Is there cosmic intelligence back of a sublime purpose which keys human destiny with that of universal nature? Many among the ancients believed this profoundly mystical idea, both in its simple and in its expanded meanings. They saw order and law working in every point in space and in every creature. A living test of its reality was spread abroad for all who had eyes to see — as it still is. It was taught that, because man was an inseparable part of the universe, he was involved in and concerned with all natural processes. This knowledge of "things as they are" freed him from the dread of death, from belief in a hereafter of eternal suffering or final oblivion. Feeling his oneness with the sun and stars, with the unfolding panorama of his earth home, he knew that, whether imbodied or not, the spiritual self within him lived on. Death, then, was seen as a periodic release from the body before a new cycle begins in the soul's ever-continuing experience.
Following through the analogy, our human lives were viewed as small portions in the larger span of the earth's destiny; and the earth in turn within the more majestic arc of the sun's lifetime. And so outward to the great galaxies, which come into being and reach the apex of their manifested existence according to still more enduring rhythms. Then they too disappear to take their cosmic rest, taking with them all that lived within their sweep, and ready themselves for other and grander cycles.
Thus we and the atoms and the stars are evolving together on one or another round of the immense spiral pathway. We all share in a common welfare, so that every being is helped by growing in unison with the whole. If man has become divorced from nature, has stunted his finer growth and blurred his vision; if he seems to stand apart from the nonhuman things, regarding them as somehow alien or hostile, let him go out on a clear night and look up at the heavens. Let him know that the living force circulating throughout the cosmos vitalizes and inspirits every particle of infinity into becoming more of what is in it to become.
(From Sunrise magazine, June/July 1998. Copyright © 1998 by Theosophical University Press)