Analogy is thus the surest guide to the comprehension of the Occult teachings. . . .
Everything in the Universe follows analogy. "As above, so below"; Man is the microcosm of the Universe. That which takes place on the spiritual plane repeats itself on the Cosmic plane. Concretion follows the lines of abstraction; corresponding to the highest must be the lowest; the material to the spiritual. — The Secret Doctrine, I, 173, 177
As you may infer by analogy every globe before it reaches its adult period, has to pass through a formation period — also septenary. Law in Nature is uniform and the conception, formation, birth, progress and development of the child differs from those of the globe only in magnitude. The globe has two periods of teething and of capillature — its first rocks which it also sheds to make room for new — and its ferns and mosses before it gets forest. As the atoms in the body change [every] seven years so does the globe renew its strata every seven cycles. . . .
. . . The correspondence between a mother-globe and her child-man may be thus worked out. Both have their seven principles. In the Globe, the elementals (of which there are in all seven species) form (a) a gross body, (b) her fluidic double (linga sariram), (c) her life principle (jiva); (d) her fourth principle kama rupa is formed by her creative impulse working from centre to circumference; (e) her fifth principle (animal soul or Manas, physical intelligence) is embodied in the vegetable (in germ) and animal kingdoms; (f) her sixth principle (or spiritual soul, Buddhi) is man (g) and her seventh principle (atma) is in a film of spiritualized akasa that surrounds her. — The Mahatma Letters, pp. 93, 94
Those alone, whom we call adepts, who know how to direct their mental vision and to transfer their consciousness — physical and psychic both — to other planes of being, are able to speak with authority on such subjects. And they tell us plainly: —
"Lead the life necessary for the acquisition of such knowledge and powers, and Wisdom will come to you naturally. Whenever you are able to attune your consciousness to any of the seven chords of 'Universal Consciousness,' those chords that run along the sounding-board of Kosmos, vibrating from one Eternity to another; when you have studied thoroughly 'the music of the Spheres,' then only will you become quite free to share your knowledge with those with whom it is safe to do so. . . . " — The Secret Doctrine, I, 166-7
THESE teachings may seem recondite when first heard, and so indeed they are. But, like all our theosophical teachings, there is one aspect of them which is very simple and contains the principal idea of each thought, i.e., of each doctrine; and it is, in each and every case, this main or principal idea which we illustrate, it remaining for yourselves to fill in the details, and to prove by your own studies the theorems advanced.
But may it not be a good thing to point out that one of the noblest results of these studies is the effect it has on the moral nature of man, of the student? You may tell a man to "be good because it is good to be good," as remarked once before; and this statement is perfectly correct and probably no one will object to it, yet it will not go very deep into the hearer's consciousness and mind. But if you tell a man that he is, in essence, an incarnate god, an incarnate divinity in his essence, and that he has come down into these spheres of matter for purposes of universal work, and that he is failing in his duty, he is failing in his relationship to his own higher self, if that duty be not accomplished, then you put a thought into that man's mind which allows him to think, and makes him think, and gives him a basis for morals, a religious and philosophical basis, which if he has any good in him at all, he himself will follow up to the end.
It is absurd to think that any one of our theosophical doctrines can be divorced from its ethical aspect. They cannot be separated so; and this, perhaps, is the distinction most easily understood between the archaic teachings and those of the various so-called cults or cultuses or quasi-religions which spring up like mushrooms from age to age and from time to time, and have a longer or shorter life, depending on circumstances, causing meanwhile more or less deplorable spiritual injury to the unfortunate people who hear of them and follow them in confidence and misplaced trust.
So far as this question of ethics as connected with our teachings is concerned, pray remember that you cannot understand them adequately unless you "live the life" that they inculcate. Our Teachers have told us so, plainly: "Live the life as it ought to be lived, and knowledge will come to you naturally." There is only one truth in nature, and understanding of it comes naturally to him or her who "obeys the law." Real knowledge brings modesty and compassion and magnanimity and courage in its train, and all the fine, old, noble virtues; and those virtues are the insignia which mark the real disciple — not foolish claims which, in direct proportion as the claims are false, are the more foolishly pretentious. The greater the claims, the less truth is there behind them.
With regard to these doctrines being so difficult: they are very difficult, not merely in their elucidation, which we are attempting, but also because they are so intimately interwoven together. Yet this very fact contains the clue, the Ariadne's thread, leading to their solution. The very fact that, just as the forces and principles and planes of nature are so interlocked and are so intimately bound together that if you really know one you know more or less of all, just so is it with these doctrines. If you really know one with some fair degree of complete knowledge — some fair degree, I say — you have a more or less perfect key that will fit the locks of all.
Indeed, analogy is the fundamental law or, if you like, the fundamental operation, of our processes of thinking, derived from nature because we are the children of nature; for just as the highest is reflected in the lowest, so is the working of the human mind. If you follow the workings of nature as taught in occultism, you will find that the lowest is but the exemplification or copy of what is above.
These teachings, which we have been studying together here, you will yourselves find in the pages of The Secret Doctrine. Search, and you will find them. Yet it may take you years to find them. But that is no real reason for discouragement. Why, in the old times, in India for example, the pupil had to pass ten or twelve years in the study of the sacred Sanskrit language alone before he was even allowed to read the scriptures written in that noble tongue; twelve more years were then passed in study of the scriptures before he was allowed even to speak of, or to give an opinion upon them. Twenty-four years of daily study, from eight to twelve hours a day, so sacred were these ancient teachings then held to be! No one may expect or need think that he or she can have any comprehension of our teachings without some honest effort on his or her own part, to study them, to understand them and, above everything else, to think about them, to reflect on them. That is the greatest help of all, to reflect, to ponder them in the mind, to brood over them.
Now, at our last study we passed in brief general review the doctrines concerning the birth, building, growth, maturity, decline, and final death, of our planetary chain. This short general review was made in order that the many and various statements made in The Secret Doctrine, here and there, and dealing with all these four aspects of the general doctrine of the spheres, should be separated in our minds. No one can give out any such recondite doctrine in its fullness, in easy language. These doctrines closely interlock; and the more esoteric part is always deliberately hid under the same words which set forth the exoteric presentation. The former must be picked out and studied; the intuition must be developed; the intellect polished; and, above everything else, the spiritual nature must be appealed to and aspired to. This process of study is not so difficult as it sounds, for these higher faculties are innate in us. The spiritual nature is the real man. The constant appeals to us by our Teachers to look inwards and to look upwards are not meaningless; they have a most profound practical value for the serious student.
We open, then, our study tonight by reading from the first volume of The Secret Doctrine as follows, on pages 158-9:
Everything in the metaphysical as in the physical Universe is septenary. Hence every sidereal body, every planet, whether visible or invisible, is credited with six companion globes. . . . The evolution of life proceeds on these seven globes or bodies from the 1st to the 7th in Seven ROUNDS or Seven Cycles.
That is, the life-wave circles around the seven globes in seven different courses, each course from globe one to globe the last being called a round. But let us not confuse a general or chain-round from globe A to globe G or the last, with a globe-round, which merely means the passing through or traversing of any one of these seven globes by the life-waves. This latter is a globe-round. Furthermore, these rounds, circling, revolving, from globe A to globe G, in any one planetary chain — ours for instance — is called an inner round. The outer rounds, as pointed out at our last meeting, refer to the seven sacred planets; and these outer rounds we shall not touch upon except very incidentally. But it ought to be pointed out that these seven sacred planets actually build and govern and oversee, each to each, all the seven globes of our earth's chain. What are the correspondences here? Let us point them out. We draw a diagram of the twelve globes of our earth's planetary chain once more:
Beginning with the seven globes on our manifested planetary chain, below the line which we have drawn in order to separate them from the five which are hid, we will call the first globe A, the next globe B, the next C, the next D, which is our earth. The one above us on the ascending arc is E, the next one above it is F, and the last one of the seven we shall mark as G. There are, furthermore, as shown in this diagram, five hid globes on the three higher planes of the solar kosmos, the universal solar system, which globes we merely mention in passing.
Now the sacred planet which builds and forms globe A, subject of course to the swabhava of globe A — that is to say, its own indwelling genius or will or spirit, its own individuality, just as a growing child is shaped more or less by its environment, but nevertheless has its own growing individuality and personality — the sacred planet, I say, that builds globe A is the Sun, or rather that planet for which the Sun is an enumerative substitute, and which we will call Vulcan. The sacred planet which builds the second globe, B, is Jupiter. The sacred planet which builds globe C, the one preceding ours on the downward arc, and from which we came during this round before we entered the earth-globe, is Venus. The sacred planet building our own Earth is Saturn. The one building globe E, to which we shall go when we leave globe D, our Earth, is Mercury. The one building globe F is Mars; and the one building globe G, or the last, is the Moon, or rather the planet for which the Moon is an exoteric enumerative substitute.
Note well, however, that in all cases we mean the spiritual genius or rector (not the physical planet) which is the builder, the former, the overseer, of any respective globe of our earth's chain.
Please understand, then, that these genii or rectors, these sacred planets actually are the kosmokratores of our planetary chain, the world builders, plus the swabhavic impulses emanating from the planetary chain itself: as, for instance, a child is born on earth; it has its own indwelling vitality, its own personality, its own individuality, its own inner push and urge to life and experience; but it is born into an environment, into conditions, which mold it in a very large degree, and which similarly in large degree direct the way and manner in which its body and higher principles are builded and work and function.
We merely allude here once more to what was said, I think at our last meeting, that when the last of the seven rounds of our earth's planetary chain is fully completed, the life-waves pass on to one of the outer rounds. Now you know that the moon which we see in our evening skies is but the relic, the kama-rupa, of a former planet which lived and completed its life cycle before our earth existed, and which was as full of life and the hosts of lives as our earth is now. It also ran the course of its seven rounds, along seven lunar globes, and when its septenary life cycle was completed, when its seventh round was completed, what then happened? Each globe, as the life-wave left it after completing the last globe-round of the seventh chain-round, passed into invisibility after it had cast forth its energies, a large part of its life-atoms, into a laya-center in space.
Let us take these seven globes, as shown in the diagram, which represent the chain of our earth, and imagine them, if you please, to be the seven globes of our moon during its last round, we mean the seventh or last moon-round. When the globe-round on A is completed, or rather nearly completed, the ten classes of life-entities prepare to leave it. The class which is most advanced projects its energy into space, into another point of the solar system, into what is called a laya-center, which is a Sanskrit word meaning a homogeneous center, a center of homogeneous substance, on a spiritual plane of course, using the word "spiritual" in a general sense. And this process goes on, for all the ten classes of that globe A, each one of these ten families or stocks leaving the globe one by one, until, when the time has come for the last animalcule of the last stock to leave the globe, that globe then suddenly disappears — and is in abscondito, invisible. And why? The reason is this: all matter, as our scientists today are beginning to realize, is but another form of kosmic force, for force and matter are one. All matter is built up of atoms; these atoms in turn are built up of electrons and protons; and these in their turn are but tiny substantial entities, built up of energic matter or force — force and matter being fundamentally one, as spirit and substance are fundamentally one.
Hence, when the life-atoms, when the life, so to say, leaves the globe, it vanishes, because those life-atoms are its ultimate particles. The globe is not annihilated, but it passes into the state which is called in abscondito, or invisibility. This is perhaps the most difficult point of all others in our study to explain, because there is nothing known to us at present on earth that we can point to as being analogous to it. At any rate, such is the fact; and, as I have tried to point out, when the life leaves an atom, its sub-atoms, so to speak, are not annihilated, but, as it were, they separate and they become invisible, and the portions of the undeveloped substance which remain behind pass into latency, into dormancy, much like ice crystals hanging in space; pass into latency as tiny globules of force-matter, and remain in that state until the attraction to activity later comes — which is another subject that we shall have to go into some day — to join the new earth-globe A, the life-atom returning, after aeons of wandering transmigration, to its own life-source.
Similarly with globe B of the moon-chain, the same process takes place, and it vanishes. And so with all the seven globes. How is it then, it may be asked, if globe D of the moon-chain vanished, that we see our present moon? We have before pointed out that our moon is a phantom, a kama-rupa, of the moon's globe D that was, but we of earth happen to be on the plane of what was the astral to the Lunarians. We have gone up a step, and we see with our physical eyes what would have been invisible to us when we lived on the moon. As a man when departing this life leaves his kama-rupa in the astral realms behind him, the shade, as the ancients put it, his spook, until it disintegrates — if haply that be the man's fortunate destiny — so does it happen with the globes; because these globes are living things. Can life come from anything but life? Clear your minds of the idea that there is any dead matter. Wipe out all that old scientific trash of fifty or one hundred years ago. There is nothing in it. Already it is ancient and forgotten. The scientists now have new theories. Fifty years ago there was nothing but matter. The forces were only "modes of motion." Forces per se did not exist; nor did anybody know how such "modes of motion" arose out of dead matter. Now, however, they are beginning to tell us that there is no matter, that there is nothing but force; and that what we call the modes of matter are merely quanta of force or energy, certain forms or functions of what these very metaphysical scientists call energy or force or whatnot.
Thus, these various globes of the moon-chain cast their life-substance each into a laya-center; these seven laya-centers forming as it were the planes of rest of these "sleeping spheres." There is more behind this which we cannot now go into; but it would be dishonest to pass over this point without calling to your attention one fact, that the higher nature of a globe, as of a man its child, is deathless, and tastes never of death — during the solar manvantara, at least — sleeps not during these intermediate times of planetary rest, but is in nirvana, for some period of time, at least. Please mark those words.
After long aeons of time, these sleeping spheres reawaken for another period of manifestation, in principle exactly as a man returns to earth incarnation. The thrill of active or to-be-manifested life now runs through these seven laya-centers, and they begin to differentiate. Do you know that the secrets regarding death and human incarnation are bound up in this subject of the planetary spheres, the planetary chain, and also in that marvelous, wonderful doctrine of the circulations of the kosmos?
What do the Christians mean — we make a slight digression which seems necessary and interesting as well — when they speak of the resurrection of the bodies of the dead? A ludicrous doctrine this, if taken at its face value as taught by the old-style theology. Much well-merited criticism by independent thinkers has been directed against this Christian dogma — well-merited criticism, we said; but nevertheless in its pagan origin it was one of the old Mystery-teachings. Here is a part, at least, of the secret of it. The life-atoms which form a man's body, which form a man's astral body, which form a man's psychic nature, which form a man's mental and spiritual nature, are his offspring, the off-throwings of the man in life who now physically is what we call "dead." They are far more "bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh," incomparably more so, than is the son of his parents, because they are himself, his own dissipated life-atoms, and they will return to him as inevitably and as infallibly as the strokes of karma for good or ill fall upon a man who has originated them, who has acted upon nature, which automatically reacts, rebounds, against the action. These life-atoms come back to him in the succeeding life, when the attraction pulls them, when the gravitational pull comes from the entity descending again through the various planes of substance into reincarnation. Each plane that he passes through after death in going out, in going up, is again traversed in coming down into reincarnation; and these life-atoms flow to him by gravitational attraction, by magnetic pull, and form anew his various vehicles on the various planes of his being. They are the life-atoms whose "faces he once dirtied," perhaps, and which he now again must wash; or, again, those which he had helped on their upward way. Because, verily, these life-atoms are themselves germ-souls in their essence, even as we men in our higher natures are children of the Highest — of the Logos, whose very essence is in us, is we ourselves! These life-atoms also, even as we ourselves, are building for an immortal destiny; and this is a really fine illustration of the interlocking of the hosts of lives of universal being.
Think of the mystery, of the wonder, behind this beautiful fact. In that way, also, are the worlds builded. This, then, is the secret meaning of the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body, an old Mystery-teaching ignorantly adopted — not the old body which Mr. Brown or Mr. Jones or Mr. Smith had, for that is gone forever; but the life-atoms which builded that former body, and actually were it, collect anew to form the new body of the reincarnating man. As they were his before, so now they come back and build him a body more or less closely like to the one he had left at death in the former life. Can you escape the action of the law? Think of the moral viewpoints that this action of karma brings to our eyes. Think of the responsibility, moral and physical and mental and spiritual, that is ours. We suffer from our own acts, and we have joy from our own acts; and these little beings, these embryonic souls, these life-atoms, build the bodies of the vehicles which once again we live in. Man, each one of us, in future aeons of time, after ages upon ages in the future, is destined to be a Logos; and the beings then in his care and charge, his own life-atoms then more or less "grown-up," will be the archangels, the angels, the prajapatis, the manus, the human souls, and all the various smaller entities, less entities such as we now know of beneath us. The Logos that is now our own Highest, our own "Father in Heaven," was, aeons upon aeons upon aeons agone, a man also, of whom our present hosts of beings were then the life-atoms, marching upwards and onwards. Can you imagine and see, now, why these doctrines have always been kept so secret and sacred? Suppose that they were subject to misunderstanding, and misrepresented in cheap advertisement, dropped in the mire, "cast before the swine," as the Syrian Teacher said!
But there is danger in all this. There is always a danger in saying more than should be said about these esoteric and holy doctrines. We have not said more than should be said; we are merely elucidating and explaining what has been said by hint and allusion in The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky. In future years we may go deeper into these things; but surely enough has been said tonight to show the analogy between and the much that might be said about the life of man and that of a planetary chain.