Western European stream·Esoteric Buddhism·CHAPTER XII.

CHAPTER XII.

THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED.

Long familiarity with the esoteric doctrine will alone give rise to a full perception of the manner in which it harmonizes with facts of Nature such as we are all in a position to ob- serve. But something may be done to indi- cate the correspondences that may be traced between the whole body of teaching now set forth and the phenomena of the world around us.

Beginning with the two great perplexities of ordinary philosophy, — the conflict between free- will and predestination and the origin of evil, — it will surely be recognized that the system of Nature now explained enables us to deal with those problems more boldly than they have ever yet been handled. Till now the most pru- dent thinkers have been least disposed to pro- fess that either by the aid of metaphysics or religion could the mystery of free-will and predestination be unraveled. The tendency of thought has been to relegate the whole enigma

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to the region of the unknowable. And strange to say this has been done contentedly by peo- ple who have been none the less contented to accept as more than a provisional hypothesis the religious doctrines which thus remained in- capable of reconciliation with some of their own most obvious consequences. The omnis- cience of a personal Creator, ranging over the future as well as the past, left man no room to exercise the independent authority over his own destinies, which nevertheless it was ab- solutely necessary to allow him to exercise in order that the policy of punishing or rewarding him for his acts in life could be recognized as anything but the most grotesque injustice. One great English philosopher, frankly facing the embarrassment, declared in a famous posthu- mous essay that by reason of these considera- tions it was impossible that God could be all- good and all-potent. People were free to in- vest him logically with one or other of these attributes, but not with both. The argument was treated with the respect due to the great reputation of its author, and put aside with the discretion due to respect for orthodox tenets. But the esoteric doctrine comes to our rescue in this emergency. First of all it honestly takes into account the insignificant size of this world compared to the universe. This is a fact of THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 265 Nature, which the early Christian church feared with a true instinct, and treated with the cruelty of terror. The truth was denied, and its authors were tortured for many centuries. Established at last beyond even the authority of papal negations, the church resorted to the "desperate expedient," to quote Mr. Rhys Davids' phrase, of pretending that it did not matter. The pretense till now has been more success- ful than its authors could have hoped. When they dreaded astronomical discovery, they were crediting the world at large with more remorse- less logic than it ultimately showed any in- clination to employ. People have been found willing, as a rule, to do that which I have de- scribed esoteric Buddhism as not requiring us to do, — to keep their science and their relig- ion in separate water-tight compartments. So long and so thoroughly has this principle been worked upon that it has finally ceased to be an argument against the credibility of a relig- ious dogma to point out that it is impossible. But when we establish a connection between our hitherto divided reservoirs and require them to stand at the same level, we cannot fail to see how the insignificance of the earth's magnitude diminishes in a corresponding pro- portion the plausibility of theories that require

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us to regard the details of our own lives' as part of the general stock of a universal Crea- tor's omniscience. On the contrary, it is un- reasonable to suppose that the creatures inhab- iting one of the smaller planets of one of the smaller suns in the ocean of the universe, where suns are but water-drops in the sea, are exempt in any way from the general principle of gov- ernment by law. But that principle cannot co- exist with government by caprice, which is an essential condition of such predestination as conventional discussions of the problems before us associate with the use of the word. For, be it observed that the predestination which conflicts with free-will is not the predestina- tion of races, but individual predestination, associated with the ideas of divine grace or wrath. The predestination of races, under laws analogous to those which control the general tendency of any multitude of independent chances, is perfectly compatible with individual free-will, and thus it is that the esoteric doc- trine reconciles the long-standing contradiction of Nature. Man has control over his own des- tiny within constitutional limits, so to speak ; he is perfectly free to make use of his natural rights as far as they go, and they go practically to infinity as far as he, the individual unit, is concerned. But the average human action, THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 267 under given conditions, taking a vast multiplic- ity of units into account, provides for the un- failing evolution of the cycles which constitute their collective destiny. Individual predestination, it is true, may be asserted, not as a religious dogma having to do with divine grace or wrath, but on purely met- aphysical grounds ; that is to say, it may be argued that each human creature is fundamen- tally, in infancy, subject to the same influence by similar circumstances, and that an adult life is thus merely the product or impression of all the circumstances which have influenced such a life from the beginning, so that if those circum- stances were known the moral and intellectual result would be known. By this train of reason- ing it can be made to appear that the circum- stances of each man's life may be theoretically knowable by a sufficiently searching intelli- gence ; that hereditary tendencies, for example, are but products of antecedent circumstances entering into any given calculation as a pertur- bation, but not the less calculable on that ac- count. This contention, however, is no less in direct conflict with the consciousness of human- ity than the religious dogma of individual pre- destination. The sense of free-will is a factor in the process which cannot be ignored, and the free-will of which we are thus sensible is not a

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mere automatic impulse, like the twitching of a dead frog's leg. The ordinary religious dogma and the ordinary metaphysical argument both require us to regard it in that light ; but the esoteric doctrine restores it to its true dignity, and shows us the scope of its activity, the lim- its of its sovereignty. It is sovereign over the individual career, but impotent in presence of the cyclic law, which even so positive a philos- opher as Draper detects in human history, — brief as the period is which he is enabled to ob- serve. And none the less does that collateral quicksand of thought which J. S. Mill discerned alongside the contradictions of theology — the great question whether speculation must work with the all-good or all-potent hypothesis — find its explanation in the system now dis- closed. Those great beings, the perfected efflo- rescence of former humanity, who, though far from constituting a supreme God, reign never- theless in a divine way over the destinies of our world, are not only not omnipotent, but, great as they are, are restricted as regards their ac- tion by comparatively narrow limits. It would seem as if, when the stage is, so to speak, pre- pared afresh for a new drama of life, they are able to introduce some improvements into the action, derived from their own experience in the drama with which they were concerned. THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 269 but are only capable, as regards the main con- struction of the piece, of repeating that which has been represented before. They can do on a large scale what a gardener can do with dah- lias on a small one ; he can evolve considerable improvements in form and color, but his flow- ers, however carefully tended, will be dahlias still. Is it nothing, one may ask in passing, in sup- port of the acceptability of the esoteric doctrine, that natural analogies support it at every turn ? As it is below, so it is above, wrote the early occult philosophers ; the microcosm is a mirror of the macrocosm. All Nature lying within the sphere of our physical observation verifies the rule, so far as that limited area can exhibit any principles. The structure of lower animals is reproduced with modifications in higher ani- mals, and in man ; the fine fibres of the leaf ramify like the branches of the tree, and the microscope follows such ramifications, repeated beyond the range of the naked eye. The dust- laden currents of rain-water by the roadside deposit therein " sedimentary rocks " in the puddles they develop, just as the rivers do in the lakes and the great waters of the world over the sea-bed. The geological work of a pond and that of an ocean differ merely in their scale, and it is only in scale that the esoteric

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doctrine shows the sublimest laws of Nature differing, in their jurisdiction over the man and their jurisdiction over the planetary family. As the children of each human generation are tended in infancy by their parents, and grow up to tend another generation in their turn, so in the whole humanity of the great manvantaric periods the men of one generation grow to be the Dhyan Chohans of the next, and then yield their places in the ultimate progress of time to their descendants, and pass themselves to higher conditions of existence. Not less decisively than it answers the ques- tion about free-will does the esoteric doctrine deal with the existence of evil. This subject has been discussed in its place in the preceding chapter on the Progress of Humanity, but the esoteric doctrine, it will be seen, grapples with the great problem more closely than by the mere enunciation of the way human free-will, which it is the purpose of Nature to grow, and cultivate into Dhyan Chohanship, must by the hypothesis be free to develop evil itself if it likes. So much for the broad principle in oper- ation ; but the way it works is traceable in the present teaching as clearly as the principle it- self. It works through physical Karma, and could not but work that way except by a sus- pension of the invariable law that causes can. THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 271 not but produce effects. The objective man born into the physical world is just as much the creation of the person he last animated as the subjective man who has in the interim been living the Devachanic existence. The evil that men do lives after them, in a more literal sense even than Shakespeare intended by those words. It may be asked, How can the moral guilt of a man in one life cause him to be born blind or crippled at a different period of the world's his- tory several thousand years later, of parents with whom he has had, through his former life, no lack of physical connection whatever? But the difficulty is met b}^ considering the opera- tion of affinities more easily than may be im- agined at the first glance. The blind or crip- pled child, as regards his physical frame, may have been the potentiality rather than the prod- uct of local circumstances. But he would not have come into existence unless there had been a spiritual monad pressing forward for incarna- tion, and bearing with it a fifth principle (so much of a fifth principle as is persistent, of course) precisely adapted by its Karma to in- habit that potential body. Given these circum- stances, and the imperfectly organized child is conceived and brought into the world, to be a cause of trouble to himself and others — an effect becoming a cause in its turn — and a liv-

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ing enigma for philosophers endeavoring to ex- plain the origin of evil. The same explanation applies, with modifica- tions, to a vast range of cases that might be cited to illustrate the problem of evil in the world. Incidentally, moreover, it covers a ques- tion connected with the operation of the Karmic law that can hardly be called a difficulty, as the answer would probably be suggested by the bearings of the doctrine itself, but is none the less entitled to notice. The selective assimi- lation of Karma-laden spirits with parentage which corresponds to their necessities or deserts is the obvious explanation which reconciles rebirth with atavism and heredity. The child born may seem to reproduce the moral and mental peculiarities of parents or ancestors as well as their physical likeness, and the fact suggests the notion that his soul is as much an offshoot of the family tree as his physical frame. It is unnecessary to enlarge here on the multi- farious embarrassments by which that theory would be surrounded, on the extravagance of supposing that a soul thus thrown off, like a spark from an anvil, without any spiritual past behind it, can have a spiritual future before it. The soul, which was thus merely a function of the body, would certainly come to an end with the dissolution of that out of which it arose THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 273 The esoteric doctrine, however, as regards trans- mitted characteristics, will afford a complete explanation of that phenomenon, as well as all others connected with human life. The family into which he is born is to the re-incarnating spirit what a new planet is to the whole tide of humanity on a round along the manvantaric chain. It has been built up by a process of evolution working on a line transverse to that of humanity's approach ; but it is fit for human- ity to inhabit when the time comes. So with the re -incarnating spirit: it presses forward into the objective world, the influences which have retained it in the Devachanic state having been exhausted, and it touches the spring of Nature, so to speak, provoking the development of a child which without such an impulse would merely have been a potentiality, not an actual development, but in whose parentage it finds — of course unconsciously by the blind opera- tion of its affinities — the exact conditions of renewed life for which it has prepared itself during its last existence. Certainly we must never forget the presence of exceptions in all broad rules of Nature. In the present case it may sometimes happen that mere accident causes an injury to a child at birth. Thus a crippled frame may come to be bestowed on a spirit whose Karma has by no means earned

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that penalty, and so with a great variety of ac- cidents. But of these all that need be said is that Nature is not at all embarrassed by her accidents ; she has ample time to repair them. The undeserved suffering of one life is amply redressed under the operation of the Karmic law in the next or the next. There is plenty of time for making the account even, and the adepts declare, I believe, that, as a matter of fact, in the long run undeserved suffering oper- ates as good luck rather than otherwise, thereby deriving from a purely scientific observation of facts a doctrine which religion has benevo- lently invented sometimes for the consolation of the afflicted. While the esoteric doctrine affords in this way an unexpected solution of the most per- plexing phenomena of life, it does this at no sacrifice in any direction of the attributes we may fairly expect of a true religious science. Foremost among the claims we may make on such a system is that it shall contemplate no injustice, either in the direction of wrong done to the deserving, or of benefits bestowed on the undeserving ; and the justice of its oper- ation must be discernible in great things and small alike. The legal maxim, de minimis non curat lex, is means of escape for human fallibil. ity from the consequences of its own imperfec- THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 275 tions. -There is no such thing as indifference to small things in chemistry or mechanics. Nature in physical operations responds with ex- actitude to small causes as certainly as to great, and we may feel instinctively sure that in her spiritual operations also she has no clumsy habit of treating trifles as of no consequence, of ig- noring small debts in consideration of paying big ones, like a trader of doubtful integrity con- tent to respect obligations which are serious enough to be enforced by law. Now the minor acts of life, good and bad alike, are of necessity ignored under any system which makes the final question at stake, admission to or exclusion from a uniform or approximately uniform con- dition of blessedness. Even as regards that merit and demerit which is solely concerned with spiritual consequences, no accurate re- sponse could be made by Nature except by means of that infinitely graduated condition of spiritual existence described by the esoteric doctrine as the Devachanic state. But the complexity to be dealt with is more serious than even the various conditions of Devachanic ex- istence can meet. No system of consequences ensuing to mankind after the life now under observation can be recognized as adapted sci- entifically to the emergency, unless it responds to the sense of justice, in regard to the multi-

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farious acts and habits of life generall}T, includ- ing those which merely relate to physical ex- istence, and are not deeply colored by right or wrong. Now, it is only by a return to physical exist- ence that people can possibly be conceived to reap with precise accuracy the harvest of the minor causes they may have generated, when last in objective life. Thus, on a careful exam- ination of the matter, the Karmic law, so unat- tractive to Buddhist students, hitherto, in its exoteric shape, — and no wonder, — will be seen not only to reconcile itself to the sense of justice, but to constitute the only imaginable method of natural action that would do this. The con- tinued individuality running through successive Karmic re-births once realized, and the corre- sponding chain of personal existences interca- lated between each borne in mind, the exquisite s}7mmetry of the whole system is in no way impaired by that feature which seems obnoxious to criticism at the first glance, — the successive baths of oblivion, through which the re-incar- nating spirit has to pass. On the contrary, that oblivion itself is in truth the only condition Dn which objective life could fairly be started afresh. Few earth-lives are entirely free from shadows, the recollection of which would darken a renewed lease of life for the former personal THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 211 ity. And if it is alleged that the forgetfulness in each life of the last involves waste of experi- ence and effort and intellectual acquirements, painfully or laboriously obtained, that objection can only be raised in forgetfulness of the Deva chanic life, in which, far from being wasted, such efforts and acquirements are the seeds from which the whole magnificent harvest of spiritual results will be raised. In the same way, the longer the esoteric doctrine occupies the mind the more clearly it is seen that every objection brought against it meets with a ready reply, and only seems an objection from the point of view of imperfect knowledge. Passing from abstract considerations to oth- ers partty interwoven with practical matters, we may compare the esoteric doctrine with the observable facts of Nature in several ways with the view of directly checking its teachings. A spiritual science which has successfully divined the absolute truth must accurately fit the facts of earth whenever it impinges on earth. A religious dogma in flagrant opposition to that which is manifestly truth in respect of geology and astronomy may find churches and congre- gations content to nurse it, but is not worth serious philosophical consideration. How then does the esoteric doctrine square with geology and astronomy ?

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It is not too much to say that it constitutes the only religious system that blends itself ea- sily with the physical truths discovered by mod- ern research in those branches of science. It not only blends itself with, in the sense of tol- erating, the nebula hypothesis and the stratifi- cation of rocks ; it rushes into the arms of these facts, so to speak, and could not get on without them. It could not get on without the great discoveries of modern biology ; as a system rec- ommending itself to notice in a scientific age it could ill afford to dispense with the latest ac- quisitions of physical geography, and it may offer a word of thanks even to Professor Tyndall for some of his experiments on light, for he seems on one occasion, as he describes the phe- nomenon without knowing what he is describ- ing, in " Fragments of Science," to have pro- voked conditions within a glass tube which en- abled him for a short time to see the elementals. The stratification of the earth's crust is, of course, a plain and visible record of the inter- racial cataclysms. Physical science is emerging from the habits of timidity, which its insolent oppression by religious bigotry for fifteen cen- turies engendered, but it is still a little shy in its relations with dogma, from the mere force of habit. In that way, geology has been con« tent to say, such and such continents, as then THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 279 shell-beds testify, must have been more than once submerged below and elevated above the surface of the ocean. It has not yet grown used to the free application of its own materials to speculation, which trenches upon religious ter- ritory. But surely if geology were required to interpret all its facts into a consistent history of the earth, throwing in the most plausible hypotheses it could invent to rill up gaps in its knowledge, it would already construct a history for mankind which in its broad outlines would not be unlike that sketched out in the chap- ter on the Great World Periods ; and the fur- ther geological discovery progresses, our esoteric teachers assure us, the more closely will the correspondence of the doctrine and the bony traces of the past be recognized. Already we find experts from the Challenger vouching for the existence of Atlantis, though the subject be- longs to a class of problems unattractive to the scientific world generally, so that the considera- tions in favor of the lost continent are not yet generally appreciated. Already thoughtful ge- ologists are quite ready to recognize that in regard to the forces which have fashioned the earth this, the period within the range of his- toric traces, may be a period of comparative inertia and slow change ; that cataclysmal met- amorphoses may have been added formerly to

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those of gradual subsidence, upheaval, and de- nudation. It is only a step or two to the rec- ognition as a fact of what no one could any longer find fault with as a hypothesis : that great continental upheavals and submergences take place alternately ; that the whole map of the world is not only thrown occasionally into new shapes, like the pictures of a kaleidoscope as its colored fragments fall into new arrange- ments, but subject to systematically recurrent changes, which restore former arrangements at enormous intervals of time. Pending further discoveries, however, it will, perhaps, be admitted that we have a sufficient block of geological knowledge already in our possession to fortify the cosmogony of the eso- teric doctrine. That the doctrine should have been withheld from the world generally as long as no such knowledge had paved the way for its reception can hardly be considered indis- creet for the part of its custodians. Whether the present generation will attach sufficient im- portance to its correspondence with what has been ascertained of Nature in other ways re- mains to be seen. These correspondences may, of course, be traced in biology as decisively as in geology. The broad Darwinian theory of the Descent of Man from the animal kingdom is not the only THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 281 support afforded by this branch of science to the esoteric doctrine. The detailed observa- tions now carried out in embryology are espe- cially interesting for the light they throw on more than one department of this doctrine. Thus the now familiar truth that the succes- sive stages of ante-natal human development correspond to the progress of human evolution through different forms of animal life is noth- ing less than a revelation, in its analogical bear- ings. It does not merely fortify the evolution- ary hypothesis itself ; it affords a remarkable illustration of the way Nature works in the evolution of new races of men at the beginning of the great round periods. When a child has to be developed from a germ which is so simple in its constitution that it is typical less of the animal — less even of the vegetable — than of the mineral kingdom, the familiar scale of evo- lution is run over, so to speak, with a rapid touch. The ideas of progress which may have taken countless ages to work out in a connected chain for the first time are once for all firmly lodged in Nature's memory, and thenceforth they can be quickly recalled in order, in a few months. So with the new evolution of human- ity on each planet as the human tide-wave of life advances. In the first round the process is exceedingly slow, and does not advance far.

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The ideas of Nature are themselves under' ev- olution. But when the process has been ac- complished once it can be quickly repeated. In the later rounds, the life impulse runs up the gamut of evolution with a facility only conceivable by help of the illustration which embryology affords. This is the explanation of the way the character of each round differs from its predecessor. The evolutionary work which has been once accomplished is soon re- peated ; then the round performs its own evo- lution at a very different rate, as the child, once perfected up to the human type, performs its own individual growth but slowly, in proportion to the earlier stages of its initial development. No elaborate comparison of exoteric Bud- dhism with the views of Nature which have now been set forth — briefly, indeed, considering their scope and importance, but comprehensive- ly enough to furnish the reader with a general idea of the system in its whole enormous range — will be required from me. With the help of the information now communicated, more ex- perienced students of Buddhist literature will be better able to apply to the enigmas that it may contain the keys which will unlock their mean- ing. The gaps in the public records of Bud- dha's teaching will be filled up readily enough now, and it will be plain why they were left. THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 283 For example, in Mr. Rhys Davids' book I find this : " Buddhism does not attempt to solve the problem of the primary origin of all things ; " and quoting from Hardy's "Manual of Bud- dhism," he goes on, " When Malunka asked the Buddha whether the existence of the world is eternal or not eternal, he made him no reply ; but the reason of this was that it was considered by the teacher as an inquiry that tended to no profit." In reality the subject was manifestly passed over because it could not be dealt with by a plain yes or no, without putting the in- quirer upon a false scent ; while to put him on the true scent would have required a complete exposition of the whole doctrine about the ev- olution of the planetary chain, an explanation of that for which the community Buddha was dealing with was not intellectually ripe. To infer from his silence that he regarded the in- quiry itself as tending to no profit is a mistake which may naturally enough have been made in the absence of any collateral knowledge, but none can be more complete in reality. No re- ligious system that ever publicly employed it- self on the problem of the origin of all things has, as will now be seen, done more than scratch the surface of that speculation, in comparison with the exhaustive researches of the esoteric science of which Buddha was no less prominent ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. an exponent than he was a prominent teacher of morals for the populace. The positive conclusions as to what Bud- dhism does teach — carefully as he has worked them out — are no less inaccurately set forth by Mr. Rhys Davids than the negative conclu- sion just quoted. It was inevitable that all such conclusions should hitherto be inaccurate. I quote an example, not to disparage the careful study of which it is the fruit, but to show how the light now shed over the whole subject pen- etrates every cranny and puts an entirely new complexion on all its features : — " Buddhism takes as its ultimate fact the ex- istence of the material world, and of conscious beings living within it ; and it holds that every- thing is subject to the law of cause and ef- fect, and that everything is constantly, though imperceptibly, changing. There is no place where this law does not operate ; no heaven or hell, therefore, in the ordinary sense. There are worlds where angels live, whose existence is more or less material according as their pre- vious lives were more or less holy ; but the angels die, and the worlds they inhabit pass away. There are places of torment, where the evil actions of men or angels produce unhappy beings ; but when the active power of the evil that produced them is exhausted, they will THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 285 vanish, and the worlds they inhabit are not eternal. The whole Kosmos — earth and heav- ens and hells — is always tending to renova- tion or destruction, is always in a course of change, a series of revolutions or of cycles, of which the beginning and the end alike are unknowable and unknown. To this universal law of composition and dissolution men and gods form no exception ; the unity of forces which constitutes a sentient being must sooner or later be dissolved, and it is only through ignorance and delusion that such a being in- dulges in the dream that it is a separable and self-existent entity." Now certainly this passage might be taken to show how the popular notions of Buddhist phi- losophy are manifestly thrown off from the real esoteric philosophy. Most assuredly that phi- losophy no more finds in the universe than in the belief of any truly enlightened thinker, Asi- atic or European, the unchangeable and eter- nal heaven and hell of monkish legend ; and "the worlds where angels live," and so on, — the vividly real though subjective strata of the Devachanic state, — are found in Nature truly enough. So with all the rest of the popular Buddhist conceptions just passed in review. But in their popular form they are the nearest caricatures of the corresponding items of eso-

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teric knowledge. Thus the notion about indi- viduality being a delusion, and the ultimate dissolution as such of the sentient being, is perfectly unintelligible without fuller explana- tions concerning the multitudinous aeons of in- dividual life, in as yet, to us, inconceivable but ever-progressive conditions of spiritual exalta- tion, which come before that unutterably remote mergence into the non-individualized condition. That condition certainly must be somewhere in futurity, but its nature is something which no uninitiated philosopher, at any rate, has ever yet comprehended by so much as the faintest glimmering guess. As with the idea of Nir- vana, so with this about the delusion of indi- viduality, writers on Buddhist doctrine derived from exoteric sources have most unfortunately found themselves entangled with some of the remote elements of the great doctrine, under the impression that they were dealing with Buddhist views of conditions immediately suc- ceeding this life. The statement, which is al- most absurd, thus put out of its proper place in the whole doctrine, may be felt not only as no longer an outrage on the understanding, but as a sublime truth when restored to its proper place in relation to other truths. The ultimate mergence of the perfected man-god, or Dhyan Chohan, in the absolute consciousness of para THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 287 nirvana has nothing to do, let me add, with the " heresy of individuality," which relates to physical personalities. To this subject I recur a little later on. Justly enough, Mr. Rhys Davids says, in ref- erence to the epitome of Buddhist doctrine quoted above : " Such teachings are by no means peculiar to Buddhism, and similar ideas lie at the foundation of earlier Indian philoso- phies." (Certainly by reason of the fact that Buddhism as concerned with doctrine was ear- lier Indian philosophy itself.) " They are to be found, indeed, in other systems widely sepa- rated from them in time and place ; and Bud- dhism, in dealing with the truth which they contain, might have given a more decisive and more lasting utterance if it had not also bor- rowed a belief in the curious doctrine of trans- migration,— a doctrine which seems to have arisen independently, if not simultaneously, in the valley of the Ganges and the valley of the Nile. The word transmigration has been used, however, in different times and at different places for theories similar, indeed, but very dif- ferent ; and Buddhism, in adopting the general idea from post-Vedic Brahmanism, so modified it as to originate, in fact, a new hypothesis. The new hypothesis, like the old one, related to life in past and future bii'ths, and contributed

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nothing to the removal here, in this life, of the evil it was supposed to explain." The present volume should have dissipated the misapprehensions on which these remarks rest. Buddhism does not believe in anything resembling the passage backwards and forwards between animal and human forms, which most people conceive to be meant by the principle of transmigration. The transmigration of Bud- dhism is the transmigration of Darwinian evo- lution scientifically developed, or rather exhaust- ively explored, in both directions. Buddhist writings certainly contain allusions to former births, in which even the Buddha himself was now one and now another kind of animal. But these had reference to the remote course of pre- human evolution, of which his fully opened vision gave him a retrospect. Never in any authentic Buddhist writings will any support be found for the notion that any human crea- ture, once having attained manhood, falls back into the animal kingdom. Again, while noth- ing, indeed, could be more ineffectual as an ex- planation of the origin of evil than such a cari- cature of transmigration as would contemplate such a return, the progressive re-births of human Egos into objective existence, coupled with the operation of physical Karma and the inevitable play of free-will within the limits of its privi THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 289 lege, do explain the origin of evil, finally and completely. The effort of Nature being to grow a new harvest of Dhyan Chohans whenever a planetary system is evolved, the incidental de- velopment of transitory evil is an unavoidable consequence under the operation of the forces or processes just mentioned, themselves una- voidable stages in the stupendous enterprise set on foot. At the same time the reader who will now take up Mr. Rhys Davids' book and examine the long passage on this subject, and on the skandhas, will realize how utterly hopeless a task it was to attempt the deduction of any ra- tional theory of the origin of evil from the exo- teric materials there made use of. Nor was it possible for these materials to suggest the true explanation of the passage immediately after- wards, quoted from the Brahmajala Sutra : — " After showing how the unfounded belief in the eternal existence of God or gods arose, Gautama goes on to discuss the question of the soul, and points out thirty-two beliefs concern- ing it, which he declares to be wrong. These are shortly as follows : ' Upon what principle, or on what ground, do these mendicants and Brahmans hold the doctrine^of future existence? They teach that the soul is material, or is im- material, or is both or neither ; that it will

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have one or many modes of consciousness ; that its perceptions will be few or boundless ; that it will be in a state of joy or of misery, or of neither. These are the sixteen heresies, teach- ing a conscious existence after death. Then there are eight heresies teaching that the soul, material or immaterial, or both or neither, finite or infinite, or both or neither, has one uncon- scious existence after death. And, finally, eight others which teach that the soul, in the same eight ways, exists after death in a state of be- ing neither conscious nor unconscious.' ' Men- dicants,' concludes the sermon, 4 that which binds the teacher to existence (viz., tanha, thirst), is cut off, but his body still remains. While his body shall remain, he will be seen by gods and men, but after the termination of life, upon the dissolution of the body, neither gods nor men will see him.' Would it be pos- sible in a more complete and categorical man- ner to deny that there is any soul, — anything of any kind which continues to exist in any manner after death ? " Certainly, for exoteric students, such a pas- sage as this could not but seem in flagrant con- tradiction with those teachings of Buddhism which deal with the successive passages of the same individuality through several incarnations, and which thus along another line of thought THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 291 may see in to assume the existence of a trans- missible soul as plainly as the passage quoted denies it. Without a comprehension of the seven principles of man, no separate utterances on the various aspects of this question of im- mortality could possibly be reconciled. But the key now given leaves the apparent contra- diction devoid of all embarrassment. In the passage last quoted Buddha is speaking of the astral personality, while the immortality recog- nized by the esoteric doctrine is that of the spiritual individuality. The explanation has been fully given in the chapter on Devachan, and in the passages quoted there from Colonel Olcott's " Buddhist Catechism." It is only since fragments of the great revelation this vol- ume contains have been given out during the last two years in the " Theosophist " that the important distinction between personality and individuality, as applied to the question of hu- man immortality, has settled into an intelligible shape, but there are plentiful allusions in former occult writing, which may now be appealed to in proof of the fact that former writers were fully alive to the doctrine itself. Turning to the most recent of the occult books, in which the veil of obscurity was still left to wrap the doc- trine from careless observation, though it was strained in many places almost to transparency,

292ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.
we might take any one of a dozen passages to illustrate the point before us. Here is one : — " The philosophers who explained the fall into generation their own way viewed spirit as something wholly distinct from the soul. They allowed its presence in the astral capsule only so far as the spiritual emanations or rays of the

4shining one ' were concerned. Man and soul
had to conquer their immortality by ascending toward the unity, with which, if successful, they were finally linked, and into which they were absorbed, so to say. The individualiza- tion of man after death depended on the spirit, not on his body and soul. Although the word ' personality,' in the sense in which it is usually understood, is an absurdity if applied literally to our immortal essence, still the latter is a dis- tinct entity, immortal and eternal per se; and as in the case of criminals beyond redemption, when the shining thread which links the spirit to the soul from the moment of the birth of a child is violently snapped, and the disembodied entity is left to share the fate of the lower ani- mals, to dissolve into ether and have its indi- viduality annihilated, — even then the spirit remains a distinct being." 2 No one can read this — scarcely any part, in- deed, of the chapter from which it is taken — ■

1Isis Unveiled, vol. i. p. 315.
TEE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 293 without perceiving, by the light of the expla- nations given in the present volume, that the esoteric doctrine now fully given out was per- fectly familiar to the writer, though I have been privileged to put it for the first time into plain and unmistakable language. It takes some mental effort to realize the difference between personality and individual- ity, but the craving for the continuity of per- sonal existence, for the full recollection always of those transitory circumstances of our present physical life which make up the personality, is manifestly no more than a passing weakness of the flesh. For many people it will perhaps remain irrational to say that any person now living, with his recollections bounded by the years of his childhood, is the same individual as some one of quite a different nationality and epoch who lived thousands of years ago, or the same that will reappear after a similar lapse of time under some entirely new conditions in the future. But the feeling " I am I" is the same through the three lives and through all the hundreds; for that feeling is more deeply seated than the feeling " I am John Smith, so high, so heavy, with such and such property and rela- tions," Is it inconceivable, as a notion in the mind, that John Smith, inheriting the gift of Tithonus, changing his name from time to time,

294ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.
marrying afresh every other generation or so, losing property here, coming into possession of property there, and getting interested as time went on in a great variety of different pursuits, — is it inconceivable that such a person in a few thousand years should forget all circum- stances connected with the present life of John Smith, just as if the incidents of that life for him had never taken place ? And yet the Ego would be the same. If this is conceivable in the imagination, what can be inconceivable in the individual continuity of an intermittent life, interrupted and renewed at regular intervals, and varied with passages through a purer con- dition of existence. No less than it clears up the apparent con- flict between the identity of successive individ- ualities and the ''heresy " of individuality will the esoteric doctrine be seen to put the " in- comprehensible mystery of Karma, which Mr. Rhys Davids disposes of so summarily, on a perfectly intelligible and scientific basis. Of this he says that because Buddhism " does not acknowledge a soul " it has to resort to the des- perate expedient of a mystery to bridge over the gulf between one life and another some- where else, — the doctrine, namely, of Karma. And he condemns the idea as " a non-exist- ent fiction of the brain." Irritated as he feels THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 295 with what he regards as the absurdity of the doctrine, he yet applies patience and great men- tal ingenuity in the effort to evolve something that shall feel like a rational metaphysical con- ception out of the tangled utterances concern- ing Karma of the Buddhist scriptures. He writes : — "Karma, from a Buddhist point of view, avoids the superstitious extreme, on the one hand, of those who believe in the separate ex- istence of some, entity called the soul ; and the irreligious extreme, on the other, of those who do not believe in moral justice and retribu- tion. Buddhism claims to have looked through the word soul for the fact it purports to cover, and to have found no fact at all, but only one or other of twenty different delusions which blind the eyes of men. Nevertheless, Buddhism is convinced that if a man reaps sorrow, dis- appointment, pain, he himself, and no other, must at some time have sown folly, error, sin; and if not in this life, then in some former birth. Where, then, in the latter case, is the identity between him who sows and him who reaps ? In that which alone remains when a man dies, and the constituent parts of the sen- tient being are dissolved, in the result, namely, of his action, speech, and thought, in his good or evil Karma (literally his doing), which doe*

296ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.
not die. We are familiar with the doctrine,

4Whatever a man soweth that shall he also
reap,' and can therefore enter into the Bud- dhist feeling that whatever a man reaps that he must also have sown ; we are familiar with the doctrine of the indestructibility of force, and can therefore understand the Buddhist dogma (however it may contravene our Christian no- tions) that no exterior power can destroy the fruit of a man's deeds, that they must work out their full effect to the pleasant or the bitter end. But the peculiarity of Buddhism lies in this : that the result of what a man is or does is held not to be dissipated, as it were, into many sepa- rate streams, but to be concentrated together in the formation of one new sentient being, — new, that is, in its constituent parts and powers, but the same in its essence, its being, its doing, its Karma." Nothing could be more ingenious as an at- tempt to invent for Buddhism an explanation of its " mystery " on the assumption that the authors of the mystery threw it up originally as a " desperate expedient " to cover their re- treat from an untenable position. But in re- ality the doctrine of Karma has a far simpler history and does not need so subtle an interpret tation. Like many other phenomena of Nature having to do with futurity, it was declared by THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 297 Buddha an incomprehensible mystery, and ques- tions concerning it were thus put aside ; but he did not mean that because it was incompre- hensible for the populace it was incomprehen- sible, or any mystery at all, for the initiates in the esoteric doctrine. It was impossible to explain it without reference to the esoteric doctrine ; but the outlines of that science once grasped, Karma, like so much else, becomes a comparatively simple matter, — a mystery only in the sense in which also the affinity of sul- phuric acid for copper and its superior affinity for iron are also mysteries. Certainly esoteric science for its " lay chelas " at all events, like chemical science for its lay chelas, — all stu- dents, that is to say, of its mere physical phe- nomena,— leaves some mysteries unfathomed in the background. I am not prepared to explain by what precise molecular changes the higher affinities which constitute Karma are stored up in the permanent elements of the fifth principle. But no more is ordinary science qualified to say what it is in a molecule of oxygen which in- duces it to desert the molecule of hydrogen with which it was in alliance in the raindrop, and attach itself to a molecule of the iron of a railing on which it falls. But the speck of rust is engendered, and a scientific explanation of that occurrence is held to have been given

298ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.
when its affinities are ascertained and appealed to. So with Karma, the fifth principle takes up the affinities of its good and evil deeds in its passage through life, passes with them into Devachan, where those which are suitable to the atmosphere, so to speak, of that state, fruc- tify and blossom in prodigious abundance, and then passes on, with such as have not yet ex- hausted their energy, into the objective world once more. And as certainly as the molecule of oxygen brought into the presence of a hundred other molecules will fly to that with which it has the most affinity, so will the Karma-laden spiritual monad fly to that incar- nation with which its mysterious attractions link it. Nor is there in that process an}^ crea- tion of a new sentient being, except in the sense that the new bodily structure evolved is a new instrument of sensation. That which in- habits it, that which feels joy or sorrow, is the old Ego, — walled off by forgetf ulness from its last set of adventures on earth, it is true, but reaping their fruit nevertheless, — the same "I am I " as before. " Strange it is," Mr. Rhys Davids thinks, that " all this " — the explanation of Buddhist philosophy which esoteric materials have ena- bled him to give — " should have seemed not THE DOCTRINE REVIEWED. 299 unattractive, these 2,300 years and more, to many despairing and earnest hearts ; that they should have trusted themselves to the so seem- ing stately bridge which Buddhism has tried to build over the river of the mysteries and sor- rows of life. . . . They have failed to see that the very keystone itself, the link between one life and another, is a mere word, — this won- derful hypothesis, this airy nothing, this im- aginary cause beyond the reach of reason, — - the individualized and individualizing grace of Karma." It would have been strange indeed if Bud- dhism had been built on such a frail foundation; but its apparent frailty has been simply due to the fact that its mighty fabric of knowledge has hitherto been veiled from view. Now that the inner doctrine has been unveiled it will be seen how little it depends for any item of its belief on shadowy subtleties of metaphysics. So far as these have clustered round Buddhism they have merely been constructed by external interpreters of stray doctrinal hints that could not be entirely left out of the simple system of morals prescribed for the populace. In that which really constitutes Buddhism we find a sublime simplicity, like that of Na- ture herself, — one law running into infinite ramifications ; complexities of detail, it is true, ESOTERIC BUDDHISM. as Nature herself is infinitely complex in her manifestations, however unchangeably uniform in her purposes, but always the immutable doc- trine of causes and their effects, which in turn become causes again in an endless cyclic pro- gression. APPENDIX. NOTE TO CHAPTER I. The further we advance in occult study, the more ex- alted in many ways become our conceptions of the Ma- hatmas. The complete comprehension of the manner in which these persons become differentiated from human- kind at large, is not to be achieved by the help of mere intellectual effort. There are aspects of the adept nature which have to do with the extraordinary development of the higher principles in man, which cannot be realized by the application of the lower. But while crude concep- tions in the beginning thus fall very short of reaching the real level of the facts, a curious complication of the prob- lem arises in this way. Our first idea of an adept who has achieved the power of penetrating the tremendous secrets of spiritual nature, is modelled on our conception of a very highly gifted man of science on our own plane. We are apt to think of him as once an adept always an adept, — as a very exalted human being, who must neces- sarily bring into play in all the relations of his life the attributes that attach to him as a Mahatma. In this way, while — as above pointed out — we shall certainly fail, do all we can, to do justice in our thoughts to his attributes as a Mahatma, we may very easily run to the opposite extreme in our thinking about him in his ordinary human

302APPENDIX.
aspect, and thus land ourselves in many perplexities, as we acquire a partial familiarity with the characteristics of the occult world. It is just because the highest attributes of adeptship have to do with principles in human nature which quite transcend the limits of physical existence, that the adept of Mahatma can only be such in the high- est acceptation of the word, when he is, as the phrase goes, "out of the body," or at all events thrown by spe- cial efforts of his will into an abnormal condition. When he is not called upon to make such efforts or to pass en- tirely beyond the limitations of this fleshly prison, he is much more like an ordinary man than experience of him in some of his aspects would lead his disciples to believe. A correct appreciation of this state of things explains the apparent contradiction involved in the position of the occult pupil towards his masters, as compared with some of the declarations that the master himself will frequently put forward. For example, the Mahatmas are persistent in asserting that they are not infallible, that they are men, like the rest of us, perhaps with a somewhat more enlarged comprehension of nature than the generality of mankind, but still liable to err both in the direction of practical business with which they may be concerned, and in their estimate of the characters of other men, or the capacity of candidates for occult development. But how are we to reconcile statements of this nature with the fundamental principle at the bottom of all occult research which enjoins the neophyte to put his trust in the teaching and guidance of his master absolutely and without re- serve ? The solution of the difficulty is found in the state of things above referred to. While the adept may be a man quite surprisingly liable to err sometimes in the ma- nipulation of worldly business, just as with ourselves some * APPENDIX. 303 of the greatest men of genius are liable to make mis- takes in their daily life that matter-of-fact people could never commit, on the other hand, directly a Mahatma comes to deal with the higher mysteries of spiritual sci- ence, he does so by virtue of the exercise of his Mahatma- attributes, and in dealing with these can hardly be recog- nized as liable to err. This consideration enables us to feel that the trust- worthiness of the teachings derived from such a source as those which have inspired the present volume, is alto- gether above the reach of small incidents which in the progress of our experience may seem to claim a revision of that enthusiastic confidence in the supreme wisdom of the adepts which the first approaches to occult study will generally evoke. Not that such enthusiasm or reverence will really be diminished on the part of any occult chela as his compre- hension of the world he is entering expands. The man who in one of his aspects is a Mahatma, may rather be brought within the limits of affectionate human regard, than deprived of his claims to reverence, by the consid- eration that in his ordinary life he is not so utterly lifted above the commonplace run of human feeling as some of his Nirvanic experiences might lead us to believe that he would be. If we keep constantly in mind that an adept is only truly an adept when exercising adept functions, but that when exercising these he may soar into spiritual rapport with that which is, in regard at all events to the limita- tions of our solar system, all that we practically mean by omniscience, we shall then be guarded from many of the mistakes that the embarrassments of the subject might create. Intricacies concerning the nature of the adept may be

304APPENDIX.
noticed here, which will hardly be quite intelligible with- out reference to some later chapters of this book, but which have so important a bearing on all attempts to un- derstand what adeptship is really like that it may be con- venient to deal with them at once. The dual nature of the Mahatma is so complete that some of his influence or wisdom on the higher planes of nature may actually be drawn upon by those in peculiar psychic relations with him, without the Manhatma-man being at the moment even conscious that such an appeal has been made to him. In this way it becomes open to us to speculate on the possibility that the relation between the spiritual Ma- hatma and the Mahatma-man may sometimes be rather in the nature of what is sometimes spoken of in esoteric writing as an overshadowing than as an incarnation in the complete sense of the word. Furthermore as another independent complication of the matter we reach this fact, that each Mahatma is not merely a human Ego in a very exalted state, but belongs, so to speak, to some specific department in the great econ- omy of nature. Every adept must belong to one or other of seven great types of adeptship ; but although we may almost certainly infer that correspondences might be traced between these various types and the seven princi- ples of man, I should shrink myself from attempting a complete elucidation of this hypothesis. It will be enough to apply the idea to what we know vaguely of the occult organization in its higher regions. For some time past it has been affirmed in esoteric writing that there are five great Chohans or superior Mahatmas presiding over the whole body of the adept fraternity. When the foregoing chapter of this book was written, I was under the impres- sion that one supreme chief on a different level again .zeroised authority over these five Chohans, but it now APPENDIX. 305 appears to me that this personage may rather be regarded as a sixth Chohan, himself the head of the sixth type of Mahatmas, and this conjecture leads at once to the fur- ther inference that there must be a seventh Chohan to complete the correspondences which we thus discern. But just as the seventh principle in nature or in man is a con- ception of the most intangible order, eluding the grasp of any intellectual thinking, and only describable in shadowy phrases of metaphysical non-significance, so we may be quite sure that the seventh Chohan is very unapproach- able by untrained imaginations. But even he no doubt plays a part in what may be called the higher economy of spiritual nature, and that there is such a personage vis- ible occasionally to some of the other Mahatmas I take to be the case. But speculation concerning him is valuable chiefly as helping to give consistency to the idea above thrown out, according to which the Mahatmas may be comprehended in their true aspect as necessary phe- nomena of nature without whom the evolution of hu- manity could hardly be imagined as advancing, not as merely exceptional men who have attained great spiritual exaltation. NOTE TO CHAPTER II. Some objection has been raised to the method in which the Esoteric Doctrine is presented to the reader in this book, on the ground that it is materialistic. I doubt if in any other way the ideas to be dealt with could so well be brought within the grasp of the mind, but it is easy, when they once are grasped, to translate them into terms of idealism. The higher principles will be the better suscep-

306APPENDIX.
tible of treatment as so many different states of the Ego,, when the attributes of these states have been separately- considered as principles undergoing evolution. But it may be useful to dwell for a while on the view of the hu- man constitution according to which the consciousness of the entity migrates successively through the stages of de- velopment, which the different principles represent. In the highest evolution we need concern ourselves with at present — that of the perfected Mahatma — it is some- times asserted in occult teaching that the consciousness of the Ego has acquired the power of residing altogether in the sixth principle. But it would be a gross view of the subject, and erroneous, to suppose that the Mahatma has on that account shaken off altogether, like a discarded sheath or sheaths, the fourth and fifth principles, in which his consciousness may have been seated during an ear- lier stage of his evolution. The entity which was the fourth or fifth principle before, has come now to be dif- ferent in its attributes, and to be entirely divorced from certain tendencies or dispositions, and is therefore a sixth principle. The change can be spoken of in more general terms as an emancipation of the adept's nature from the enthralments of his lower self, from desires of the ordi- nary earth-life — even from the limitations of the affec- tions ; for the Ego, which is entirely conscious in his sixth principle, has realized the unity of the true Egos of all mankind on the higher plane, and can no longer be drawn by bonds of sympathy to any one more than to any other. He has attained that love of humanity as a whole which transcends the love of the Maya or illusion which consti- tutes the separate human creature for the limited being on the lower levels . of evolution. He has not lost his fourth and fifth principles, — these have themselves at- tained Mahatmaship ; just as the animal soul of the lowei APPENDIX. 307 kingdom, in reaching humanity, has blossomed into the fifth state. That consideration helps us to realize more accurately the passage of ordinary human beings through the long series of incarnations of the human plane. Once fairly on that plane of existence, the consciousness of the primitive man gradually envelops the attributes of the fifth principle. But the Ego at first remains a centre of thought-activity working chiefly with impulses and desires of the fourth stage of evolution. Flashes of the higher human reason illumine it fitfully at first, but by degrees the more intellectual man grows into the fuller possession of this. The impulses of human reason assert themselves more and more strongly. The invigorated mind becomes the predominant force in the life. . Consciousness is trans- ferred to the fifth principle, oscillating, however, between the tendencies of the lower and higher nature for a long while, — that is to say, over vast periods of evolution and many hundred lives, — and thus gradually purifying and exalting the Ego. All this while the Ego is thus a unity in one aspect of the matter, and its sixth principle but a potentiality of ultimate development. As regards the seventh principle, that is the true Unknowable, the su- preme controlling cause of all things, which is the same for one man as for every man, the same for humanity as for the animal kingdom, the same for the physical as for the astral or devachanic or nirvanic planes of existence : no one man has got a seventh principle, in the higher conception of the subject ; we a^e all in the same un- fathomable way overshadowed by the seventh principle of the cosmos. How does this view of the subject harmonize with the statement in the foregoing chapter, that in a certain sense the principles are separable, and that the sixth even can be imagined as divorcing itself from its next lower neigh-

308APPENDIX.
bor, and, by reincarnation, as growing a new fifth prin- ciple by contact with a human organism ? There is no incompatibility in the spirit of the two views. The sev- enth principle is one and indivisible in all Nature, but there is a mysterious persistence through it of certain life- impulses, which thus constitute threads on which succes- sive existences may be strung. Such a life-impulse does not expire even in the extraordinary case supposed, in which an Ego, projected upon it and developed along it up to a certain point, falls away from it altogether and as a complete whole. I am not in a position to dogmatize with precision as to what happens in such a case, but the subsequent incarnations of the spirit along that line of impulse are clearly of the original sequence ; and thus, in the materialistic treatment of the idea, it may be said, with as much approach to accuracy as language will allow in either mode, that the sixth principle of the fallen entity in such a case separates itself from the original fifth, and reincarnates on its own account. But with these abnormal processes it is unnecessary to occupy ourselves to any great extent. The normal evo- lution is the problem we have first to solve ; and while the consideration of the seven principles as such is, to my own mind, the most instructive method by which the prob- lem can be dealt with, it is well to remember always that the Ego is a unity progressing through various spheres or states of being, undergoing change and growth and purifi- cation all through the course of its evolution, — that it is a consciousness seated in this, or that, or the other, of the potential attributes of a human entity. APPENDIX. 309 NOTE TO CHAPTER III. An expression occurs in this chapter which does not recommend itself to the somewhat fuller conceptions I have been able to form of the subject since this book was written. It is stated that " the spiritual monads — the individual atoms of that immense life-impulse of which so much has been said — do not fully complete their min- eral existence on globe A, then complete it on globe B, and so on. They pass several times round the whole cir- cle as minerals, and then again several times round as vegetables, &c." Now it is intelligible to me that I was permitted to use this form of expression in the first in- stance because the main purpose in view was to elucidate the way in which the human entity was gradually evolved from processes of Nature going on in the first instance in lower kingdoms. But in truth at a later stage of the inquiry it becomes manifest that the vast process of which the evolution of humanity and all which that leads up to is the crowning act, the descent of spirit into matter, does not bring about a differentiation of individualities until a much later stage than is contemplated in the passage just quoted. In the mineral worlds on which the higher forms of plant and animal life have not yet been established, there is no such thing, as yet, as an individual spiritual monad, unless indeed by virtue of some inconceivable unity — inconceivable, but subject to treatment as a the- ory none the less — in the life-impulses which are destined to give rise to the later chains of highly organized exist- ence. Just as in a preceding note we assumed the unity of such a life-impulse in the case of a perverted human Ego falling away as a whole from the current of evolu- tion on which it was launched, so we may assume the same

310APPENDIX.
unity backwards to the earliest beginnings of the plane- tary chain. But this can be no more than a protective hypothesis, reserving us the right to investigate some mys- teries later on that we need not go into at present. For a general appreciation of the subject it is better to regard the first infusion, as it were, of spirit into matter as pro- voking a homogeneous manifestation. The specific forms of the mineral kingdom, the crystals and differentiated rocks, are but bubbles in the seething mass assuming par- tially individualized forms for a time, and rushing again into the general substance of the growing cosmos, not yet true individualities. Nor even in the vegetable kingdom does individuality set in. The vegetable establishes or- ganic matter in physical manifestation, and prepares the way for the higher evolution of the animal kingdom. In this, for the first time, but only in the higher regions of this, is true individuality evoked. Therefore it is not till we begin in imagination to contemplate the passage of the great life-impulse round the planetary chain on the level of animal incarnation, that it would be strictly justifiable to speak of the spiritual monads as travelling round the circle as a plurality, to which the word " they " would properly apply. It is evidently not with the intention of encouraging any close study of evolution on the very grand scale with which we are dealing here, that the adept authors of the doctrine set forth in this volume have opened the subject of the planetary chain. As far as humanity is concerned, the period during which this earth will be occupied by our race is more than long enough to absorb all our specula- tive energy. The magnitude of the evolutionary process to be accomplished during that period is more than enough to tax to the utmost the capacities of an ordinary imagi- nation. But it is extremely advantageous for students of APPENDIX. 311 the occult doctrine to realize the plurality of worlds in our system once for all — their intimate relations with, their interdependence on each other — before concentrat- ing attention on the evolution of this single planet. For in many respects the evolution of a single planet follows a routine, as it will be found directly, that bears an ana- logical resemblance to the routine affecting the entire se- ries of planets to which it belongs. The older writings on occult science, of the obscurely worded order, some- times refer to successive states of one world, as if suc- cessive worlds were meant, and vice versa. Confusion thus arises in the reader's mind, and according to the bent of his own inclination he clings to various interpretations of the misty language. The obscurity disappears when we realize that in the actual facts of Nature we have to recognize both courses of change. Each planet, while in- habited by humanity, goes through metamorphoses of a highly important and impressive character, the effect of which may in each case be almost regarded as equivalent to the reconstitution of the world. But none the less, if the whole group of such changes is treated as a unity, does it form one of a higher series of changes. The sev- eral worlds of the chain are objective realities, and not symbols of change in one single, variable world. Further remarks on this head will fall into their place more nat- urally at the close of a later chapter. NOTE TO CHAPTERS V., VI. There is no part of the present volume which I now regard as in so much urgent need of amplification as chap-

812APPENDIX.
ters V. and VI. The Kama loca stage of existence, and that higher region or state of Devachan, to which it is but the antechamber, were, designedly I take it, left by our teachers in the first instance in partial obscurity, in order that the whole scheme of evolution might be the better understood. The spiritual state which immediately fol- lows our present physical life is a department of Nature, the study of which is almost unhealthily attractive for every one who once realizes that some contact with it — some processes of experiment with its conditions — are pos- sible even during this life. Already we can to a certain ex- tent discern the phenomena of that state of existence into which a human creature passes at the death of the body. The experience of spiritualism has supplied us with facts concerning it in very great abundance. These facts are but too highly suggestive of theories and inferences which seem to reach the ultimate limits of speculation, and noth- ing but the bracing mental discipline of esoteric study in its broadest aspect will protect any mind addressed to the consideration of these facts from conclusions which that study shows to be necessarily erroneous. For this reason, theosophical inquirers have nothing to regret as far as their own progress in spiritual science is at stake, in the circumstances which have hitherto induced them to be rather neglectful of the problems that have to do with the state of existence next following our own. It is im- possible to exaggerate the intellectual advantages to be derived from studying the broad design of Nature through- out those vast realms of the future which only the perfect clairvoyance of the adepts can penetrate, before going into details regarding that spiritual foreground, which is partially accessible to less powerful vision, but liable, on a first acquaintance, to be mistaken for the whole expanse of the future. APPENDIX. 313 The earlier processes, however, through which the soul passes at death, may be described at this date somewhat more fully than they are denned in the foregoing chapter. The nature of the struggle that takes place in Kama loca between the upper and lower duads may now, I believe, be apprehended more clearly than at first. That struggle appears to be a very protracted and variegated process, and to constitute, — not, as some of us may have conjec- tured at first, an automatic or unconscious assertion of affinities or forces quite ready to determine the future of the spiritual monad at the period of death, — but a phase of existence which may be, and in the vast majority of cases is more than likely to be, continued over a consider- able series of years. And during this phase of existence it is quite possible for departed human entities to mani- fest themselves to still living persons through the agency of spiritual mediumship, in a way which may go far to- wards accounting for, if it does not altogether vindicate, the impressions that spiritualists derive from such com- munications. But we must not conclude too hastily that the human soul going through the struggle or evolution of Kama loca is in all respects what the first glance at the position, as thus defined, may seem to suggest. First of all, we must beware of too grossly materializing our conception of the struggle, by thinking of it as a mechanical separation of principles. There is a mechanical separation involved in the discard of lower principles when the consciousness of the Ego is firmly seated in the higher. Thus at death the body is mechanically discarded by the soul, which in union, perhaps (with intermediate principles), may act- ually be seen by some clairvoyants of a high order to quit the tenement it no longer needs. And a very sim- ilar process may ultimately take place in Kama loca it-

314APPENDIX.
self, in regard to the matter of the astral principles. But postponing this consideration for a few moments, it is im- portant to avoid supposing that the struggle of Kama loca does itself constitute this ultimate division of principles, or second death upon the astral plane. The struggle of Kama loca is in fact the life of the en- tity in that phase of existence. As quite correctly stated in the text of the foregoing chapter, the evolution taking place during that phase of existence is not concerned with the responsible choice between good and evil which goes on during physical life. Kama loca is a portion of the great world of effects, — not a sphere in which causes are generated (except under peculiar circumstances). The Kama loca entity, therefore, is not truly master of his own acts ; he is rather the sport of his own already estab- lished affinities. But these are all the while asserting themselves, or exhausting themselves, by degrees, and the Kama loca entity has an existence of vivid consciousness of one sort or another the whole time. Now a moment's reflection will show that those affinities, which are gath- ering strength. and asserting themselves, have to do with the spiritual aspirations of the life last experienced, while those which are exhausting themselves have to do with its material tastes, emotions, and proclivities. The Kama loca entity, be it remembered, is on his way to Devachan, or, in other words, is growing into that state which is the Devachanic state, and the process of growth is accom- plished by action and reaction, by ebb and flow, like al- most every other in Nature, — by a species of oscillation between the conflicting attractions of matter and spirit. Thus the Ego advances towards Heaven, so to speak, or recedes towards earth, during his Kama loca existence, and it is just this tendency to oscillate between the two poles of thought or condition that brings him back occa- sionally within the sphere of the life he has just quitted. APPENDIX. gig thiet tf £\wa,nJ meaDS "* °n°e that his «*»* »jmpa- tine. with that Me are dissipated. His sympathies^ the higher aspects of that life, be it remembered, are not even on their way to dissipation. For instance, in what i exerc.se of affection, which is a function of Devachanic essence in a preeminent degree. Bnt perhaps even" regard to h affecti(ms there be ^ J ™ m aspects of these, and the contemplation of [hem, w h he _ tances and surroundings of the earth-life, may of en have to do wtth the recession towards earth-life of the Kama loca entity referred to above Of conrseit will be apparent at once that the inter- ZrZTl PraCtiCe °f SpiritUaKsm SetS «P ^twcen snch Kama-loca entities as are here in view, and the periods of the soul's existence in which earth memories engage its attention ; and there are two consider" of ^ry important natnre which arise out JZZ 1st. While its attention is thus directed, it is turned away from the spiritual progress on which t is enZli during its oscillations in the other direction. It Ly f afr 1 well remember, and in conversation refer to th I , . aspirations of the life m earth, ^^ J?. « iZTC'T t0 be °f " °rfer te eannot b a! latcdbact into terms of the ordinarv phvsical iutellec wtii:1 th- T' io be not •**» fc« faculties which are in operation in the soul during its oe upatiou Wlth old.earth memor;es The ZJ oc w & f ed> but °niy to a ^ im^« -*-t by the case of a poor emigrant, whom we may imagine prospering in his new country, getting educated there concerning himself with its publics and fa^

316APPENDIX.
philanthropy, and so on. He may keep up an interchange of letters with his relations at home, but he will find it difficult to keep them au courant with all that has come to be occupying his thoughts. The illustration will only fully apply to our present purpose, however, if we think of the emigrant as subject to a psychological law which draws a veil over his understanding when he sits down to write to his former friends, and restores him during that time to his former mental condition. He would then be less and less able to write about the old topics as time went on, for they would not only be below the level of those to the con- sideration of which his real mental activities had risen, but would to a great extent have faded from his memory. His letters would be a source of surprise to their recip- ients, who would say to themselves that it was certainly so-and-so who was writing, but that he had grown very dull and stupid compared to what he used to be before he went abroad. 2dly. It must be borne in mind that a very well-known law of physiology, according to which faculties are invig- orated by use and atrophied by neglect, applies on the as- tral as well as on the physical plane. The soul in Kama- loca, which acquires the habit of fixing its attention on the memories of the life it has quitted, will strengthen and harden those tendencies which are at war with its higher impulses. The more frequently it is appealed to by the affection of friends still in the body to avail itself of the opportunities furnished by mediumship for mani- festing its existence on the physical plane, the more vehe- ment will be the impulses which draw it back to physical life, and the more serious the retardation of its spiritual progress. This consideration appears to involve the most influential motive which leads the representatives of The- osophical teaching to discountenance and disapprove of APPENDIX. 317 all attempts to hold communication with departed souls by means of the spiritual seance. The more such com- munications are genuine the more detrimental they are to the inhabitants of Kama loca concerned with them. In the present state of our knowledge it is difficult to deter- mine with confidence the extent to which the Kama loca entities are thus injured. And we may be tempted to be- lieve that in some cases the great satisfaction derived by the living persons who communicate, may outweigh the injury so inflicted on the departed soul. This satisfac- tion, however, will only be keen in proportion to the fail- ure of the still living friend to realize the circumstances under which the communication takes place. At first, it is true, very shortly after death, the still vivid and com- plete memories of earth-life may enable the Kama loca entity to manifest himself as a personage very fairly like his deceased self, but from the moment of death the change in the direction of his evolution sets in. He will, as manifesting on the physical plane, betray no fresh fer- mentation of thought in his mind. He will never, in that manifestation, be any wiser, or higher in the scale of Na- ture, than he was when he died ; on the contrary, he must become less and less intelligent, and apparently less in- structed than formerly, as time goes on. He will never do himself justice in communication with the friends left behind, and his failure in this respect will grow more and more painful by degrees. Yet another consideration operates to throw a very doubtful light on the wisdom or propriety of gratifying a desire for intercourse with deceased friends. We may say, never mind the gradually fading interest of the friend who has gone before, in the earth left behind ; while there is anything of his or her old self left to manifest itself to us, it will be a delight to communicate even with that*

318APPENDIX.
And we may argue that if the beloved person is delayed a little on his way to Heaven by talking with us, he or she would be willing to make that sacrifice for our sake. The point overlooked here is, that on the astral, just as on the physical plane, it is a very easy thing to set up a bad habit. The soul in Kama loca once slaking a thirst for earthly intercourse at the wells of mediumship will have a strong impulse to fall back again and again on that in- dulgence. We may be doing a great deal more than di- verting the soul's attention from its own proper business by holding spiritualistic relations with it. We may be doing it serious and almost permanent injury. I am not affirming that this would invariably or generally be the case, but a severe view of the ethics of the subject must recognize the dangerous possibilities involved in the course of action under review. On the other hand, however, it is plain that cases may arise in which the desire for com- munication chiefly asserts itself from the other side : that is to say, in which the departed soul is laden with some unsatisfied desire — pointing possibly towards the fulfil- ment of some neglected duty on earth — the attention to which, on the part of still living friends, may have an ef- fect quite the reverse of that attending the mere encour- agement of the Kama loca entity in the resumption of its old earthly interests. In such cases the living friends may, by falling in with its desire to communicate, be the means, indirectly, of smoothing the path of the spiritual progress. Here again, however, we must be on our guard against the delusive aspect of appearances. A wish man- ifested by an inhabitant of Kama loca may not always be the expression of an idea then operative in his mind. It may be the echo of an old, perhaps of a very old, desire, then for the first time finding a channel for its outward expression. In this way, although it would be reasonable APPENDIX. 319 to treat as important an intelligible wish conveyed to us from Kama loca by a person only lately deceased, it would be prudent to regard with great suspicion such a wish ema- nating from the shade of a person who had been dead a long time, and whose general demeanor as a shade did not seem to convey the notion that he retained any vivid con- sciousness of his old personality. The recognition of all these facts and possibilities of Kama loca will, I think, afford theosophists a satisfactory explanation of a good many experiences connected with spiritualism which the first exposition of the Esoteric Doc- trine, as bearing on this matter, left in much obscurity. It will be readily perceived that as the soul slowly clears itself in Kama loca of the affinities which retard its Devachanic development, the aspect it turns towards the earth is more and more enfeebled, and it is inevitable that there must always be in Kama loca an enormous number of entities nearly ripe for a complete mergence in Devachan, who ou that very account appear to an earthly observer in a state of advanced decrepitude. These will have sunk, as regards the activity of their lower astral principles, into the condition of the altogether vague and unintelligible entities, which, following the example of older occult writers, I have referred to as " shells " in the text of this chapter. The designation, however, is not altogether a happy one. It might have been better to have followed another precedent, and to have called them "shades," but either way their condition would be the same. All the vivid consciousness inhering, as they left the earth, in the principles appropriately related to the activities of physical life, has been transferred to the higher principles which do not manifest at stances. Their memory of earth-life has almost become extinct. Their lower principles are in such cases only reawakened by the

320APPENDIX.
influences of the mediumistic current into which they may be drawn, and they become then little more than astral looking-glasses, in which the thoughts of the medium or sitters at the stance are reflected. If we can imagine the colors on a painted canvas sinking by degrees into the substance of the material, and at last re emerging in their pristine brilliancy on the other side, we shall be conceiv- ing a process which might not have destroyed the picture, but which would leave a gallery in which it took place a dreary scene of brown and meaningless backs, and that is very much what the Kama loca entities become before they ultimately shed the very material on which their first astral consciousness operated, and pass into the wholly purified Devachanic condition. But this is not the whole of the story which teaches us to regard manifestations coming from Kama loca with dis- trust. Our present comprehension of the subject enables us to realize that when the time arrives for that second death on the astral plane, which releases the purified Ego from Kama loca altogether and sends it onward to the Devachanic state — something is left behind in Kama loca which corresponds to the dead body bequeathed to the earth when the soul takes its first flight from physical existence. A dead astral body is in fact left behind in Kama loca, and there is certainly no impropriety in ap- plying the epithet " shell " to that residuum. The true shell in that state disintegrates in Kama loca before very long, just as the true body left to the legitimate processes of Nature on earth would soon decay and blend its ele- ments with the general reservoirs of matter of the order to which they belong. But until that disintegration is ac- complished, the shell which the real Ego has altogether abandoned may even in that state be mistaken sometimes at spiritual seances for a living entity. It remains for a APPENDIX. 321 time an astral looking-glass, in which mediums may see their own thoughts reflected, and take these back, fully believing them to come from an external source These phenomena in the truest sense of the term are galvanized • astral corpses ; none the less so, because until they are actually disintegrated a certain subtle connection will sub- sist between them and the true Devachanic spirit ; just as such a subtle communication subsists in the first in- stance between the Kama loca entity and the dead body left on earth. That last - mentioned communication is kept up by the finally-diffused material of the original third principle, or linga sharira, and a study of this branch of the subject will, I believe, lead us up to a better com- prehension than we possess at present of the circum- stances under which materializations are sometimes ac- complished at spiritual seances. But without going into that digression now, it is enough to recognize that the analogy may help to show how, between the Devachanic entity and the discarded shell in Kama loca a similar con- nection may continue for a while, acting, while it lasts, as a drag on the higher spirit, but perhaps as an after-glow of sunset on the shell. It would surely be distressing, however, m the highest degree, to any living friend of rhe person concerned, to get, through clairvoyance, or in any other way, sight or cognition of such a shell, and to be led mto mistaking it for the true entity. The comparatively clear view of Kama loca which we are now enabled to take, may help us to employ terms re- a mg to its phenomena with more precision than we have hitherto been able to attain. I think if we adopt one new expression, "astral soul," as applying to the entities in Kama loca who have recently quitted earth-life, or who for other reasons still retain, in the aspect they turn back towards earth, a large share of the intellectual attributes

322APPENDIX.
that distinguished them on earth, we shall then find the other terms in use already, adequate to meet our remain- ing emergencies. Indeed, we may then get rid entirely of the inconvenient term " elementary," liable to be con- fused with elemental, and singularly inappropriate to the beings it describes. I would suggest that the astral soul as it sinks (regarded from our point of view) into intel- lectual decrepitude, should be spoken of in its faded con- dition as a shade, and that the term shell should be re- served for the true shells or astral dead bodies which the Devachanic spirit has finally quitted. We are naturally led in studying the law of spiritual growth in Kama loca to inquire how long a time may probably elapse before the transfer of consciousness from the lower to the higher principles of the astral soul may be regarded as complete ; and as usual, when we come to figures relating to the higher processes of Nature, the an- swer is very elastic. But I believe the esoteric teachers of the East declare that as regards the average run of humanity — for what may be called, in a spiritual sense, the great middle classes of humanity — it is unusual that a Kama loca entity will be in a position to manifest as such for more than twenty-five to thirty years. But on each side of this average the figures may run up very consid- erably. That is to say, a very ignoble and besotted hu- man creature may hang about in Kama loca for a much longer time for want of any higher principles sufficiently developed to take up his consciousness at all, and at the other end of the scale the very intellectual and mentally- active soul may remain for very long periods in Kama loca (in the absence of spiritual affinities in corresponding force), by reason of the great persistence of forces and causes generated on the higher plane of effects, though mental activity could hardly be divorced in this way from APPENDIX. 323 spirituality except in cases where it was exclusively asso- ciated with worldly ambition. Again, while Kama loca periods may thus be prolonged beyond the average from various causes, they may sink to almost infinitesimal brev- ity when the spirituality of a person dying at a ripe old age, and at the close of a life which has legitimately ful- filled its purpose, is already far advanced. There is one other important possibility connected with manifestations reaching us by the usual channels of com- munication with Kama loca, which it is desirable to notice here, although from its nature the realization of such a possibility cannot be frequent. No recent students of theosophy can expect to know as yet very much about the conditions of existence which await adepts who relinquish the use of physical bodies on earth. The higher possi- bilities open to them appear to me quite beyond the reach of intellectual appreciation. No man is clever enough, by virtue of the mere cleverness seated in a liv- ing brain, to understand Nirvana ; but it would appear that adepts in some cases elect to pursue a course lying midway between re-incarnation and the passage into Nir- vana, and in the higher regions of Devachan ; that is to say, in the arupa state of Devachan may await the slow advance of human evolution towards the exalted condi- tion they have thus attained. Now an adept who had thus become a Devachanic spirit of the most elevated type would not be cut off by the conditions of his Devachanic state — as would be the case with a natural Devachanic spirit passing through that state on his way to re-incarna- tion — from manifesting his influence on earth. His would certainly not be an influence which would make itself felt by the instrumentality of any physical signs to mixed audiences, but it is not impossible that a medium of the highest type — who would more properly be called APPENDIX. a seer — might be thus influenced. By such an Adept spirit, some great men in the world's history may from time to time have been overshadowed and inspired, con- sciously or unconsciously as the case may have been: The disintegration of shells in Kama loca will inevi- tably suggest to any one who endeavors to comprehend the process at all, that there must be in Nature some general reservoirs of the matter appropriate to that sphere of existence, corresponding to the physical earth and its surrounding elements, into which our own bodies are resigned at death. The grand mysteries on which this consideration impinges will claim a far more exhaustive investigation than we have yet been enabled to under- take ; but one broad idea connected with them may use- fully be put forward without further delay. The state of Kama loca is one which has its corresponding orders of matter in manifestation round it. I will not here at- tempt to go into the metaphysics of the problem, which might even lead us to discard the notion that astral mat- ter need be any less real and tangible than that which appeals to our physical senses. It is enough for the present to explain that the propinquity of Kama loca to the earth, which is so readily made apparent by spirit- ualistic experience, is explained by Oriental teaching to arise from this fact, — that Kama loca is just as much in and of the earth as, during our lives, our astral soul is in and of the living man. The stage of Kama loca, in fact, the great realm of matter in the appropriate state which constitutes Kama loca and is perceptible to the senses of astral entities, as also to those of many clair- voyants, is the fourth principle of the earth, just as the Kama-rupa is the fourth principle of man. For the earth has its seven principles like the human creatures who in- habit it. Thus, the Devachanic state corresponds to the APPENDIX. 325 fifth principle of the earth, and Nirvana to the sixth principle. NOTE TO CHAPTER VII. Later information and study — the comparison, that is to say, of the various branches of the doctrine, and the col, location of other statements with those in Chapter VII — show the difficulty of applying figures to the Esoteric Doc- trines m a very striking light. Figures may be quite trust- worthy as representing broad averages, and yet very misleading when applied to special cases. Devachanic periods vary for different people within such very wide limits that any rule laid down in the matter must be sub- ject to a bewildering cloud of exceptions. To begin with the average mentioned above has no doubt been computed with reference to fully matured adults. Between the quite young child who has no Devachanic period at all and the adult who accomplishes an average period we have to take note of persons dying in youth, who have accumulated Karma, and who must therefore pass through the usual stages of spiritual development, but for whom the brief lives they have spent have not produced causes which take very long to work themselves out. Such persons would return to incarnation after a sojourn in the world of effects of corresponding brevity. Again there are such things as artificial incarnations accomplished by the direct interven- tion of the Mahatmas when a chela who may not yet have acquired anything resembling the power of controlling the -matter himself, is brought back into incarnation almost immediately after his previous physical death, without having been suffered to float into the current of natural APPENDIX. causes at all. Of course in such cases it may be said that the claims the person concerned has established on the Mahatmas are themselves natural causes of a kind, the intervention of the Mahatmas, who are quite beyond the liability of acting capriciously in such a matter, being so much fruit of effort in the preceding life, so much Karma. But still either way such cases would be equally with- drawn from the operation of the general average rule. Clearly it is impossible when the complicated facts of an entirely unfamiliar science are being presented to untrained mind for the first time, to put them forward with all their appropriate qualifications, compensations and abnor- mal developments visible from the beginning. We must be content to take the broad rules first and deal with the exceptions afterwards, and especially is this the case with occult study, in connection with which the traditional methods of teaching, generally followed, aim at impress- ing every fresh idea on the memory, by provoking the perplexity it at last relieves. In relation to another mat- ter dealt with in the preceding pages, an important ex- ception in Nature has thus, it seems to me now, been left out of account. The description I have given of the prog- ress of the human tide-wave is quite coherent as it stands, but since the publication of the original edition of this book some criticism was directed, in India, to a compari- son between my version of the story and certain passages in other writings, known to emanate from a Mahatma. A discrepancy between the two statements was pointed out, the other version assuming the possibility that a monad actually might have travelled round the seven planets once more often than the compeers among whom he might ultimately find himself on this earth. My account of the obscurations appears to render this contingency impossi- ble. The clue to the mystery appears to lie outside the APPENDIX. 327 domain of those facts concerning which the adepts are willing to speak freely; and the reader must clearly un- derstand that the explanation I am about to offer is the fruit of my own speculation and comparison of different parts of the doctrine — not authentic information received from the author of my general teaching. The fact appears to be that the obscurations are so far complete as to present all the phenomena above described in regard to each planet they affect as a whole. But ex- ceptional phenomena, for which we must be ever on the alert, come into play even in this matter. The great bulk of humanity is driven on from one planet to the next by the great cyclic impulse when its time comes for such a transition, but the planet it quits is not utterly denuded of humanity, nor is it, in every region of its surface rendered, by the physical and climatic changes that come on, unfit to be the habitation of human beings. Even during ob- scuration a small colony of humanity clings to each planet, and the monads associated with these small colonies fol- lowing different laws of evolution, and beyond the reach of those attractions which govern the main vortex of hu- manity in the planet occupied by the great tide-wave, pass on from world to world along what may be called the inner round of evolution, far ahead of the race at large. What may be the circumstances which occasion- ally project a soul even from the midst of the great human vortex, right out of the attraction of the planet occupied by the tide-wave, and into the attraction of the Inner Round — is a question that can only be a subject for us at present of very uncertain conjecture. It may be worth while to draw attention, in connection with the solution I have ventured to offer as applicable to the problem of the Inner Rounds, to the way in which the fact of Nature I assume to exist, would harmonize APPENDIX. with the widely diffused doctrines of the Deluge. That portion of a planet which remained habitable during an obscuration would be equivalent to the Noah's Ark of the biblical narrative taken in its largest symbolical meaning. Of course the narrative of the Deluge has minor sym- bolical meanings also, but it does not appear improbable that the Kabalists should also have associated with it the larger significance now suggested. In due time when the obscured planet grew ready once more to receive a full population of humanity, the colonists of the ark would be ready to commence the process of populating it afresh. NOTE TO CHAPTER VIII. The condition into which the monads failing to pass the middle of the fifth round must fall as the tide of evo- lution sweeps on, leaving them stranded, so to speak, upon the shores of time, is not described very fully in this chapter. By a few words only is it indicated that the failures of each manwantara are not absolutely annihilated when they reach " the end of their tether," but are destined after some enormous period of waiting to pass once more into the current of evolution. Many inferences may be deduced from this condition of things. The period of waiting which the failures have thus to undergo, is, to begin with, a duration so stupendous as to baffle the im- agination. The latter half of the fifth round, the whole of the sixth and seventh have to be performed by the suc- cessful graduates in spirituality, and the latter rounds are of immensely longer duration than those of the middle period. Then follows the vast interval of Nirvanic rest, which closes the manwantara, the immeasurable Night APPENDIX. 329 of Brahma, the Pralaya of the whole planetary chain. Only when the next manwantara begins do the failures begin to wake from their awful trance — awful to the imagination of beings in the full activity of life, though such a trance, being necessarily all but destitute of con- sciousness, is possibly no more tedious than a dreamless night in the memory of a profound sleeper. The fate of the failures may be grievous first of all, rather on account of what they miss, than on account of what they incur. Secondly, however, it is grievous on account of that to which it leads, for all the trouble of physical life and almost endless incarnations must be gone through afresh, when the failures wake up; whereas the perfected beings, who outstripped them in evolution during that fifth round in which they became failures, will have grown into the god-like perfection of Dhyan Chohanhood during their trance, and will be the presiding geniuses of the next manwantara, not its helpless subjects. Apart altogether, meanwhile, from what may be regard- ed as the personal interest of the entities concerned, the existence of the failures in Nature at the beginning of each manwantara is a fact which contributes in a very important degree to a comprehension of the evolutionary system. When the planetary chain is first of all evolved out of chaos — if we may use such an expression as " first of all" in a qualified sense, having regard to the reflec- tion that "in the beginning" is a mere fa^on de parler applied to any period in eternity — there are no failures to deal with. Then the descent of spirit into matter, through the elemental, mineral, and other kingdoms, goes on in the way already described in earlier chapters of this book. But from the second manwantara of a planet- ary chain, during the activity of the solar system, which provides for many such manwantaras, the course of events APPENDIX. is somewhat different — easier, if I may again be allowed to use an expression that is applicable rather in a con- versational than a severely scientific sense. At any rate it is quicker, for human entities are already in Existence, ready to enter into incarnation as the world, also already in existence, can be got ready for them. The truth thus appears to be, that after the first manwantara of a series — ■ enormously longer in duration than its successors — no entities, then first evolved from quite the lower kingdoms, do more than attain the threshold of humanity. The late failures pass first into incarnation, and then eventually the surviving animal entities already differentiated. But, compared with the passages in the Esoteric Doctrine which affect the current evolution of our own race, these considerations, relating to the very early periods of world- evolution, have little more than an intellectual interest, and cannot as yet by any contributions of mine be very greatly amplified. %4 vO * 8 M v> ^ S Xi f\s \. V . ■ *V~' i ^°-<- ', ^ <p r " J* ' \°°. .^^ " -_ A L

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