# The Ocean of Theosophy

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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.
> 
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> 
>  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_.
>
> — *The Ocean of Theosophy (Public Domain (Project Gutenberg))*