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next world in the chain, perfect it, and abandon it. Then to the next and next and next --
until the sevenfold round of world-evolutions along the chain is run through and the
Mahayug comes to its end. Then chaos again -- the Pralaya. As this life-impulse (at the
seventh and last round from planet to planet) moves on it leaves behind it dying and --
very soon -- "dead planets."
The last seventh round man having passed on to a subsequent world, the precedent one
with all its mineral, vegetable and animal life (except man) begins to gradually die out,
when with the exit of the last animalcule it is extinguished, or as H.P.B. has it -- snuffed
out (minor or partial pralaya). When the Spirit-man reaches the last bead of the chain and
passes into final Nirvana, this last world also disappears or passes into subjectivity. Thus
are there among the stellar galaxies births and deaths of worlds ever following each other
in the orderly procession of natural Law. And -- as said already -- the last bead is strung
upon the thread of the "Mahayuga."
When the last cycle of man-bearing has been completed by that last fecund earth; and
humanity has reached in a mass the stage of Buddhahood and passed out of the objective
existence into the mystery of Nirvana -- then "strikes the hour;" the seen becomes the
unseen, the concrete resumes its pre-cyclic state of atomic distribution.
But the dead worlds left behind the on-sweeping impulse do not continue dead. Motion is
the eternal order of things and affinity or attraction its handmaid of all works. The thrill
of life will again re-unite the atoms, and it will stir again in the inert planet when the time
comes. Though all its forces have remained statu quo and are now asleep, yet little by
little it will -- when the hour re-strikes -- gather for a new cycle of man-bearing
maternity, and give birth to something still higher as moral and physical types than
during the preceding manvantara. And its "cosmic atoms already in a differentiated state"
(differing -- in the producing force, in the mechanical sense, of motions and effects)
remain statu quo as well as globes and everything else in the process of formation." Such
is the "hypothesis fully in accordance with (your) (my) note." For, as planetary
development is as progressive as human or race evolution, the hour of the Pralaya's
coming catches the series of worlds at successive stages of evolution; (i.e.) each has
attained to some one of the periods of evolutionary progress -- each stops there, until the
outward impulse of the next manvantara sets it going from that very point -- like a
stopped time-piece re-wound. Therefore, have I used the word "differentiated."
At the coming of the Pralaya no human, animal, or even vegetable entity will be alive to
see it, but there will be the earth or globes with their mineral kingdoms; and all these
planets will be physically disintegrated in the pralaya, yet not destroyed; for they have
their places in the sequence of evolution and their "privations" coming again out of the
subjective, they will find the exact point from which they have to move on around the
chain of "manifested forms." This, as we know, is repeated endlessly throughout
ETERNITY. Each man of us has gone this ceaseless round, and will repeat it for ever and
ever. The deviation of each one's course, and his rate of progress from Nirvana to
Nirvana is governed by causes which he himself creates out of the exigencies in which he
finds himself entangled.
This picture of an eternity of action may appal the mind that has been accustomed to look
forward to an existence of ceaseless repose. But their concept is not supported by the
analogies of nature, nor -- and ignorant though I may be thought of your Western
Science, may I not say? -- by the teachings of that Science. We know that periods of
action and rest follow each other in everything in nature from the macrocosm with its
Solar Systems down to man and its parent-earth, which has its seasons of activity
followed by those of sleep; and that in short all nature, like her begotten living forms has
her time for recuperation. So with the spiritual individuality, the Monad which starts on
its downward and upward cyclic rotation. The periods which intervene between each
great manvantarian "round" are proportionately long to reward for the thousands of
existences passed on various globes; while the time given between each "race birth" -- or
rings as you call them -- is sufficiently lengthy to compensate for any life of strife and
misery during that lapse of time passed in conscious bliss after the re-birth of the Ego. To
conceive of an eternity of bliss or woe, and to offset it to any conceivable deeds of merit
or demerit of a being who may have lived a century or even a millenium in the flesh, can
only be proposed by one who has never yet grasped the awful reality of the word
Eternity, nor pondered upon the law of perfect justice and equilibrium which pervades
nature. Further instructions may be given you, which will show how nicely justice is done
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