar to western ears, but the records of their thoughts, their
work and powers remain. Still more, in the quiet unmoveable East there
are to-day by the hundred persons who know of their own knowledge that
the Great Lodge still exists and has its Mahatmas, Adepts, Initiates,
Brothers. And yet further, in that land are such a number of experts in
the practical application of minor though still very astonishing power
over nature and her forces, that we have an irresistible mass of human
evidence to prove the proposition laid down.

And if Theosophy—the teaching of this Great Lodge—is as said, both
scientific and religious, then from the ethical side we have still more
proof. A mighty Triad acting on and through ethics is that composed of
Buddha, Confucius, and Jesus. The first, a Hindoo, founds a religion
which to-day embraces many more people than Christianity, teaching
centuries before Jesus the ethics which he taught and which had been
given out even centuries before Buddha. Jesus coming to reform his
people repeats these ancient ethics, and Confucius does the same thing
for ancient and honorable China.

The Theosophist says that all these great names represent members
of the one single brotherhood, who all have a single doctrine. And
the extraordinary characters who now and again appear in western
civilization, such as St. Germain, Jacob Boehme, Cagliostro,
Paracelsus, Mesmer, Count St. Martin, and Madame H. P. Blavatsky,
are agents for the doing of the work of the Great Lodge at the
proper time. It is true they are generally reviled and classed as
impostors—though no one can find out why they are when they generally
confer benefits and lay down propositions or make discoveries of
great value to science after they have died. But Jesus himself would
be called an impostor to-day if he appeared in some Fifth avenue
theatrical church rebuking the professed Christians. Paracelsus was
the originator of valuable methods and treatments in medicine now
universally used. Mesmer taught hypnotism under another name. Madame
Blavatsky brought once more to the attention of the West the most
important system, long known to the Lodge, respecting man, his nature
and destiny. But all are alike called imposters by a people who have
no original philosophy of their own and whose mendicant and criminal
classes exceed in misery and in number those of any civilization on the
earth.

It will not be unusual for nearly all occidental readers to wonder how
men could possibly know so much and have such power over the operations
of natural law as I have ascribed to the Initiates, now so commonly
spoken of as the Mahatmas. In India, China, and other Oriental lands no
wonder would arise on these heads, because there, although everything
of a material civilization is just now in a backward state, they have
never lost a belief in the inner nature of man and in the power he may
exercise if he will. Consequently living examples of such powers and
capacities have not been absent from those people. But in the West a
materialistic civilization having arisen through a denial of the soul
life and nature consequent upon a reaction from illogical dogmatism,
there has not been any investigation of these subjects and, until
lately, the general public has not believed in the possibility of
anyone save a supposed God having such power.

A Mahatma endowed with power over space, time, mind, and matter, is
a possibility just because he is a perfected man. Every human being
has the germ of all the powers attributed to these great Initiates,
the difference lying solely in the fact that we have in general
not developed what we possess the germ of, while the Mahatma has
gone through the training and experience which have caused all the
unseen human powers to develop in him, and conferred gifts that look
god-like to his struggling brother below. Telepathy, mind-reading, and
hypnotism, all long ago known to Theosophy, show the existence in the
human subject of planes of consciousness, functions, and faculties
hitherto undreamed of. Mind-reading and the influencing of the mind
of the hypnotized subject at a distance prove the existence of a mind
which is not wholly dependent upon a brain, and that a medium exists
through which the influencing thought may be sent. It is under this
law that the Initiates can communicate with each other at no matter
what distance. Its _rationale_, not yet admitted by the schools of
the hypnotizers, is, that if the two minds vibrate or change into the
same state they will think alike, or, in other words, the one who is
to hear at a distance receives the impression sent by the other. In
the same way with all other powers, no matter how extraordinary. They
are all natural, although now unusual, just as great musical ability
is natural though not usual or common. If an Initiate can make a solid
object move without contact, it is because he understands the two laws
of attraction and repulsion of which “gravitation” is but the name for
one; if he is able to precipitate out of the viewless air the carbon
which we know is in it, forming the carbon into sentences upon the
paper, it is through his knowledge of the occult higher chemistry, and
the use of a trained and powerful image making faculty which every man
possesses; if he reads your thoughts with ease, that results from the
use of the inner and only real powers of sight, which require no retina
to see the fine-pictured web which the vibrating brain of man weaves
about him. All that the Mahatma may do is natural to the perfected man;
but if those powers are not at once revealed to us it is because the
race is as yet selfish altogether and still living for the present and
the transitory.

I repeat then, that though the true doctrine disappears for a time
from among men it is bound to reäppear, because first, it is impacted
in the imperishable center of man’s nature; and secondly, the Lodge
forever preserves it, not only in actual objective records, but also in
the intelligent and fully self-conscious men who, having successfully
overpassed the many periods of evolution which preceded the one we
are now involved in, cannot lose the precious possessions they have
acquired. And because the elder brothers are the highest product of
evolution through whom alone, in cöoperation with the whole human
family, the further regular and workmanlike prosecution of the plans of
the Great Architect of the Universe could be carried on, I have thought
it well to advert to them and their Universal Lodge before going to
other parts of the subject.




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 Æther, 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 Sanscrit, is used in place of Æther, 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 outwards, 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 to-day 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
four billion three hundred and twenty million 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 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.




CHAPTER III.


Coming now to our Earth the view put forward by Theosophy regarding
its genesis, its evolution and the evolution of the Human, Animal and
other Monads, is quite different from modern ideas, and in some things
contrary to accepted theories. But the theories of to-day are not
stable. They change with each century, while the Theosophical one never
alters because, in the opinion of those Elder Brothers who have caused
its repromulgation and pointed to its confirmation in ancient books,
it is but a statement of facts in nature. The modern theory is, on the
contrary, always speculative, changeable, and continually altered.

Following the general plan outlined in preceding pages, the Earth is
sevenfold. It is an entity and not a mere lump of gross matter. And
being thus an entity of a septenary nature there must be six other
globes which roll with it in space. This company of seven globes has
been called the “Earth Chain”, the “Planetary Chain”. In _Esoteric
Buddhism_ this is clearly stated, but there a rather hard and fast
materialistic view of it is given and the reader led to believe that
the doctrine speaks of seven distinct globes, all separated from though
connected with each other. One is forced to conclude that the author
meant to say that the globe Earth is as distinct from the other six as
Venus is from Mars.

This is not the doctrine. The earth is one of seven globes, in respect
to man’s consciousness only, because when he functions on one of the
seven he perceives it as a distinct globe and does not see the other
six. This is in perfect correspondence with man himself who has six
other constituents of which only the gross body is visible to him
because he is now functioning on the Earth—or the fourth globe—and his
body represents the Earth. The whole seven “globes” constitute one
single mass or great globe and they all interpenetrate each other.
But we have to say “globe”, because the ultimate shape is globular or
spherical. If one relies too closely on the explanation made by Mr.
Sinnett it might be supposed that the globes did not interpenetrate
each other but were connected by currents or lines of magnetic force.
And if too close attention is paid to the diagrams used in the _Secret
Doctrine_ to illustrate the scheme, without paying due regard to the
explanations and cautions given by H. P. Blavatsky, the same error
may be made. But both she and her Adept teachers say, that the seven
globes of our chain are in “_coadunition with each other but not in
consubstantiality_”.[1] This is further enforced by cautions not to
rely on statistics or plane surface diagrams, but to look at the
metaphysical and spiritual aspect of the theory as stated in English.
Thus from the very source of Mr. Sinnett’s book we have the statement,
that these globes are united in one mass though differing from each
other in substance, and that this difference of substance is due to
change of centre of consciousness.

[1] _Secret Doctrine_, Vol. 1, p. 166, first edition.

The Earth Chain of seven globes as thus defined is the direct
reïncarnation of a former chain of seven globes, and that former
family of seven was the moon chain, the moon itself being the visible
representative of the fourth globe of the old chain. When that former
vast entity composed of the Moon and six others, all united in one
mass, reached its limit of life it died just as any being dies. Each
one of the seven sent its energies into space and gave similar life or
vibration to cosmic dust—matter,—and the total cohesive force of the
whole kept the seven energies together. This resulted in the evolving
of the present Earth Chain of seven centres of energy or evolution
combined in one mass. As the Moon was the fourth of the old series it
is on the same plane of perception as the Earth, and as we are now
confined in our consciousness largely to Earth we are able only to see
one of the old seven—to wit: our Moon. When we are functioning on any
of the other seven we will perceive in our sky the corresponding old
corpse which will then be a Moon, and we will not see the present Moon.
Venus, Mars, Mercury and other visible planets are all fourth-plane
globes of distinct planetary masses and for that reason are visible
to us, their companion six centres of energy and consciousness being
invisible. All diagrams on plane surfaces will only becloud the theory
because a diagram necessitates linear divisions.

The stream or mass of Egos which evolves on the seven globes of our
chain is limited in number, yet the actual quantity is enormous. For
though the universe is limitless and infinite, yet in any particular
portion of Cosmos in which manifestation and evolution have begun
there is a limit to the extent of manifestation and to the number of
Egos engaged therein. And the whole number of Monads now going through
evolution on our Earth Chain came over from the old seven planets or
globes which I have described. _Esoteric Buddhism_ calls this mass
of Egos a “life wave”, meaning the stream of Monads. It reached this
planetary mass, represented to our consciousness by the central point
our Earth, and began on Globe A or No. 1, coming like an army or river.
The first portion began on Globe A and went through a long evolution
there in bodies suited to such a state of matter, and then passed on to
B, and so on through the whole seven greater states of consciousness
which have been called globes. When the first portion left A others
streamed in and pursued the same course, the whole army proceeding
with regularity round the septenary route.

This journey went on for four circlings round the whole, and then the
whole stream or army of Egos from the old Moon Chain had arrived, and
being complete, no more entered after the middle of the Fourth Round.
The same circling process of these differently arrived classes goes
on for seven complete Rounds of the whole seven planetary centres of
consciousness, and when the seven are ended as much perfection as is
possible in the immense period occupied will have been attained, and
then this chain or mass of “globes” will die in its turn to give birth
to still another series.

Each one of the globes is used by evolutionary law for the development
of seven races, and of senses, faculties and powers appropriate to that
state of matter: the experience of the whole seven globes being needed
to make a perfect development. Hence we have the Rounds and Races. The
Round is a circling of the seven centres of planetary consciousness;
the Race the racial development on one of those seven. There are seven
races for each globe, but the total of forty-nine races only makes up
seven great races, the special septennate of races on each globe or
planetary centre composing in reality one race of seven constituents or
special peculiarities of function and power.

And as no complete race could be evolved in a moment on any globe, the
slow, orderly processes of nature, which allow no jumps, must proceed
by appropriate means. Hence sub-races have to be evolved one after the
other before the perfect root race is formed, and then the root race
sends off its off-shoots while it is declining and preparing for the
advent of the next great race.

As illustrating this, it is distinctly taught that on the Americas is
to be evolved the new—sixth—race; and here all the races of the earth
are now engaged in a great amalgamation from which will result a
very highly developed sub-race, after which others will be evolved by
similar processes until the new one is completed.

Between the end of any great race and the beginning of another there
is a period of rest, so far as the globe is concerned, for then the
stream of human Egos leaves it for another one of the chain in order
to go on with further evolution of powers and faculties there. But
when the last, the seventh, race has appeared and fully perfected
itself, a great dissolution comes on, similar to that which I briefly
described as preceding the birth of the earth’s chain, and then the
world disappears as a tangible thing, and so far as the human ear is
concerned there is silence. This, it is said, is the root of the belief
so general that the world will come to an end, that there will be a
judgment-day, or that there have been universal floods or fires.

Taking up evolution on the Earth, it is stated that the stream of
Monads begins first to work up the mass of matter in what are called
elemental conditions when all is gaseous or fiery. For the ancient
and true theory is that no evolution is possible without the Monad as
vivifying agent. In this first stage there is no animal nor vegetable.
Next comes the mineral when the whole mass hardens, the Monads being
all imprisoned within. Then the first Monads emerge into vegetable
forms which they construct themselves, and no animals yet appear. Next
the first class of Monads emerges from the vegetable and produces the
animal, then the human astral and shadowy model, and we have minerals,
vegetables, animals and future men, for the second and later classes
are still evolving in the lower kingdoms. When the middle of the Fourth
Round is reached no more Monads emerge into the human stage and will
not until a new planetary mass, reïncarnated from ours, is made. This
is the whole process roughly given, but with many details left out,
for in one of the rounds man appears before the animals. But this
detail need lead to no confusion.

And to state it in another way. The plan comes first in the universal
mind, after which the astral model or basis is made, and when that
astral model is completed, the whole process is gone over so as to
condense the matter, up to the middle of the Fourth Round. Subsequent
to that, which is our future, the whole mass is spiritualized with
full consciousness and the entire body of globes raised up to a higher
plane of development. In the process of condensing above referred to
there is an alteration in respect to the time of the appearance of man
on the planet. But as to these details the teachers have only said,
“that at the Second Round the plan varies, but the variation will not
be given to this generation.” Hence it is impossible for me to give it.
But there is no vagueness on the point that seven great races have to
evolve here on this planet, and that the entire collection of races has
to go seven times round the whole series of seven globes.

Human beings did not appear here in two sexes first. The first were of
no sex, then they altered into hermaphrodite, and lastly separated into
male and female. And this separation into male and female for human
beings was over 18,000,000 years ago. For that reason is it said, in
these ancient schools, that our humanity is 18,000,000 years old and a
little over.




CHAPTER IV.


Respecting the nature of man there are two ideas current in the
religious circles of Christendom. One is the teaching and the other
the common acceptation of it; the first is not secret, to be sure,
in the Church, but it is so seldom dwelt upon in the hearing of the
laity as to be almost arcane for the ordinary person. Nearly everyone
says he has a soul and a body, and there it ends. What the soul is,
and whether it is the real person or whether it has any powers of its
own, are not inquired into, the preachers usually confining themselves
to its salvation or damnation. And by thus talking of it as something
different from oneself, the people have acquired an underlying notion
that they are not souls because the soul may be lost by them. From
this has come about a tendency to materialism causing men to pay more
attention to the body than to the soul, the latter being left to
the tender mercies of the priest of the Roman Catholics, and among
dissenters the care of it is most frequently put off to the dying day.
But when the true teaching is known it will be seen that the care of
the soul, which is the Self, is a vital matter requiring attention
every day, and not to be deferred without grievous injury resulting to
the whole man, both soul and body.

The Christian teaching, supported by St. Paul, since upon him, in fact,
dogmatic Christianity rests, is that man is composed of body, soul,
and spirit. This is the threefold constitution of man, believed by the
theologians but kept in the background because its examination might
result in the readoption of views once orthodox but now heretical.
For when we thus place soul between spirit and body, we come very
close to the necessity for looking into the question of the soul’s
responsibility—since mere body can have no responsibility. And in order
to make the soul responsible for the acts performed, we must assume
that it has powers and functions. From this it is easy to take the
position that the soul may be rational or irrational, as the Greeks
sometimes thought, and then there is but a step to further Theosophical
propositions. This threefold scheme of the nature of man contains, in
fact, the Theosophical teaching of his sevenfold constitution, because
the four other divisions missing from the category can be found in the
powers and functions of body and soul, as I shall attempt to show later
on. This conviction that man is a septenary and not merely a duad, was
held long ago and very plainly taught to every one with accompanying
demonstrations, but like other philosophical tenets it disappeared
from sight, because gradually withdrawn at the time when in the east
of Europe morals were degenerating and before materialism had gained
full sway in company with scepticism, its twin. Upon its withdrawal
the present dogma of body, soul, spirit, was left to Christendom. The
reason for that concealment and its rejuvenescence in this century is
well put by Mme. H. P. Blavatsky in the _Secret Doctrine_. In answer to
the statement, “we cannot understand how any danger could arise from
the revelation of such a purely philosophical doctrine as the evolution
of the planetary chain,” she says:

 The danger was this: Doctrines such as the Planetary chain or the
 seven races at once give a clue to the sevenfold nature of man, for
 each principle is correlated to a plane, a planet, and a race; and
 the human principles are, on every plane, correlated to the sevenfold
 occult forces—those of the higher planes being of tremendous occult
 power, the abuse of which would cause incalculable evil to humanity. A
 clue which is, perhaps, no clue to the present generation—especially
 the Westerns—protected as they are by their very blindness and
 ignorant materialistic disbelief in the occult; but a clue which
 would, nevertheless, be very real in the early centuries of the
 Christian era, to people fully convinced of the reality of occultism
 and entering a cycle of degradation which made them ripe for abuse of
 occult powers and sorcery of the worst description.

Mr. A. P. Sinnett, at one time an official in the Government of India,
first outlined in this century the real nature of man in his book
_Esoteric Buddhism_, which was made up from information conveyed to him
by H. P. Blavatsky directly from the Great Lodge of Initiates to which
reference has been made. And in thus placing the old doctrine before
western civilization he conferred a great benefit on his generation and
helped considerably the cause of Theosophy. His classification was:

  (1.) The Body, or _Rupa_.

  (2.) Vitality, or _Prana-Jiva_.

  (3.) Astral Body, or _Linga-Sarira_.

  (4.) Animal Soul, or _Kama-Rupa_.

  (5.) Human Soul, or _Manas_.

  (6.) Spiritual Soul, or _Buddhi_.

  (7.) Spirit, or _Atma_.

The words in italics being equivalents in the Sanscrit language adopted
by him for the English terms. This classification stands to this day
for all practical purposes, but it is capable of modification and
extension. For instance, a later arrangement which places Astral body
second instead of third in the category does not substantially alter
it. It at once gives an idea of what man is, very different from
the vague description by the words “body and soul,” and also boldly
challenges the materialistic conception that mind is the product of
brain, a portion of the body. No claim is made that these principles
were hitherto unknown, for they were all understood in various ways not
only by the Hindus but by many Europeans. Yet the compact presentation
of the sevenfold constitution of man in intimate connection with the
septenary constitution of a chain of globes through which the being
evolves, had not been given out. The French Abbé, Eliphas Levi,
wrote about the astral realm and the astral body, but evidently had
no knowledge of the remainder of the doctrine, and while the Hindus
possessed the other terms in their language and philosophy, they did
not use a septenary classification, but depended chiefly on a fourfold
one and certainly concealed (if they knew of it) the doctrine of a
chain of seven globes including our earth. Indeed, a learned Hindu,
Subba Row, now deceased, asserted that they knew of a sevenfold
classification, but that it had not been and would not be given out.

Considering these constituents in another manner, we would say that
the lower man is a composite being, but in his real nature is a unity,
or immortal being, comprising a trinity of Spirit, Discernment, and
Mind which requires four lower mortal instruments or vehicles through
which to work in matter and obtain experience from Nature. This trinity
is that called _Atma-Buddhi-Manas_ in Sanscrit, difficult terms to
render in English. _Atma_ is Spirit, _Buddhi_ is the highest power of
intellection, that which discerns and judges, and _Manas_ is Mind. This
threefold collection is the real man; and beyond doubt the doctrine is
the origin of the theological one of the trinity of Father, Son, and
Holy Ghost. The four lower instruments or vehicles are shown in this
table:

  _Atma_,   {The Passions and Desires,
  _Buddhi_, {Life Principle,
  _Manas_,  {Astral Body,
            {Physical Body.

These four lower material constituents are transitory and subject to
disintegration in themselves as well as to separation from each other.
When the hour arrives for their separation to begin, the combination
can no longer be kept up, the physical body dies, the atoms of which
each of the four is composed begin to separate from each other, and
the whole collection being disjointed is no longer fit for one
as an instrument for the real man. This is what is called “death”
among us mortals, but it is not death for the real man because he is
deathless, persistent, immortal. He is therefore called the Triad,
or indestructible trinity, while they are known as the Quaternary or
mortal four.

This quaternary or lower man is a product of cosmic or physical laws
and substance. It has been evolved during a lapse of ages, like any
other physical thing, from cosmic substance, and is therefore subject
to physical, physiological, and psychical laws which govern the race
of man as a whole. Hence its period of possible continuance can be
calculated just as the limit of tensile strain among the metals used
in bridge building can be deduced by the engineer. Any one collection
in the form of man made up of these constituents is therefore limited
in duration by the laws of the evolutionary period in which it exists.
Just now, that is generally seventy to one hundred years, but its
possible duration is longer. Thus there are in history instances where
ordinary persons have lived to be two hundred years of age; and by a
knowledge of the occult laws of nature the possible limit of duration
may be extended nearly to four hundred years.

               { Brain,
               { Nerves,
  The visible  { Blood,
  physical     { Bones,
  man is:      { Lymph,
               { Muscles,
               { Organs of Sensation and Action,
               {   and Skin,

  The unseen   { Astral Body,
  physical     { Passions and Desires,
  man is:      { Life Principle, (called _prana_ or _jiva_.)

It will be seen that the physical part of our nature is thus extended
to a second department which, though invisible to the physical eye, is
nevertheless material and subject to decay. Because people in general
have been in the habit of admitting to be real only what they can see
with the physical eye, they have at last come to suppose that the
unseen is neither real nor material. But they forget that even on the
earth plane noxious gases are invisible though real and powerfully
material, and that water may exist in the air held suspended and
invisible until conditions alter and cause its precipitation.

Let us recapitulate before going into details. The _Real Man_ is
the trinity of _Atma-Buddhi-Manas_, or Spirit and Mind, and he uses
certain agents and instruments to get in touch with nature in order
to know himself. These instruments and agents are found in the lower
Four—or the Quaternary—each principle in which category is of itself an
instrument for the particular experience belonging to its own field,
the body being the lowest, least important, and most transitory of the
whole series. For when we arrive at the body on the way down from the
Higher Mind, it can be shown that all of its organs are in themselves
senseless and useless when deprived of the man within. Sight, hearing,
touch, taste, and smelling do not pertain to the body but to the second
unseen physical man, the real organs for the exercise of those powers
being in the Astral Body, and those in the physical body being but the
mechanical outer instruments for making the coördination between nature
and the real organs inside.




CHAPTER V.


The body, as a mass of flesh, bones, muscles, nerves, brain matter,
bile, mucous, blood, and skin is an object of exclusive care for too
many people, who make it their god because they have come to identify
themselves with it, meaning it only when they say “I.” Left to itself
it is devoid of sense, and acts in such a case solely by reflex and
automatic action. This we see in sleep, for then the body assumes
attitudes and makes motions which the waking man does not permit. It is
like mother earth in that it is made up of an infinitesimal number of
“lives”. Each of these lives is a sensitive point. Not only are there
microbes, bacilli, and bacteria, but these are composed of others, and
those others of still more minute lives. These lives are not the cells
of the body, but make up the cells, keeping ever within the limits
assigned by evolution to the cell. They are forever whirling and moving
together throughout the whole body, being in certain apparently void
spaces as well as where flesh, membrane, bones, and blood are seen.
They extend, too, beyond the actual outer limits of the body to a
measurable distance.

One of the mysteries of physical life is hidden among these “lives”.
Their action, forced forward by the Life energy—called _Prana_ or
_Jiva_—will explain active existence and physical death. They are
divided into two classes, one the destroyers, the other the preservers,
and these two war upon each other from birth until the destroyers
win. In this struggle the Life Energy itself ends the contest because
it is life that kills. This may seem heterodox, but in Theosophical
philosophy it is held to be the fact. For, it is said, the infant
lives because the combination of healthy organs is able to absorb
the life all around it in space, and is put to sleep each day by the
overpowering strength of the stream of life, since the preservers
among the cells of the youthful body are not yet mastered by the other
class. These processes of going to sleep and waking again are simply
and solely the restoring of the equilibrium in sleep and the action
produced by disturbing it when awake. It may be compared with the
arc-electric light wherein the brilliant arc of light at the point
of resistance is the symbol of the waking active man. So in sleep we
are again absorbing and not resisting the Life Energy; when we wake
we are throwing it off. But as it exists around us like an ocean in
which we swim, our power to throw it off is necessarily limited. Just
when we wake we are in equilibrium as to our organs and life; when we
fall asleep we are yet more full of life than in the morning; it has
exhausted us; it finally kills the body. Such a contest could not be
waged forever, since the whole solar system’s weight of life is pitted
against the power to resist focussed in one small human frame.

The body is considered by the Masters of Wisdom to be the most
transitory, impermanent, and illusionary of the whole series of
constituents in man. Not for a moment is it the same. Ever changing, in
motion in every part, it is in fact never complete or finished though
tangible. The ancients clearly perceived this, for they elaborated a
doctrine called Naimittika Pralaya, or the continual change in material
things, the continual destruction. This is known now to science in the
doctrine that the body undergoes a complete alteration and renovation
every seven years. At the end of the first seven years it is not the
same body it was in the beginning. At the end of our days it has
changed seven times, perhaps more. And yet it presents the same general
appearance from maturity until death; and it is a human form from birth
to maturity. This is a mystery science explains not; it is a question
pertaining to the cell and to the means whereby the general human shape
is preserved.

The “cell” is an illusion. It is merely a word. It has no existence
as a material thing, for any cell is composed of other cells. What,
then, is a cell? It is the ideal form within which the actual physical
atoms—made up of the “lives”—arrange themselves. As it is admitted that
the physical molecules are forever rushing away from the body, they
must be leaving the cells each moment. Hence there is no physical cell,
but the privative limits of one, the ideal walls and general shape. The
molecules assume position within the ideal shape according to the laws
of nature, and leave it again almost at once to give place to other
atoms. And as it is thus with the body, so is it with the earth and
with the solar system. Thus also is it, though in slower measure, with
all material objects. They are all in constant motion and change. This
is modern and also ancient wisdom. This is the physical explanation of
clairvoyance, clairaudience, telepathy, and mind-reading. It helps to
show us what a deluding and unsatisfactory thing our body is.

Although, strictly speaking, the second constituent of man is the
Astral Body—called in Sanscrit _Linga Sarira_—we will consider Life
Energy—or _Prana_ and _Jiva_ in Sanscrit—together, because to our
observation the phenomenon of life is more plainly exhibited in
connection with the body.

Life is not the result of the operation of the organs, nor is it gone
when the body dissolves. It is a universally pervasive principle. It
is the ocean in which the earth floats; it permeates the globe and
every being and object on it. It works unceasingly on and around us,
pulsating against and through us forever. When we occupy a body we
merely use a more specialized instrument than any other for dealing
with both _Prana_ and _Jiva_. Strictly speaking, _Prana_ is breath; and
as breath is necessary for continuance of life in the human machine,
that is the better word. _Jiva_ means “life”, and also is applied to
the living soul, for the life in general is derived from the Supreme
Life itself. _Jiva_ is therefore capable of general application,
whereas _Prana_ is more particular. It cannot be said that one has a
definite amount of this Life Energy which will fly back to its source
should the body be burned, but rather that it works with whatever be
the mass of matter in it. We, as it were, secrete or use it as we
live. For whether we are alive or dead, life-energy is still there; in
life among our organs sustaining them, in death among the innumerable
creatures that arise from our destruction. We can no more do away with
this life than we can erase the air in which the bird floats, and like
the air it fills all the spaces on the planet, so that nowhere can
we lose the benefit of it nor escape its final crushing power. But
in working upon the physical body this life—_Prana_—needs a vehicle,
means, or guide, and this vehicle is the astral body.

There are many names for the Astral Body. Here are a few: _Linga
Sarira_, Sanscrit, meaning design body, and the best one of all;
ethereal double; phantom; wraith; apparition; doppelgänger; personal
man; perisprit; irrational soul; animal soul; _Bhuta_; elementary;
spook; devil; demon. Some of these apply only to the astral body when
devoid of the corpus after death. _Bhuta_, devil, and elementary are
nearly synonymous; the first Sanscrit, the other English. With the
Hindus the _Bhuta_ is the Astral Body when it is by death released from
the body and the mind; and being thus separated from conscience, is a
devil in their estimation. They are not far wrong, if we abolish the
old notion that a devil is an angel fallen from heaven, for this bodily
devil is something which rises from the earth.

It may be objected that the term Astral Body is not the right one
for this purpose. The objection is one which arises from the nature
and genesis of the English language, for as that has grown up in a
struggle with nature and among a commercial people it has not as yet
coined the words needed for designating the great range of faculties
and organs of the unseen man. And as its philosophers have not admitted
the existence of these inner organs, the right terms do not exist in
the language. So in looking for words to describe the inner body the
only ones found in English were the “astral body”. This term comes near
to the real fact, since the substance of this form is derived from
cosmic matter or star matter, roughly speaking. But the old Sanscrit
word describes it exactly—_Linga Sarira_, the design body—because it
is the design or model for the physical body. This is better than
“ethereal body”, as the latter might be said to be subsequent to the
physical, whereas in fact the astral body precedes the material one.

The astral body is made of matter of very fine texture as compared
with the visible body, and has a great tensile strength, so that it
changes but little during a lifetime, while the physical alters every
moment. And not only has it this immense strength, but at the same time
possesses an elasticity permitting its extension to a considerable
distance. It is flexible, plastic, extensible, and strong. The matter
of which it is composed is electrical and magnetic in its essence, and
is just what the whole world was composed of in the dim past when the
processes of evolution had not yet arrived at the point of producing
the material body for man. But it is not raw or crude matter. Having
been through a vast period of evolution and undergone purifying
processes of an incalculable number, its nature has been refined to a
degree far beyond the gross physical elements we see and touch with the
physical eye and hand.

The astral body is the guiding model for the physical one, and all the
other kingdoms have the same astral model. Vegetables, minerals, and
animals have the ethereal double, and this theory is the only one
which will answer the question how it is that the seed produces its own
kind and all sentient beings bring forth their like. Biologists can
only say that the facts are as we know them, but can give no reason
why the acorn will never grow anything but an oak except that no man
ever knew it to be otherwise. But in the old schools of the past the
true doctrine was known, and it has been once again brought out in the
West through the efforts of H. P. Blavatsky and those who have found
inspiration in her works.

This doctrine is, that in early times of the evolution of this globe
the various kingdoms of nature are outlined in plan or ideal form
first, and then the astral matter begins to work on this plan with the
aid of the Life principle, until after long ages the astral human form
is evolved and perfected. This is, then, the first form that the human
race had, and corresponds in a way with the allegory of man’s state in
the garden of Eden. After another long period, during which the cycle
of further descent into matter is rolling forward, the astral form at
last clothes itself with a “coat of skin”, and the present physical
form is on the scene. This is the explanation of the verse of the book
of Genesis which describes the giving of coats of skin to Adam and
Eve. It is the final fall into matter, for from that point on the man
within strives to raise the whole mass of physical substance up to a
higher level, and to inform it all with a larger measure of spiritual
influence, so that it may be ready to go still further on during the
next great period of evolution after the present one is ended. So at
the present time the model for the growing child in the womb is the
astral body already perfect in shape before the child is born. It is
on this the molecules arrange themselves until the child is complete,
and the presence of the ethereal design-body will explain how the form
grows into shape, how the eyes push themselves out from within to the
surface of the face, and many other mysterious matters in embryology
which are passed over by medical men with a description but with no
explanation. This will also explain, as nothing else can, the cases
of marking of the child in the womb sometimes denied by physicians
but well-known by those who care to watch, to be a fact of frequent
occurrence. The growing physical form is subject to the astral model;
it is connected with the imagination of the mother by physical and
psychical organs; the mother makes a strong picture from horror, fear,
or otherwise, and the astral model is then similarly affected. In the
case of marking by being born legless, the ideas and strong imagination
of the mother act so as to cut off or shrivel up the astral leg, and
the result is that the molecules, having no model of leg to work on,
make no physical leg whatever; and similarly in all such cases. But
where we find a man who still feels the leg which the surgeon has cut
off, or perceives the fingers that were amputated, then the astral
member has not been interfered with, and hence the man feels as if it
were still on his person. For knife or acid will not injure the astral
model, but in the first stages of its growth ideas and imagination have
the power of acid and sharpened steel.

In the ordinary man who has not been trained in practical occultism or
who has not the faculty by birth, the astral body cannot go more than
a few feet from the physical one. It is a part of that physical, it
sustains it and is incorporated in it just as the fibres of the mango
are all through that fruit. But there are those who, by reason of
practices pursued in former lives on the earth, have a power born with
them of unconsciously sending out the astral body. These are mediums,
some seers, and many hysterical, cataleptic, and scrofulous people.
Those who have trained themselves by a long course of excessively hard
discipline which reaches to the moral and mental nature and quite
beyond the power of the average man of the day, can use the astral
form at will, for they have gotten completely over the delusion that
the physical body is a permanent part of them, and, besides, they have
learned the chemical and electrical laws governing in this matter. In
their case they act with knowledge and consciously; in the other cases
the act is done without power to prevent it, or to bring it about at
will, or to avoid the risks attendant on such use of potencies in
nature of a high character.

The astral body has in it the real organs of the outer sense organs.
In it are the sight, hearing, power to smell, and the sense of touch.
It has a complete system of nerves and arteries of its own for the
conveyance of the astral fluid which is to that body as our blood is
to the physical. It is the real personal man. There are located the
subconscious perception and the latent memory, which the hypnotizers
of the day are dealing with and being baffled by. So when the body
dies the astral man is released, and as at death the immortal man—the
Triad—flies away to another state, the astral becomes a shell of
the once living man and requires time to dissipate. It retains all
the memories of the life lived by the man, and thus reflexly and
automatically can repeat what the dead man knew, said, thought, and
saw. It remains near the deserted physical body nearly all the time
until that is completely dissipated, for it has to go through its own
process of dying. It may become visible under certain conditions. It is
the spook of the spiritualistic _séance_ rooms, and is there made to
masquerade as the real spirit of this or that individual. Attracted by
the thoughts of the medium and the sitters, it vaguely flutters where
they are, and then is galvanized into a factitious life by a whole host
of elemental forces and by the active astral body of the medium who is
holding the _séance_ or of any other medium in the audience. From it
(as from a photograph) are then reflected into the medium’s brain all
the boasted evidences which spiritualists claim go to prove identity
of deceased friend or relative. These evidences are accepted as proof
that the spirit of the deceased is present, because neither mediums nor
sitters are acquainted with the laws governing their own nature, nor
with the constitution, power, and function of astral matter and astral
man.

The Theosophical philosophy does not deny the facts proven in
spiritualistic _séances_, but it gives an explanation of them wholly
opposed to that of the spiritualists. And surely the utter absence of
any logical scientific explanation by these so-called spirits of the
phenomena they are said to produce supports the contention that they
have no knowledge to impart. They can merely cause certain phenomena;
the examination of those and deductions therefrom can only be properly
carried on by a trained brain guided by a living trinity of spirit,
soul, and mind. And here another class of spiritualistic phenomena
requires brief notice. That is the appearance of what is called a
“materialized spirit”.

Three explanations are offered: _First_, that the astral body of
the living medium detaches itself from its corpus and assumes the
appearance of the so-called spirit; for one of the properties of the
astral matter is capacity to reflect an image existing unseen in ether.
_Second_, the actual astral shell of the deceased—wholly devoid of his
or her spirit and conscience—becomes visible and tangible when the
condition of air and ether is such as to so alter the vibration of the
molecules of the astral shell that it may become visible. The phenomena
of density and apparent weight are explained by other laws. _Third_,
an unseen mass of electrical and magnetic matter is collected, and
upon it is reflected out of the astral light a picture of any desired
person either dead or living. This is taken to be the “spirit” of such
persons, but it is not, and has been justly called by H. P. Blavatsky
a “psychological fraud”, because it pretends to be what it is not. And,
strange to say, this very explanation of materializations has been
given by a “spirit” at a regular _séance_, but has never been accepted
by the spiritualists just because it upsets their notion of the return
of the spirits of deceased persons.

Finally, the astral body will explain nearly all the strange psychical
things happening in daily life and in dealings with genuine mediums;
it shows what an apparition may be and the possibility of such being
seen, and thus prevents the scientific doubter from violating good
sense by asserting you did not see what you know you have seen; it
removes superstition by showing the real nature of these phenomena, and
destroys the unreasonable fear of the unknown which makes a man afraid
to see a “ghost”. By it also we can explain the apportation of objects
without physical contact, for the astral hand may be extruded and made
to take hold of an object, drawing it in toward the body. When this is
shown to be possible, then travelers will not be laughed at who tell of
seeing the Hindu yogee make coffee cups fly through the air and distant
objects approach apparently of their own accord untouched by him or any
one else. All the instances of clairvoyance and clairaudience are to be
explained also by the astral body and astral light. The astral—which
are the real—organs do the seeing and the hearing, and as all material
objects are constantly in motion among their own atoms the astral sight
and hearing are not impeded, but work at a distance as great as the
extension of the astral light or matter around and about the earth.
Thus it was that the great seer Swedenborg saw houses burning in the
city of Stockholm when he was at another city many miles off, and by
the same means any clairvoyant of the day sees and hears at a distance.




CHAPTER VI.


The author of _Esoteric Buddhism_—which book ought to be consulted by
all students of Theosophy, since it was made from suggestions given by
some of the Adepts themselves—gave the name _Kama rupa_ to the fourth
principle of man’s constitution. The reason was that the word _Kama_ in
the Sanscrit language means “desire”, and as the idea intended to be
conveyed was that the fourth principle was the “body or mass of desires
and passions”, Mr. Sinnett added the Sanscrit word for body or form,
which is _Rupa_, thus making the compound word _Kamarupa_. I shall call
it by the English equivalent—passions and desires—because those terms
exactly express its nature. And I do this also in order to make the
sharp issue which actually exists between the psychology and mental
philosophy of the west and those of the east. The west divides man into
intellect, will, and feeling, but it is not understood whether the
passions and desires constitute a principle in themselves or are due
entirely to the body. Indeed, most people consider them as being the
result of the influence of the flesh, for they are designated often by
the terms “desires of the flesh” and “fleshly appetites”. The ancients,
however, and the Theosophists know them to be a principle in themselves
and not merely the impulses from the body. There is no help to be had
in this matter from the western psychology, now in its infancy and
wholly devoid of knowledge about the inner, which is the psychical,
nature of man, and from this point there is the greatest divergence
between it and Theosophy.

The passions and desires are not produced by the body, but, on the
contrary, the body is caused to be by the former. It is desire and
passion which caused us to be born, and will bring us to birth again
and again in this body or in some other. It is by passion and desire we
are made to evolve through the mansions of death called lives on earth.
It was by the arising of desire in the unknown first cause, the one
absolute existence, that the whole collection of worlds was manifested,
and by means of the influence of desire in the now manifested world is
the latter kept in existence.

This fourth principle is the balance principle of the whole seven. It
stands in the middle, and from it the ways go up or down. It is the
basis of action and the mover of the will. As the old Hermetists say:
“Behind will stands desire.” For whether we wish to do well or ill we
have to first arouse within us the desire for either course. The good
man who at last becomes even a sage had at one time in his many lives
to arouse the desire for the company of holy men and to keep his desire
for progress alive in order to continue on his way. Even a Buddha or a
Jesus had first to make a vow, which is a desire, in some life, that
he would save the world or some part of it, and to persevere with
the desire alive in his heart through countless lives. And equally
so, on the other hand, the bad man life after life took unto himself
low, selfish, wicked desires, thus debasing instead of purifying this
principle. On the material and scientific side of occultism,—the use of
the inner hidden powers of our nature—if this principle of desire be
not strong, the master power of imagination cannot do its work, because
though it makes a mould or matrix the will cannot act unless it is
moved, directed, and kept up to pitch by desire.

The desires and passions, therefore, have two aspects, the one being
low and the other high. The low is that shown by the constant placing
of the consciousness entirely below in the body and the astral body;
the high comes from the influence of and aspiration to the trinity
above, of Mind, Buddhi, and Spirit. This fourth principle is like the
sign Libra in the path of the Sun through the Zodiac; when the Sun (who
is the real man) reaches that sign he trembles in the balance. Should
he go back the worlds would be destroyed; he goes onward, and the whole
human race is lifted up to perfection.

During life the emplacement of the desires and passions is, as obtains
with the astral body, throughout the entire lower man, and like that
ethereal counterpart of our physical person it may be added to or
diminished, made weak or increased in strength, debased or purified.

At death it informs the astral body, which then becomes a mere shell;
for when a man dies his astral body and principle of passion and desire
leave the physical in company and coalesce. It is then that the term
_Kamarupa_ may be applied, as _Kamarupa_ is really made of astral body
and _Kama_ in conjunction, and this joining of the two makes a shape or
form which though ordinarily invisible is material and may be brought
into visibility. Although it is empty of mind and conscience, it has
powers of its own that can be exercised whenever the conditions permit.
These conditions are furnished by the medium of the spiritualists,
and in every _séance_ room the astral shells of deceased persons are
always present to delude the sitters, whose powers of discrimination
have been destroyed by wonderment. It is the “devil” of the Hindus, and
a worse enemy the poor medium could not have. For the astral spook—or
_Kamarupa_—is but the mass of the desires and passions abandoned by the
real person who has fled to “heaven” and has no concern with the people
left behind, least of all with _séances_ and mediums. Hence, being
devoid of the nobler soul, these desires and passions work only on the
very lowest part of the medium’s nature and stir up no good elements,
but always the lower leanings of the being. Therefore it is that even
the spiritualists themselves admit that in the ranks of the mediums
there is much fraud, and mediums have often confessed, “the spirits did
tempt me and I committed fraud at their wish.”

This _Kamarupa_ spook is also the enemy of our civilization, which
permits us to execute men for crimes committed and thus throw out into
the ether the mass of passion and desire free from the weight of the
body and liable at any moment to be attracted to any sensitive person.
Being thus attracted, the deplorable images of crimes committed and
also the picture of the execution and all the accompanying curses and
wishes for revenge are implanted in living persons, who, not seeing the
evil, are unable to throw it off. Thus crimes and new ideas of crimes
are wilfully propagated every day by those countries where capital
punishment prevails.

The astral shells together with the still living astral body of the
medium, helped by certain forces of nature which the Theosophists
call “elementals”, produce nearly all the phenomena of non-fraudulent
spiritualism. The medium’s astral body having the power of extension
and extrusion forms the framework for what are called “materialized
spirits”, makes objects move without physical contact, gives reports
from deceased relatives, none of them anything more than recollections
and pictures from the astral light, and in all this using and being
used by the shells of suicides, executed murderers, and all such spooks
as are naturally near to this plane of life. The number of cases in
which any communication comes from an actual spirit out of the body
is so small as to be countable almost on one hand. But the spirits of
living men sometimes, while their bodies are asleep, come to _séances_
and take part therein. But they cannot recollect it, do not know how
they do it, and are not distinguished by mediums from the mass of
astral corpses. The fact that such things can be done by the inner
man and not be recollected proves nothing against these theories, for
the child can see without knowing how the eye acts, and the savage who
has no knowledge of the complex machinery working in his body still
carries on the process of digestion perfectly. And that the latter is
unconscious with him is exactly in line with the theory, for these
acts and doings of the inner man are the unconscious actions of the
subconscious mind. These words “conscious” and “subconscious” are of
course used relatively, the unconsciousness being that of the brain
only. And hypnotic experiments have conclusively proved all these
theories, as on one day not far away will be fully admitted. Besides
this, the astral shells of suicides and executed criminals are the
most coherent, longest lived, and nearest to us of all the shades of
hades, and hence must, out of the necessity of the case, be the real
“controls” of the _séance_ room.

Passion and desire together with astral model-body are common to men
and animals, as also to the vegetable kingdom, though in the last but
faintly developed. And at one period in evolution no further material
principles had been developed, and all the three higher, of Mind, Soul,
and Spirit, were but latent. Up to this point man and animal were
equal, for the brute in us is made of the passions and the astral body.
The development of the germs of Mind made man because it constituted
the great differentiation. The God within begins with _Manas_ or mind,
and it is the struggle between this God and the brute below which
Theosophy speaks of and warns about. The lower principle is called bad
because by comparison with the higher it is so, but still it is the
basis of action. We cannot rise unless self first asserts itself in
the desire to do better. In this aspect it is called _rajas_ or the
active and bad quality, as distinguished from _tamas_, or the quality
of darkness and indifference. Rising is not possible unless _rajas_
is present to give the impulse, and by the use of this principle of
passion all the higher qualities are brought to at last so refine and
elevate our desires that they may be continually placed upon truth
and spirit. By this Theosophy does not teach that the passions are to
be pandered to or satiated, for a more pernicious doctrine was never
taught, but the injunction is to make use of the activity given by the
fourth principle so as to ever rise and not to fall under the dominion
of the dark quality that ends with annihilation, after having begun in
selfishness and indifference.

Having thus gone over the field and shown what are the lower
principles, we find Theosophy teaching that at the present point of
man’s evolution he is a fully developed quaternary with the higher
principles partly developed. Hence it is taught that to-day man
shows himself to be moved by passion and desire. This is proved by a
glance at the civilizations of the earth, for they are all moved by
this principle, and in countries like France, England, and America
a glorification of it is exhibited in the attention to display, to
sensuous art, to struggle for power and place, and in all the habits
and modes of living where the gratification of the senses is sometimes
esteemed the highest good. But as Mind is being evolved more and more
as we proceed in our course along the line of the race development,
there can be perceived underneath in all countries the beginning of
the transition from the animal possessed of the germ of real mind to
the man of mind complete. This day is therefore known to the Masters,
who have given out some of the old truths, as the “transition period”.
Proud science and prouder religion do not admit this, but think we are
as we always will be. But believing in his teacher, the theosophist
sees all around him the evidence that the race mind is changing by
enlargement, that the old days of dogmatism are gone and the “age of
inquiry” has come, that the inquiries will grow louder year by year
and the answers be required to satisfy the mind as it grows more and
more, until at last, all dogmatism being ended, the race will be ready
to face all problems, each man for himself, all working for the good
of the whole, and that the end will be the perfecting of those who
struggle to overcome the brute. For these reasons the old doctrines are
given out again, and Theosophy asks every one to reflect whether to
give way to the animal below or look up to and be governed by the God
within.

A fuller treatment of the fourth principle of our constitution would
compel us to consider all such questions as those presented by the
wonder workers of the east, by spiritualistic phenomena, hypnotism,
apparitions, insanity, and the like, but they must be reserved for
separate handling.




CHAPTER VII.


In our analysis of man’s nature we have so far considered only the
perishable elements which make up the lower man, and have arrived at
the fourth principle or plane—that of desire—without having touched
upon the question of Mind. But even so far as we have gone it must be
evident that there is a wide difference between the ordinary ideas
about Mind and those found in Theosophy. Ordinarily the Mind is
thought to be immaterial, or to be merely the name for the action of
the brain in evolving thought, a process wholly unknown other than by
inference, or that if there be no brain there can be no mind. A good
deal of attention has been paid to cataloguing some mental functions
and attributes, but the terms are altogether absent from the language
to describe actual metaphysical and spiritual facts about man. This
confusion and poverty of words for these uses are due almost entirely,
first, to dogmatic religion, which has asserted and enforced for many
centuries dogmas and doctrines which reason could not accept, and
secondly to the natural war which grew up between science and religion
just as soon as the fetters placed by religion upon science were
removed and the latter was permitted to deal with facts in nature. The
reaction against religion naturally prevented science from taking any
but a materialistic view of man and nature. So from neither of these
two have we yet gained the words needed for describing the fifth,
sixth, and seventh principles, those which make up the Trinity, the
real man, the immortal pilgrim.

The fifth principle is _Manas_, in the classification adopted by Mr.
Sinnett, and is usually translated Mind. Other names have been given
to it, but it is the knower, the perceiver, the thinker. The sixth is
_Buddhi_, or spiritual discernment; the seventh is _Atma_, or Spirit,
the ray from the Absolute Being. The English language will suffice to
describe in part what _Manas_ is, but not _Buddhi_, nor _Atma_, and
will leave many things relating to _Manas_ undescribed.

The course of evolution developed the lower principles and produced
at last the form of man with a brain of better and deeper capacity
than that of any other animal. But this man in form was not man in
mind, and needed the fifth principle, the thinking, perceiving one, to
differentiate him from the animal kingdom and to confer the power of
becoming self-conscious. The monad was imprisoned in these forms, and
that monad is composed of _Atma_ and _Buddhi_; for without the presence
of the monad evolution could not go forward. Going back for a moment to
the time when the races were devoid of mind, the question arises, “who
gave the mind, where did it come from, and what is it?” It is the link
between the Spirit of God above and the personal below; it was given
to the mindless monads by others who had gone all through this process
ages upon ages before in other worlds and systems of worlds, and it
therefore came from other evolutionary periods which were carried out
and completed long before the solar system had begun. This is the
theory, strange and unacceptable to-day, but which must be stated if we
are to tell the truth about theosophy; and this is only handing on what
others have said before.

The manner in which this light of mind was given to the Mindless Men
can be understood from the illustration of one candle lighting many.
Given one lighted candle and numerous unlighted ones, it follows that
from one light the others may also be set aflame. So in the case of
_Manas_. It is the candle of flame. The mindless men having four
elementary principles of Body, Astral Body, Life and Desire, are the
unlighted candles that cannot light themselves. The Sons of Wisdom,
who are the Elder Brothers of every family of men on any globe, have
the light, derived by them from others who reach back, and yet farther
back, in endless procession with no beginning nor end. They set fire to
the combined lower principles and the Monad, thus lighting up _Manas_
in the new men and preparing another great race for final initiation.
This lighting up of the fire of _Manas_ is symbolized in all great
religions and Freemasonry. In the east one priest appears holding
a candle lighted at the altar, and thousands of others light their
candles from this one. The Parsees also have their sacred fire which is
lighted from some other sacred flame.

_Manas_, or the Thinker, is the reïncarnating being, the immortal who
carries the results and values of all the different lives lived on
earth or elsewhere. Its nature becomes dual as soon as it is attached
to a body. For the human brain is a superior organism and _Manas_ uses
it to reason from premises to conclusions. This also differentiates
man from animal, for the animal acts from automatic and so-called
instinctual impulses, whereas the man can use reason. This is the lower
aspect of the Thinker or _Manas_, and not, as some have supposed, the
highest and best gift belonging to man. Its other, and in theosophy
higher, aspect is the intuitional, which knows, and does not depend on
reason. The lower, and purely intellectual, is nearest to the principle
of Desire, and is thus distinguished from its other side which has
affinity for the spiritual principles above. If the Thinker, then,
becomes wholly intellectual, the entire nature begins to tend downward;
for intellect alone is cold, heartless, selfish, because it is not
lighted up by the two other principles of _Buddhi_ and _Atma_.

In _Manas_ the thoughts of all lives are stored. That is to say: in
any one life, the sum total of thoughts underlying all the acts of the
life-time will be of one character in general, but may be placed in
one or more classes. That is, the business man of to-day is a single
type; his entire life thoughts represent but one single thread of
thought. The artist is another. The man who has engaged in business,
but also thought much upon fame and power which he never attained,
is still another. The great mass of self-sacrificing, courageous,
and strong poor people who have but little time to think, constitute
another distinct class. In all these the total quantity of life
thoughts makes up the stream or thread of a life’s meditation—“that
upon which the heart was set”—and is stored in _Manas_, to be
brought out again at any time in whatever life the brain and bodily
environments are similar to those used in engendering that class of
thoughts.

It is _Manas_ which sees the objects presented to it by the bodily
organs and the actual organs within. When the open eye receives a
picture on the retina, the whole scene is turned into vibrations in the
optic nerves which disappear into the brain, where _Manas_ is enabled
to perceive them as idea. And so with every other organ or sense. If
the connection between _Manas_ and the brain be broken, intelligence
will not be manifested unless _Manas_ has by training found out how
to project the astral body from the physical and thereby keep up
communication with fellowmen. That the organs and senses do not cognize
objects, hypnotism, mesmerism, and spiritualism have now proved. For,
as we see in mesmeric and hypnotic experiments, the object seen or
felt, and from which all the effects of solid objects may be sensed, is
often only an idea existing in the operator’s brain. In the same way
_Manas_, using the astral body, has only to impress an idea upon the
other person to make the latter see the idea and translate it into a
visible body from which the usual effects of density and weight seem
to follow. And in hypnotism there are many experiments, all of which
go to show that so called matter is not _per se_ solid or dense; that
sight does not always depend on the eye and rays of light proceeding
from an object; that the intangible for one normal brain and organs may
be perfectly tangible for another; and that physical effects in the
body may be produced from an idea solely. The well-known experiments of
producing a blister by a simple piece of paper, or preventing a real
blistering plaster from making a blister, by force of the idea conveyed
to a subject, either that there was to be or not to be a blister,
conclusively prove the power of effecting an impulse on matter by the
use of that which is called _Manas_. But all these phenomena are the
exhibition of the powers of lower _Manas_ acting in the astral Body and
the fourth principle—Desire, using the physical body as the field for
the exhibition of the forces.

It is this lower _Manas_ which retains all the impressions of a
life-time and sometimes strangely exhibits them in trances or dreams,
delirium, induced states, here and there in normal conditions, and very
often at the time of physical death. But it is so occupied with the
brain, with memory and with sensation, that it usually presents but few
recollections out of the mass of events that years have brought before
it. It interferes with the action of Higher _Manas_ because just at
the present point of evolution, Desire and all corresponding powers,
faculties, and senses are the most highly developed, thus obscuring,
as it were, the white light of the spiritual side of _Manas_. It is
tinted by each object presented to it, whether it be a thought-object
or a material one. That is to say, Lower _Manas_ operating through
the brain is at once altered into the shape and other characteristics
of any object, mental or otherwise. This causes it to have four
peculiarities. _First_, to naturally fly off from any point, object,
or subject; _second_, to fly to some pleasant idea; _third_, to fly
to an unpleasant idea; _fourth_, to remain passive and considering
naught. The first is due to memory and the natural motion of _Manas_;
the second and third are due to memory alone; the fourth signifies
sleep when not abnormal, and when abnormal is going toward insanity.
These mental characteristics all belonging to Lower _Manas_, are those
which the Higher _Manas_, aided by _Buddhi_ and _Atma_, has to fight
and conquer. Higher _Manas_, if able to act, becomes what we sometimes
call Genius; if completely master, then one may become a god. But
memory continually presents pictures to Lower _Manas_, and the result
is that the Higher is obscured. Sometimes, however, along the pathway
of life we do see here and there men who are geniuses or great seers
and prophets. In these the Higher powers of _Manas_ are active and the
person illuminated. Such were the great Sages of the past, men like
Buddha, Jesus, Confucius, Zoroaster, and others. Poets, too, such as
Tennyson, Longfellow, and others, are men in whom Higher _Manas_ now
and then sheds a bright ray on the man below, to be soon obscured,
however, by the effect of dogmatic religious education which has given
memory certain pictures that always prevent _Manas_ from gaining full
activity.

In this higher Trinity, we have the God above each one; this is _Atma_,
and may be called the Higher Self.

Next is the spiritual part of the soul called _Buddhi_; when thoroughly
united with _Manas_ this may be called the Divine Ego.

The inner Ego, who reïncarnates, taking on body after body, storing up
the impressions of life after life, gaining experience and adding it
to the divine Ego, suffering and enjoying through an immense period of
years, is the fifth principle—_Manas_—not united to _Buddhi_. This is
the permanent individuality which gives to every man the feeling of
being himself and not some other; that which through all the changes
of the days and nights from youth to the end of life makes us feel
one identity through all the period; it bridges the gap made by sleep;
in like manner it bridges the gap made by the sleep of death. It is
this, and not our brain, that lifts us above the animal. The depth and
variety of the brain convolutions in man are caused by the presence of
_Manas_, and are not the cause of mind. And when we either wholly or
now and then become consciously united with _Buddhi_, the Spiritual
Soul, we behold God, as it were. This is what the ancients all desired
to see, but what the moderns do not believe in, the latter preferring
rather to throw away their own right to be great in nature, and to
worship an imaginary god made up solely of their own fancies and not
very different from weak human nature.

This permanent individuality in the present race has therefore been
through every sort of experience, for Theosophy insists on its
permanence and in the necessity for its continuing to take part in
evolution. It has a duty to perform, consisting in raising up to a
higher state all the matter concerned in the chain of globes to which
the earth belongs. We have all lived and taken part in civilization
after civilization, race after race, on earth, and will so continue
throughout all the rounds and races until the seventh is complete.
At the same time it should be remembered that the matter of this
globe and that connected with it has also been through every kind of
form, with possibly some exceptions in very low planes of mineral
formation. But in general all the matter visible, or held in space
still unprecipitated, has been moulded at one time or another into
forms of all varieties, many of these being such as we now have no
idea of. The processes of evolution, therefore, in some departments,
now go forward with greater rapidity than in former ages because both
_Manas_ and matter have acquired facility of action. Especially is this
so in regard to man, who is the farthest ahead of all things or beings
in this evolution. He is now incarnated and projected into life more
quickly than in earlier periods when it consumed many years to obtain
a “coat of skin”. This coming into life over and over again cannot be
avoided by the ordinary man because Lower _Manas_ is still bound by
Desire, which is the preponderating principle at the present period.
Being so influenced by Desire, _Manas_ is continually deluded while in
the body, and being thus deluded is unable to prevent the action upon
it of the forces set up in the life time. These forces are generated
by _Manas_, that is, by the thinking of the life time. Each thought
makes a physical as well as mental link with the desire in which it is
rooted. All life is filled with such thoughts, and when the period of
rest after death is ended _Manas_ is bound by innumerable electrical
magnetic threads to earth by reason of the thoughts of the last life,
and therefore by desire, for it was desire that caused so many thoughts
and ignorance of the true nature of things. An understanding of this
doctrine of man being really a thinker and made of thought will make
clear all the rest in relation to incarnation and reïncarnation. The
body of the inner man is made of thought, and this being so it must
follow that if the thoughts have more affinity for earth-life than for
life elsewhere a return to life here is inevitable.

At the present day _Manas_ is not fully active in the race, as Desire
still is uppermost. In the next cycle of the human period _Manas_ will
be fully active and developed in the entire race. Hence the people of
the earth have not yet come to the point of making a conscious choice
as to the path they will take; but when in the cycle referred to,
_Manas_ is active, all will then be compelled to consciously make the
choice to right or left, the one leading to complete and conscious
union with _Atma_, the other to the annihilation of those beings who
prefer that path.




CHAPTER VIII.


How man has come to be the complex being that he is and why, are
questions that neither Science nor Religion makes conclusive answer
to. This immortal thinker having such vast powers and possibilities,
all his because of his intimate connection with every secret part of
Nature from which he has been built up, stands at the top of an immense
and silent evolution. He asks why Nature exists, what the drama of
life has for its aim, how that aim may be attained. But Science and
Religion both fail to give a reasonable reply. Science does not pretend
to be able to give the solution, saying that the examination of things
as they are is enough of a task; religion offers an explanation both
illogical and unmeaning and acceptable but to the bigot, as it requires
us to consider the whole of Nature as a mystery and to seek for the
meaning and purpose of life with all its sorrow in the pleasure of a
God who cannot be found out. The educated and enquiring mind knows that
dogmatic religion can only give an answer invented by man while it
pretends to be from God.

What then is the universe for, and for what final purpose is man the
immortal thinker here in evolution? It is all for the experience
and emancipation of the soul, for the purpose of raising the entire
mass of manifested matter up to the stature, nature, and dignity of
conscious god-hood. The great aim is to reach self-consciousness; not
through a race or a tribe or some favored nation, but by and through
the perfecting, after transformation, of the whole mass of matter as
well as what we now call soul. Nothing is or is to be left out. The
aim for present man is his initiation into complete knowledge, and
for the other kingdoms below him that they may be raised up gradually
from stage to stage to be in time initiated also. This is evolution
carried to its highest power; it is a magnificent prospect; it makes of
man a god, and gives to every part of nature the possibility of being
one day the same; there is strength and nobility in it, for by this no
man is dwarfed and belittled, for no one is so originally sinful that
he cannot rise above all sin. Treated from the materialistic position
of Science, evolution takes in but half of life; while the religious
conception of it is a mixture of nonsense and fear. Present religions
keep the element of fear, and at the same time imagine that an Almighty
being can think of no other earth but this and has to govern this one
very imperfectly. But the old theosophical view makes the universe a
vast, complete, and perfect whole.

Now the moment we postulate a double evolution, physical and spiritual,
we have at the same time to admit that it can only be carried on by
reïncarnation. This is, in fact, demonstrated by science. It is shown
that the matter of the earth and of all things physical upon it was at
one time either gaseous or molten; that it cooled; that it altered;
that from its alterations and evolutions at last were produced all
the great variety of things and beings. This, on the physical plane,
is transformation or change from one form to another. The total mass
of matter is about the same as in the beginning of this globe, with
a very minute allowance for some star dust. Hence it must have been
changed over and over again, and thus been physically reformed and
reëmbodied. Of course, to be strictly accurate, we cannot use the
word reïncarnation, because “incarnate” refers to flesh. Let us say
“reëmbodied”, and then we see that both for matter and for man there
has been a constant change of form and this is, broadly speaking,
“reïncarnation”. As to the whole mass of matter, the doctrine is that
it will all be raised to man’s estate when man has gone further on
himself. There is no residuum left after man’s final salvation which in
a mysterious way is to be disposed of or done away with in some remote
dustheap of nature. The true doctrine allows for nothing like that, and
at the same time is not afraid to give the true disposition of what
would seem to be a residuum. It is all worked up into other states,
for as the philosophy declares there is no inorganic matter whatever
but that every atom is alive and has the germ of self-consciousness,
it must follow that one day it will all have been changed. Thus what
is now called human flesh is so much matter that one day was wholly
mineral, later on vegetable, and now refined into human atoms. At a
point of time very far from now the present vegetable matter will have
been raised to the animal stage and what we now use as our organic or
fleshy matter will have changed by transformation through evolution
into self-conscious thinkers, and so on up the whole scale until the
time shall come when what is now known as mineral matter will have
passed on to the human stage and out into that of thinker. Then at
the coming on of another great period of evolution the mineral matter
of that time will be some which is now passing through its lower
transformations on other planets and in other systems of worlds. This
is perhaps a “fanciful” scheme for the men of the present day, who are
so accustomed to being called bad, sinful, weak, and utterly foolish
from their birth that they fear to believe the truth about themselves,
but for the disciples of the ancient theosophists it is not impossible
or fanciful, but is logical and vast. And no doubt it will one day be
admitted by everyone when the mind of the western race has broken away
from Mosaic chronology and Mosaic ideas of men and nature. Therefore
as to reïncarnation and metempsychosis we say that they are first to
be applied to the whole cosmos and not alone to man. But as man is
the most interesting object to himself, we will consider in detail its
application to him.

This is the most ancient of doctrines and is believed in now by more
human minds than the number of those who do not hold it. The millions
in the East almost all accept it; it was taught by the Greeks; a large
number of the Chinese now believe it as their forefathers did before
them; the Jews thought it was true, and it has not disappeared from
their religion; and Jesus, who is called the founder of Christianity,
also believed and taught it. In the early Christian church it was known
and taught, and the very best of the fathers of the church believed and
promulgated it.

Christians should remember that Jesus was a Jew who thought his mission
was to Jews, for he says in St. Matthew, “I am not sent but unto
the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” He must have well known the
doctrines held by them. They all believed in reïncarnation. For them
Moses, Adam, Noah, Seth, and others had returned to earth, and at the
time of Jesus it was currently believed that the old prophet Elias was
yet to return. So we find, first, that Jesus never denied the doctrine,
and on various occasions assented to it, as when he said that John the
Baptist was actually the Elias of old whom the people were expecting.
All this can be seen by consulting St. Matthew in chapters XVII, XI,
and others.

In these it is very clear that Jesus is shown as approving the doctrine
of reïncarnation. And following Jesus we find St. Paul, in Romans IX,
speaking of Esau and Jacob being actually in existence before they
were born, and later such great Christian fathers as Origen, Synesius,
and others believing and teaching the theory. In Proverbs VIII, 22,
we have Solomon saying that when the earth was made he was present,
and that, long before he could have been born as Solomon, his delights
were in the habitable parts of the earth with the sons of men. St.
John the Revelator says in Revs. III, 12, he was told in a vision which
refers to the voice of God or the voice of one speaking for God, that
whosoever should overcome would not be under the necessity of “going
out” any more, that is, would not need to be reïncarnated. For five
hundred years after Jesus the doctrine was taught in the church until
the council of Constantinople. Then a condemnation was passed upon
a phase of the question which has been regarded by many as against
reïncarnation, but if that condemnation goes against the words of
Jesus it is of no effect. It does go against him, and thus the church
is in the position of saying in effect that Jesus did not know enough
to curse, as it did, a doctrine known and taught in his day and which
was brought to his notice prominently and never condemned but in fact
approved by him. Christianity is a Jewish religion, and this doctrine
of reïncarnation belongs to it historically by succession from the
Jews, and also by reason of its having been taught by Jesus and the
early fathers of the church. If there be any truthful or logical way
for the Christian church to get out of this position—excluding, of
course, dogmas of the church—the theosophist would like to be shown
it. Indeed, the theosophist holds that whenever a professed Christian
denies the theory he thereby sets up his judgment against that of
Jesus, who must have known more about the matter than those who follow
him. It is the anathema hurled by the church council and the absence of
the doctrine from the teaching now that have damaged Christianity and
made of all the Christian nations people who pretend to be followers of
Jesus and the law of love, but who really as nations are followers of
the Mosaic law of retaliation. For alone in reïncarnation is the answer
to all the problems of life, and in it and Karma is the force that will
make men pursue in fact the ethics they have in theory. It is the aim
of the old philosophy to restore this doctrine to whatsoever religion
has lost it; and hence we call it the “lost chord of Christianity.”

But who or what is it that reïncarnates? It is not the body, for that
dies and disintegrates; and but few of us would like to be chained
forever to such bodies as we now have, admitted to be infected with
disease except in the case of the savage. It is not the astral body,
for, as shown, that also has its term and must go to pieces after
the physical has gone. Nor is it the passions and desires. They,
to be sure, have a very long term, because they have the power to
reproduce themselves in each life so long as we do not eradicate
them. And reïncarnation provides for that, since we are given by it
many opportunities of slowly, one by one, killing off the desires and
passions which mar the heavenly picture of the spiritual man.

It has been shown how the passional part of us coalesces with the
astral after death and makes a seeming being that has a short life
to live while it is disintegrating. When the separation is complete
between the body that has died, the astral body, and the passions
and desires—life having begun to busy itself with other forms—the
Higher Triad, _Manas_, _Buddhi_, and _Atma_, who are the real man,
immediately go into another state, and when that state, which is called
_Devachan_, or heaven, is over, they are attracted back to earth for
reïncarnation. They are the immortal part of us; they, in fact, and no
other are we. This should be firmly grasped by the mind, for upon its
clear understanding depends the comprehension of the entire doctrine.
What stands in the way of the modern western man’s seeing this clearly
is the long training we have all had in materialistic science and
materializing religion, both of which have made the mere physical
body too prominent. The one has taught of matter alone and the other
has preached the resurrection of the body, a doctrine against common
sense, fact, logic, and testimony. But there is no doubt that the
theory of the bodily resurrection has arisen from the corruption of
the older and true teaching. Resurrection is founded on what Job says
about seeing his redeemer in his flesh, and on St. Paul’s remark that
the body was raised incorruptible. But Job was an Egyptian who spoke of
seeing his teacher or initiator, who was the redeemer, and Jesus and
Paul referred to the spiritual body only.

Although reïncarnation is the law of nature, the complete trinity of
_Atma-Buddhi-Manas_ does not yet fully incarnate in this race. They use
and occupy the body by means of the entrance of _Manas_, the lowest of
the three, and the other two shine upon it from above, constituting the
God in Heaven. This was symbolized in the old Jewish teaching about the
Heavenly Man who stands with his head in heaven and his feet in hell.
That is, the head _Atma_ and _Buddhi_ are yet in heaven, and the feet,
_Manas_, walk in hell, which is the body and physical life. For that
reason man is not yet fully conscious, and reïncarnations are needed
to at last complete the incarnation of the whole trinity in the body.
When that has been accomplished the race will have become as gods, and
the godlike trinity being in full possession the entire mass of matter
will be perfected and raised up for the next step. This is the real
meaning of “the word made flesh”. It was so grand a thing in the case
of any single person, such as Jesus or Buddha, as to be looked upon
as a divine incarnation. And out of this, too, comes the idea of the
crucifixion, for _Manas_ is thus crucified for the purpose of raising
up the thief to paradise.

It is because the trinity is not yet incarnate in the race that life
has so many mysteries, some of which are showing themselves from day to
day in all the various experiments made on and in man.

The physician knows not what life is nor why the body moves as it
does, because the spiritual portion is yet enshrouded in the clouds of
heaven; the scientist is wandering in the dark, confounded and confused
by all that hypnotism and other strange things bring before him,
because the conscious man is out of sight on the very top of the divine
mountain, thus compelling the learned to speak of the “subconscious
mind”, the “latent personality”, and the like; and the priest can give
us no light at all because he denies man’s god-like nature, reduces
all to the level of original sin, and puts upon our conception of God
the black mark of inability to control or manage the creation without
invention of expedients to cure supposed errors. But this old truth
solves the riddle and paints God and Nature in harmonious colors.

Reïncarnation does not mean that we go into animal forms after death,
as is believed by some Eastern peoples. “Once a man always a man” is
the saying in the Great Lodge. But it would not be too much punishment
for some men were it possible to condemn them to rebirth in brute
bodies; however nature does not go by sentiment but by law, and we,
not being able to see all, cannot say that the brutal man is brute all
through his nature. And evolution having brought _Manas_ the Thinker
and Immortal Person on to this plane, cannot send him back to the brute
which has not _Manas_.

By looking into two explanations for the literal acceptation by some
people in the East of those laws of Manu which seem to teach the
transmigrating into brutes, insects, and so on, we can see how the true
student of this doctrine will not fall into the same error.

The first is, that the various verses and books teaching such
transmigration have to do with the actual method of reïncarnation, that
is, with the explanation of the actual physical processes which have to
be undergone by the Ego in passing from the unembodied to the embodied
state, and also with the roads, ways, or means of descent from the
invisible to the visible plane. This has not yet been plainly explained
in Theosophical books, because on the one hand it is a delicate matter,
and on the other the details would not as yet be received even by
Theosophists with credence, although one day they will be. And as these
details are not of the greatest importance they are not now expounded.
But as we know that no human body is formed without the union of the
sexes, and that the germs for such production are locked up in the
sexes and must come from food which is taken into the body, it is
obvious that foods have something to do with the reïncarnating of the
Ego. Now if the road to reïncarnation leads through certain food and
none other, it may be possible that if the Ego gets entangled in food
which will not lead to the germ of physical reproduction, a punishment
is indicated where Manu says that such and such practices will lead to
transmigration, which is then a “hindrance”. I throw this out so far
for the benefit of certain theosophists who read these and whose own
theories on this subject are now rather vague and in some instances
based on quite other hypotheses.

The second explanation is, that inasmuch as nature intends us to use
the matter which comes into our body and astral body for the purpose,
among others, of benefiting the matter by the impress it gets from
association with the human Ego, if we use it so as to give it only a
brutal impression it must fly back to the animal kingdom to be absorbed
there instead of being refined and kept on the human plane. And as all
the matter which the human Ego gathered to it retains the stamp or
photographic impression of the human being, the matter transmigrates
to the lower level when given an animal impress by the Ego. This
actual fact in the great chemical laboratory of nature could easily be
misconstrued by the ignorant. But the present-day students know that
once _Manas_ the Thinker has arrived on the scene he does not return
to baser forms; first, because he does not wish to, and second, because
he cannot. For just as the blood in the body is prevented by valves
from rushing back and engorging the heart, so in this greater system of
universal circulation the door is shut behind the Thinker and prevents
his retrocession. Reïncarnation as a doctrine applying to the real man
does not teach transmigration into kingdoms of nature below the human.




CHAPTER IX.


In the West, where the object of life is commercial, financial, social,
or scientific success, that is, personal profit, aggrandizement,
and power, the real life of man receives but little attention, and
we, unlike the Orientals, give scant prominence to the doctrine of
preëxistence and reïncarnation. That the church denies it is enough for
many, with whom no argument is of any use. Relying on the church, they
do not wish to disturb the serenity of their faith in dogmas that may
be illogical; and as they have been taught that the church can bind
them in hell, a blind fear of the anathema hurled at reïncarnation in
the Constantinople council about 500 A. D., would alone debar them
from accepting the accursed theory. And the church in arguing on the
doctrine urges the objection that if men are convinced that they will
live many lives, the temptation to accept the present and do evil
without check will be too strong. Absurd as this seems, it is put
forward by learned Jesuits, who say men will rather have the present
chance than wait for others. If there were no retribution at all this
would be a good objection, but as Nature has also a Nemesis for every
evil doer, and as each, under the law of Karma—which is that of cause
and effect and perfect justice—must receive the exact consequences
himself in every life for what good or bad deeds and thoughts he did
and had in other lives, the basis for moral conduct is secure. It is
safe under this system, since no man can by any possibility, or favor,
or edict, or belief escape the consequences, and each one who grasps
this doctrine will be moved by conscience and the whole power of
nature to do well in order that he may receive good and become happy.

It is maintained that the idea of rebirth is uncongenial and unpleasant
because on the one hand it is cold, allowing no sentiment to interfere,
prohibiting us from renouncing at will a life which we have found to
be sorrowful; and on the other, that there appears to be no chance
under it for us to see our loved ones who have passed away before us.
But whether we like it or not Nature’s laws go forward unerringly,
and sentiment or feeling can in no way avert the consequence that
must follow a cause. If we eat bad food bad results must come. The
glutton would have Nature permit him to gorge himself without the
indigestion which will come, but Nature’s laws are not to be thus put
aside. Now, the objection to reïncarnation that we will not see our
loved ones in heaven as promised in dogmatic religion, presupposes
a complete stoppage of the evolution and development of those who
leave earth before ourselves, and also assumes that recognition is
dependent on physical appearance. But as we progress in this life
so also must we progress upon leaving it, and it would be unfair to
compel the others to await our arrival in order that we may recognize
them. And if one reflects on the natural consequences of arising to
heaven where all trammels are cast off, it must be apparent that those
who have been there, say, twenty of mortal years before us must,
in the nature of things mental and spiritual, have made a progress
equal to many hundreds of years here under varied and very favorable
circumstances. How then could we, arriving later and still imperfect,
be able to recognize those who had been perfecting themselves in heaven
with such advantages? And as we know that the body is left behind
to disintegrate, so, it is evident, recognition cannot depend, in
the spiritual and mental life, on physical appearance. For not only
is this thus plain, but since we are aware that an unhandsome or
deformed body often enshrines a glorious mind and pure soul, and that a
beautifully formed exterior—such as in the case of the Borgias—may hide
an incarnate devil in character, the physical form gives no guarantee
of recognition in that world where the body is absent. And the mother
who has lost a child who had grown to maturity must know that she loved
the child when a baby as much as afterwards when the great alteration
to later life had completely swept away the form and features of early
youth. The Theosophists see that this objection can have no existence
in the face of the eternal and pure life of the soul. And Theosophy
also teaches that those who are like unto each other and love each
other will be reïncarnated together whenever the conditions permit.
Whenever one of us has gone farther on the road to perfection, he
will always be moved to help and comfort those who belong to the same
family. But when one has become gross and selfish and wicked, no one
would want his companionship in any life. Recognition depends on the
inner sight and not on outward appearance; hence there is no force in
this objection. And the other phase of it relating to loss of parent,
child, or relative is based on the erroneous notion that as the parents
give the child its body so also is given its soul. But soul is immortal
and parentless; hence this objection is without a root.

Some urge that Heredity invalidates Reïncarnation. We urge it as proof.
Heredity in giving us a body in any family provides the appropriate
environment for the Ego. The Ego only goes into the family which either
completely answers to its whole nature, or which gives an opportunity
for the working out of its evolution, and which is also connected with
it by reason of past incarnations or causes mutually set up. Thus the
evil child may come to the presently good family because parents and
child are indissolubly connected by past actions. It is a chance for
redemption to the child and the occasion of punishment to the parents.
This points to bodily heredity as a natural rule governing the bodies
we must inhabit, just as the houses in a city will show the mind of
the builders. And as we as well as our parents were the makers and
influencers of bodies, took part in and are responsible for states of
society in which the development of physical body and brain was either
retarded or helped on, debased or the contrary, so we are in this life
responsible for the civilization in which we now appear. But when we
look at the characters in human bodies, great inherent differences are
seen. This is due to the soul inside, who is suffering or enjoying in
the family, nation, and race his own thoughts and acts which in the
past lives have made it inevitable he should incarnate with.

Heredity provides the tenement and also imposes those limitations of
capacity of brain or body which are often a punishment and sometimes
a help, but it does not affect the real Ego. The transmission of
traits is a physical matter, and nothing more than the coming out into
a nation of the consequences of the prior lives of all Egos who are
to be in that race. The limitations imposed on the Ego by any family
heredity are exact consequences of that Ego’s prior lives. The fact
that such physical traits and mental peculiarities are transmitted
does not confute reïncarnation, since we know that the guiding mind
and real character of each are not the result of a body and brain but
are peculiar to the Ego in its essential life. Transmission of trait
and tendency by means of parent and body is exactly the mode selected
by nature for providing the incarnating Ego with the proper tenement
in which to carry on its work. Another mode would be impossible and
subversive of order.

Again, those who dwell on the objection from heredity forget that they
are accentuating similarities and overlooking divergencies. For while
investigations on the line of heredity have recorded many transmitted
traits, they have not done so in respect to divergencies from heredity
vastly greater in number. Every mother knows that the children of a
family are as different in character as the fingers on one hand—they
are all from the same parents, but all vary in character and capacity.

But heredity as the great rule and as a complete explanation is
absolutely overthrown by history, which shows no constant transmission
of learning, power, and capacity. For instance, in the case of the
ancient Egyptians long gone and their line of transmission shattered,
we have no transmission to their descendants. If physical heredity
settles the question of character, how has the great Egyptian character
been lost? The same question holds in respect to other ancient and
extinct nations. And taking an individual illustration we have the
great musician Bach, whose direct descendants showed a decrease in
musical ability leading to its final disappearance from the family
stock. But Theosophy teaches that in both of these instances—as in all
like them—the real capacity and ability have only disappeared from
a family and national body, but are retained in the Egos who once
exhibited them, being now incarnated in some other nation and family of
the present time.

Suffering comes to nearly all men, and a great many live lives
of sorrow from the cradle to the grave, so it is objected that
reïncarnation is unjust because we suffer for the wrong done by some
other person in another life. This objection is based on the false
notion that the person in the other life was some one else. But in
every life it is the same person. When we come again we do not take up
the body of some one else, nor another’s deeds, but are like an actor
who plays many parts, the same actor inside though the costumes and the
lines recited differ in each new play. Shakespeare was right in saying
that life is a play, for the great life of the soul is a drama, and
each new life and rebirth another act in which we assume another part
and put on a new dress, but all through it we are the self-same person.
So instead of its being unjust, it is perfect justice, and in no other
manner could justice be preserved.

But, it is said, if we reïncarnate how is it that we do not remember
the other life; and further, as we cannot remember the deeds for which
we suffer is it not unjust for that reason? Those who ask this always
ignore the fact that they also have enjoyment and reward in life and
are content to accept them without question. For if it is unjust to
be punished for deeds we do not remember, then it is also inequitable
to be rewarded for other acts which have been forgotten. Mere entry
into life is no fit foundation for any reward or punishment. Reward
and punishment must be the just desert for prior conduct. Nature’s
law of justice is not imperfect, and it is only the imperfection of
human justice that requires the offender to know and remember in this
life a deed to which a penalty is annexed. In the prior life the doer
was then quite aware of what he did, and nature affixes consequences
to his acts, being thus just. We well know that she will make the
effect follow the cause whatever we wish and whether we remember or
forget what we did. If a baby is hurt in its first years by the nurse
so as to lay the ground for a crippling disease in after life, as is
often the case, the crippling disease will come although the child
neither brought on the present cause nor remembered aught about it.
But reïncarnation, with its companion doctrine of Karma, rightly
understood, shows how perfectly just the whole scheme of nature is.

Memory of a prior life is not needed to prove that we passed through
that existence, nor is the fact of not remembering a good objection.
We forget the greater part of the occurrences of the years and days of
this life, but no one would say for that reason we did not go through
these years. They were lived, and we retain but little of the details
in the brain, but the entire effect of them on the character is kept
and made a part of ourselves. The whole mass of detail of a life is
preserved in the inner man to be one day fully brought back to the
conscious memory in some other life when we are perfected. And even
now, imperfect as we are and little as we know, the experiments in
hypnotism show that all the smallest details are registered in what
is for the present known as the subconscious mind. The theosophical
doctrine is that not a single one of these happenings is forgotten in
fact, and at the end of life when the eyes are closed and those about
say we are dead every thought and circumstance of life flash vividly
into and across the mind.

Many persons do, however, remember that they have lived before. Poets
have sung of this, children know it well, until the constant living in
an atmosphere of unbelief drives the recollection from their minds for
the present, but all are subject to the limitations imposed upon the
Ego by the new brain in each life. This is why we are not able to keep
the pictures of the past, whether of this life or the preceding ones.
The brain is the instrument for the memory of the soul, and, being new
in each life with but a certain capacity, the Ego is only able to use
it for the new life up to its capacity. That capacity will be fully
availed of or the contrary, just according to the Ego’s own desire
and prior conduct, because such past living will have increased or
diminished its power to overcome the forces of material existence.

By living according to the dictates of the soul the brain may at last
be made porous to the soul’s recollections; if the contrary sort of a
life is led, then more and more will clouds obscure that reminiscence.
But as the brain had no part in the life last lived, it is in general
unable to remember. And this is a wise law, for we should be very
miserable if the deeds and scenes of our former lives were not hidden
from our view until by discipline we become able to bear a knowledge of
them.

Another objection brought up is that under the doctrine of
reïncarnation it is not possible to account for the increase of
the world’s population. This assumes that we know surely that its
population has increased and are keeping informed of its fluctuations.
But it is not certain that the inhabitants of the globe have increased,
and, further, vast numbers of people are annually destroyed of whom we
know nothing. In China year after year many thousands have been carried
off by flood. Statistics of famine have not been made. We do not know
by how many thousands the deaths in Africa exceed the births in any
year. The objection is based on imperfect tables which only have to do
with western lands. It also assumes that there are fewer Egos out of
incarnation and waiting to come in than the number of those inhabiting
bodies, and this is incorrect. Annie Besant has put this well in her
“Reïncarnation” by saying that the inhabited globe resembles a hall in
a town which is filled from the much greater population of the town
outside; the number in the hall may vary, but there is a constant
source of supply from the town. It is true that so far as concerns this
globe the number of Egos belonging to it is definite; but no one knows
what that quantity is nor what is the total capacity of the earth for
sustaining them. The statisticians of the day are chiefly in the West,
and their tables embrace but a small section of the history of man.
They cannot say how many persons were incarnated on the earth at any
prior date when the globe was full in all parts, hence the quantity of
egos willing or waiting to be reborn is unknown to the men of to-day.
The Masters of theosophical knowledge say that the total number of
such egos is vast, and for that reason the supply of those for the
occupation of bodies to be born over and above the number that die is
sufficient. Then too it must be borne in mind that each ego for itself
varies the length of stay in the _post-mortem_ states. They do not
reïncarnate at the same interval, but come out of the state after death
at different rates, and whenever there occurs a great number of deaths
by war, pestilence, or famine, there is at once a rush of souls to
incarnation, either in the same place or in some other place or race.
The earth is so small a globe in the vast assemblage of inhabitable
planets there is a sufficient supply of Egos for incarnation here. But
with due respect to those who put this objection, I do not see that it
has the slightest force or any relation to the truth of the doctrine of
reïncarnation.




CHAPTER X.


Unless we deny the immortality of man and the existence of soul,
there are no sound arguments against the doctrine of preëxistence
and re-birth save such as rest on the dictum of the church that each
soul is a new creation. This dictum can be supported only by blind
dogmatism, for given a soul we must sooner or later arrive at the
theory of re-birth, because even if each soul is new on this earth
it must keep on living somewhere after passing away, and in view of
the known order of nature will have other bodies in other planets or
spheres. Theosophy applies to the self—the thinker—the same laws which
are seen everywhere in operation throughout nature, and those are all
varieties of the great law that effects follow causes and no effect
is without a cause. The soul’s immortality—believed in by the mass of
humanity—demands embodiment here or elsewhere, and to be embodied means
reïncarnation. If we come to this earth for but a few years and then go
to some other, the soul must be embodied there as well as here, and if
we have travelled from some other world we must have had there too our
proper vesture. The powers of mind and the laws governing its motion,
its attachment, and its detachment as given in theosophical philosophy
show that its reëmbodiment must be here, where it moved and worked,
until such time as the mind is able to overcome the forces which chain
it to this globe. To permit the involved entity to transfer itself to
another scene of action before it had overcome all the causes drawing
it here and without its having worked out its responsibilities to other
entities in the same stream of evolution would be unjust and contrary
to the powerful occult laws and forces which continually operate upon
it. The early Christian Fathers saw this, and taught that the soul had
fallen into matter and was obliged by the law of its nature to toil
upward again to the place from which it came. They used an old Greek
hymn which ran:

    Eternal Mind, thy seedling spark,
      Through this thin vase of clay,
    Athwart the waves of chaos dark
      Emits a timorous ray.
    This mind enfolding soul is sown,
      Incarnate germ in earth:
    In pity, blessed Lord, then own
      What claims in Thee its birth.
    Far forth from Thee, thou central fire,
      To earth’s sad bondage cast,
    Let not the trembling spark expire;
      Absorb thine own at last!

Each human being has a definite character different from every other
human being, and masses of beings aggregated into nations show as
wholes that the national force and distinguishing peculiarities go to
make up a definite and separate national character. These differences,
both individual and national, are due to essential character and not to
education. Even the doctrine of the survival of the fittest should show
this, for the fitness cannot come from nothing but must at last show
itself from the coming to the surface of the actual inner character.
And as both individuals and nations among those who are ahead in the
struggle with nature exhibit an immense force in their character,
we must find a place and time where the force was evolved. These,
Theosophy says, are this earth and the whole period during which the
human race has been on the planet.

So, then, while heredity has something to do with the difference in
character as to force and morale, swaying the soul and mind a little
and furnishing also the appropriate place for receiving reward and
punishment, it is not the cause for the essential nature shown by every
one.

But all these differences, such as those shown by babes from birth, by
adults as character comes forth more and more, and by nations in their
history, are due to long experience gained during many lives on earth,
are the outcome of the soul’s own evolution. A survey of one short
human life gives no ground for the production of his inner nature. It
is needful that each soul should have all possible experience, and
one life cannot give this even under the best conditions. It would be
folly for the Almighty to put us here for such a short time, only to
remove us just when we had begun to see the object of life and the
possibilities in it. The mere selfish desire of a person to escape the
trials and discipline of life is not enough to set nature’s laws aside,
so the soul must be reborn until it has ceased to set in motion the
cause of rebirth, after having developed character up to its possible
limit as indicated by all the varieties of human nature, when every
experience has been passed through, and not until all of truth that can
be known has been acquired. The vast disparity among men in respect
to capacity compels us, if we wish to ascribe justice to Nature or to
God, to admit reïncarnation and to trace the origin of the disparity
back to the past lives of the Ego. For people are as much hindered and
handicapped, abused and made the victims of seeming injustice because
of limited capacity, as they are by reason of circumstances of birth or
education. We see the uneducated rising above circumstances of family
and training, and often those born in good families have very small
capacity; but the troubles of nations and families arise from want of
capacity more than from any other cause. And if we consider savage
races only, there the seeming injustice is enormous. For many savages
have good actual brain capacity but still are savage. This is because
the Ego in that body is still savage and undeveloped, for in contrast
to the savage there are many civilized men with small actual brain
force who are not savage in nature because the indwelling Ego has had
long experience in civilization during other lives, and being a more
developed soul has power to use the brain instrument to its highest
limit.

Each man feels and knows that he has an individuality of his own, a
personal identity which bridges over not only the gaps made by sleep
but also those sometimes supervening on temporary lesions in the brain.
This identity never breaks from beginning to end of life in the normal
person, and only the persistence and eternal character of the soul will
account for it.

So, ever since we began to remember, we know that our personal identity
has not failed us, no matter how bad may be our memory. This disposes
of the argument that identity depends on recollection, for the reason
that if it did depend alone on recollection we should each day have
to begin over again, as we cannot remember the events of the past in
detail, and some minds remember but little yet feel their personal
identity. And as it is often seen that some who remember the least
insist as strongly as the others on their personal identity, that
persistence of feeling must come from the old and immortal soul.

Viewing life and its probable object, with all the varied experience
possible for man, one must be forced to the conclusion that a single
life is not enough for carrying out all that is intended by Nature, to
say nothing of what man himself desires to do. The scale of variety
in experience is enormous. There is a vast range of powers latent in
man which we see may be developed if opportunity be given. Knowledge
infinite in scope and diversity lies before us, and especially in these
days when special investigation is the rule. We perceive that we have
high aspirations with no time to reach up to their measure, while the
great troop of passions and desires, selfish motives and ambitions, war
with us and among themselves, pursuing us even to the door of death.
All these have to be tried, conquered, used, subdued. One life is not
enough for all this. To say that we have but one life here with such
possibilities put before us and impossible of development is to make
the universe and life a huge and cruel joke perpetrated by a powerful
God who is thus accused, by those who believe in a special creation of
souls, of triumphing and playing with puny man just because that man is
small and the creature of the Almighty. A human life at most is seventy
years; statistics reduce this to about forty; and out of that little
remainder a large part is spent in sleep and another part in childhood.
Thus in one life it is perfectly impossible to attain to the merest
fraction of what Nature evidently has in view. We see many truths
vaguely which a life gives us no time to grasp, and especially is this
so when men have to make such a struggle to live at all. Our faculties
are small or dwarfed or weak; one life gives no opportunity to alter
this; we perceive other powers latent in us that cannot possibly be
brought out in such a small space of time; and we have much more than a
suspicion that the extent of the field of truth is vastly greater than
the narrow circle we are confined to. It is not reasonable to suppose
that either God or nature projects us into a body simply to fill us
with bitterness because we can have no other opportunity here, but
rather we must conclude that a series of incarnations has led to the
present condition, and that the process of coming here again and again
must go on for the purpose of affording us the opportunity needed.

The mere fact of dying is not of itself enough to bring about
development of faculties or the elimination of wrong tendency and
inclination. If we assume that upon entering heaven we at once acquire
all knowledge and purity, then that state after death is reduced to a
dead level and life itself with all its discipline is shorn of every
meaning. Some of the churches teach of a school of discipline after
death where it is impudently stated that the Apostles themselves, well
known to be ignorant men, are to be the teachers. This is absurd and
devoid of any basis or reason in the natural order. Besides, if there
is to be such subsequent discipline, why were we projected into life
at all? And why after the suffering and the error committed are we
taken from the place where we did our acts? The only solution left is
in reïncarnation. We come back to earth because on it and with the
beings upon it our deeds were performed; because it is the only proper
place where punishment and reward can be justly meted out; because
here is the only natural spot in which to continue the struggle toward
perfection, toward the development of the faculties we have and the
destruction of the wickedness in us. Justice to ourselves and to all
other beings demands it, for we cannot live for ourselves, and it
would be unjust to permit some of us to escape, leaving those who were
participants with us to remain or to be plunged into a hell of eternal
duration.

The persistence of savagery, the rise and decay of nations and
civilizations, the total extinction of nations, all demand an
explanation found nowhere but in reïncarnation. Savagery remains
because there are still Egos whose experience is so limited that they
are still savage; they will come up into higher races when ready. Races
die out because the Egos have had enough of the experience that sort
of race gives. So we find the red Indian, the Hottentot, the Easter
Islanders, and others as examples of races deserted by high Egos and as
they are dying away other souls who have had no higher life in the past
enter into the bodies of the race to go on using them for the purpose
of gaining such experience as the race body will give. A race could
not possibly arise and then suddenly go out. We see that such is not
the case, but science has no explanation; it simply says that this is
the fact, that nations decay. But in this explanation no account is
taken of the inner man nor of the recondite subtle and occult laws that
unite to make a race. Theosophy shows that the energy drawn together
has to expend itself gradually, and therefore the reproduction of
bodies of the character of that race will go on, though the Egos are
not compelled to inhabit bodies of that sort any longer than while
they are of the same development as the race. Hence a time comes when
the whole mass of Egos which built up the race leaves it for another
physical environment more like themselves. The economy of Nature will
not permit the physical race to suddenly fade away, and so in the real
order of evolution other and less progressed Egos come in and use the
forms provided, keeping up the production of new bodies but less and
less in number each century. These lower Egos are not able to keep up
to the limit of the capacity of the congeries of energies left by the
other Egos, and so while the new set gains as much experience as is
possible the race in time dies out after passing through its decay.
This is the explanation of what we may call descending savagery, and
no other theory will meet the facts. It has been sometimes thought by
ethnologists that the more civilized races kill off the others, but
the fact is that in consequence of the great difference between the
Egos inhabiting the old race body and the energy of that body itself,
the females begin to be sterile, and thus slowly but surely the number
of deaths exceeds the births. China itself is in process of decay,
she being now in the almost stationary stage just before the rush
downward. Great civilizations like those of Egypt and Babylon have gone
because the souls who made them have long ago reïncarnated in the great
conquering nations of Europe and the present American continents. As
nations and races they have been totally reïncarnated and born again
for greater and higher purposes than ever. Of all the old races the
Aryan Indian alone yet remains as the preserver of the old doctrines.
It will one day rise again to its old heights of glory.

The appearance of geniuses and great minds in families destitute of
these qualities, as well as the extinction from a family of the genius
shown by some ancestor, can only be met by the law of rebirth. Napoleon
the First came in a family wholly unlike him in power and force.
Nothing in his heredity will explain his character. He said himself,
as told in the Memoirs of Prince Talleyrand, that he was Charlemagne.
Only by assuming for him a long series of lives giving the right line
of evolution or cause for his mind and nature and force to be brought
out, can we have the slightest idea why he or any other great genius
appeared at all. Mozart when an infant could compose orchestral score.
This was not due to heredity, for such a score is not natural, but
is forced, mechanical, and wholly conventional, yet he understood it
without schooling. How? Because he was a musician reïncarnated, with
a musical brain furnished by his family and thus not impeded in his
endeavors to show forth his musical knowledge. But stronger yet is the
case of Blind Tom, a negro whose family could not by any possibility
have a knowledge of the piano, a modern instrument, so as to transmit
that knowledge to the atoms of his body, yet he had great musical power
and knew the present mechanical musical scale on the piano. There are
hundreds of examples like these among the many prodigies who have
appeared to the world’s astonishment. In India there are many histories
of sages born with complete knowledge of philosophy and the like,
and doubtless in all nations the same can be met with. This bringing
back of knowledge also explains instinct, for that is no more than
recollection divisible into physical and mental memory. It is seen in
the child and the animal, and is no more than the result of previous
experience. And whether we look at the new-born babe flinging out its
arms for self-protection, or the animal with very strong instinctual
power, or the bee building a cell on the rules of geometry, it is all
the effect of reïncarnation acting either in the mind or physical
cell, for under what was first laid down no atom is devoid of life,
consciousness, and intelligence of its own.

In the case of the musician Bach we have proof that heredity counts for
nothing if the Ego is not advanced, for his genius was not borne down
his family line; it gradually faded out, finally leaving the family
stream entirely. So, too, the coming of idiots or vicious children to
parents who are good, pure, or highly intellectual is explained in the
same way. They are cases where heredity is set at nought by a wholly
bad or deficient Ego.

And lastly, the fact that certain inherent ideas are common to the
whole race is explained by the sages as due to recollection of such
ideas, which were implanted in the human mind at the very beginning of
its evolutionary career on this planet by those brothers and sages who
learned their lessons and were perfected in former ages long before the
development of this globe began. No explanation for inherent ideas is
offered by science that will do more than say, “they exist.” These were
actually taught to the mass of Egos who are engaged in this earth’s
evolution; they were imprinted or burned into their natures, and always
recollected; they follow the Ego through the long pilgrimage.

It has been often thought that the opposition to reïncarnation has been
solely based on prejudice, when not due to a dogma which can only stand
when the mind is bound down and prevented from using its own powers.
It is a doctrine the most noble of all, and with its companion one
of Karma, next to be considered, it alone gives the basis for ethics.
There is no doubt in my mind that the founder of Christianity took it
for granted and that its present absence from that religion is the
reason for the contradiction between the professed ethics of Christian
nations and their actual practices which are so contrary to the morals
given out by Jesus.




CHAPTER XI.


Karma is an unfamiliar word for Western ears. It is the name adopted by
Theosophists of the nineteenth century for one of the most important
of the laws of nature. Ceaseless in its operation, it bears alike upon
planets, systems of planets, races, nations, families, and individuals.
It is the twin doctrine to reïncarnation. So inextricably interlaced
are these two laws that it is almost impossible to properly consider
one apart from the other. No spot or being in the universe is exempt
from the operation of Karma, but all are under its sway, punished
for error by it yet beneficently led on, through discipline, rest,
and reward, to the distant heights of perfection. It is a law so
comprehensive in its sweep, embracing at once our physical and our
moral being, that it is only by paraphrase and copious explanation one
can convey its meaning in English. For that reason the Sanscrit term
_Karma_ was adopted to designate it.

Applied to man’s moral life it is the law of ethical causation,
justice, reward and punishment; the cause for birth and rebirth, yet
equally the means for escape from incarnation. Viewed from another
point it is merely effect flowing from cause, action and reaction,
exact result for every thought and act. It is act and the result of
act; for the word’s literal meaning is action. Theosophy views the
Universe as an intelligent whole, hence every motion in the Universe
is an action of that whole leading to results, which themselves become
causes for further results. Viewing it thus broadly, the ancient Hindus
said that every being up to Brahma was under the rule of Karma.

It is not a being but a law, the universal law of harmony which
unerringly restores all disturbance to equilibrium. In this the
theory conflicts with the ordinary conception about God, built up
from the Jewish system, which assumes that the Almighty as a thinking
entity, extraneous to the Cosmos, builds up, finds his construction
inharmonious, out of proportion, errant, and disturbed, and then has to
pull down, destroy, or punish that which he created. This has either
caused thousands to live in fear of God, in compliance with his assumed
commands, with the selfish object of obtaining reward and securing
escape from his wrath, or has plunged them into darkness which comes
from a denial of all spiritual life. But as there is plainly, indeed
painfully, evident to every human being a constant destruction going
on in and around us, a continual war not only among men but everywhere
through the whole solar system, causing sorrow in all directions,
reason requires a solution of the riddle. The poor, who see no refuge
or hope, cry aloud to a God who makes no reply, and then envy springs
up in them when they consider the comforts and opportunities of the
rich. They see the rich profligates, the wealthy fools, enjoying
themselves unpunished. Turning to the teacher of religion, they meet
the reply to their questioning of the justice which will permit such
misery to those who did nothing requiring them to be born with no
means, no opportunities for education, no capacity to overcome social,
racial, or circumstantial obstacles, “It is the will of God.” Parents
produce beloved offspring who are cut off by death at an untimely hour,
just when all promised well. They too have no answer to the question
“Why am I thus afflicted?” but the same unreasonable reference to
an inaccessible God whose arbitrary will causes their misery. Thus
in every walk of life, loss, injury, persecution, deprivation of
opportunity, nature’s own forces working to destroy the happiness
of man, death, reverses, disappointment continually beset good and
evil men alike. But nowhere is there any answer or relief save in
the ancient truths that each man is the maker and fashioner of his
own destiny, the only one who sets in motion the causes for his own
happiness and misery. In one life he sows and in the next he reaps.
Thus on and forever, the law of Karma leads him.

Karma is a beneficent law wholly merciful, relentlessly just, for true
mercy is not favor but impartial justice.

            “My brothers! each man’s life
            The outcome of his former living is;
    The bygone wrongs bring forth sorrows and woes,
             The bygone right breeds bliss....
             This is the doctrine of Karma.”

How is the present life affected by that bygone right and wrong act,
and is it always by way of punishment? Is Karma only fate under another
name, an already fixed and formulated destiny from which no escape is
possible, and which therefore might make us careless of act or thought
that cannot affect destiny? It is not fatalism. Everything done in a
former body has consequences which in the new birth the Ego must enjoy
or suffer, for, as St. Paul said: “Brethren, be not deceived. God is
not mocked, for whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap.” For
the effect is in the cause, and Karma produces the manifestation of it
in the body, brain, and mind furnished by reïncarnation. And as a cause
set up by one man has a distinct relation to him as a centre from which
it came, so each one experiences the results of his own acts. We may
sometimes seem to receive effects solely from the acts of others, but
this is the result of our own acts and thoughts in this or some prior
life. We perform our acts in company with others always, and the acts
with their underlying thoughts have relation always to other persons
and to ourselves.

No act is performed without a thought at its root either at the time
of performance or as leading to it. These thoughts are lodged in that
part of man which we have called _Manas_—the mind, and there remain as
subtle but powerful links with magnetic threads that enmesh the solar
system, and through which various effects are brought out. The theory
put forward in earlier pages that the whole system to which this globe
belongs is alive, conscious on every plane, though only in man showing
self-consciousness, comes into play here to explain how the thought
under the act in this life may cause result in this or the next birth.
The marvellous modern experiments in hypnotism show that the slightest
impression, no matter how far back in the history of the person, may
be waked up to life, thus proving it is not lost but only latent. Take
for instance the case of a child born humpbacked and very short, the
head sunk between the shoulders, the arms long and legs curtailed. Why
is this? His karma for thoughts and acts in a prior life. He reviled,
persecuted, or otherwise injured a deformed person so persistently or
violently as to imprint in his own immortal mind the deformed picture
of his victim. For in proportion to the intensity of his thought will
be the intensity and depth of the picture. It is exactly similar to
the exposure of the sensitive photographic plate, whereby, just as
the exposure is long or short, the impression in the plate is weak or
deep. So this thinker and actor—the Ego—coming again to rebirth carries
with him this picture, and if the family to which he is attracted for
birth has similar physical tendencies in its stream, the mental picture
causes the newly-forming astral body to assume a deformed shape by
electrical and magnetic osmosis through the mother of the child. And
as all beings on earth are indissolubly joined together, the misshapen
child is the karma of the parents also, an exact consequence for
similar acts and thoughts on their part in other lives. Here is an
exactitude of justice which no other theory will furnish.

But as we often see a deformed human being—continuing the instance
merely for the purpose of illustration—having a happy disposition, an
excellent intellect, sound judgment, and every good moral quality, this
very instance leads us to the conclusion that karma must be of several
different kinds in every individual case, and also evidently operates
in more than one department of our being, with the possibility of being
pleasant in effect for one portion of our nature and unpleasant for
another.

Karma is of three sorts:

_First_—that which has not begun to produce any effect in our lives
owing to the operation on us of some other karmic causes. This is
under a law well known to physicists, that two opposing forces tend
to neutrality, and that one force may be strong enough to temporarily
prevent the operation of another one. This law works on the unseen
mental and karmic planes or spheres of being just as it does on the
material ones. The force of a certain set of bodily, mental, and
psychical faculties with their tendencies may wholly inhibit the
operation on us of causes with which we are connected, because the
whole nature of each person is used in the carrying out of this law.
Hence the weak and mediocre furnish a weak focus for karma, and in them
the general result of a lifetime is limited, although they may feel it
all to be very heavy. But that person who has a wide and deep-reaching
character and much force will feel the operation of a greater quantity
of karma than the weaker person.

_Second_—that karma which we are now making or storing up by our
thoughts and acts, and which will operate in the future when the
appropriate body, mind, and environment are taken up by the incarnating
Ego in some other life, or whenever obstructive karma is removed.

This bears both on the present life and the next one. For one may in
this life come to a point where, all previous causes being worked out,
new karma, or that which is unexpended, must begin to operate.

Under this are those cases where men have sudden reverses of fortune
or changes for the better either in circumstances or character. A very
important bearing of this is on our present conduct. While old karma
must work out and cannot be stopped, it is wise for the man to so think
and act now under present circumstances, no matter what they are, that
he shall produce no bad or prejudicial causes for the next rebirth or
for later years in this life. Rebellion is useless, for the law works
on whether we weep or rejoice. The great French engineer, de Lesseps,
is a good example of this class of karma. Raised to a high pitch of
glory and achievement for many years of his life, he suddenly falls
covered with shame through the Panama canal scandal. Whether he was
innocent or guilty, he has the shame of the connection of his name with
a national enterprise all besmirched with bribery and corruption that
involved high officials. This was the operation of old karmic causes on
him the very moment those which had governed his previous years were
exhausted. Napoleon I is another, for he rose to a very great fame,
then suddenly fell and died in exile and disgrace. Many other cases
will occur to every thoughtful reader.

_Third_—that karma which has begun to produce results. It is the
operating now in this life on us of causes set up in previous lives in
company with other Egos. And it is in operation because, being most
adapted to the family stock, the individual body, astral body, and race
tendencies of the present incarnation, it exhibits itself plainly,
while other unexpended karma awaits its regular turn.

These three classes of karma govern men, animals, worlds, and periods
of evolution. Every effect flows from a cause precedent, and as all
beings are constantly being reborn they are continually experiencing
the effects of their thoughts and acts (which are themselves causes) of
a prior incarnation. And thus each one answers, as St. Matthew says,
for every word and thought; none can escape either by prayer, or favor,
or force, or any other intermediary.

Now as karmic causes are divisible into three classes, they must have
various fields in which to work. They operate upon man in his mental
and intellectual nature, in his psychical or soul nature, and in his
body and circumstances. The spiritual nature of man is never affected
or operated upon by karma.

One species of karma may act on the three specified planes of our
nature at the same time to the same degree, or there may be a mixture
of the causes, some on one plane and some on another. Take a deformed
person who has a fine mind and a deficiency in his soul nature. Here
punitive or unpleasant karma is operating on his body while in his
mental and intellectual nature good karma is being experienced, but
psychically the karma, or cause, being of an indifferent sort the
result is indifferent. In another person other combinations appear.
He has a fine body and favorable circumstances, but the character is
morose, peevish, irritable, revengeful, morbid, and disagreeable to
himself and others. Here good physical karma is at work with very bad
mental, intellectual, and psychical karma. Cases will occur to readers
of persons born in high station having every opportunity and power, yet
being imbecile or suddenly becoming insane.

And just as all these phases of the law of karma have sway over the
individual man, so they similarly operate upon races, nations, and
families. Each race has its karma as a whole. If it be good that race
goes forward. If bad it goes out—annihilated as a race—though the
souls concerned take up their karma in other races and bodies. Nations
cannot escape their national karma, and any nation that has acted in
a wicked manner must suffer some day, be it soon or late. The karma of
the nineteenth century in the West is the karma of Israel, for even the
merest tyro can see that the Mosaic influence is the strongest in the
European and American nations. The old Aztec and other ancient American
peoples died out because their own karma—the result of their own life
as nations in the far past—fell upon and destroyed them. With nations
this heavy operation of karma is always through famine, war, convulsion
of nature, and the sterility of the women of the nation. The latter
cause comes near the end and sweeps the whole remnant away. And the
individual in race or nation is warned by this great doctrine that if
he falls into indifference of thought and act, thus moulding himself
into the general average karma of his race or nation, that national and
race karma will at last carry him off in the general destiny. This is
why teachers of old cried, “Come ye out and be ye separate.”

With reïncarnation the doctrine of karma explains the misery and
suffering of the world, and no room is left to accuse Nature of
injustice.

The misery of any nation or race is the direct result of the thoughts
and acts of the Egos who make up the race or nation. In the dim past
they did wickedly and now suffer. They violated the laws of harmony.
The immutable rule is that harmony must be restored if violated.
So these Egos suffer in making compensation and establishing the
equilibrium of the occult cosmos. The whole mass of Egos must go on
incarnating and reïncarnating in the nation or race until they have
all worked out to the end the causes set up. Though the nation may
for a time disappear as a physical thing, the Egos that made it do
not leave the world, but come out as the makers of some new nation
in which they must go on with the task and take either punishment or
reward as accords with their karma. Of this law the old Egyptians are
an illustration. They certainly rose to a high point of development,
and as certainly they were extinguished as a nation. But the souls—the
old Egos—live on and are now fulfilling their self-made destiny as some
other nation now in our period. They may be the new American nation,
or the Jews fated to wander up and down in the world and suffer much
at the hands of others. This process is perfectly just. Take, for
instance, the United States and the Red Indians. The latter have been
most shamefully treated by the nation. The Indian Egos will be reborn
in the new and conquering people, and as members of that great family
will be the means themselves of bringing on the due results for such
acts as were done against them when they had red bodies. Thus it has
happened before, and so it will come about again.

Individual unhappiness in any life is thus explained:

(_a_) It is punishment for evil done in past lives; or (_b_) it is
discipline taken up by the Ego for the purpose of eliminating defects
or acquiring fortitude and sympathy. When defects are eliminated it is
like removing the obstruction in an irrigating canal which then lets
the water flow on. Happiness is explained in the same way: the result
of prior lives of goodness.

The scientific and self-compelling basis for right ethics is found
in these and in no other doctrines. For if right ethics are to be
practised merely for themselves, men will not see why, and have never
been able to see why, for that reason they should do right. If ethics
are to be followed from fear, man is degraded and will surely evade; if
the favor of the Almighty, not based on law or justice, be the reason,
then we will have just what prevails to-day—a code given by Jesus to
the west professed by nations and not practised save by the few who
would in any case be virtuous.

On this subject the Adepts have written the following to be found in
the _Secret Doctrine_:

 Nor would the ways of karma be inscrutable were men to work in union
 and harmony instead of disunion and strife. For our ignorance of
 those ways—which one portion of mankind calls the ways of Providence
 dark and intricate, while another sees in them the action of blind
 fatalism, and a third simple chance with neither gods nor devils to
 guide them—would surely disappear if we would but attribute all these
 to their correct cause. With right knowledge, or at any rate with a
 confident conviction that our neighbors will no more work harm to
 us than we would think of harming them, two-thirds of the world’s
 evil would vanish into thin air. Were no man to hurt his brother,
 Karma-Nemesis would have neither cause to work for nor weapons to act
 through.... We cut these numerous windings in our destinies daily
 with our own hands, while we imagine that we are pursuing a track on
 the royal high road of respectability and duty, and then complain of
 those ways being so intricate and so dark. We stand bewildered before
 the mystery of our own making and the riddles of life that _we will
 not_ solve, and then accuse the great Sphinx of devouring us. But
 verily there is not an accident in our lives, not a misshapen day or a
 misfortune, that could not be traced back to our own doings in this or
 another life.... Knowledge of karma gives the conviction that if—

        ‘virtue in distress and vice in triumph
    Make atheists of Mankind’,

 it is only because that mankind has ever shut its eyes to the great
 truth that man is himself his own saviour as his own destroyer; that
 he need not accuse heaven and the gods, fates and providence, of the
 apparent injustice that reigns in the midst of humanity. But let him
 rather remember and repeat this bit of Grecian wisdom which warns man
 to forbear accusing _That_ which

    ‘Just though mysterious, leads us on unerring
    Through ways unmarked from guilt to punishment’

 —which are now the ways and the high road on which move onward the
 great European nations. The western Aryans had every nation and tribe
 like their eastern brethren of the fifth race, their Golden and their
 Iron ages, their period of comparative irresponsibility, or the Satya
 age of purity, while now several of them have reached their Iron age,
 the _Kali Yuga_, an age _black with horrors_. This state will last ...
 until we begin acting from within instead of ever following impulses
 from without.... Until then the only palliative is union and harmony—a
 Brotherhood in _actu_ and _altruism_ not simply in name.




CHAPTER XII.


Let us now consider the states of man after the death of the body and
before birth, having looked over the whole field of the evolution
of things and beings in a general way. This brings up at once the
questions: Is there any heaven or hell, and what are they? Are they
states or places? Is there a spot in space where they may be found
and to which we go or from where we come? We must also go back to the
subject of the fourth principle of the constitution of man, that called
Kama in Sanscrit and desire or passion in English. Bearing in mind what
was said about that principle, and also the teaching in respect to
the astral body and the Astral Light, it will be easier to understand
what is taught about the two states _ante_ and _post mortem_. In
chronological order we go into kama loka—or the plane of desire—first
on the demise of the body, and then the higher principles, the real
man, fall into the state of _Devachan_. After dealing with kama loka it
will be more easy to study the question of _Devachan_.

The breath leaves the body and we say the man is dead, but that is only
the beginning of death; it proceeds on other planes. When the frame is
cold and eyes closed, all the forces of the body and mind rush through
the brain, and by a series of pictures the whole life just ended is
imprinted indelibly on the inner man not only in a general outline
but down to the smallest detail of even the most minute and fleeting
impression. At this moment, though every indication leads the physician
to pronounce for death and though to all intents and purposes the
person is dead to this life, the real man is busy in the brain, and
not until his work there is ended is the person gone. When this solemn
work is over the astral body detaches itself from the physical, and,
life energy having departed, the remaining five principles are in the
plane of kama loka.

The natural separation of the principles brought about by death divides
the total man into three parts:

_First_, the visible body with all its elements left to further
disintegration on the earth plane, where all that it is composed of is
in time resolved into the different physical departments of nature.

_Second_, the _kama rupa_ made up of the astral body and the passions
and desires, which also begins at once to go to pieces on the astral
plane.

_Third_, the real man, the upper triad of _Atma-Buddhi-Manas_,
deathless but now out of earth conditions, devoid of body, begins
in _devachan_ to function solely as mind clothed in a very ethereal
vesture which it will shake off when the time comes for it to return to
earth.

_Kama loka_—or the place of desire—is the astral region penetrating and
surrounding the earth. As a place it is on and in and about the earth.
Its extent is to a measurable distance from the earth, but the ordinary
laws obtaining here do not obtain there, and entities therein are not
under the same conditions as to space and time as we are. As a state it
is metaphysical, though that metaphysic relates to the astral plane.
It is called the plane of desire because it relates to the fourth
principle, and in it the ruling force is desire devoid of and divorced
from intelligence. It is an astral sphere intermediate between earthly
and heavenly life. Beyond any doubt it is the origin of the Christian
theory of purgatory, where the soul undergoes penance for evil done
and from which it can be released by prayer and other ceremonies or
offerings. The fact underlying this superstition is that the soul may
be detained in _kama loka_ by the enormous force of some unsatisfied
desire, and cannot get rid of the astral and kamic clothing until that
desire is satisfied by some one on earth or by the soul itself. But
if the person was pure minded and of high aspirations, the separation
of the principles on that plane is soon completed, permitting the
higher triad to go into _Devachan_. Being the purely astral sphere,
it partakes of the nature of the astral matter which is essentially
earthly and devilish, and in it all the forces work undirected by soul
or conscience. It is the slag-pit, as it were, of the great furnace of
life, where nature provides for the sloughing off of elements which
have no place in _Devachan_, and for that reason it must have many
degrees, every one of which was noted by the ancients. These degrees
are known in Sanscrit as _lokas_ or places in a metaphysical sense.
Human life is very varied as to character and other potentialities, and
for each of these the appropriate place after death is provided, thus
making _kama loka_ an infinitely varied sphere. In life some of the
differences among men are modified and some inhibited by a similarity
of body and heredity, but in _kama loka_ all the hidden desires and
passions are let loose in consequence of the absence of body, and for
that reason the state is vastly more diversified than the life plane.
Not only is it necessary to provide for the natural varieties and
differences, but also for those caused by the manner of death, about
which something shall be said. And all these various divisions are
but the natural result of the life thoughts and last thoughts of the
persons who die on earth. It is beyond the scope of this work to go
into a description of all these degrees, inasmuch as volumes would be
needed to describe them, and then but few would understand.

To deal with _kama loka_ compels us to deal also with the fourth
principle in the classification of man’s constitution, and arouses
a conflict with modern ideas and education on the subject of the
desires and passions. It is generally supposed that the desires and
passions are inherent tendencies in the individual, and they have
an altogether unreal and misty appearance for the ordinary student.
But in this system of philosophy they are not merely inherent in the
individual nor are they due to the body _per se_. While the man is
living in the world the desires and passions—the principle _kama_—have
no separate life apart from the astral and inner man, being, so to
say, diffused throughout his being. But as they coalesce with the
astral body after death and thus form an entity with its own term of
life, though without soul, very important questions arise. During
mortal life the desires and passions are guided by the mind and soul;
after death they work without guidance from the former master; while
we live we are responsible for them and their effects, and when we
have left this life we are still responsible, although they go on
working and making effects on others while they last as the sort of
entity I have described, and without our direct guidance. In this is
seen the continuance of responsibility. They are a portion of the
_skandhas_—well known in eastern philosophy—which are the aggregates
that make up the man. The body includes one set of the _skandhas_, the
astral man another, the _kama_ principle is another set, and still
others pertain to other parts. In _kama_ are the really active and
important ones which control rebirths and lead to all the varieties of
life and circumstance upon each rebirth. They are being made from day
to day under the law that every thought combines instantly with one of
the elemental forces of nature, becoming to that extent an entity which
will endure in accordance with the strength of the thought as it leaves
the brain, and all of these are inseparably connected with the being
who evolved them. There is no way of escaping; all we can do is to have
thoughts of good quality, for the highest of the Masters themselves are
not exempt from this law, but they “people their current in space”
with entities powerful for good alone.

Now in _kama loka_ this mass of desire and thought exists very
definitely until the conclusion of its disintegration, and then the
remainder consists of the essence of these _skandhas_, connected, of
course, with the being that evolved and had them. They can no more be
done away with than we can blot out the universe. Hence they are said
to remain until the being comes out of _devachan_, and then at once by
the law of attraction they are drawn to the being, who from them as
germ or basis builds up a new set of _skandhas_ for the new life. _Kama
loka_ therefore is distinguished from the earth plane by reason of the
existence therein, uncontrolled and unguided, of the mass of passions
and desires; but at the same time earth-life is also a _kama loka_,
since it is largely governed by the principle _kama_, and will be so
until at a far distant time in the course of evolution the races of
men shall have developed the fifth and sixth principles, thus throwing
_kama_ into its own sphere and freeing earth-life from its influence.

The astral man in _kama loka_ is a mere shell devoid of soul and mind,
without conscience and also unable to act unless vivified by forces
outside of itself. It has that which seems like an animal or automatic
consciousness due wholly to the very recent association with the human
Ego. For under the principle laid down in another chapter, every atom
going to make up the man has a memory of its own which is capable
of lasting a length of time in proportion to the force given it. In
the case of a very material and gross or selfish person the force
lasts longer than in any other, and hence in that case the automatic
consciousness will be more definite and bewildering to one who without
knowledge dabbles with necromancy. Its purely astral portion contains
and carries the record of all that ever passed before the person when
living, for one of the qualities of the astral substance is to absorb
all scenes and pictures and the impressions of all thoughts, to keep
them, and to throw them forth by reflection when the conditions permit.
This astral shell, cast off by every man at death, would be a menace to
all men were it not in every case, except one which shall be mentioned,
devoid of all the higher principles which are the directors. But those
guiding constituents being disjoined from the shell, it wavers and
floats about from place to place without any will of its own, but
governed wholly by attractions in the astral and magnetic fields.

It is possible for the real man—called the spirit by some—to
communicate with us immediately after death for a few brief moments,
but, those passed, the soul has no more to do with earth until
reïncarnated. What can and do influence the sensitive and the medium
from out of this sphere are the shells I have described. Soulless and
conscienceless, these in no sense are the spirits of our deceased ones.
They are the clothing thrown off by the inner man, the brutal earthly
portion discarded in the flight to _devachan_, and so have always
been considered by the ancients as devils—our personal devils—because
essentially astral, earthly, and passional. It would be strange indeed
if this shell, after being for so long the vehicle of the real man on
earth, did not retain an automatic memory and consciousness. We see the
decapitated body of the frog or the cock moving and acting for a time
with a seeming intelligence, and why is it not possible for the finer
and more subtle astral form to act and move with a far greater amount
of seeming mental direction?

Existing in the sphere of _kama loka_, as, indeed, also in all parts of
the globe and the solar system, are the elementals or nature forces.
They are innumerable, and their divisions are almost infinite, as they
are, in a sense, the nerves of nature. Each class has its own work just
as has every natural element or thing. As fire burns and as water
runs down and not up under their general law, so the elementals act
under law, but being higher in the scale than gross fire or water their
action seems guided by mind. Some of them have a special relation to
mental operations and to the action of the astral organs, whether these
be joined to a body or not. When a medium forms the channel, and also
from other natural coördination, these elementals make an artificial
connection with the shell of a deceased person, aided by the nervous
fluid of the medium and others near, and then the shell is galvanized
into an artificial life. Through the medium connection is made with
the physical and psychical forces of all present. The old impressions
on the astral body give up their images to the mind of the medium, the
old passions are set on fire. Various messages and reports are then
obtained from it, but not one of them is original, not one is from the
spirit. By their strangeness, and in consequence of the ignorance of
those who dabble in it, this is mistaken for the work of spirit, but
it is all from the living when it is not the mere picking out from the
astral light of the images of what has been in the past. In certain
cases to be noted there is an intelligence at work that is wholly and
intensely bad, to which every medium is subject, and which will explain
why so many of them have succumbed to evil, as they have confessed.

A rough classification of these shells that visit mediums would be as
follows:

(1) Those of the recently deceased whose place of burial is not far
away. This class will be quite coherent in accordance with the life and
thought of the former owner. An unmaterial, good, and spiritualized
person leaves a shell that will soon disintegrate. A gross, mean,
selfish, material person’s shell will be heavy, consistent, and long
lived: and so on with all varieties.

(2) Those of persons who had died far away from the place where the
medium is. Lapse of time permits such to escape from the vicinity of
their old bodies, and at the same time brings on a greater degree of
disintegration which corresponds on the astral plane to putrefaction on
the physical. These are vague, shadowy, incoherent; respond but briefly
to the psychic stimulus, and are whirled off by any magnetic current.
They are galvanized for a moment by the astral currents of the medium
and of those persons present who were related to the deceased.

(3) Purely shadowy remains which can hardly be given a place. There
is no English to describe them, though they are facts in this sphere.
They might be said to be the mere mould or impress left in the astral
substance by the once coherent shell long since disintegrated. They
are therefore so near being fictitious as to almost deserve the
designation. As such shadowy photographs they are enlarged, decorated,
and given an imaginary life by the thoughts, desires, hopes, and
imaginings of medium and sitters at the _séance_.

(4) Definite, coherent entities, human souls bereft of the spiritual
tie, now tending down to the worst state of all, _avitchi_, where
annihilation of the personality is the end. They are known as black
magicians. Having centred the consciousness in the principle of _kama_,
preserved intellect, divorced themselves from spirit, they are the
only damned beings we know. In life they had human bodies and reached
their awful state by persistent lives of evil for its own sake; some
of such already doomed to become what I have described, are among us
on earth to-day. These are not ordinary shells, for they have centred
all their force in _kama_, thrown out every spark of good thought or
aspiration, and have a complete mastery of the astral sphere. I put
them in the classification of shells because they are such in the
sense that they are doomed to disintegration consciously as the others
are to the same end mechanically only. They may and do last for many
centuries, gratifying their lusts through any sensitive they can lay
hold of where bad thought gives them an opening. They preside at nearly
all _séances_, assuming high names and taking the direction so as to
keep the control and continue the delusion of the medium, thus enabling
themselves to have a convenient channel for their own evil purposes.
Indeed, with the shells of suicides, of those poor wretches who die at
the hand of the law, of drunkards and gluttons, these black magicians
living in the astral world hold the field of physical mediumship and
are liable to invade the sphere of any medium no matter how good.
The door once open, it is open to all. This class of shell has lost
higher _manas_, but in the struggle not only after death but as well
in life the lower portion of _manas_ which should have been raised up
to godlike excellence was torn away from its lord and now gives this
entity intelligence which is devoid of spirit but has power to suffer
as it will when its final day shall come.

In the state of _Kama Loka_ suicides and those who are suddenly shot
out of life by accident or murder, legal or illegal, pass a term
almost equal to the length life would have been but for the sudden
termination. These are not really dead. To bring on a normal death, a
factor not recognized by medical science must be present. That is, the
principles of the being as described in other chapters have their own
term of cohesion, at the natural end of which they separate from each
other under their own laws. This involves the great subject of the
cohesive forces of the human subject, requiring a book in itself. I
must be content therefore with the assertion that this law of cohesion
obtains among the human principles. Before that natural end the
principles are unable to separate. Obviously the normal destruction
of the cohesive force cannot be brought about by mechanical processes
except in respect to the physical body. Hence a suicide, or person
killed by accident or murdered by man or by order of human law, has
not come to the natural termination of the cohesion among the other
constituents, and is hurled into the _kama loka_ state only partly
dead. There the remaining principles have to wait until the actual
natural life term is reached, whether it be one month or sixty years.

But the degrees of _kama loka_ provide for the many varieties of the
last-mentioned shells. Some pass the period in great suffering, others
in a dreamy sort of sleep, each according to the moral responsibility.
But executed criminals are in general thrown out of life full of hate
and revenge, smarting under a penalty they do not admit the justice of.
They are ever rehearsing in _kama loka_ their crime, their trial, their
execution, and their revenge. And whenever they can gain touch with a
sensitive living person, medium or not, they attempt to inject thoughts
of murder and other crime into the brain of such unfortunate. And that
they succeed in such attempts the deeper students of Theosophy full
well know.

We have now approached _devachan_. After a certain time in _kama loka_
the being falls into a state of unconsciousness which precedes the
change into the next state. It is like the birth into life, preluded
by a term of darkness and heavy sleep. It then wakes to the joys of
_devachan_.




CHAPTER XIII.


Having shown that just beyond the threshold of human life there is a
place of separation wherein the better part of man is divided from
his lower and brute elements, we come to consider what is the state
after death of the real being, the immortal who travels from life to
life. Struggling out of the body the entire man goes into _kama loka_,
to purgatory, where he again struggles and loosens himself from the
lower _skandhas_; this period of birth over, the higher principles,
_Atma-Buddhi-Manas_, begin to think in a manner different from that
which the body and brain permitted in life. This is the state of
_Devachan_, a Sanscrit word meaning literally “the place of the gods,”
where the soul enjoys felicity; but as the gods have no such bodies
as ours, the Self in _devachan_ is devoid of a mortal body. In the
ancient books it is said that this state lasts “for years of infinite
number”, or “for a period proportionate to the merit of the being”;
and when the mental forces peculiar to the state are exhausted, “the
being is drawn down again to be reborn in the world of mortals”.
_Devachan_ is therefore an interlude between births in the world. The
law of karma which forces us all to enter the world, being ceaseless in
its operation and also universal in scope, acts also on the being in
_devachan_, for only by the force or operation of Karma are we taken
out of _devachan_. It is something like the pressure of atmosphere
which, being continuous and uniform, will push out or crush that
which is subjected to it unless there be a compensating quantity of
atmosphere to counteract the pressure. In the present case the karma of
the being is the atmosphere always pressing the being on or out from
state to state; the counteracting quantity of atmosphere is the force
of the being’s own life-thoughts and aspirations which prevent his
coming out of _devachan_ until that force is exhausted, but which being
spent has no more power to hold back the decree of our self-made mortal
destiny.

The necessity for this state after death is one of the necessities of
evolution growing out of the nature of mind and soul. The very nature
of _manas_ requires a devachanic state as soon as the body is lost, and
it is simply the effect of loosening the bonds placed upon the mind by
its physical and astral encasement. In life we can but to a fractional
extent act out the thoughts we have each moment; and still less can we
exhaust the psychic energies engendered by each day’s aspirations and
dreams. The energy thus engendered is not lost or annihilated, but is
stored in _Manas_, but the body, brain, and astral body permit no full
development of the force. Hence, held latent until death, it bursts
then from the weakened bonds and plunges _Manas_, the thinker, into
the expansion, use, and development of the thought-force set up in
life. The impossibility of escaping this necessary state lies in man’s
ignorance of his own powers and faculties. From this ignorance delusion
arises, and _Manas_ not being wholly free is carried by its own force
into the thinking of _devachan_. But while ignorance is the cause for
going into this state the whole process is remedial, restful, and
beneficial. For if the average man returned at once to another body in
the same civilization he had just quitted, his soul would be completely
tired out and deprived of the needed opportunity for the development of
the higher part of his nature.

Now the Ego being minus mortal body and _kama_, clothes itself in
_devachan_ with a vesture which cannot be called body but may be styled
means or vehicle, and in that it functions in the devachanic state
entirely on the plane of mind and soul. Everything is as real then to
the being as this world seems to be to us. It simply now has gotten the
opportunity to make its own world for itself unhampered by the clogs of
physical life. Its state may be compared to that of the poet or artist
who, rapt in ecstacy of composition or arrangement of color, cares not
for and knows not of either time or objects of the world.

We are making causes every moment, and but two fields exist for the
manifestation in effect of those causes. These are, the objective as
this world is called, and the subjective which is both here and after
we have left this life. The objective field relates to earth life and
the grosser part of man, to his bodily acts and his brain thoughts, as
also sometimes to his astral body. The subjective has to do with his
higher and spiritual parts. In the objective field the psychic impulses
cannot work out, nor can the high leanings and aspirations of his soul;
hence these must be the basis, cause, substratum, and support for the
state of _devachan_. What then is the time, measured by mortal years,
that one will stay in _devachan_?

This question while dealing with what earth-men call time does not,
of course, touch the real meaning of time itself, that is, of what
may be in fact for this solar system the ultimate order, precedence,
succession, and length of moments. It is a question which may be
answered in respect to our time, but not certainly in respect to the
time on the planet Mercury, for instance, where time is not the same
as ours, nor, indeed, in respect to time as conceived by the soul. As
to the latter any man can see that after many years have slipped away
he has no direct perception of the time just passed, but is able only
to pick out some of the incidents which marked its passage, and as to
some poignant or happy instants or hours he seems to feel them as but
of yesterday. And thus it is for the being in _devachan_. No time is
there. The soul has all the benefit of what goes on within itself
in that state, but it indulges in no speculations as to the lapse of
moments; all is made up of events, while all the time the solar orb
is marking off the years for us on the earth plane. This cannot be
regarded as an impossibility if we will remember how, as is well known
in life, events, pictures, thoughts, argument, introspective feeling
will all sweep over us in perfect detail in an instant, or, as is known
of those who have been drowning, the events of a whole life time pass
in a flash before the eye of the mind. But the Ego remains as said in
_devachan_ for a time exactly proportioned to the psychic impulses
generated during life. Now this being a matter which deals with the
mathematics of the soul, no one but a Master can tell what the time
would be for the average man of this century in every land. Hence we
have to depend on the Masters of wisdom for that average, as it must be
based upon a calculation. They have said, as is well put by Mr. A. P.
Sinnett in his _Esoteric Buddhism_, that the period is fifteen hundred
years in general. From a reading of his book, which was made up from
letters from the Masters, it is to be inferred he desires it to be
understood that the devachanic period is in each and every case fifteen
centuries; but to do away with that misapprehension his informants
wrote at a later date that that is the average period and not a fixed
one. Such must be the truth, for as we see that men differ in respect
to the periods of time they remain in any state of mind in life due to
the varying intensities of their thoughts, so it must be in _devachan_
where thought has a greater force though always due to the being who
had the thoughts.

What the Master did say on this is as follows: “The ‘dream of
_devachan_’ lasts until karma is satisfied in that direction. In
_devachan_ there is a gradual exhaustion of force. The stay in
_devachan_ is proportionate to the unexhausted psychic impulses
originated in earth life. Those whose actions were preponderatingly
material will be sooner brought back into rebirth by the force of
_Tanha_.” _Tanha_ is the thirst for life. He therefore who has not
in life originated many psychic impulses will have but little basis
or force in his essential nature to keep his higher principles in
_devachan_. About all he will have are those originated in childhood
before he began to fix his thoughts on materialistic thinking. The
thirst for life expressed by the word _Tanha_ is the pulling or
magnetic force lodged in the _skandhas_ inherent in all beings. In
such a case as this the average rule does not apply, since the whole
effect either way is due to a balancing of forces and is the outcome
of action and reaction. And this sort of materialistic thinker may
emerge out of _devachan_ into another body here in a month, allowing
for the unexpended psychic forces originated in early life. But as
every one of such persons varies as to class, intensity and quantity
of thought and psychic impulse, each may vary in respect to the time
of stay in _devachan_. Desperately materialistic thinkers will remain
in the devachanic condition stupefied or asleep, as it were, as they
have no forces in them appropriate to that state save in a very vague
fashion, and for them it can be very truly said that there is no state
after death so far as mind is concerned; they are torpid for a while,
and then they live again on earth. This general average of the stay in
_devachan_ gives us the length of a very important human cycle, the
Cycle of Reïncarnation. For under that law national development will be
found to repeat itself, and the times that are past will be found to
come again.

The last series of powerful and deeply imprinted thoughts are those
which give color and trend to the whole life in _devachan_. The last
moment will color each subsequent moment. On those the soul and mind
fix themselves and weave of them a whole set of events and experiences,
expanding them to their highest limit, carrying out all that was not
possible in life. Thus expanding and weaving these thoughts the entity
has its youth and growth and growing old, that is, the uprush of the
force, its expansion, and its dying down to final exhaustion. If the
person has led a colorless life the _devachan_ will be colorless; if a
rich life, then it will be rich in variety and effect. Existence there
is not a dream save in a conventional sense, for it is a stage of the
life of man, and when we are there this present life is a dream. It is
not in any sense monotonous. We are too prone to measure all possible
states of life and places for experience by our present earthly one and
to imagine it to be reality. But the life of the soul is endless and
not to be stopped for one instant. Leaving our physical body is but a
transition to another place or plane for living in. But as the ethereal
garments of _devachan_ are more lasting than those we wear here, the
spiritual, moral, and psychic causes use more time in expanding and
exhausting in that state than they do on earth. If the molecules that
form the physical body were not subject to the general chemical laws
that govern physical earth, then we should live as long in these bodies
as we do in the devachanic state. But such a life of endless strain and
suffering would be enough to blast the soul compelled to undergo it.
Pleasure would then be pain, and surfeit would end but in an immortal
insanity. Nature, always kind, leads us soon again into heaven for a
rest, for the flowering of the best and highest in our natures.

_Devachan_ is then neither meaningless nor useless. “In it we are
rested; that part of us which could not bloom under the chilling
skies of earth-life bursts forth into flower and goes back with us
to earth-life stronger and more a part of our nature than before.
Why should we repine that Nature kindly aids us in the interminable
struggle, why keep the mind revolving about the present petty
personality and its good and evil fortunes?”[2]

  [2] Letter from Mahatma K. H. See _Path_, p. 192, Vol. 5.

But it is sometimes asked, what of those we have left behind: do we see
them there? We do not see them there in fact, but we make to ourselves
their images as full, complete, and objective as in life, and devoid of
all that we then thought was a blemish. We live with them and see them
grow great and good instead of mean or bad. The mother who has left a
drunken son behind finds him before her in _devachan_ a sober, good
man, and likewise through all possible cases, parent, child, husband,
and wife have their loved ones there perfect and full of knowledge.
This is for the benefit of the soul. You may call it a delusion if
you will, but the illusion is necessary to happiness just as it often
is in life. And as it is the mind that makes the illusion, it is no
cheat. Certainly the idea of a heaven built over the verge of hell
where you must know, if any brains or memory are left to you under the
modern orthodox scheme, that your erring friends and relatives are
suffering eternal torture, will bear no comparison with the doctrine
of _devachan_. But entities in _devachan_ are not wholly devoid of
power to help those left on earth. Love, the master of life, if real,
pure, and deep, will sometimes cause the happy Ego in _devachan_ to
affect those left on earth for their good, not only in the moral field
but also in that of material circumstance. This is possible under a
law of the occult universe which cannot be explained now with profit,
but the fact may be stated. It has been given out before this by H. P.
Blavatsky, without, however, much attention being drawn to it.

The last question to consider is whether we here can reach those in
_devachan_ or do they come here. We cannot reach them nor affect them
unless we are Adepts. The claim of mediums to hold communion with the
spirits of the dead is baseless, and still less valid is the claim of
ability to help those who have gone to _devachan_. The Mahatma, a being
who has developed all his powers and is free from illusion, can go
into the devachanic state and then communicate with the Egos there.
Such is one of their functions, and that is the only school of the
Apostles after death. They deal with certain entities in _devachan_
for the purpose of getting them out of the state so as to return to
earth for the benefit of the race. The Egos they thus deal with are
those whose nature is great and deep but who are not wise enough to be
able to overcome the natural illusions of _devachan_. Sometimes also
the hypersensitive and pure medium goes into this state and then holds
communication with the Egos there, but it is rare, and certainly will
not take place with the general run of mediums who trade for money. But
the soul never descends here to the medium. And the gulf between the
consciousness of _devachan_ and that of earth is so deep and wide that
it is but seldom the medium can remember upon returning to recollection
here what or whom it met or saw or heard in _devachan_. This gulf is
similar to that which separates _devachan_ from rebirth; it is one in
which all memory of what preceded it is blotted out.

The whole period allotted by the soul’s forces being ended in
_devachan_, the magnetic threads which bind it to earth begin to assert
their power. The Self wakes from the dream, it is borne swiftly off to
a new body, and then, just before birth, it sees for a moment all the
causes that led it to _devachan_ and back to the life it is about to
begin, and knowing it to be all just, to be the result of its own past
life, it repines not but takes up the cross again—and another soul has
come back to earth.




CHAPTER XIV.


The doctrine of Cycles is one of the most important in the whole
theosophical system, though the least known and of all the one most
infrequently referred to. Western investigators have for some centuries
suspected that events move in cycles, and a few of the writers in the
field of European literature have dealt with the subject, but all in
a very incomplete fashion. This incompleteness and want of accurate
knowledge have been due to the lack of belief in spiritual things and
the desire to square everything with materialistic science. Nor do
I pretend to give the cyclic law in full, for it is one that is not
given out in detail by the Masters of Wisdom. But enough has been
divulged, and enough was for a long time known to the Ancients to add
considerably to our knowledge.

A cycle is a ring or turning, as the derivation of the word indicates.
The corresponding words in the Sanscrit are _Yuga_, _Kalpa_,
_Manvantara_, but of these _yuga_ comes nearest to cycle, as it is
lesser in duration than the others. The beginning of a cycle must be
a moment, that added to other moments makes a day, and those added
together constitute months, years, decades, and centuries. Beyond
this the West hardly goes. It recognizes the moon cycle and the great
sidereal one, but looks at both and upon the others merely as periods
of time. If we are to consider them as but lengths of time there is
no profit except to the dry student or to the astronomer. And in
this way to-day they are regarded by European and American thinkers,
who say cycles exist but have no very great bearing on human life
and certainly no bearing on the actual recurrence of events or the
reäppearance on the stage of life of persons who once lived in the
world. The theosophical theory is distinctly otherwise, as it must be
if it carries out the doctrine of reïncarnation to which in preceding
pages a good deal of attention has been given. Not only are the cycles
named actual physical facts in respect to time, but they and other
periods have a very great effect on human life and the evolution of
the globe with all the forms of life thereon. Starting with the moment
and proceeding through a day, this theory erects the cycle into a
comprehensive ring, which includes all in its limits. The moment being
the basis, the question to be settled in respect to the great cycles
is, When did the first moment come? This cannot be answered, but it
can be said that the truth is held by the ancient theosophists to be
that at the first moments of the solidification of this globe the mass
of matter involved attained a certain and definite rate of vibration
which will hold through all variations in any part of it until its hour
for dissolution comes. These rates of vibration are what determine the
different cycles, and, contrary to the ideas of western science, the
doctrine is that the solar system and the globe we are now on will
come to an end when the force behind the whole mass of seen and unseen
matter has reached its limit of duration under cyclic law. Here our
doctrine is again different from both the religious and scientific one.
We do not admit that the ending of the force is the withdrawal by a God
of his protection, nor the sudden propulsion by him of another force
against the globe, but that the force at work and determining the great
cycle is that of man himself considered as a spiritual being; when he
is done using the globe he leaves it, and then with him goes out the
force holding all together; the consequence is dissolution by fire or
water or what not, these phenomena being simply effects and not causes.
The ordinary scientific speculations on this head are that the earth
may fall into the sun, or that a comet of density may destroy the
globe, or that we may collide with a greater planet known or unknown.
These dreams are idle for the present.

Reïncarnation being the great law of life and progress, it is
interwoven with that of the cycles and karma. These three work
together, and in practice it is almost impossible to disentangle
reïncarnation from cyclic law. Individuals and nations in definite
streams return in regularly recurring periods to the earth, and thus
bring back to the globe the arts, the civilization, the very persons
who once were on it at work. And as the units in nation and race are
connected together by invisible strong threads, large bodies of such
units moving slowly but surely all together reunite at different times
and emerge again and again together into new race and new civilization
as the cycles roll their appointed rounds. Therefore the souls who
made the most ancient civilizations will come back and bring the old
civilization with them in idea and essence, which being added to what
others have done for the development of the human race in its character
and knowledge will produce a new and higher state of civilization. This
newer and better development will not be due to books, to records, to
arts or mechanics, because all those are periodically destroyed so far
as physical evidence goes, but the soul ever retaining in _Manas_ the
knowledge it once gained and always pushing to completer development
the higher principles and powers, the essence of progress remains and
will as surely come out as the sun shines. And along this road are the
points when the small and large cycles of Avatars bring out for man’s
benefit the great characters who mould the race from time to time.

The Cycle of Avatars includes several smaller ones. The greater are
those marked by the appearance of Rama and Krishna among the Hindus,
of Menes among the Egyptians, of Zoroaster among the Persians, and
of Buddha to the Hindus and other nations of the East. Buddha is
the last of the great Avatars and is in a larger cycle than is Jesus
of the Jews, for the teachings of the latter are the same as those
of Buddha and tinctured with what Buddha had taught to those who
instructed Jesus. Another great Avatar is yet to come, corresponding
to Buddha and Krishna combined. Krishna and Rama were of the
military, civil, religious, and occult order; Buddha of the ethical,
religious, and mystical, in which he was followed by Jesus; Mohammed
was a minor intermediate one for a certain part of the race, and
was civil, military, and religious. In these cycles we can include
mixed characters who have had great influence on nations, such as
King Arthur, Pharaoh, Moses, Charlemagne reïncarnated as Napoleon
Buonaparte, Clovis of France reborn as Emperor Frederic III of Germany,
and Washington the first President of the United States of America
where the root for the new race is being formed.

At the intersection of the great cycles dynamic effects follow and
alter the surface of the planet by reason of the shifting of the poles
of the globe or other convulsion. This is not a theory generally
acceptable, but we hold it to be true. Man is a great dynamo, making,
storing, and throwing out energy, and when masses of men composing a
race thus make and distribute energy, there is a resulting dynamic
effect on the material of the globe which will be powerful enough
to be distinct and cataclysmic. That there have been vast and awful
disturbances in the strata of the world is admitted on every hand
and now needs no proof; these have been due to earthquakes and ice
formation so far as concerns geology; but in respect to animal forms
the cyclic law is that certain animal forms now extinct and also
certain human ones not known but sometimes suspected will return again
in their own cycle; and certain human languages now known as dead will
be in use once more at their appointed cyclic hour.

“The Metonic cycle is that of the Moon. It is a period of about
nineteen years, which being completed the new and the full moons return
on the same days of the month.”

“The cycle of the Sun is a period of twenty eight years, which having
elapsed the Dominical or Sunday letters return to their former place
and proceed in the former order according to the Julian calendar.”

The great Sidereal year is the period taken by the equinoctial points
to make in their precession a complete revolution of the heavens. It
is composed of 25,868 solar years almost. It is said that the last
sidereal year ended about 9,868 years ago, at which time there must
have been on this earth a violent convulsion or series of such, as well
as distributions of nations. The completion of this grand period brings
the earth into newer spaces of the cosmos, not in respect to its own
orbit, but by reason of the actual progress of the sun in an orbit of
its own that cannot be measured by any observer of the present day, but
which is guessed at by some and located in one of the constellations.

Affecting man especially are the spiritual, psychic, and moral cycles,
and out of these grow the national, racial, and individual cycles. Race
and national cycles are both historical. The individual cycles are
of reïncarnation, of sensation, and of impression. The length of the
individual reïncarnation cycle for the general mass of men is fifteen
hundred years, and this in its turn gives us a large historical cycle
related closely to the progress of civilization. For as the masses of
persons return from _devachan_, it must follow that the Roman, the
Greek, the old Aryan, and other Ages will be seen again and can to
a very great extent be plainly traced. But man is also affected by
astronomical cycles because he is an integral part of the whole, and
these cycles mark the periods when mankind as a whole will undergo a
change. In the sacred books of all nations these are often mentioned,
and are in the Bible of the Christians, as, for instance, in the story
of Jonah in the belly of the whale. This is an absurdity when read
as history, but not so as an astronomical cycle. “Jonah” is in the
constellations, and when that astronomical point which represents man
reaches a point in the Zodiac which is directly opposite the belly of
Cetus or the whale on the other side of the circle, by what is known
as the process of opposition, then Jonah is said to be in the centre
of the fish and is “thrown out” at the expiration of the period when
that man-point has passed so far along in the Zodiac as to be out
of opposition to the whale. Similarly as the same point moves thus
through the Zodiac it is brought by opposition into the different
constellations that are exactly opposite from century to century while
it moves along. During these progresses changes take place among men
and on earth exactly signified by the constellations when those are
read according to the right rules of symbology. It is not claimed
that the conjunction causes the effect, but that ages ago the Masters
of Wisdom worked out all the problems in respect to man and found in
the heavens the means for knowing the exact dates when events are
sure to recur, and then by imprinting in the minds of older nations
the symbology of the Zodiac were able to preserve the record and the
prophecy. Thus in the same way that a watchmaker can tell the hour by
the arrival of the hands or the works of the watch at certain fixed
points, the Sages can tell the hour for events by the Zodiacal clock.
This is not of course believed to-day, but it will be well understood
in future centuries, and as the nations of the earth have all similar
symbols in general for the Zodiac, and as also the records of races
long dead have the same, it is not likely that the vandal-spirit of
the western nineteenth century will be able to efface this valuable
heritage of our evolution. In Egypt the Denderah Zodiac tells the same
tale as that one left to us by the old civilization of the American
continent, and all of these are from the same source; they are the
work of the Sages who come at the beginning of the great human cycle
and give to man when he begins his toilsome ascent up the road of
development those great symbols and ideas of an astronomical character
which will last through all the cycles.

In regard to great cataclysms occurring at the beginning and ending
of the great cycles, the main laws governing the effects are those of
Karma and Reëmbodiment, or Reïncarnation, proceeding under cyclic rule.
Not only is man ruled by these laws, but every atom of matter as well,
and the mass of matter is constantly undergoing a change at the same
time with man. It must therefore exhibit alterations corresponding to
those through which the thinker is going. On the physical plane effects
are brought out through the electrical and other fluids acting with
the gases on the solids of the globe. At the change of a great cycle
they reach what may be termed the exploding point and cause violent
convulsions of the following classes: (_a_) Earthquakes, (_b_) Floods,
(_c_) Fire, (_d_) Ice.

Earthquakes may be brought on according to this philosophy by two
general causes; _first_, subsidence or elevation under the earth-crust
due to heat and steam, _second_, electrical and magnetic changes which
affect water and earth at the same time. These last have the power
to instantaneously make the earth fluidic without melting it, thus
causing immense and violent displacements in large or small waves. And
this effect is sometimes seen now in earthquake districts when similar
electrical causes are at work in a smaller measure.

Floods of general extent are caused by displacement of water from the
subsidence or elevation of land, and by those combined with electrical
change which induces a copious discharge of moisture. The latter is
not a mere emptying of a cloud, but a sudden turning of vast bodies of
fluids and solids into water.

Universal fires come on from electrical and magnetic changes in the
atmosphere by which the moisture is withdrawn from the air and the
latter turned into a fiery mass; and, secondly, by the sudden expansion
of the solar magnetic centre into seven such centres, thus burning the
globe.

Ice cataclysms come on not only from the sudden alteration of the poles
but also from lowered temperature due to the alteration of the warm
fluid currents in the sea and the hot magnetic currents in the earth,
the first being known to science, the latter not. The lower stratum of
moisture is suddenly frozen, and vast tracts of land covered in a night
with many feet of ice. This can easily happen to the British Isles if
the warm currents of the ocean are diverted from its shores.

Both Egyptians and Greeks had their cycles, but in our opinion derived
them from the Indian Sages. The Chinese always were a nation of
astronomers, and have recorded observations reaching far back of the
Christian era, but as they belong to an old race which is doomed to
extinction—strange as the assertion may appear—their conclusions will
not be correct for the Aryan races. On the coming of the Christian era
a heavy pall of darkness fell on the minds of men in the West, and
India was for many centuries isolated so as to preserve these great
ideas during the mental night of Europe. This isolation was brought
about deliberately as a necessary precaution taken by that great
Lodge to which I adverted in Chapter I, because its Adepts, knowing
the cyclic laws perfectly, wished to preserve philosophy for future
generations. As it would be mere pedantry and speculation to discuss
the unknown Saros and Naros and other cycles of the Egyptians, I will
give the Brahmanical ones, since they tally almost exactly with the
correct periods.

A period or exhibition of universal manifestation is called a
Brahmanda, that is a complete life of Brahma, and Brahma’s life is
made of his days and years, which, being cosmical are each of immense
duration. His day is as man’s 24 odd hours long, his year 360 odd days,
the number of his years is 100.

Taking now this globe—since we are concerned with no other—its
government and evolution proceed under _Manu_ or _man_, and from
this is the term _Manvantara_ or “between two _Manus_.” The course
of evolution is divided into four _Yugas_ for every race in its own
time and way. These _Yugas_ do not affect all mankind at one and the
same time, as some races are in one of the _Yugas_ while others are
in a different cycle. The Red Indian, for instance, is in the end of
his stone age, while the Aryans are in quite a different state. These
four _Yugas_ are: _Krita_, or _Satya_, the golden; _Treta_; _Dvapara_;
and _Kali_ or the black. The present age for the West and India is
_Kali Yuga_, especially in respect to moral and spiritual development.
The first of these is slow in comparison with the rest, and the
present—_Kali_—is very rapid, its motion being accelerated precisely
like certain astronomical periods known to-day in regard to the Moon,
but not fully worked out.


                                TABLE.
  —————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
                                                          MORTAL YEARS.
  —————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
  360 (odd) mortal days make                                          1
  _Krita Yuga_   has                                          1,728,000
  _Treta Yuga_    “                                           1,296,000
  _Dvapara Yuga_  “                                             864,000
  _Kali Yuga_     “                                             432,000
  _Maha Yuga_, or the four preceding, has                     4,320,000
  71 _Maha Yugas_ form the reign of one _Manu_, or          306,720,000
  14 _Manus_ are                                          4,294,080,000
  Add the dawns or twilights between each _Manu_             25,920,000
  These reigns and dawns make 1000 _Maha Yugas_,
      a _Kalpa_, or Day of _Brahma_                       4,320,000,000
  _Brahma’s_ Night equals his Day and Day and
      Night together make                                 8,640,000,000
  360 of these Days make _Brahma’s_ Year              3,110,400,000,000
  100 of these Years make _Brahma’s_ Life           311,040,000,000,000


The first 5000 years of _Kali Yuga_ will end between the years 1897 and
1898. This _Yuga_ began about 3102 years before the Christian era, at
the time of Krishna’s death. As 1897-98 are not far off, the scientific
men of to-day will have an opportunity of seeing whether the close
of the five thousand year cycle will be preceded or followed by any
convulsions or great changes political, scientific, or physical, or all
of these combined. Cyclic changes are now proceeding as year after year
the souls from prior civilizations are being incarnated in this period
when liberty of thought and action are not so restricted in the West as
they have been in the past by dogmatic religious prejudice and bigotry.
And at the present time we are in a cycle of transition, when, as a
transition period should indicate, everything in philosophy, religion,
and society is changing. In a transition period the full and complete
figures and rules respecting cycles are not given out to a generation
which elevates money above all thoughts and scoffs at the spiritual
view of man and nature.




CHAPTER XV.


Between Science and Theosophy there is a wide gulf, for the present
unbridged, on the question of the origin of man and the differentiation
of species. The teachers of religion in the West offer on this
subject a theory, dogmatically buttressed by an assumed revelation,
as impossible as the one put forward by scientific men. And yet the
religious expounders are nearer than science to the truth. Under the
religious superstition about Adam and Eve is hidden the truth, and in
the tales of Cain, Seth, and Noah is vaguely shadowed the real story of
the other races of men, Adam being but the representative of one single
race. The people who received Cain and gave him a wife were some of
those human races which had appeared simultaneously with the one headed
by Adam.

The ultimate origin or beginning of man is not to be discovered,
although we may know when and from where the men of this globe came.
Man never was not. If not on this globe, then on some others, he ever
was, and will ever be in existence somewhere in the Cosmos. Ever
perfecting and reaching up to the image of the Heavenly Man, he is
always becoming. But as the human mind cannot go back to any beginning,
we shall start with this globe. Upon this earth and upon the whole
chain of globes of which it is a part seven races of men appeared
simultaneously, coming over to it from other globes of an older chain.
And in respect to this earth—the fourth of this chain—these seven
races came simultaneously from another globe of this chain. This
appearance of seven races together happens in the first and in part of
the second round of the globes. In the second round the seven masses
of beings are amalgamated, and their destiny after that is to slowly
differentiate during the succeeding rounds until at the seventh round
the seven first great races will be once more distinct, as perfect
types of the human race as this period of evolution will allow. At the
present time the seven races are mixed together, and representatives of
all are in the many so-called races of men as classified by our present
science. The object of this amalgamation and subsequent differentiation
is to give to every race the benefit of the progress and power of the
whole derived from prior progress in other planets and systems. For
Nature never does her work in a hasty or undue fashion, but, by the
sure method of mixture, precipitation, and separation, brings about the
greatest perfection. And this method was one known to the Alchemists,
though not fully understood in all its bearings even by them.

Hence man did not spring from a single pair. Neither did he come
from any tribe or family of monkey. It is hopeless to look to either
religion or science for a solution of the question, for science
is confused on her own admission, and religion is tangled with a
revelation that in its books controverts the theory put forward by
the priest. Adam is called the first man, but the record in which the
story is found shows that other races of men must have existed on the
earth before Cain could have founded a city. The Bible, then, does not
support the single pair theory. If we take up one of the hypotheses of
Science and admit for the moment that man and monkey differentiated
from one ancestor, we have then to decide where the first ancestor
came from. The first postulate of the Lodge on this subject is that
seven races of men appeared simultaneously on the earth, and the first
negative assumption is that man did not spring from a single pair or
from the animal kingdom.

The varieties of character and capacity which subsequently appear in
man’s history are the forthcoming of the variations which were induced
in the Egos in other and long anterior periods of evolution upon other
chains of globes. These variations were so deeply impacted as to be
equivalent to inherent characteristics. For the races of this globe the
prior period of evolution was passed on the chain of globes of which
our moon is the visible representative.

The burning question of the anthropoid apes as related to man is
settled by the Masters of Wisdom, who say that instead of those being
our progenitors they were produced by man himself. In one of the early
periods of the globe the men of that time begot from large females
of the animal kingdom the anthropoids, and in anthropoid bodies were
caught a certain number of Egos destined one day to be men. The
remainder of the descendants of the true anthropoid are the descendants
of those illegitimate children of men, and will die away gradually,
their Egos entering human bodies. Those half-ape and half-man bodies
could not be ensouled by strictly animal Egos, and for that reason they
are known to the Secret Doctrine as the “Delayed Race”, the only one
not included in the fiat of Nature that no more Egos from the lower
kingdoms will come into the human kingdom until the next _Manvantara_.
But to all kingdoms below man except the anthropoids, the door is now
closed for entry into the human stage, and the Egos in the subordinate
forms must all wait their turn in the succeeding great Cycle. And as
the delayed Egos of the Anthropoid family will emerge into the man
stage later on, they will thus be rewarded for the long wait in that
degraded race. All the other monkeys are products in the ordinary
manner of the evolutionary processes.

On this subject I cannot do better than quote the words of one of those
Masters of Wisdom, giving the esoteric anthropology from the secret
volumes, thus:

 The anatomical resemblance between Man and the higher Ape, so
 frequently cited by the Darwinists as pointing to some former ancestor
 common to both, presents an interesting problem the proper solution of
 which is to be sought for in the esoteric explanation of the genesis
 of the pithecoid stocks. We have given it so far as was useful by
 stating that the bestiality of the primeval mindless races resulted
 in the production of huge man-like monsters—the offspring of human
 and animal parents. As time rolled on and the still semi-astral forms
 consolidated into the physical, the descendants of these creatures
 were modified by external conditions until the breed, dwindling in
 size, culminated in the lower Apes of the Miocene period. With these
 the later Atlanteans renewed the sin of the “Mindless”—this time with
 full responsibility. The resultants of their crime were the species
 now known as the Anthropoid.... Let us remember the esoteric teaching
 which tells us of Man having had in the Third Round a gigantic
 Ape-like form on the astral plane. And similarly at the close of the
 Third Race in this Round. Thus it accounts for the human features
 of the Apes, especially of the later Anthropoids,—apart from the
 fact that these latter preserved by heredity a resemblance to their
 Atlanto-Lemurian sires.

The same teachers furthermore assert that the mammalian types were
produced in the fourth round, subsequent to the appearance of the
human types. For this reason there was no barrier against fertility,
because the root-types of those mammals were not far enough removed
to raise the natural barrier. The unnatural union in the third race,
when man had not yet had the light of _Manas_ given to him, was not a
crime against Nature, since, no mind being present save in the merest
germ, no responsibility could attach. But in the fourth round, the
light of _Manas_ being present, the renewal of the act by the new
race was a crime, because it was done with a full knowledge of the
consequences and against the warning of conscience. The karmic effect
of this, including as it does all races, has yet to be fully felt and
understood—at a much later day than now.

As man came to this globe from another planet, though of course then a
being of very great power before being completely enmeshed in matter,
so the lower kingdoms came likewise in germ and type from other
planets, and carry on their evolution step by step upward by the aid
of man, who is, in all periods of manifestation, at the front of the
wave of life. The Egos in these lower kingdoms could not finish their
evolution in the preceding globe-chain before its dissolution, and
coming to this they go forward age after age, gradually approaching
nearer the man stage. One day they too will become men and act as the
advance guard and guide for other lower kingdoms of this or other
globes. And in the coming from the former planet there are always
brought with the first and highest class of beings some forms of animal
life, some fruits and other products, as models or types for use here.
It will not be profitable to go into this here with particularity,
for being too far ahead of the time it would evoke only ridicule from
some and stupidity from others. But the general forms of the various
kingdoms being so brought over, we have next to consider how the
differentiation of animal and other lower species began and was carried
on.

This is the point where intelligent aid and interference from a mind
or mass of minds is absolutely necessary. Such aid and interference
was and is the fact, for Nature unaided cannot do the work right. But
I do not mean that God or angel interferes and aids. It is Man who
does this. Not the man of the day, weak and ignorant as he is, but
great souls, high and holy men of immense power, knowledge, and wisdom.
Just such as every man would now know he could become, if it were not
that religion on one hand and science on the other have painted such
a picture of our weakness, inherent evil and purely material origin
that nearly all men think they are puppets of God or cruel fate without
hope, or remain with a degrading and selfish aim in view both here and
after. Various names have been given to these beings now removed from
our plane. They are the _Dhyanis_, the Creators, the Guides, the Great
Spirits, and so on by many titles. In theosophical literature they are
called the _Dhyanis_.

By methods known to themselves and to the Great Lodge they work on the
forms so brought over, and by adding here, taking away there, and often
altering, they gradually transform by such alteration and addition
the kingdoms of nature as well as the gradually forming gross body of
man. This process is carried on chiefly in the purely astral period
preceding the gross physical stage, as the impulses thus given will
surely carry themselves forward through the succeeding times. When
the midway point of evolution is reached the species emerge on to the
present stage and not showing the connection to the eye of man nor to
our instruments. The investigations of the day have traced certain
species down to a point where, as is confessed, it is not known to what
root they go back. Taking oxen on one side and horses on the other,
we see that both are hoofed, but one has a split hoof and the other
but one toe. These bring us back, when we reach the oldest ancestor
of each, to the midway point, and there science has to stop. At this
spot the wisdom of the Masters comes in to show that back of this is
the astral region of ancient evolution, where were the root-types in
which the Dhyanis began the evolution by alteration and addition which
resulted in the differentiation afterwards on this gross plane into the
various families, species, and genera.

A vast period of time, about 300,000,000 years, was passed by earth
and man and all the kingdoms of nature in an astral stage. Then there
was no gross matter such as we now know. This was in the early rounds
when Nature was proceeding slowly with the work of perfecting the
types on the astral plane, which is matter, though very fine in its
texture. At the end of that stretch of years the process of hardening
began, the form of man being the first to become solid, and then some
of the astral prototypes of the preceding rounds were involved in
the solidification, though really belonging to a former period when
everything was astral. When those fossils are discovered it is argued
that they must be those of creatures which coëxisted with the gross
physical body of man.

While that argument is proper enough under the other theories of
Science, it becomes only an assumption if the existence of the astral
period be admitted. It would be beyond the scope of this work to go
further into particulars. But it may incidentally be said that neither
the bee nor the wheat could have had their original differentiation in
this chain of globes, but must have been produced and finished in some
other from which they were brought over into this. Why this should be
so I am willing to leave for the present to conjecture.

To the whole theory it may be objected that Science has not been able
to find the missing links between the root-types of the astral period
and the present fossils or living species. In the year 1893 at Moscow
Professor Virchow said in a lecture that the missing link was as far
off as ever, as much of a dream as ever, and that no real evidence was
at hand to show man as coming from the animals. This is quite true,
and neither class of missing link will be discovered by Science under
her present methods. For all of them exist in the astral plane and
therefore are invisible to the physical eye. They can only be seen by
the inner astral senses, which must first be trained to do their work
properly, and until Science admits the existence of the astral and
inner senses she will never try to develop them. Always, then, Science
will be without the instruments for discovering the astral links left
on the astral plane in the long course of differentiation. The fossils
spoken of above, which were, so to say, solidified out of date, form an
exception to the impossibility of finding any missing links, but they
are blind alleys to Science because she admits none of the necessary
facts.

The object of all this differentiation, amalgamation, and separation is
well stated by another of the Masters, thus:

 Nature consciously prefers that matter should be indestructible in
 organic rather than inorganic forms, and works slowly but incessantly
 towards the realization of this object—the evolution of conscious life
 out of inert material.




CHAPTER XVI.


The field of psychic forces, phenomena, and dynamics is a vast one.
Such phenomena are seen and the forces exhibited every day in all
lands, but until a few years ago very little attention was given to
them by scientific persons, while a great deal of ridicule was heaped
upon those who related the occurrences or averred belief in the
psychic nature. A cult sprang up in the United States some forty years
ago calling itself quite wrongly “spiritualism”, but having a great
opportunity it neglected it and fell into mere wonder-seeking without
the slightest shadow of a philosophy. It has accomplished but little
in the way of progress except a record of many undigested facts which
for four decades failed to attract the serious attention of people in
general. While it has had its uses, and includes in its ranks many good
minds, the great dangers and damages coming to the human instruments
involved and to those who sought them more than offset the good done in
the opinion of those disciples of the Lodge who would have man progress
evenly and without ruin along his path of evolution. But other Western
investigators of the accepted schools have not done much better, and
the result is that there is no Western Psychology worthy of the name.

This lack of an adequate system of Psychology is a natural consequence
of the materialistic bias of science and the paralyzing influence of
dogmatic religion; the one ridiculing effort and blocking the way,
the other forbidding investigation. The Roman Catholic branch of the
Christian Church is in some respects an exception, however. It has
always admitted the existence of the psychic world—for it is the
realm of devils and angels, but as angels manifest when they choose
and devils are to be shunned, no one is permitted by that Church to
meddle in such matters except an authorized priest. So far as that
Church’s prohibiting the pernicious practice of necromancy indulged
in by “spiritualists” it was right, but not in its other prohibitions
and restrictions. Real psychology is an Oriental product to-day. Very
true the system was known in the West when a very ancient civilization
flourished in America, and in certain parts of Europe anterior to the
Christian era, but for the present day psychology in its true phase
belongs to the Orient.

Are there psychic forces, laws, and powers? If there are, then there
must be the phenomena. And if all that has been outlined in preceding
chapters is true, then in man are the same powers and forces which are
to be found anywhere in Nature. He is held by the Masters of Wisdom to
be the highest product of the whole system of evolution, and mirrors in
himself every power, however wonderful or terrible, of Nature; by the
very fact of being such a mirror he is man.

This has long been recognized in the East, where the writer has seen
exhibitions of such powers which would upset the theories of many a
Western man of science. And in the West the same phenomena have been
repeated for the writer, so that he knows of his own knowledge that
every man of every race has the same powers potentially. The genuine
psychic—or, as they are often called, magical—phenomena done by the
Eastern faquir or yogee are all performed by the use of natural forces
and processes not even dreamed of as yet by the West. Levitation of the
body in apparent defiance of gravitation is a thing to be done with
ease when the process is completely mastered. It contravenes no law.
Gravitation is only half of a law. The Oriental sage admits gravity,
if one wishes to adopt the term; but the real term is attraction,
the other half of the law being expressed by the word repulsion, and
both being governed by the great laws of electrical force. Weight and
stability depend on polarity, and when the polarity of an object is
altered in respect to the earth immediately underneath it, then the
object may rise. But as mere objects are devoid of the consciousness
found in man, they cannot rise without certain other aids. The human
body, however, will rise in the air unsupported, like a bird, when its
polarity is thus changed. This change is brought about consciously by
a certain system of breathing known to the Oriental; it may be induced
also by aid from certain natural forces spoken of later, in the cases
of those who without knowing the law perform the phenomena, as with the
saints of the Roman Catholic Church.

A third great law which enters into many of the phenomena of the East
and West is that of Cohesion. The power of Cohesion is a distinct power
of itself, and not a result as is supposed. This law and its action
must be known if certain phenomena are to be brought about, as, for
instance, what the writer has seen, the passing of one solid iron ring
through another, or a stone through a solid wall. Hence another force
is used which can only be called dispersion. Cohesion is the dominating
force, for, the moment the dispersing force is withdrawn, the cohesive
force restores the particles to their original position.

Following this out the Adept in such great dynamics is able to disperse
the atoms of an object—excluding always the human body—to such a
distance from each other as to render the object invisible, and then
can send them along a current formed in the ether to any distance on
the earth. At the desired point the dispersing force is withdrawn, when
immediately cohesion reässerts itself and the object reäppears intact.
This may sound like fiction, but being known to the Lodge and its
disciples as an actual fact, it is equally certain that Science will
sooner or later admit the proposition.

But the lay mind infected by the materialism of the day wonders how all
these manipulations are possible, seeing that no instruments are spoken
of. The instruments are in the body and brain of man. In the view of
the Lodge “the human brain is an exhaustless generator of force”, and
a complete knowledge of the inner chemical and dynamic laws of Nature,
together with a trained mind, give the possessor the power to operate
the laws to which I have referred. This will be man’s possession in
the future, and would be his to-day were it not for blind dogmatism,
selfishness, and materialistic unbelief. Not even the Christian lives
up to his Master’s very true statement that if one had faith he could
remove a mountain. A knowledge of the law when added to faith gives
power over matter, mind, space, and time.

Using the same powers, the trained Adept can produce before the eye,
objective to the touch, material which was not visible before, and
in any desired shape. This would be called creation by the vulgar,
but it is simply evolution in your very presence. Matter is held
suspended in the air about us. Every particle of matter, visible or
still unprecipitated, has been through all possible forms, and what
the Adept does is to select any desired form, existing, as they all
do, in the Astral Light and then by effort of the Will and Imagination
to clothe the form with the matter by precipitation. The object so
made will fade away unless certain other processes are resorted to
which need not be here described, but if these processes are used the
object will remain permanently. And if it is desired to make visible a
message on paper or other surface, the same laws and powers are used.
The distinct—photographically and sharply definite—image of every line
of every letter or picture is formed in the mind, and then out of the
air is drawn the pigment to fall within the limits laid down by the
brain, “the exhaustless generator of force and form”. All these things
the writer has seen done in the way described, and not by any hired or
irresponsible medium, and he knows whereof he speaks.

This, then, naturally leads to the proposition that the human Will
is all powerful and the Imagination is a most useful faculty with a
dynamic force. The Imagination is the picture-making power of the human
mind. In the ordinary average human person it has not enough training
or force to be more than a sort of dream, but it may be trained.
When trained it is the Constructor in the Human Workshop. Arrived at
that stage it makes a matrix in the Astral substance through which
effects objectively will flow. It is the greatest power, after Will,
in the human assemblage of complicated instruments. The modern Western
definition of Imagination is incomplete and wide of the mark. It is
chiefly used to designate fancy or misconception and at all times
stands for unreality. It is impossible to get another term as good
because one of the powers of the trained Imagination is that of making
an image. The word is derived from those signifying the formation or
reflection of an image. This faculty used, or rather suffered to act,
in an unregulated mode has given the West no other idea than that
covered by “fancy”. So far as that goes it is right but it may be
pushed to a greater limit, which, when reached causes the Imagination
to evolve in the Astral substance an actual image or form which may be
then used in the same way as an iron moulder uses a mould of sand for
the molten iron. It is therefore the King faculty, inasmuch as the Will
cannot do its work if the Imagination be at all weak or untrained. For
instance, if the person desiring to precipitate from the air wavers in
the least with the image made in the Astral substance, the pigment
will fall upon the paper in a correspondingly wavering and diffused
manner.

To communicate with another mind at any distance the Adept attunes all
the molecules of the brain and all the thoughts of the mind so as to
vibrate in unison with the mind to be affected, and that other mind and
brain have also to be either voluntarily thrown into the same unison
or fall into it voluntarily. So though the Adept be at Bombay and his
friend in New York, the distance is no obstacle, as the inner senses
are not dependent on an ear, but may feel and see the thoughts and
images in the mind of the other person.

And when it is desired to look into the mind and catch the thoughts
of another and the pictures all around him of all he has thought and
looked at, the Adept’s inner sight and hearing are directed to the mind
to be seen, when at once all is visible. But, as said before, only a
rogue would do this, and the Adepts do not do it except in strictly
authorized cases. The modern man sees no misdemeanor in looking into
the secrets of another by means of this power, but the Adepts say
it is an invasion of the rights of the other person. No man has the
right, even when he has the power in his hand, to enter into the mind
of another and pick out its secrets. This is the law of the Lodge to
all who seek, and if one sees that he is about to discover the secrets
of another he must at once withdraw and proceed no further. If he
proceeds his power is taken from him in the case of a disciple; in the
case of any other person he must take the consequence of this sort of
burglary. For Nature has her laws and her policemen, and if we commit
felonies in the Astral world the great Law and the guardians of it, for
which no bribery is possible, will execute the penalty, no matter how
long we wait, even if it be for ten thousand years. Here is another
safeguard for ethics and morals. But until men admit the system of
philosophy put forward in this book, they will not deem it wrong to
commit felonies in fields where their weak human law has no effect, but
at the same time by thus refusing the philosophy they will put off the
day when all may have these great powers for the use of all.

Among phenomena useful to notice are those consisting of the moving of
objects without physical contact. This may be done, and in more than
one way. The first is to extrude from the physical body the Astral
hand and arm, and with those grasp the object to be moved. This may
be accomplished at a distance of as much as ten feet from the person.
I do not go into argument on this, only referring to the properties
of the Astral substance and members. This will serve to some extent
to explain several of the phenomena of mediums. In nearly all cases
of such apportation the feat is accomplished by thus using the unseen
but material Astral hand. The second method is to use the elementals
of which I have spoken. They have the power when directed by the inner
man to carry objects by changing the polarity, and then we see, as with
the fakirs of India and some mediums in America, small objects moving
apparently unsupported. These elemental entities are used when things
are brought from longer distances than the length to which the Astral
members may be stretched. It is no argument against this that mediums
do not know they do so. They rarely if ever know anything about how
they accomplish any feat, and their ignorance of the law is no proof of
its non-existence. Those students who have seen the forces work from
the inside will need no argument on this.

Clairvoyance, clairaudience, and second-sight are all related very
closely. Every exercise of any one of them draws in at the same time
both of the others. They are but variations of one power. Sound is
one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Astral sphere, and
as light goes with sound, sight obtains simultaneously with hearing.
To see an image with the Astral senses means that at the same time
there is a sound, and to hear the latter infers the presence of a
related image in Astral substance. It is perfectly well known to the
true student of occultism that every sound produces instantaneously
an image, and this, so long known in the Orient, has lately been
demonstrated in the West in the production to the eye of sound pictures
on a stretched tympanum. This part of the subject can be gone into
very much further with the aid of occultism, but as it is a dangerous
one in the present state of society I refrain at this point. In the
Astral Light are pictures of all things whatsoever that happened to any
person, and as well also pictures of those events to come the causes
for which are sufficiently well marked and made. If the causes are yet
indefinite, so will be the images of the future. But for the mass of
events for several years to come all the producing and efficient causes
are always laid down with enough definiteness to permit the seer to see
them in advance as if present. By means of these pictures, seen with
the inner senses, all clairvoyants exercise their strange faculty. Yet
it is a faculty common to all men, though in the majority but slightly
developed; but occultism asserts that were it not for the germ of this
power slightly active in every one no man could convey to another any
idea whatsoever.

In clairvoyance the pictures in the Astral Light pass before the inner
vision and are reflected into the physical eye from within. They then
appear objectively to the seer. If they are of past events or those to
come, the picture only is seen; if of events actually then occurring,
the scene is perceived through the Astral Light by the inner sense.
The distinguishing difference between ordinary and clairvoyant vision
is, then, that in clairvoyance with waking sight the vibration is
communicated to the brain first, from which it is transmitted to the
physical eye, where it sets up an image upon the retina, just as the
revolving cylinder of the phonograph causes the mouthpiece to vibrate
exactly as the voice had vibrated when thrown into the receiver. In
ordinary eye vision the vibrations are given to the eye first and
then transmitted to the brain. Images and sounds are both caused
by vibrations, and hence any sound once made is preserved in the
Astral Light from whence the inner sense can take it and from within
transmit it to the brain, from which it reaches the physical ear. So
in clairaudience at a distance the hearer does not hear with the ear,
but with the centre of hearing in the Astral body. Second-sight is
a combination of clairaudience and clairvoyance or not, just as the
particular case is, and the frequency with which future events are seen
by the second-sight seer adds an element of prophecy.

The highest order of clairvoyance—that of spiritual vision—is very
rare. The usual clairvoyant deals only with the ordinary aspects and
strata of the Astral matter. Spiritual sight comes only to those who
are pure, devoted, and firm. It may be attained by special development
of the particular organ in the body through which alone such sight
is possible, and only after discipline, long training, and the
highest altruism. All other clairvoyance is transitory, inadequate,
and fragmentary, dealing, as it does, only with matter and illusion.
Its fragmentary and inadequate character results from the fact that
hardly any clairvoyant has the power to see into more than one of the
lower grades of Astral substance at any one time. The pure-minded and
the brave can deal with the future and the present far better than
any clairvoyant. But as the existence of these two powers proves the
presence in us of the inner senses and of the necessary medium—the
Astral Light, they have, as such human faculties, an important bearing
upon the claims made by the so-called “spirits” of the _séance_ room.

Dreams are sometimes the result of brain action automatically
proceeding, and are also produced by the transmission into the brain
by the real inner person of those scenes or ideas high or low which
that real person has seen while the body slept. They are then strained
into the brain as if floating on the soul as it sinks into the body.
These dreams may be of use, but generally the resumption of bodily
activity destroys the meaning, perverts the image, and reduces all
to confusion. But the great fact of all dreaming is that some one
perceives and feels therein, and this is one of the arguments for the
inner person’s existence. In sleep the inner man communes with higher
intelligences, and sometimes succeeds in impressing the brain with what
is gained, either a high idea or a prophetic vision, or else fails in
consequence of the resistance of brain fibre. The karma of the person
also determines the meaning of a dream, for a king may dream that which
relates to his kingdom, while the same thing dreamed by a citizen
relates to nothing of temporal consequence. But, as said by Job: “In
dreams and visions of the night man is instructed.”

Apparitions and doubles are of two general classes. The one, astral
shells or images from the astral world, either actually visible to the
eye or the result of vibration within thrown out to the eye and thus
making the person think he sees an objective form without. The other,
the astral body of living persons and carrying full consciousness or
only partially so endowed. Laborious attempts by Psychical Research
Societies to prove apparitions without knowing these laws really
prove nothing, for out of twenty admitted cases nineteen may be
the objectivization of the image impressed on the brain. But that
apparitions have been seen there is no doubt. Apparitions of those just
dead may be either pictures made objective as described, or the Astral
Body—called _Kama Rupa_ at this stage—of the deceased. And as the
dying thoughts and forces released from the body are very strong, we
have more accounts of such apparitions than of any other class.

The Adept may send out his apparition, which, however, is called by
another name, as it consists of his conscious and trained astral body
endowed with all his intelligence and not wholly detached from his
physical frame.

Theosophy does not deny nor ignore the physical laws discovered
by science. It admits all such as are proven, but it asserts the
existence of others which modify the action of those we ordinarily
know. Behind all the visible phenomena is the occult cosmos with its
ideal machinery; that occult cosmos can only be fully understood by
means of the inner senses which pertain to it; those senses will not be
easily developed if their existence is denied. Brain and mind acting
together have the power to evolve forms, first as astral ones in astral
substance, and later as visible ones by accretions of the matter on
this plane. Objectivity depends largely on perception, and perception
may be affected by inner stimuli. Hence a witness may either see an
object which actually exists as such without, or may be made to see one
by internal stimulus. This gives us three modes of sight: (_a_) with
the eye by means of light from an object, (_b_) with the inner senses
by means of the Astral Light, and (_c_) by stimulus from within which
causes the eye to report to the brain, thus throwing the inner image
without. The phenomena of the other senses may be tabulated in the same
manner.

The Astral substance being the register of all thoughts, sounds,
pictures, and other vibrations, and the inner man being a complete
person able to act with or without coördination with the physical, all
the phenomena of hypnotism, clairvoyance, clairaudience, mediumship,
and the rest of those which are not consciously performed may be
explained. In the Astral substance are all sounds and pictures, and
in the Astral man remain impressions of every event, however remote
or insignificant; these acting together produce the phenomena which
seem so strange to those who deny or are unaware of the postulates of
occultism.

But to explain the phenomena performed by Adepts, Fakirs, Yogees,
and all trained occultists, one has to understand the occult laws of
chemistry, of mind, of force, and of matter. These it is obviously not
the province of such a work as this to treat in detail.




CHAPTER XVII.


In the history of psychical phenomena the records of so-called
“spiritualism” in Europe, America, and elsewhere hold an important
place. Advisedly I say that no term was ever more misapplied than
that of “spiritualism” to the cult in Europe and America just
mentioned, inasmuch as there is nothing of the spirit about it. The
doctrines given in preceding chapters are those of true spiritualism;
the misnamed practices of modern mediums and so-called spiritists
constitute the Worship of the Dead, old-fashioned necromancy, in fact,
which was always prohibited by spiritual teachers. They are a gross
materializing of the spiritual idea, and deal with matter more than
with its opposite. This cult is supposed by some to have originated
about forty years ago in America at Rochester, N. Y., under the
mediumship of the Fox sisters, but it was known in Salem during the
witchcraft excitement, and in Europe one hundred years ago the same
practices were pursued, similar phenomena seen, mediums developed, and
_séances_ held. For centuries it has been well known in India where
it is properly designated “_bhuta_ worship”, meaning the attempt to
communicate with the devil or Astral remnants of deceased persons. This
should be its name here also, for by it the gross and devilish, or
earthly, parts of man are excited, appealed to, and communicated with.
But the facts of the long record of forty years in America demand a
brief examination. These facts all studious Theosophists must admit.
The theosophical explanation and deductions, however, are totally
different from those of the average spiritualist. A philosophy has not
been evolved in the ranks or literature of spiritualism; nothing but
theosophy will give the true explanation, point out defects, reveal
dangers, and suggest remedies.

As it is plain that clairvoyance, clairaudience, thought-transference,
prophecy, dream and vision, levitation, apparitional appearance, are
all powers that have been known for ages, the questions most pressing
in respect to spiritualism are those relating to communication with
the souls of those who have left this earth and are now disembodied,
and with unclassified spirits who have not been embodied here but
belong to other spheres. Perhaps also the question of materialization
of forms at _séances_ deserves some attention. Communication includes
trance-speaking, slate and other writing, independent voices in the
air, speaking through the physical vocal organs of the medium, and
precipitation of written messages out of the air. Do the mediums
communicate with the spirits of the dead? Do our departed friends
perceive the state of life they have left, and do they sometimes return
to speak to and with us?

The answers are intimated in foregoing chapters. Our departed do not
see us here. They are relieved from the terrible pang such a sight
would inflict. Once in a while a pure-minded, unpaid medium may ascend
in trance to the state in which a deceased soul is, and may remember
some bits of what was there heard; but this is rare. Now and then in
the course of decades some high human spirit may for a moment return
and by unmistakable means communicate with mortals. At the moment of
death the soul may speak to some friend on earth before the door is
finally shut. But the mass of communications alleged as made day after
day through mediums are from the astral unintelligent remains of men,
or in many cases entirely the production of, invention, compilation,
discovery, and collocation by the loosely attached Astral body of the
living medium.

Certain objections arise to the theory that the spirits of the dead
communicate. Some are:

I. At no time have these spirits given the laws governing any of
the phenomena, except in a few instances, not accepted by the cult,
where the theosophical theory was advanced. As it would destroy such
structures as those erected by A. J. Davis, these particular spirits
fell into discredit.

II. The spirits disagree among themselves, one stating the after-life
to be very different from the description by another. These
disagreements vary with the medium and the supposed theories of the
deceased during life. One spirit admits reïncarnation and others deny
it.

III. The spirits have discovered nothing in respect to history,
anthropology, or other important matters, seeming to have less ability
in that line than living men; and although they often claim to be men
who lived in older civilizations, they show ignorance thereupon or
merely repeat recently published discoveries.

IV. In these forty years no _rationale_ of phenomena nor of development
of mediumship has been obtained from the spirits. Great philosophers
are reported as speaking through mediums, but utter only drivel and
merest commonplaces.

V. The mediums come to physical and moral grief, are accused of fraud,
are shown guilty of trickery, but the spirit guides and controls do not
interfere to either prevent or save.

VI. It is admitted that the guides and controls deceive and incite to
fraud.

VII. It is plainly to be seen through all that is reported of the
spirits that their assertions and philosophy, if any, vary with the
medium and the most advanced thought of living spiritualists.

From all this and much more that could be adduced, the man of
materialistic science is fortified in his ridicule, but the theosophist
has to conclude that the entities, if there be any communicating, are
not human spirits, and that the explanations are to be found in some
other theories.

Materialization of a form out of the air, independent of the medium’s
physical body, is a fact. But it is not a spirit. As was very well
said by one of the “spirits” not favored by spiritualism, one way to
produce this phenomenon is by the accretion of electrical and magnetic
particles into one mass upon which matter is aggregated and an image
reflected out of the Astral sphere. This is the whole of it; as much
a fraud as a collection of muslin and masks. How this is accomplished
is another matter. The spirits are not able to tell, but an attempt
has been made to indicate the methods and instruments in former
chapters. The second method is by the use of the Astral body of the
living medium. In this case the Astral form exudes from the side of
the medium, gradually collects upon itself particles extracted from
the air and the bodies of the sitters present until at last it becomes
visible. Sometimes it will resemble the medium; at others it bears a
different appearance. In almost every instance dimness of light is
requisite because a high light would disturb the Astral substance in
a violent manner and render the projection difficult. Some so-called
materializations are hollow mockeries, as they are but flat plates of
electrical and magnetic substance on which pictures from the Astral
Light are reflected. These seem to be the faces of the dead, but they
are simply pictured illusions.

If one is to understand the psychic phenomena found in the history of
“spiritualism” it is necessary to know and admit the following:

I. The complete heredity of man astrally, spiritually, and psychically,
as a being who knows, reasons, feels, and acts through the body, the
Astral body, and the soul.

II. The nature of the mind, its operation, its powers; the nature and
power of imagination; the duration and effect of impressions. Most
important in this is the persistence of the slightest impression as
well as the deepest; that every impression produces a picture in the
individual aura; and that by means of this a connection is established
between the auras of friends and relatives old, new, near, distant, and
remote in degree: this would give a wide range of possible sight to a
clairvoyant.

III. The nature, extent, function, and power of man’s inner Astral
organs and faculties included in the terms Astral body and _Kama_.
That these are not hindered from action by trance or sleep, but are
increased in the medium when entranced; at the same time their action
is not free, but governed by the mass chord of thought among the
sitters, or by a predominating will, or by the presiding devil behind
the scenes; if a sceptical scientific investigator be present, his
mental attitude may totally inhibit the action of the medium’s powers
by what we might call a freezing process which no English terms will
adequately describe.

IV. The fate of the real man after death, his state, power, activity
there, and his relation, if any, to those left behind him here.

V. That the intermediary between mind and body—the Astral body—is
thrown off at death and left in the Astral light to fade away; and that
the real man goes to _Devachan_.

VI. The existence, nature, power, and function of the Astral light
and its place as a register in Nature. That it contains, retains, and
reflects pictures of each and every thing that happened to anyone, and
also every thought; that it permeates the globe and the atmosphere
around it; that the transmission of vibration through it is practically
instantaneous, since the rate is much quicker than that of electricity
as now known.

VII. The existence in the Astral light of beings not using bodies
like ours, but not human in their nature, having powers, faculties,
and a sort of consciousness of their own; these include the elemental
forces or nature sprites divided into many degrees, and which have to
do with every operation of Nature and every motion of the mind of man.
That these elementals act at _séances_ automatically in their various
departments, one class presenting pictures, another producing sounds,
and others depolarizing objects for the purposes of apportation.
Acting with them in this Astral sphere are the soulless men who live
in it. To these are to be ascribed the phenomenon, among others, of
the “independent voice”, always sounding like a voice in a barrel just
because it is made in a vacuum which is absolutely necessary for an
entity so far removed from spirit. The peculiar _timbre_ of this sort
of voice has not been noticed by the spiritualists as important, but it
is extremely significant in the view of occultism.

VIII. The existence and operation of occult laws and forces in nature
which may be used to produce phenomenal results on this plane; that
these laws and forces may be put into operation by the subconscious man
and by the elementals either consciously or unconsciously, and that
many of these occult operations are automatic in the same way as is the
freezing of water under intense cold or the melting of ice under heat.

IX. That the Astral body of the medium, partaking of the nature of
the Astral substance, may be extended from the physical body, may
act outside of the latter, and may also extrude at times any portion
of itself such as hand, arm, or leg and thereby move objects, indite
letters, produce touches on the body, and so on _ad infinitum_. And
that the Astral body of any person may be made to feel sensation,
which, being transmitted to the brain, causes the person to think he is
touched on the outside or has heard a sound.

Mediumship is full of dangers because the Astral part of the man is
now only normal in action when joined to the body; in distant years it
will normally act without a body as it has in the far past. To become a
medium means that you have to become disorganized physiologically and
in the nervous system, because through the latter is the connection
between the two worlds. The moment the door is opened all the unknown
forces rush in, and as the grosser part of nature is nearest to us it
is that part which affects us most; the lower nature is also first
affected and inflamed because the forces used are from that part of us.
We are then at the mercy of the vile thoughts of all men, and subject
to the influence of the shells in _Kama Loka_. If to this be added the
taking of money for the practice of mediumship, an additional danger
is at hand, for the things of the spirit and those relating to the
Astral world must not be sold. This is the great disease of American
spiritualism which has debased and degraded its whole history; until
it is eliminated no good will come from the practice; those who wish
to hear truth from the other world must devote themselves to truth and
leave all considerations of money out of sight.

To attempt to acquire the use of the psychic powers for mere curiosity
or for selfish ends is also dangerous for the same reasons as in the
case of mediumship. As the civilization of the present day is selfish
to the last degree and built on the personal element, the rules for
the development of these powers in the right way have not been given
out, but the Masters of Wisdom have said that philosophy and ethics
must first be learned and practised before any development of the
other department is to be indulged in; and their condemnation of
the wholesale development of mediums is supported by the history of
spiritualism, which is one long story of the ruin of mediums in every
direction.

Equally improper is the manner of the scientific schools which
without a thought for the true nature of man indulge in experiments
in hypnotism in which the subjects are injured for life, put into
disgraceful attitudes, and made to do things for the satisfaction of
the investigators which would never be done by men and women in their
normal state. The Lodge of the Masters does not care for Science unless
it aims to better man’s state morally as well as physically, and no
aid will be given to Science until she looks at man and life from the
moral and spiritual side. For this reason those who know all about the
psychical world, its denizens and laws, are proceeding with a reform in
morals and philosophy before any great attention will be accorded to
the strange and seductive phenomena possible for the inner powers of
man.

And at the present time the cycle has almost run its course for this
century. Now, as a century ago, the forces are slackening; for that
reason the phenomena of spiritualism are lessening in number and
volume; the Lodge hopes by the time the next tide begins to rise that
the West will have gained some right knowledge of the true philosophy
of Man and Nature, and be then ready to bear the lifting of the veil a
little more. To help on the progress of the race in this direction is
the object of this book, and with that it is submitted to its readers
in every part of the world.

       *       *       *       *       *




                   The United Lodge of Theosophists

                             DECLARATION.


The policy of this Lodge is independent devotion to the cause
of Theosophy, without professing attachment to any Theosophical
organization. It is loyal to the great Founders of the Theosophical
Movement, but does not concern itself with dissensions or differences
of individual opinion.

The work it has on hand and the end it keeps in view are too absorbing
and too lofty to leave it the time or inclination to take part in side
issues. That work and that end is the dissemination of the Fundamental
Principles of the philosophy of Theosophy, and the exemplification in
practice of those principles, through a truer realization of the SELF;
a profounder conviction of Universal Brotherhood.

It holds that the unassailable _Basis for Union_ among Theosophists,
wherever and however situated, is “_similarity of aim, purpose and
teaching_,” and therefore has neither Constitution, By-Laws nor
Officers, the sole bond between its associates being that _basis_. And
it aims to disseminate this idea among Theosophists in the furtherance
of Unity.

It regards as Theosophists all who are engaged in the true service
of Humanity, without distinction of race, creed, sex, condition or
organization, and

It welcomes to its association all those who are in accord with its
declared purposes and who desire to fit themselves, by study and
otherwise, to be the better able to help and teach others.

 “_The true Theosophist belongs to no cult or sect, yet belongs to each
 and all._”

 Being in sympathy with the purposes of this Lodge, as set forth in
 its “Declaration”, I hereby record my desire to be enrolled as an
 Associate; it being understood that such association calls for no
 obligation on my part other than that which I, myself, determine.

The foregoing is the Form signed by Associates of The United Lodge of
Theosophists.

Inquiries are invited from all persons to whom this Movement may
appeal. Cards for signature will be sent upon request, and every
possible assistance furnished Associates in their studies and in
efforts to form local Lodges. There are no dues of any kind, and no
formalities to be complied with.

Correspondence should be addressed to

  GENERAL REGISTRAR, _United Lodge of Theosophists_,
  Los Angeles, California.

 Metropolitan Building, Broadway at Fifth St.




                               THEOSOPHY

A Magazine Devoted to The Theosophical Movement, The Brotherhood
of Humanity, The Study of Occult Science and Philosophy, and Aryan
Literature.


“THEOSOPHY” is published by The United Lodge of Theosophists. Like the
Association of Free and Independent Theosophists which has sponsored
it, this monthly magazine is devoted to the promulgation of Theosophy
as it was given by Those who brought it. Theosophy is reprinting in
every issue the wonderful magazine articles of H. P. Blavatsky, and
Wm. Q. Judge, first printed in _Lucifer_, _The Theosophist_ and _The
Path_ by these writers, many years ago. Old workers for Theosophy
have for the most part quite forgotten these articles, which are of
inestimable value to the sincere student. To most Theosophists of later
years they are quite unknown. Other articles concerning the history of
the Theosophical Movement and related subjects appear monthly; but the
writers for and editors of the magazine remain anonymous, as it is the
desire of the publishers of “THEOSOPHY” that its readers should judge
the value of its original matter from the inherent quality perceived in
the articles themselves, and not from the names signed to them.

       *       *       *       *       *

Subscription price, $2.00 yearly. Single copies 25 cents. Sample copy
(back number) will be sent for a limited time upon receipt of ten cents
in stamps.

       *       *       *       *       *

  ——_ADDRESS_——

               METROPOLITAN BLDG.
  THEOSOPHY
               LOS ANGELES, CALIF.

Students interested in obtaining a clear and correct understanding of
the actual Teachings known under the name of THEOSOPHY should have the
following books. They can be ordered of any local bookseller, or orders
may be sent direct to The United Lodge of Theosophists. The prices
given include postage.

  OCEAN OF THEOSOPHY                               $.75

 A succinct presentation of the Teachings, by W. Q. Judge.


  KEY TO THEOSOPHY                                 2.00

 A complete outline of the philosophy in the form of questions and
 answers, by H. P. Blavatsky.


  CONVERSATIONS ON THEOSOPHY                        .10

 A brief but clear statement of principles, in question and answer; pp.
 16. In quantities for propaganda, 50 copies for $1.00.


  ISIS UNVEILED (2 Volumes)                        6.50

 A Master Key to Science and Theology, the work that “broke the moulds
 of men’s minds”. By H. P. Blavatsky.


  THE SECRET DOCTRINE (2 Volumes and Index)       12.50

 The Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy containing “all that
 can be given out in this century”. By H. P. Blavatsky.


  “THEOSOPHY” (Per Volume)                         4.00

 Back Volumes, bound in half leather, 576 pages each, filled with
 reprints of invaluable writings of H. P. B. and W. Q. J. hitherto out
 of print, and containing also many excellent original articles.

       *       *       *       *       *

Those who find the Teachings of Theosophy expressive of their highest
ideals and conformable to reason and experience, and who are desirous
of entering the _PATH_, are urged to read, ponder and assimilate to the
utmost possible extent:

  THE VOICE OF THE SILENCE                         $.75

 Chosen Fragments from the Book of Golden Precepts. By H. P. Blavatsky.


  THE BHAGAVAD-GITA                                 .75

 The Book of Devotion, rendered by W. Q. Judge.


  LIGHT ON THE PATH                                 .75

 Rules for Disciples, with Comments, and the Treatise on Karma, written
 down by M. C.


 LETTERS THAT HAVE HELPED ME

  Volume 1                                          .50
  Volume 2                                          .75

 Letters written by “Z. L. Z.”, “Greatest of the Exiles”, to Jasper
 Niemand and others. By W. Q. Judge.


  YOGA APHORISMS OF PATANJALI                       .75

 Rendered into English, with an Introduction and Notes. By W. Q. Judge.


  THEOSOPHY AND THE MOVEMENT                        .25

 Extracts from the writings of H. P. B. and W. Q. J., including the
 Epitome of Theosophy.

       *       *       *       *       *

Orders should be addressed and all remittances made payable to The
United Lodge of Theosophists, Metropolitan Building, Broadway at Fifth
St., Los Angeles, California.

       *       *       *       *       *

Transcriber's Notes

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations
in hyphenation, spelling, accents and punctuation remain unchanged.

Italics are represented thus _italic_.





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