the phenomena-mala

an illustrated arcana
of abstraction

dennis cordell
 THE PHENOMENA-MALA
An Illustrated Arcana of Abstraction

by
Dennis Cordell
www.denniscordell.zenfolio.com

All rights reserved. This book or any portion

thereof may not be reproduced or used in any
manner whatsoever without the expressed
written permission of the author.
bDe.gNas Productions
bde.gnas@yahoo.com
From the Cognitive Revolution (c.70,000 BCE), when Homo-Sapiens
evolved imagination, to modern times, art in its endless visual forms has
given clues to how humans record, behave and perceive the meaning of their
lives. This meaning was mostly depicted figuratively until the development of
visual abstraction. Much of early non-figurative art was inspired
telepathically by perfected beings of great power who channelled spiritual
teachings through selected human artists. The phenomena depicted in this
work could not be portrayed in a “realist” or figurative mode because much
phenomena is non-objective, of a spiritual nature, and not fully understood.

In spiritualism, ectoplasm is said to be formed by physical mediums while in

a trance state. This material is excreted as a gauze-like substance from
orifices on the medium’s body. Perfected beings, spirits or angels, are said to
drape this substance over a nonphysical object, thus enabling these spirits to
interact in the physical and perceivable universe. Some accounts claim that
ectoplasm begins clear and almost invisible, but darkens and becomes visible,
as the psychic energy becomes stronger. According to some mediums,
ectoplasm cannot occur in light conditions as the ectoplasmic substance
would disintegrate. Digital ectoplasm, which can be observed in higher levels
of light, often requires the digital sensor of a camera to act as a medium.
Digital ectoplasm discerned through telepathic photography can, under the
right circumstances, be observed near the base, or trunk, of various plants in
what initially appears as dew but lies in the plant’s cells just beneath the outer
membrane and the membrane-bounded organelles and nucleus. Much of plant
ectoplasm may channel messages having to do with photosynthesis and
environmental issues, although nature’s perfected beings will also use plants
to transmit what is sometimes referred to as ancient wisdom (eg. the burning
bush, the lotus, etc.)


Much of this communication occurs during the plant’s cellular mitosis as an
occult nursery rhyme. For the images in this study, begonia plants provided
much (but not all) of a digital seance, while the camera sensor functioned as a
“Ouija board” through a form of clairvoyance, or clairpixelation. The
camera’s sensor was able to pick up a jewel-like digital ectoplasm which was
later enhanced using photographic manipulation on a computer.

No purely divine being can have an independent conscious existence before

the spark which issued from the pure essence of the Absolute has passed
through every elemental form of the phenomenal world and acquired
individuality, first by natural impulse and then by self-induced and self-
devised efforts, and thus ascend through all the degrees of intelligence, from
the lowest to the highest mind, from mineral and plant, up to the realms of the
holiest archangel. When the mind becomes irradiated by enlightenment, then
the human mental faculty, the intellect, becomes suffused and filled with
spiritual discrimination and vision and is illuminated by the radiance of
divinity. Therefore, the radiant mind is human reason lit by the light of a
revelation of the divine, plus human intellect and self-consciousness.

Phenomena are the impermanent, ever-changing outward appearances of

things, as opposed to permanent enduring realities. Phenomena are objects of
perception as opposed to objects of cognition as that which is perceived by
the senses, contrasted with that which is conceived by the mind. The word
correlates with both meanings of noumena. Under the first meaning it may be
said that everything is phenomenal except reality — but the word may also be
used relatively. Under the second meaning, phenomena is a word stressing
the mechanical aspect of things, as contrasted with the unseen intelligences
behind such things, such as the forces of science and the intelligent noumena
of which they are the manifestations.


Induction is the process of reasoning from the parts to the whole, from the
particular to the general, or from the individual to the universal; contrasted
with deduction, which reasons from the whole to the parts, from the general
to the particular, from the universal to the individual. Science endeavors to
establish general laws by reasoning from particular observations. But it is
necessary to assume that what is true in an individual case will be true in the
general case of which it is only an instance. Hypotheses are necessarily and
naturally regarded as provisional, subject to modification in the light of
subsequent, more extended observations of nature. This method endeavors to
come to an understanding of nature by a continued process of trial and error,
the formulation of its laws becoming ever wider. But an essential part of this
method itself is deductive, since it reasons back from the provisional
hypotheses to new facts which support the refutation of them. Induction and
deduction are interdependent functions of the ratiocinative mind. The data of
scientific induction are sensory percepts and no amount of such data will
enable ascertaining the truth about the causal worlds which underlie
phenomena.

A monad is an elementary particle and one of the ultimate elements of the

universe which serves as a substantial form of being but lacking a clear
perception of other monads. Each monad is a center of force which is eternal
and indestructible, reflecting the universe as an established harmony. A
monad is a unit of consciousness as defined by Pythagoras to indicate unity.
Additionally, the monad is a spark which radiates in an infinite number of
rays from a primeval uncreated ray.


Number lies at the root of the manifested universe. Numbers and harmonious
proportions guide the first differentiations of homogeneous substance into
heterogeneous elements, and number and numbers set limits to the formative
hand of nature. Reasoning minds lend a spurious reality to abstractions in
which genuine realities appear in the guise of such abstraction. Number is
such an apparent abstraction, known only by its effects in a world which
seems real, and which regards number as an attribute. Yet nothing is more
fundamental than number. Balzac noted that number is an entity and a
divinity The creative logos itself is called a number, meaning number one,
arising out of no-number or the zero. Esoteric systems set great store by
numbers — some systems more so than others — because, thoroughly
mystical, numbers play a prominent part in every cosmogony. For the
Pythagoreans number was a creative, emanational formative power, and the
Sepher Yetsirah (Numbers of Creation) gives the whole process of evolution
in numbers, while elsewhere the I Ching speaks of celestial numbers.

The sacredness of numbers begins with the great first — the one, and ends
with the nought or zero — the boundless circle representing the universe. All
the intervening figures, however multiplied relate to facts in nature. They are
a key to the ancient views on cosmogony, including humanity and beings,
and the evolution of the races, spiritually as well as physically. The circle,
zero, or nought is the symbol of the all, equivalent to non-being, in
contradistinction to the number one. Number one is equivalent to the cosmic
monad, the odd. Odd numbers are considered to be perfect or celestial and the
even numbers imperfect, manifested, or terrestrial. The cosmic one, the first,
alone was cosmic unity and therefore good and harmonious, because no
disharmony can to be found in the unitary one alone. One is the universal
abstraction, entirely by itself and independent of every other power whether
noumenal or phenomenal. The cosmic one is intimately intertwined with the
universal zero, the latter being equivalent to the universal all.


The Pythagorean concept of the monad is a process of manifestation in which
the monad was the first phenomenon to come into existence. This
phenomenon produced the dyad as a duality which begat numeric integers
and numerous abstract entities. From these numbers came points, from points
came lines, from lines came two-dimensional entities, then three-dimensional
entities, bodies, and eventually culminating in the four elements of the
physical world: earth, water, fire and air.

In the Hi-ts’ze, the appendices to the I Ching, the universe is described as a

living organism called T’ai-ch’i (the supreme being, or most ultimate). The
processes of birth and rebirth, or the production of life, are due to the
manifestations of tao by means of the yang and yin. To yang belong the
numbers 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9; to yin belong the numbers 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10. There
are then five celestial and five terrestrial numbers. These rows of five operate
upon each other, and each number has another with which it corresponds. The
sum of either of these two number sets is twenty-five. It is in accordance with
these factors that the processes of the universe are effected. The text of the
original treatise is from a system of eight trigrams and sixty-four hexagrams,
composed of whole and broken lines. Altering the positions of the whole and
broken lines form the changes in the diagrams. This work has been assigned
to Fu-Hsi during the thirtieth century BCE. The first extant commentary on
the work is assigned to Ching Wen, founder of the Chou dynasty in 1122
BCE.


The tendency of evolution on an upward arc is towards unity; on a downward
arc, towards diversity; and both tendencies are active in the human being.
Unity may be viewed as simple or as all-inclusive as when it appears as the
goal of both analysis and synthesis. Cosmic unity implies wholeness,
homogeneity, uniformity, indivisibility and individuality. Its expression is
cosmic space but can be applied to any individual monadic unit. Unity, in
contrast with duality or multiplicity, is relative, such as a whole in relation to
its parts, or the hyparxis of a hierarchy. Hyparxis refers to a realm outside of
time and space. This is not a realm that is easily accessible, but something
that is encountered on the path of transformation. A hyparxis is the
reconciling impulse in the triad of time (past, present and future ) and later as
the reconciling or at least ‘connecting’ element between fact and value,
existence and essence, etc. Unity during manvantaric (a period of
manifestation) cosmic differentiation does not lose its origin in the vast
diversities of differentiation, for the unity remains original and expresses
itself at the same time as the emanated hierarchies which flow forth from it,
later in time to return into it again.

There is no supreme god in the Tao system of philosophy, no demiurge or

maker of the cosmos and the yearly renovation of nature is due to the
spontaneity of tao. As explained in the I Ching, tao brings about the revolving
mutations of the yin and yang in which there is a system of mutations of
nature — the most ultimate which produced the two regulating powers of yin
and yang which produce the four shapes of the seasons. Tao is the ultimate
reality in which all attributes are united, it is heavy as a stone but light as a
feather. It is the unity underlying plurality. Whatever is done without it fails;
whatever is done by means of it, succeeds. It has neither root nor stalk, leaf
nor flower. Yet upon it depends the generation and the growth of the cosmos
of ten thousand things, each after its kind. Svabhavat is an equivalent, also
the deep akashic abysses of the highest reaches of the cosmic anima mundi,
manifesting periodically.


The process of passing from the simple to the complex is known as
differentiation. Philosophically, differentiation is from homogeneity to
heterogeneity and from unity to multiplicity. This does not imply that unity is
less than multiplicity or diminished by it, for unity contains all that comes
from it. Differentiation is much the same as manifestation in which the
process of evolution on the downward arc is one of continuous
differentiations, while the inverse process takes place on the upward arc. A
duad represents the beginning of differentiation or departure from cosmic
simplicity and wholeness. Differentiation begins after zero, from which the
number one is the first differentiation. Spirit is the first differentiation from
space, and primordial matter is the first differentiation from spirit.
Differentiation also implies specialization of function, as is seen in biology in
connection with the evolution of the cell.

A monad is a spiritual life-atom, a living being, evolving on its own plane. A

life-atom is the vehicle of the monad which enlightens it, and in turn
enlightens a physical atom. The ultimates of nature are atoms on the material
side and monads on the energetic side. Monads are indivisible, atoms are
divisible and the splitting of the atom has caused evolution to speed up, thus
creating both future shock and, later, information overload. Monads are
indivisible particles containing in themselves the potentialities of all possible
future development as being self-moved, self-driven, spiritually indivisible
entities, and the ultimates of being and self-consciousness. Monads exist in
the vast expanses of the spatial deeps in which space is an infinite host of
monads filled.


Pantheism is the doctrine that the root-essence of the universe is divinity, that
divinity pervades throughout and is the substratum, the inmost, of all beings
and things — every atom, sun, universe, and human. Pantheism excludes the
idea that deity is separate from the universe; and while monotheism and
polytheism are regarded as being exclusive of each other, recognizes both as
complementary albeit partial statements of truth. In pantheism everything that
is, is a manifestation of an all-permeant, divine essence. Pantheism conceives
the basis of evolution, by which an inner divinity, the monadic essence, or the
hosts of monads progressively evolve from lower to higher manifestation,
because the same ultimate essence is the very heart of each.

Life-atoms belong to all planes, functioning within each of the principles of

which the human composition is built. Thus there are divine life-atoms,
spiritual life-atoms, intellectual, psychic, vital, astral, and physical life-atoms.
During a lifetime those which are intimately connected with an individual are
in a state of constant flux and reflux, entering and leaving in unceasing
rhythms the body of their owner or host. But after death, the dominant
controlling factor having departed, each group of life-atoms proceeds to
peregrinate throughout their respective natural habitats. Thus when the
physical body dies, the life-atoms of the body go into the soil, into plants, or
into the bodies of beasts or humans— through food or by osmosis, or in
breathing creatures through the air that are drawn to bodies by magnetic
affiliation. This transmigration of the life-atoms is the origin of the theories of
the transmigration of the human soul into beasts after death. The life-atoms
belonging to the astral plane are also liberated at death and follow along the
same lines as the physical life-atoms as they find their way into and out of
other astral vehicles with which they are in magnetic rapport. In this way they
help form the astral vehicles of individuals of the three lower kingdoms as
well as of the animal and human kingdoms.


The success of magnetic healing arises from the fact that human or animal
magnetism is a fluid, and hence an emanation flowing from the healer to the
sufferer. All human beings have this magnetic fluid, but some natural-born
healers have the instinctive power of projecting or emitting their own
magnetism, which flows from different parts of the body, but especially from
the tips of the fingers, the eyes, or the hands. Magnetism is a manifestation of
the universal cosmic electromagnetism, life-energy, or fohat. Magnetism,
which is the alter-ego of electricity, is that aspect or functioning of cosmic
electromagnetism causing attraction and repulsion, and distinguished by
bipolarity. All electromagnetism arises from akasha (ether), and the bipolarity
of magnetism and electricity is simply the fundamental bipolarity in cosmic
structure inherent in the akasha of the cosmic womb in which worlds are
born. Magnetism is an emanation from the beings or entities which produce it
from their own inner vital power. It flows forth from them as an aura, usually
unconsciously. Thus magnetism has an auric efflux or fluidity which finds its
foundation in the vitality or pranic sources of the beings or things from which
it flows. Those who are especially endowed with the faculty of arousing it in
themselves and projecting it can use it for either corrective or destructive
purposes.


Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, becoming,
existence or reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their
relations. A traditional realist position in ontology is that time and space have
existence apart from the human mind. As such, there are “lunar monads”
known as pitris who are the ancestors of humanity. They entered the cycle of
evolution as the astral doubles of early humanity.

There are also both angelic and human monads. The former is but an essence.
There are countless animal and human monads but only one monad manifests
in the mineral kingdom. Within the higher animals the monad increases
continually awakening sensations.

The reincarnating ego is used to signify a monadic unity. This reincarnating

ego is the combined spiritual, intellectual, and psychological fruit gathered in
the monad at the end of each individual life of an embodied entity.
Atmamatra is a primordial spiritual particle, monad, or elementary portion of
material which is a spiritual atom as opposed to the elementary elements of
the self.


Egos are indirect or reflected consciousnesses, seeing themselves as apart
from other egos, each having its own individualized characteristics. But the
self is the purest and strongest intuition of being, as a universal principle, and
as the summit of the hierarchy called humanity. It is pure consciousness, the
essential principle which gives to every person knowledge of selfhood. As it
has no egoic consciousness, it seems to be unconsciousness. To become self-
conscious, a vehicle is needed, so that the self may see itself reflected as in a
mirror. In humans what is called the personal self is a compound, in which
the true selfhood ray shines dimly through many screens. This causes various
mental states to be regarded as pertaining to our individuality, though they are
actually influences which flow into and out of the mind, and to which we
attribute a false sense of ownership, as when we say, “I am happy,” instead of
“I am experiencing happiness.” Liberation frees us from these false selves as
we abandon the heresy of separateness, and see the true self within us as
being identical with that self in all beings.

Certain human beings, because of a common monadic origin in an identical

spiritual source, are of the same spiritual family, and in consequence have
bonds among themselves of intensive sympathy, and sympathetic intellectual
understanding and processes of mentation. These feelings cause them to feel
more at-one with each other than with human beings similarly united but not
derivative from the same spiritual ray. Yet all these different spiritual rays
converge or coalesce on a loftier plane into another cosmic entity still more
sublime than the former ones. This is but one of many others which on a
divine plane still loftier than the last, find their common point of origin in a
cosmic individuality still grander.


Humanity is only partially self-conscious, because they can contemplate only
part of that in themselves which is now the contemplator but may become
part of what is contemplated. As the subject, the knower, shifts upwards and
inwards as more and more of the vestures pass into the category of objects or
what is known. The unknown manifests the universe in order to attain full
self-consciousness, and in humans, the microcosm, an unself-conscious spark
of divinity passes through stages of evolution and experience in order to
achieve relatively full self-consciousness. The potentiality of self-
consciousness, however, is in every atom. In order to become self-conscious,
spirit must pass through every cycle of cosmic being, until every ego has
attained full self-consciousness as a human being or equivalent entity. Early
humanity was not self-conscious. It was the intellectual fires which gave the
human mind its self-perception and self-consciousness. While individualism
is a necessary stage in evolution, human evolution is on the road towards
realization of the unity of all selves. Hence selfishness is the greatest obstacle
in spiritual development. It is not its grosser manifestations that are most
harmful, but the subtler forms in which it may wear the mask of virtue. It is
overcome by aspiration towards the source of our being, by recognizing the
barrenness and futility of self-seeking and its destructive results, and by the
cultivation of a primal instinct of altruism which is at the heart of every
being. Selfhood in its sense of concentration on the lower self and its interests
is widespread today. It is a paradox that in selflessness is found the noblest
and highest emanation of self-expression of the spiritual self in humanity. We
strive to wean our lower self from attachments to objects of personal desire
and to achieve a feeling which pertains to a divine essence. Without altruism,
no society, whether of animals or humans, could hold together. Instead of
regarding self as a difficult goal, it can be regarded as the original “home”
from which we have wandered.


Spirit differs radically from matter. A finite spirit is independent of its body,
and as such, the physical universe is unhampered by spiritual law. The
universe, though essentially a unity, appears as a plurality of monads,
manifesting under the dual — yet essentially illusory — aspects of formless,
or abstract, spirit and matter. There is therefore no essential difference
between spirit and matter, these being but mutually contrasted aspects of one
underlying and all-pervading abstract substance. The three hypostases of
objectivization are privation, form, and matter. Privation does not signify
emptiness or nothingness, for the term means that which precedes form and is
actively manifested as the root cause and source of the latter. Because it is
formless it is called privation — as having no form thus implies limitation or
constriction. Form also is equivalent to vehicle, body or embodiment.
Because an absolutely formless thing would have no qualities by which it
could be distinguished from any other entity, the word is interpreted as
without body or form. Hence it implies that entities in the formless spheres
exist as ideas, which will become embodied in various lower planes in
another era during an immensely long cosmic existence. Cosmic pralaya
(dissolution) is not such for formless entities, as only monadic forms are
dissolved. The monad does not descend into the planes of matter, but shoots
forth from itself a multitude of rays. Each ray forms the essential nature of
the complex evolving being to which it pertains, and hence the monad is the
primal or ultimate source of all that being’s life and characteristic attributes,
the immortal part of the being, whether that being be human, animal,
vegetable, mineral, or whatever. The rays from a person’s individual monad
which form the complex essential nature of being, are the sources of the
different centers in the human constitution. These sources persist throughout
all the evolutionary transformations in the life cycle and gather the life-atoms
at each new incarnation of the reincarnating ego.


The dissolution and manifestation of nature is called the elemental pralaya
because the universe then returns to its original elements. In one sense, it is
partial because the dissolution reaches as far as the elements and there stops.
The inner portions or constitution of the universe remain in status quo, which
does not signify that they are inactive — any more so than the reincarnating
ego is inactive when the lower quaternary of the human constitution
undergoes its prakritika pralaya or death. A prakrita pralaya occurs at the
end of an age when the cosmos goes into pralaya. At that time everything
that exists is resolved into the primal elements only to be reissued or
emanated anew at the end of the long pralaya. Prakritika pralaya may apply
to a globe when it refers to the cosmic pralaya, the resolving of the prakritis
(progression, originating, or primordial state) goes beyond the cosmic
elements and are then resolved into the One. During a pralaya, matter
crumbles or vanishes away into something else that interpenetrates it.
Pralaya is the state of latency or rest between two manvantaras of great life
cycles. During pralaya, everything disappears from the phenomenal universe
and is transferred into a noumenal essence which periodically throughout
eternity gives birth to all the phenomena of nature. Pralaya is dissolution of
the visible into the invisible, the heterogeneous into the homogeneous as the
objective universe returns its primal and eternally productive cause, to
reappear at the following cosmic dawn. Pralaya is like a state of nonbeing for
all existences on the lower material planes. A pralaya is not the same as an
obscuration, because an obscuration is the passage of a life-wave from a
globe or equivalent celestial body to a globe on another plane. During such
an obscuration the globe abandoned by the life-wave remains in status quo —
in a refrigerated condition, so to speak — awaiting the influx of the
succeeding life-wave.


Because the mineral kingdom is limited to a single monad, humanity
developed chrysopoeia, or the transmutation of “base metals” (e.g., lead) into
“noble metals” (particularly gold), as well as the creation of an elixir of
immortality, the creation of panaceas able to cure any disease, and the
development of an alkahest, a universal solvent. However, a potential
problem involving alkahest is that, if it dissolves everything, then it cannot be
placed into a container because it would dissolve the container. The alkahest
from a metaphysical, psychological, and mystical aspect is the higher self
which, by its intrinsic energies, working upon matter or the base “metals”
produces in time the pure gold of the mind. Alchemists considered gold as a
masculine deposit of the emanative fire of the sun. While divine alchemy
seeks to purify the gold of human nature, physical alchemy seeks gold by
transmutation from baser metals. In contrast, brass is mentioned as signifying
the baser elements of passional matter; and silver is the watery or feminine
principle of the moon. The “Golden Rule” is the law of humanity’s higher
nature, which is love and harmony, as contrasted with the law of a lower
nature, which makes for personal separateness and sets individuals at
variance with their neighbor. Its realization in thought and conduct is an
indispensable requisite to attainment on the path of wisdom and liberation.

In cosmic evolution, no sooner does duality in evolutionary manifestation

supervene, than matter, of necessity, appears as the other pole or alter ego of
spirit, from the dual nature of manifestation itself. It is only by the interaction
of polar forces that evolution can proceed, a process everywhere, mystically
or theologically, typified by various conflicts. The same duality is present in
human nature in which the adversary is the lower quaternary manifesting
through the terrestrial nature, which first dominates, and then eventually is
dominated by, the upper triad or spirit.


The hierarchical system on which nature is constructed of one life, one
intelligence, and hence one plan ruling throughout all the hierarchical
branches, and yet every hierarchical branch containing in its essence all free
action within the confines of its field, demonstrates that there is no
reconciliation between the free will of individuals in any part of nature and
common life, vitality, or the intelligence which permeates the Absolute. This
difficulty arises in exoteric spiritual systems which envision a will in
humanity wrongly supposed to be different from the spiritual laws founded in
the cosmic intelligence. A person uses their free will as much in refraining as
in acting. Another difficulty lies in the misuse of the adjective “free,” which
is understood to mean a will free from cosmic unity, and all too often running
more or less wild and contrary to cosmic structure. Reluctance by humans to
acknowledge the mandates of cosmic law induces the varieties of evil,
disharmony, and even disease with which human life is all too often cursed.
The way to freedom, peace, wisdom, and love is by subordinating the
individual human will to harmony with the spiritual.

The antahkarana is an intermediary bridge between something that is low to

something that is high. Every messenger of truth and light is an antahkarana
between the divine and humanity. Every great initiate is an antahkarana
between humanity and the spiritual essence of their own inner purity. Earth
was pounded by meteorites, mostly made of metal, during the first half-
billion years of its existence. Meteorite collisions also melted the earth’s
crust, leading to geothermal activity and the more complex compounds used
in metabolism. Just as a lump of coal goes through numerous initiations to
become a diamond, so likewise must humanity evolve to develop their
antahkarana, thus exiting the state of the spiritual weed and entering the state
of the spiritual rose.


Initiation is a process by which beings develop the power and knowledge to
work for the cosmos through spiritual expansion toward higher levels of
consciousness. Just as minerals evolved into precious metals, spiritually
enlightened beings were in past incarnations ordinary humans, but have
undergone a series of spiritual transformations. These initiatory
transformations are forms of spiritual alchemy which create avatars (celestial
beings) as true embodiments of spiritual perfection, driven by noble goals.

Phenomena such as earthquakes are generally the end-products of a chain of

causation operating not only on the physical plane but also on other cosmic
planes. A study of the geology of the earth’s crust as regards the lie of the
rocks, the position of faults, the presence of volcanic activities, etc., may
indicate the places most likely to be affected. However, the relation between
earthquakes and the positions of the heavenly bodies is a result of events on
the mental plane of the earth. The more subtle forms of force-matter or astral
light form the links between the physical earth and the mental state of the
living beings upon it, and rapid and more or less violent physical cataclysms
may be regarded as the final effects of a sudden release of tension in those
higher realms. Unusual psychic conditions perceptible to animals and
occasionally to humans precede earthquakes many hours before a shock, and
long before the seismographs show even the smallest tremor.

Many ancient peoples knew how to avail themselves of the magical virtues of
precious stones. The sapphire was especially valued because it enshrines
some of the influences of the planet Venus as transmitted through the higher
aspect of the moon, and so is able to induce equanimity and banish evil
thoughts. The sapphire will open barred doors and dwellings for the spirit of
humanity as it produces more peace than any other gem, but those who would
wear it must lead a pure and holy life.


The Greeks worshiped stones. The Ophites and Siderites had serpent stones
and star stones. There is the Lia Fail or speaking stone of Westminster and
Pliny’s stones which ran away when a hand approached them. Historically
there are numerous studies about mineral talismans and gemstones with
potent properties. A stone is an organism enshrining a divine spark or monad.
The difference between the stone and the human is that what is expressed in
humans is latent in the stone. Why were the hierophants of genuine magic or
occult science able to evoke from a stone its latent potencies? The skill of the
magician knows what can be done by placing stones in a particular grouping,
perhaps with certain ceremonies, etc. Why do particular stones, like particular
plants, animals, or humans, possess particular virtues? Physical matter is a
concretion of universal light or radiation, but it needs the eye of a seer to
perceive what starry virtue lies sleeping in a gem or other talisman.

Light, as a form of radiation, is an efflux or substance which can be traced

back to a source or focus which gave it birth and from and through which it
therefore pours as an extension of vitality. Light, and most other forms of
radiation, partake of both an undulatory and corpuscular character, for in one
sense it is both, and in another sense it is neither, for its undulations or
discrete particles are merely the methods by which it subjects itself to human
examination. In itself it is both force and substance, and as everything in the
universe is in an unceasing state of vibration or constant movement, even a
discrete particle — because of their vibrational activities — is as readily
conceivable as undulatory in its character as corpuscular. The important thing
about light is not so much its modes of motion or manifestation, but the fact
that it is the vital efflux or substance flowing forth from a living being,
whether microcosmic or macrocosmic. The same observations, mutatis
mutandis, may be said of other forms of radiation — electricity, magnetism
(electricity’s alter-ego), heat, and even, on far higher planes, thought and
consciousness.


The planets are individual manifestations of conscious intelligences, their
distances from the sun being generally in rhythmical progression and their
motions directed by mind and volition. The universe is the product of cosmic
mind or intelligence, whose activities manifest on the material plane as the
laws of nature. The universe and all in it, proceeding from cosmic
consciousness, is imbued throughout with the qualities and attributes of its
divine originators — energizing and guiding all just as the ancient teaching of
analogy is the master key to understanding universal nature. Monads may be
looked upon as the seeds of cosmic life, life-centers or energy points, and
naught in the universe is the product of chance, but is the offspring of mind.
Thus the solar system itself sprang from such a cosmic seed or monad, and
the same holds true for the planets, nebulae, comets, and all other
individually enduring cosmic bodies. Comets are coordinated with earlier and
later stages of nebular evolution, playing an activating part in the formation
of individual celestial bodies. The planets did not emerge from the sun, but
the sun is their “co-uterine sibling” with the same nebular origin. The sun is
the great distributor of light and other radiations, including vital energy,
throughout our solar system, and is itself a member of a hierarchy of solar
beings. The sacred planets are: the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars,
Jupiter, and Saturn — the Sun and Moon being substitutes for esoteric and
invisible planets. The complete number of the planets of a solar system is
twelve, which is the number of globes composing a planetary chain. These
twelve sacred planets are closely linked with the twelve houses of the zodiac.
Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto are said not to belong to the solar system (nor are
they included among the twelve sacred planets), but are members of the
larger universal solar system.


The extraterrestrial minerals which had formed the geological substance of
earth in conjunction with hydrothermally heated water also created
organisms. Additionally these minerals evolved into diamonds and other
precious stones including gold. The diamond is a symbol of the imperishable
attributes of the cosmic quinta essentia — the fifth essence of medieval
mystics. It is the highest element in ancient and medieval philosophy that
permeates all nature and is the substance composing the celestial bodies.
Quinta essentia is the essence of substance in its purest and most
concentrated form, being too spiritual to manifest in material realms directly
but sending into the world of manifestation its diamond heart.

The ’ophanim signifies the turning or revolving of celestial bodies, especially

the planets, with a focus on the indwelling angelic hosts which give the
celestial bodies their respective individualities, characteristic, energies,
substances, and which produce and control their various cyclical movements
in both space and time. The ’ophanim is one of the ten classes of the angelic
hosts comprising the planetary realm, as opposed to the lower elemental
realm.

When an avatar appears or whenever an effort is made to aid humanity along

spiritual lines, the powers of darkness automatically react along their own
lines. This corresponding tendency to evil is the fundamental significance of
doom.

Fetahil is a creative power mandated to form humanity, but failed to do so

because of its extreme purity. Thus other and lower powers — Iukabar Zivo
— completed the work. In the structure of the universe, all creative powers of
too high a rank are unable, because of spiritual righteousness and lofty
status, to form the lower planes until the intermediate ranges, in the gradually
descending ladder of life, have been evolved or emanated into manifestation.


The simplest chemical compounds through random physical processes
eventually produced simple organic entities. These natural, material entities
produced, by accretion of environmental experience, ever more complex and
evolved structures forming a continuum of physical evolution, until
consciousness resulted. Because all evolution lies latent within the essence of
each entity, humanity has evolved most recently from the anthropoids. By
contrast, the most spiritual, highly evolved entities, working with the least
evolved kingdoms at the opening of planetary manifestation, gradually built
up the inner and outer vehicles necessary for the expression of innate
consciousness within those kingdoms of nature. The lower kingdoms found
manifestation through the more evolved, so that the human kingdom became
the origin of all the kingdoms below it. As such, the lower kingdoms of
nature came to accouchement through the proto-human stock of earlier
evolutionary periods.

An avatar is that which passes down a celestial energy or an individualized

complex of celestial energies to become a celestial being in order to
overshadow and illuminate a human being. These divine rays come down at
the cyclic time of each of the evolved human’s various incarnations. These
avataric descents do not pertain solely to a race or solar system, because
nature repeats itself by analogy, and the same line of enlarging understanding
of evolutionary development takes place in all spheres mutatis mutandis.


Cosmic fohat is a bipolar vital electricity. As the bridge between spirit and
matter, fohat is the collection of intelligent forces through which cosmic
ideation impresses itself upon substance, thus forming the various worlds of
manifestation. In the manifested universe, it is that electric vital power which
unites and brings together all forms, giving them the first impulse which
becomes, in time, a cosmic statute. Fohat becomes the propelling force or the
active power which causes the One to become Two and Three . . . then fohat
is transformed into that force which brings together the elemental atoms and
makes them aggregate and combine. Fohat is ever-present and active from
the primordial beginnings of a manvantara to its last end, nor does it then
actually pass out of existence, but becomes quiescent or latent, sleeping or
dormant during the succeeding cosmic pralaya. Fohatic magnetism is the
spiritual magnetism or electricity maintained individually in each entity, from
subatomic to galactic. The twelve signs of the zodiac each have their own
fohatic magnetism which together form the characteristic quality of the
galaxy. These twelve magnetisms, which are actually six bipolar magnetisms,
are also responsible for the precession of the equinoxes.

Nitya pralaya is the constant destruction of all that is. It represents

continuous dissolution, taking place without cessation in everything from a
sun or planet to an atom. It is continuous change, which can take place only
by the destruction of the preceding condition or state, a state in which the
indwelling entity remains, while its various principles and vehicles undergo
incessant revision. Nitya thus has no absolute reference to a time period, but
is the unceasing, continuous changes or modifications of living things or
beings, to growth and decay, life and death, as exemplified by the continuous
change in the cells of our bodies. It is the opposite of nitya sarga which is the
endless productive or generative activity of the universe manifesting as a
continuous creation or productive activity, which proceeds from within
outwards as the emanative force of the cosmic hierarchy or cosmic monad.


The conservation of energy is a theory that the total energy of any material
system is a quantity which cannot be increased or decreased by any action
among the parts, and that when energy seems to disappear it is merely
transformed into an equivalent quantity of another mode of energy. The
theory is an affirmation that something cannot be created out of nothing or
resolved into nothing because there is a constant flow of force into any such
physical or material system from sources exterior to a “closed material
system.” Such forces are not exterior but closed material systems of
phenomena on the physical plane of inner and powerful perceptions which
produce physical systems as an appearance — real enough for the entities
within it while it lasts, but vanishing once the inner, controlling forces are
withdrawn. When this system vanishes, the atoms simply disappear because
the cohering energies which make them are withdrawn. This irreconcilability
between atoms and perceptual vibrations is discerned when light is the effect
produced in matter by light itself, which is one of the modes or effects of
cosmic vital electricity — of fohat acting on the terrestrial planes. As such,
the forces of science become mere abstractions.


Physical bodies are three-dimensional and anything with fewer or more
dimensions is not a physical body. In mathematics we may assume as many
or few so-called dimensions as we like, as independent variables, and use this
formulation in the interpretation of phenomena. Thus we can represent
motion or position in time by a vector or a line, and devise a special
interpretation of physical phenomena, which we may call a space-time
continuum. If we imagine the existence of one, two, or four-dimensional
physical bodies it is easy to calculate how many sides and edges, such a
transcendental body would have, supposing it could exist. But such
calculations are purely algebraic. Such speculations have been used to
explain phenomena such as spiritualism and UFOs. However, this
dimensional calculus is only useful for the interpretation of nonphysical ideas
such as the phenomena of thought or emotion — where physical concepts
have been abstracted from the mind.

Modern spiritualism is an unconscious blundering into necromancy. If the

astral remains of the dead are really called up, then the normal processes of
their dissolution are interfered with. If they appear, but are not called up, then
they have been impersonated by still more harmful and dangerous denizens
of the lower astral light.


Like light, consciousness can manifest only by means of a vehicle, and it can
have various degrees of manifestation according to the planes of perception.
Every manifested entity is conscious to some degree, and is an expression of
divine consciousness or spirit. Enlightenment is said to be a latent spiritual
consciousness which becomes manifest intellectually as mind, so far as the
human constitution goes. Human consciousness is closely linked to the senses
and the term consciousness is often used as alternative to spirit as the purest
form of cosmic force or cosmic force-substance. There are states or degrees
of consciousness, according to the level on which the conscious essence is
manifested. Therefore, it is possible to call one state unconscious by contrast
with another, as when we compare waking consciousness with the
consciousness of sleep or trance.

Modern discussions of chrysopoeia, or alchemy, are generally split into an

examination of its exoteric practical applications and its esoteric spiritual
aspects although both applications are complementary. The athanor is the
self-feeding furnace of the alchemists, and also a transmitting agent formed
of astral substance or fluid. Electricity is the upper rung of existence, and
astral fluid, the athanor of the alchemists, is its lowest.

The ability to walk unharmed across a bed of live coals, or to handle fire and
heated objects with impunity is well known to many ordinary fakirs,
sorcerers, and adepts. Likewise, some mediums are rendered invulnerable to
fire as a cause produced consciously and at will. All these cases result from a
compression of the astral fluid already existing about a person which forms
an elastic shell, impenetrable by any physical object. This invisible shell of
compressed astral fluid also accounts for instances where a person cannot be
shot. In these cases the bullets appear just beyond the muzzle of the weapon,
quiver in the air, and fall to the ground, as if meeting an impenetrable barrier.


The cintamani is a magical jewel, which manifests whatever one wishes. It is
the philosopher’s stone serving as an alchemical vehicle that turns the human
body into immortal gold. Other properties include the ability to transmute
base metals into gold or silver, and the ability to heal all forms of illness and
prolong the life of any person who consumes a small part of this jewel.
Further attributes of this vehicle include the transmutation of common
crystals into precious stones and diamonds.

A philosopher’s stone can be created by an alchemical method known as the

Magnum Opus. This stone produces the process used to transmute a lesser
substance into a higher form — usually lead into gold.


Atonement is reconciliation of that which is lower, with that which is higher.
In its best sense atonement means the becoming at one between the human
ego and its spiritual counterpart, where the life or vitality of the lower
personal being is offered up as a sacrifice, willing and utterly joyful, to the
higher self. All forces of nature originally spring from a common source, a
cosmic spiritual unit, which is the heart of nature itself. Hence it is no more
possible to divorce attraction from its alter ego repulsion than it would be to
have a stick which has only one end. This reconciliation applies directly to
forces of gravitation, which is a bipolarity similar to electricity being
recognized as both a positive attraction and negative repulsion. Just as human
beings, because of the bipolarity in their vital auras feel attracted to, repelled
by, or both from other human beings and thus producing the strong
sympathies and antipathies which are so well known, so likewise does gravity
operate. Celestial bodies are not only strongly or weakly attracted to each
other, but are likewise strongly or weakly repelled by each other although
their spiritual counterparts are frequently reconciled harmoniously.

Attraction, and hence gravitation, is a manifestation of cosmic desire, which

draws together separate things into unities. Gravitation, like all the other
phenomena of nature, is attributed to living beings with the vital electricity or
vital magnetism emanating from these beings. This electricity or magnetism
is one of the phenomena of life and of cosmic intelligence. In the lower
magnitudes it is found in and among the molecules, atoms, and electronic
particles where the same observations apply. Cohesion among the
infinitesimals is the microcosmic fundamental quality that manifest itself in
macrocosmic phenomena, such as gravitation.


When the great period of the universal cosmic pralaya occurs, and the
universe is indrawn, the spiritual entities then enter into their paranirvana,
which is exactly what occurs with the death of a human being. They are
drawn by their spiritual gravitational attractions into still higher hierarchies of
being, into still higher spiritual realms, rising and growing and learning.
While the lower elements of the cosmos, the body of the universe follow their
own particular gravitational attractions as the physical body turns to dust.
When the clock of eternity points once again to the hour for the cosmos to
‘come forth into light,’ then in the distant abysms of space and time the
cosmic life-centers are aroused into activity once more.

The cosmic “divine” is both transcendent and immanent, allowing

manifestation to break into innumerable rays which produce various deific
powers in inner and outer nature. Each of these inherent divinities, however,
emanate from an all-encompassing and forever unmanifested origin. Various
universes spring from this rootless root at periodic intervals called
manvantaras, and then resolve back into the pre-manvantaric condition or
pralaya, only to issue forth again when the pralaya of whatever magnitude
has run its course. Therefore, at one and the same time divinity is
transcendent and immanent, eternal and unmanifest, while its rays or cosmic
sparks of whatever magnitude are periodic and manifested. Hence from each
manifested cosmic hierarch proceed the multiple rays, to which in various
theogonies are given names and attributes of superior deities. The demiurge is
a deity in its creative aspect, not a personal deity, but an abstract term
denoting a host of creative powers. The chief divinities are the cosmic
elements originating in and from a primordial element.


Out of cosmic ideation springs the activity of universal mind — the collective
aggregate of all individualized consciousnesses everywhere. The appearance
and disappearance of worlds is a continuous process in an endless chain of
interlocking cosmic hierarchies. As one of these hierarchies comes into
existence it is like an exhalation of divine breath, and each such exhalation is
a thought of cosmic ideation which becomes a world. This breath is cosmic
ideation entering into a manvantara and is the root of all individual
consciousness everywhere. Just as pre-cosmic ideation is regarded as the root
of consciousness, so pre-cosmic substance is the spiritual substratum of
matter. Manvantara is produced by means of the interlocking and interacting
motion of cosmic ideation with primordial cosmic substance. Further, fohat is
the intelligent energy behind this interlocking activity, which during
manvantara joins the two together.

Cosmic consciousness grouped under thought, will, understanding, and

feeling, are collectively expressed as universal mind. During deep sleep, the
human mind is in abeyance on the physical plane. Consciousness is not
affecting the physical brain as in waking hours. Similarly in the cosmos at the
manvantaric dawn, universal mind “was not” because there was, as yet, no
vehicle for its expression through the cosmic hierarchies. Universal mind
remained during pralaya in a state of intense spiritual-intellectual activity, as
the permanent root of subsequent cosmic mental action arising during
manvantara. Universal mind has various applications, because nature is built
on analogical structure and function, and hence what applies to the great
likewise applies to the small. Thus universal mind is applicable either to a
solar system, a galactic system, or a system comprising a number of galaxies,
etc. As such, it stands for the higher ranges of the astral light as the
storehouse of ideas impressed upon it by the creative spiritual forces, and the
source of human principles.
Cosmic ideation and cosmic substance are one in their primordial
character, yet as the reawakening of the universal mind into manvantara
needs the appropriate cosmic fields of action, cosmic substance may be
said to be the manvantaric vehicle of cosmic ideation. Conversely,
during cosmic pralaya, all the varied differentiations of cosmic
substance are resolved back or indrawn once again into cosmic unity, a
subjective condition, and hence during the cosmic pralaya cosmic
ideation can no longer be called active, but passive.

During a manvantara the one uniform and non-compounded spirit

becomes differentiated into the incomprehensibly vast varieties of
manifested nature; whereas during pralaya differentiation vanishes and
returns into the non-compounded homogeneity of the cosmic spirit.

Esotericism is often viewed as a perennially hidden, inner tradition. A

second perspective sees esotericism as a category that encompasses
movements which embrace an “enchanted” world-view in the face of
increasing disenchantment. A third view regards esotericism as a
category encompassing all of Western culture’s “rejected knowledge”
that is accepted neither by the scientific establishment nor by orthodox
religious authorities.

Apocrypha is applied to writings regarded as esoteric, for private instruction,

and of profounder import than exoteric writings; but the rise of bogus esoteric
schools has slowly brought the word into contempt and clothed it with its
later meaning of spurious or doubtful.


The term philosophia perennis, has been used since the Renaissance and of
which scholasticism made much use. The term signifies the totality of
primordial and universal truths and therefore the metaphysical axioms whose
formulation does not belong to any particular system.

Although the idea that varying viewpoints could be categorized together

under the rubric of “esotericism” developed in the late eighteenth century,
esoteric currents were largely ignored as a subject of academic inquiry. In
Europe during the eighteenth century, amid the Age of Enlightenment, these
esoteric traditions came to be regularly categorized under the labels of
“superstition,” “magic,” and “the occult.”

Aporrheta refers to secret or mystical instructions delivered to a candidate for

initiation in the Mysteries. These Mysteries are facts of rigidly esoteric
character, learned by adepts through initiation, which are improper to divulge
to the uninitiated — hence spoken of as forbidden. Arrhetos is whatever is
considered too holy, too sacred, or improper in every aspect to divulge to the
public whether in speech or writing.

The kabiri are four lower classes of spiritual entities otherwise known as
pitris, kumaras, and agnishvattas — all children of the cosmos who are held
in the highest veneration by those who are initiated into the Mysteries.

Panpsychists maintain that consciousness emerges from the combination of

billions of subatomic consciousnesses, just as the brain emerges from the
organization of billions of subatomic particles. But how do these tiny
consciousnesses combine?


In working upon the physical body, prana automatically uses the linga-sarira
(model-body) as its vehicle of expression during earth-life. Prana may be
said to be the psychoelectric veil or field manifesting in the individual as
vitality. The life-atoms of prana fly instantly back, at the moment of physical
dissolution, to the natural pranic reservoirs of the planet. The atoms
impregnated with the life-principle are partially transmitted to progeny by
heredity, and partially are drawn once more together and become the
animating principle of a new body in every new incarnation. The term jiva is
sometimes used similarly to prana, however prana means outbreathing and
jiva means life per se. There is a universal or cosmic jiva or life principle,
just as there are innumerable hosts of individualized jivas, which are the
atoms of the former similar to drops in the ocean of cosmic life. These
individualized jivas are relatively eternal, and correspond to the term monad
whereas prana is applied to the life-fluid or jivaic aura when manifesting in
the human constitution. The three sorts of pranayama include puraka
(inhaling), kumbhaka (retaining), and rechaka (exhaling). Pranayama is a
very different thing from the advice given by doctors to breathe deeply, and
to fill the lungs with fresh air. Pranayama should never be practiced by
anyone unless under the guidance of initiated gurus who teach it only in rare
cases to certain pupils for karmic purposes.


In the astral-vital organisms of living beings the breath is called prana. This
is not limited to the respiratory functions, but includes what physiologists
might call nerve currents operating in all parts of the body, of which the
pulmonary diastole and systole is only a particular manifestation. The
ceaseless alternate outflowing and inflowing of cosmic life or hierarchies is
called the Great Breath from its analogy to physiological breathing, which
implies incessant alternating motion, expansion and contraction, of life, air,
wind, or spirit. The human monad reincarnates into a center of consciousness
known as the jiva. The jiva becomes prana when a child is born and begins to
breathe. Like a sponge immersed in water, the interior of the sponge is
similar to the prana, while the water outside the sponge is the jiva.

The astral body, model-body, or linga-sarira is connected with the physical

body by an extensible cord of astral-vital substance, which allows the astral
to separate locally from the physical for a certain distance, as happens in
sleep and trance, without severing the actual connection. When the cord is
severed, however, physical death ensues. This cord is both magnetic and of
odic force.

Everything on earth is the shadow or reflection of its prototype in superior

inner spheres. Matter is the shadow of spirit while the human linga-sarira
(model-body) is called the shadow-body, and similarly the astral light is
called the shadow of cosmic substance, both representing the nether pole of
their respective higher counterparts. A shadow is what enables manifestation
itself by giving to light objective reality — the necessary corollary which
completes light or goodness as their creator on earth. Every divinity has its
accompanying dark aspect of shadow, frequently called its veil, sheath, of
vehicle.


The law of cycles arises out of the ever-unceasing alternations of the Great
Breath of spirit in the universe. Abstract absolute motion, as the worlds
evolve, assumes an ever-growing tendency to circular movement. Hence arise
the wheels and globes of cosmic evolution and the rounds of the evolutionary
life-waves. Motion is repetitive, ever returning to similar, but not identical,
points. The geometrical symbol is the helix, which combines the cyclic with
the progressive motion. If the axis of the helix is itself a circle, a vortex
results, thus creating wheels within wheels as the process advances to further
degrees of complexity. The ancients divided time into endless cycles with all
periods being of various durations, and each marking the beginning or end of
some event either cosmic, mundane, physical or metaphysical. There were
cycles of only a few years, and cycles of immense duration.

Matter is alive, conscious in some degree, and vibrationally responsive to the

laws of nature, and the same general principles apply also to diseases in the
animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms. The vital currents of human
electricity connect the conscious person with their body by the living wires of
nerves. The rhythmic motion or natural harmony vibrating in each cell and
organ at its own rate, is responsive to the universal vibration or Great Breath
which in other modes of motion manifests as heat, light, sound, density, etc.
But beyond the electrical and vibrational states of the body, and above the
mental influence, is the essential self, the source of all harmony or rhythmic
procedures keyed to this harmony and striving to raise the lower nature to act
in unison with its finer and greater powers.


There is no non-living matter, for even rocks are concreted living monads,
which because of their temporarily passing through a state of concretion do
not manifest the innate powers and functions of vitality which they do on
inner and invisible planes. The only distinction between what is popularly
called living and non-living matter is the differences in organic development
on the physical plane. Everything is always alive — in organized beings of
flesh, in vegetation, and in the rocks. Magnetism and electricity, forms of
radiation, are manifestations of cosmic vitality and atoms and their
component particles, being themselves electrical in essence, are life particles.
In a long forgotten epoch of past history, spontaneous generation was on
earth the most common way by which life broke through into the physical
plane from the inner invisible worlds. Spontaneous generation has changed
its methods now, almost escaping detection, in the genesis of terrestrial life.
Every point in space, every particle of material substance, is a living being or
life-atom. Such a life-atom finding itself in proper physical surroundings on a
physical plane, and impelled by its own karmic urge, will begin to express
itself on this plane and gather nourishment to itself, first by osmosis from the
surrounding ether or air, and finally from the environing matter of the place
where it is. What takes place in the history of the life-germ on earth today, as
in the growth of the human seed into the embryo and thereafter into the
human child, is but a more complicated picture of what spontaneous
generation was in the early history of the earth, when almost any point of
physical matter was quivering with life and desired to self-express itself
through evolutionary unfolding as a living being. Every star is the
embodiment of a conscious living being, pursuing its own pathways of
destiny, and intimately bound together not only with its own planetary family
but with all the other stars and planets in the galaxy to which it belongs.


The one eternal element is abstract space, coexistent with endless duration,
primordial substance, and unending motion as the breath of one element.
Perpetual motion is ever-becoming, ever-present, and ever-existing. Thus
perpetual motion is an irresolvable first principle, and from it proceed
relatively perpetual motions, such as the motions of the celestial orbs. All
motion is in one sense perpetual. When motion is stopped by concussion, heat
is generated and the motion continues, so that it could be assumed that the
same amount of motion will affect the same amount of matter for ever. The
physical universe is conceived as matter and motion, being the productions of
originating substance and hence, illusory in their appearances and phenomena
as both, in essence, are indestructible, uncreated, and eternal. More so is the
ultra-physical, when considered as noumena apart from manifested physical
productions. The equation of energies of perpetual motion can always be
made to balance outside factors, such as the earth’s rotation. If thought and
volition are regarded as forms of energy, the scope of the problem is enlarged
because perpetual motion is possible but not in the way in which it is
understood.


The music of the spheres is an extremely archaic philosophy which states that
the world was called forth out of chaos by sound or harmony, and that the
universe is constructed on harmonic proportions. The intervals between
planets correspond to musical sounds, so perfectly consonant that they
produce the sweetest melody which is inaudible to humans by reason of the
transcendence of the sound which our ears are incapable of receiving. Every
monad or life-atom, is in constant motion, and as it moves emits a sound, its
own keynote, and this sound is in musical harmony with nature’s all-inclusive
harmonic symphonies. Furthermore, every particle of matter, every physical
atom, in its incessant movements produces a sound which is a song, so that if
we had the power of spiritual hearing (genuine clairaudience), we would be
able to hear this unimaginably grand symphony of sounds. In such a state we
would hear the grass growing, and the opening of a flower would itself be a
marvelous natural orchestral performance.


Force is an effect produced on matter, including the unknown cause of that
effect. It is a definite measurable quantity, usable in calculating the
quantitative relation between phenomena. But force remains a mystery. If it is
an inherent property of matter, then matter becomes a self-moving entity, a
divine thing in its essence, but if it acts on matter from outside, then where
does it inhere? Is it an independent existence? The forces of science are
effects produced on the physical plane by elementals or nature forces, which
are themselves secondary causes and the effects of primary causes, ultimately
of divine origin, which exist behind the veil of terrestrial phenomena. Eternal
motion gives rise to the dual manifestation of force and matter, twin aspects
of the same substance. In the universe force may be generalized as a unity,
just as substance or consciousness may — but just as there are
consciousnesses and substances, so likewise cosmic force is essentially
intelligent, and therefore essentially belonging to nature’s divinities. These
divinities exist on different planes of the invisible worlds of the universe in
hierarchical structures or degrees. Therefore the inner and invisible conscious
and self-conscious forces, which are really divinities of many kinds, which by
their interconnections and interwoven activities, produce the differentiated
and marvelously varied manifested world in which we live.

Consciousness and thought are manifestations of motion in the guise of active

intelligence. The beginning of differentiation is spoken of as the beginning of
change. Life manifests as motion, and as it passes from plane to plane
produces what is called birth and death. Absolute motion and what humans
call absolute rest — really but another form of incessant motion — converge
into one. The tendency of cosmic motion is a spiral and in kinematics, simple
harmonic motion generates ellipses, of which the straight line and the circle
are limiting cases.


Standards of measurement successfully adopted for phenomena within
terrestrial limits have proven inadequate for the definition of phenomena
outside those limits. Both theory and experimentation show that these
standards are largely conceptual and must be changed to suit new conditions.
To introduce a volitional principle into nature is to assume that the volitional
principle is absent elsewhere — an assumption purely speculative. The
universe is not divided into a mechanical section and a volitional section,
separated by a hypothetical boundary that varies according to investigation. A
mechanical interpretation is adopted for practical purposes on the physical
plane, which enables results that do not bring the validity of its assumptions
into question. Science finds that one form of motion is consequent upon
another, but it knows nothing about the cause of motion. Words like force and
mass are merely convenient abstractions. Likewise, there is no reason for
introducing a psychological element into nature at one point rather than at
another, for such disjunct compartments do not exist in nature. Indeterminacy,
as used by science, is the opposite of determinism and both imply attitudes of
mind rather than actualities in nature.

When the instinct of the animal body, the mental reasoning faculties, and the
reembodying ego’s intuition are functioning together, a being will be keyed to
health, sanity, and wisdom. Otherwise, an inner conflict manifests in some
form of disorder. In humans, the organic vital fluid of the reembodying ego is
the cohering factor for the entire constitution, dominating over all minor vital
expressions of the life-atoms. The intense and ceaseless activity of these life-
atoms builds and composes the body, and as age comes on, and the physical
vehicle naturally and normally weakens, the uninterrupted activity of the vital
power becomes too strong to be held in check by the gripping influence of the
vital-electrical field. Thus the atomic forces, continuing unabated within the
body structure, slowly weaken the structure and destroy it, until death occurs.
Apart from regular medical practice, widespread forms of drugless healing
are employed today. Forms of faith or magnetic healing depend on the ability
of the ‘healer’ to convey life-forces to the diseased person. If the practitioner
succeeds in conveying the vitality of pranic fluids from their own healthy
body to another person, that healthy life-force expels inharmonious vibrations
in the affliction and restores health. Such cures can be permanent, although
usually they are temporary, lasting from a few days to a few years. However,
the magnetic healer’s emanation may induce germs or mental bias, thus
complicating any cure. Moreover, the subtle infection on karma affects both
healer and patient in the outcome. Even baleful persons can displace a disease
and, by driving it back onto some inner level of the sufferer’s constitution,
create a seeming cure.

Medicine was originally a divine science, providing for the well-being of the
spiritual, mental, psychic, astral, and physical human. Archaic medicine
included a profound knowledge of astrology, alchemy, occult physiology, the
finer forces vibrating as sound, color, form, thought and feeling, and
whatever related humans to their universe of natural law and order. This was
the basis of the natural “magic” which tradition has linked with the medical
art. This knowledge was dual in its power to work for life or death, for good
or evil ends. Its full comprehension required not only a trained intellect, but
the intuitive understanding of a pure spiritual nature. What writings are
available today are of little practical value without the “lost key.”
Interpretation of legendary and classical beliefs and customs, and of
archaeological findings, overlooks what is known of ancient medical practice
which is largely exoteric yet symbolic of a deeper teaching than we possess.
However, in making a pure, serene, uplifting atmosphere around a sick
person, invokes the influences of wholeness within and without their body.
By putting the inner person in tune with their body, disordered nature-forces
manifesting as disease would tend to flow freely into the currents of health.


However illness is displaced, it cannot be denied out of existence, and sooner
or later it will reappear in a more unnatural and probably more dangerous
form because of the suppression of its endeavor to exhaust itself in physical
expression. Physical disease, originating as karma in this or a former life,
becomes visible while working its way out of the system for good. It is
positively pernicious for a healer to act upon the will, conscience, or moral
integrity of a sick person by hypnotizing their mind, will, or conscience into
believing that sickness does not exist, or that it is fate from past actions. Any
such control of another’s conscious life is a form of hypnotism, and falls
under what is called black magic. On the other hand, a healer is morally
obligated to help the sick in the right ways of treating the body, mind, and
soul involving the arousing of the patient’s inner powers of spiritual, moral,
and intellectual resistance against weaknesses in themselves. In mesmerism
the emanation from a pure-minded operator arouses the disordered forces of
the diseased body to vibrate harmoniously. Thus the sufferer makes
themselves healthy. The best of all healing is where the sufferer is brought
into a state of self-confidence through a higher kind of resignation which
brings peace and inner quiet and works in harmony with the body’s natural
resources of health.

Nemesis has been called the retributive aspect of karma as the automatic
reestablishing of equilibrium brought about by the action of the human being.
Human free will grows greater as it becomes the free will of the universe of which
humanity is an integral and inseparable part. Thus, it is humans who create causes,
and karma which adjusts the effects.


Jiva is the universal principle of a life force and is contained in all the
particles of material existence. The actions of these principles begin in the
extreme subtleties of a universal “mind” and end with the grossest
condescension of human frailty as the weakness of human perception. This
frailty within human perception tends to view both jiva and prana as
synonyms. Fortunately this subtle misperception is corrected on the higher
planes. Perception alone is not a sufficient means to know objects and
principles behind observed reality in which certain existent phenomena are
not perceived but are derived. Bhrantidarsana describes the illusions arising
out of the egotistical, imperfect human mind in its attempts to understand
reality. However an imperfectly evolved human mind is extremely apt to
mistake illusions for verities, presentiments for realities, and appearances for
the fundamental substratum of being. Any partially developed intellect or
understanding can de facto have only an illusory conception of the
manifestations of true reality.

The correction of misperception between the jiva and prana is corrected by

an understanding of angelic atomicity. Prana is similar to a “vitality bubble”
composed of atoms which are charged with prana of different colors. Each
color has a specific atomic structure and is maintained by a specific angel.
Angels are members of numerous hierarchies of celestial powers, from the
formative hosts that emanates from the formative heavens down to the
presiding spirit of an atom. Angels serve as intermediaries or envoys between
the divine and the human, or terrestrial, realms. An angelus rector is a ruling
angel who causes a planet to pursue its course around the sun. The Asdts are
fiery spiritual beings or self-conscious spirits of cosmic character, emanating
from the heavens.


The fall refers to the descent of enlightened beings whose mission was to
enlighten nascent humanity, and the lower kingdoms of nature. Additionally,
the fall refers to the descent of human beings into matter, when they became
clothed in skin, and began to reproduce by sexual generation. Both of these
events in the cycle of evolution have been perverted by ecclesiastical error
into calamities. The War in Heaven was the natural opposition of lower
nature to the progress of unfolding beings essential to evolution. The fall of
humanity includes the natural human evolutionary passage into physical
corporeality, and the misuse of human intelligence — but does not refer to
the natural use of procreative functions or to innate sinfulness. Those cosmic
entities of various classes who in the course of their evolution descended into
matter in order to form and inform the lower worlds rebelled in a purely
mystical sense against spirit or heaven, asserting individual free will and
divine love. Their act is one of compassion and self-sacrifice, and they are
eventually saved, while they carry the cycle of evolution along the ascending
arc. Theology, and John Milton, have misinterpreted this into the legend of
the fallen angles, whose rebellion was a crime, who are the eternal enemies of
humanity, and who are in consequence doomed to final destruction.

The lower mind or psycho-nervous effluvia of the brain acts through the
nervous ganglia in the kamic, or desire, centers, such as the liver, stomach,
and spleen, though the central ganglia of this nervous system are situated in
the base of the skull. The brain, and with it the heart, are the organs of
spiritual and intellectual powers far higher than those represented by mere
human personality working through the brain-mind. Hence the higher forms
of thought and superconsciousness correlate with the cerebral and cardiac
centers. However, it is only in rare moments that the brain tissues are
suffused with the glory emanating directly from a higher nature to work
through the pineal and pituitary glands in the skull and through the secret
center in the heart.


The optic thalami are the two great posterior ganglia at the base of the brain,
forming part of the wall of the third ventricle. They are the bed from which
optic fibers arise, as well as a special center for the correlation and
transmission of sensory, motor, and ideational impressions which,
consciously and subconsciously, interact between the body and the brain. The
thalami are a central station for the reception, condensation, and transmission
of all the intercommunicating lines between consciousness and the external
world. Embryology shows the optic thalami playing an early and leading part
in connection with the pineal gland, then at the apex of the developing head
in antiquity when the pineal gland functioned as the only eye of vision. At
that stage of evolution, the human was as unselfconscious in personality and
as gelatinous in physical structure as the embryo now is at its first stages. The
embryo repeats the gradual growth and dominating position of the cerebral
hemispheres which, in the history of the early root-races, gave play to
intellectual faculties at the expense of spiritual vision. Then the pineal “eye,”
no longer active, retired to the hollow of the brain where the optic thalami
developed the current two eyes of physical vision. The original eye has since
then continued to function — although unrecognized by the vast majority of
people — as the organ of intuitive discernment.

Turiya is the highest of all the states into which consciousness may be cast. It
is a practical annihilation of the ordinary human consciousness as it unites
with the overshadowing higher mind and becomes at one with the monadic
essence. Turiya is a state of consciousness of the deepest abstraction from
things of the material world — that state which seems to be a complete
trance, physically speaking. The higher consciousness of the human being,
often unconscious of the brain-mind consciousness, enters into turiya and
brings about a condition of perfectly dreamless sleep. However, it is a state of
the highest or most exalted spiritual and intellectual activity, of spiritual
ecstasy — or highest samadhi.


The pineal gland is a rounded, oblong body, about one-third of an inch long,
of a deep reddish color, connected with the posterior part of the third
ventricle, and intimately related to the optic thalami which are the organs of
reception and condensation of the most sensitive and sensorial incitations
from the periphery of the body. This organ is in central relation to the
coordinating organs of all the senses and sensations, and to the thinking brain
which perfects and coordinates ideas. Modern morphologists have shown it to
be the homologue of the “third eye.” It is the seat of the highest
consciousness in humanity — the omniscient spiritual and all-embracing
mind. Actually, the third eye withdrew, pari passu, into the central cavity of
the developing brain. There it has remained as a symbol of that past spiritual
vision which humans will regain as they progress consciously along the
upward arc of the evolutionary cycle. Descartes reasoned that the seat of the
pneuma was the pineal gland which, he said, though it was tied to the brain,
was yet capable of being put into a kind of swinging motion by “animal
spirits” that cross the cavities of the skull. He was right about the organ’s
response in oscillations or what the ancients called animal spirits which are
otherwise expressed as the circulating currents of the nerve-aura. When the
focused power of the active pituitary is directed to higher psychic levels, its
influence, through radiated wave-energy, reaches the pineal gland which
responds with spiritual clairvoyance. If, however, the increased activity is
upon the lower astral levels, the effects are distorted and misleading. When
the pituitary is connected with the optic and nerve centers, its enlargement
becomes uncontrolled, giving rise to strange hallucinations, hearing, etc. No
one organ of a human being can function alone from coordinated activity
with the other parts of the human constitution. Thus while the pituitary body
can stimulate increased activity in the pineal gland, the pineal gland in its
turn can act strongly upon the pituitary body and, as the latter is awakened
and begins to vibrate, the physical brain becomes influenced by the spiritual
and higher intellectual inspirations from the pineal.


A photon is a particle of light. After a journey of billions of miles hurtling
through space, a photon may collide with an electron in a leaf on earth giving
the electron a huge energy boost. When this occurs, the electron starts to
bounce around, a little like a pinball. It makes its way through a tiny part of
the leaf’s cell, and passes on its extra energy to a molecule that can act as an
energy currency to fuel the plant, thus creating a hybrid extraterrestrial plant
on earth.

The fertilization of the germ-cell in plant or animal is the spiritual incubating

of matter for differentiating the objective planes, in order to manifest a
subjective monadic life. The reincarnating ego, to make a new body of the
fertilized microscopic egg cell, is analogous to the world-germ awakening to
begin another galactic, solar, or planetary existence. This desire for sentience
shows itself in everything reflected in objective existence. In the embryonic
germ-cell, both human and subhuman kingdoms manifests essential selfhood,
or svabhava, and their own degree of evolution.

Bacteria are a host of visible and invisible agents which carry out many
processes of evolutionary life and death. They are links in the karmic chain
which return results of whatever was an antecedent cause. Thus bacteria of a
disease will produce injurious toxins only when the karmic conditions within
the individual provide a suitable culture-medium for them. The selective
functions of these creative and destructive microorganisms are directed by an
invisible hierarchy of intelligences which guide the nature forces both
physically and metaphysically as merited. The whole process is as natural as
the analogous way in which trillions of body cells react to the stimulation or
depression of harmonious or discordant states of mind and emotions. Both
cells and bacteria are living entities, sentient but not intelligent in the human
sense. To regard bacteria as the primal cause of a disease is mistaking the
phenomena for the noumena which is working out karmic effects.


The essential principle in reproduction is that an individual separates a
portion of itself, which then evolves independently into a similar individual.
This may occur by fission, as in the amoeba and other unicellular forms. Or
by budding, as in the sea anemone and many plants or by the throwing off of
spores, as occurs in mosses and fungi, or by the production of an egg, hatched
within or without the body. The egg may contain the positive and negative
reproductive elements, and be self-fertilizing, or it may contain only the
negative element and so require fertilizing. The positive element may be
contributed by the same individual as supplies the negative element thus
incurring hermaphroditism. Or the positive and negative elements may be in
different individuals, and present the usual mode of reproduction. The human
body has at one time or another passed through all these states and is destined
to transcend the present mode, which is but a passing phase in evolutionary
history.


Chaitanya is the invisible essence of human intelligence, the cosmic root of
monadic individuality, and the cosmic intelligence-force or essential
consciousness behind and within individuality. All individual egos in the
universe are rooted in cosmic chaitanya as their universal source, and
become individualized in the material realms by means of the karanopadhi,
or the thoughts through which spiritual monadic entities work and manifest
themselves. The karana-sarira, or the karanopadhi or causal body, is the
vehicular instrumental body-form produced by the working of what is
perhaps the most mysterious principle or element, mystically speaking, in the
constitution not only of humanity, but of the universe — the very mysterious
spiritual bijas. These are the seeds of kama-manas (desire) left in the fabric
of the reincarnating entity, which act as the karana, or instrumental cause, of
such entity’s reincarnations on earth. As such, chaos is “chaotic” only in the
sense that its constituents are unformed and unorganized while resting in a
storehouse of all the latent seeds from former manvantaras.

Associated with each human being is an angel who has accompanied that
same individual being through successive incarnations, eventually leading to
a destiny of opportunities to compensate for the misperceptions and
imbalance of previous incarnations. Similarly, the angel evolves through the
deeds of the incarnating individual. Archangels are contemplative celestial
beings which reside in several hierarchies. These realms are sometimes
referred to as the celestial lights in which the agents of karmic laws reside.
Flagae denotes an order of spiritual beings which correspond to guardian
angels, called the higher pitris in whom constitutional principles of nature
are actively manifest. An archangel is associated with large cohesive groups
of humanity such as a city or country, as well as smaller groups such as a
congregation of family. Obviously the archangel of a family is of a lesser
rank than the archangel of a city.


A planetary spirit presides over the highest hierarchies of archangels. These
beings have all passed through a stage of evolution corresponding to the
humanity of earth only on other worlds, in long past cycles. Earth is far too
young to have produced high planetary spirits.

Besides being our terrestrial globe, earth is a comprehensive symbol of the

material or vehicular side of manifestation as well as one of the elements. It is
primordial undifferentiated matter which produces the manifested worlds of
entities. Connected with these entities are the numerous allusions to earth as
the nether pole of substantiation, often synonymous with the nether regions.
As the lowest of the several elements, earth denotes physicalization, in which
physical matter is a combination of all four elements with the earth-element
predominating. The pure element, however, is not physical in its
characteristic property, or tattva, but is, in connection with the human organs,
the non-physical tattva of the senses. Earth is characterized by square or
cubical forms and by fixity although the name earth is usually applied to the
grossest globe, which alone is in a more direct rapport with our physical
senses. The earth actually is an animate being (Gaia), as are all the celestial
globes and the nature spirits pertaining to it which were said by medieval
European mystics to be primarily the gnomes.

The gates of hell are various places on the surface of the planet that have
acquired a legendary reputation for being entrances to the underworld. Often
they are found in regions of unusual geological activity, particularly volcanic
areas, or sometimes at lakes, caves or mountains. The gates of hell create a
nature deficit thus causing an alienation from nature. This alienation produces
a diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties and higher rates of
physical and emotional illnesses in humanity.


Worlds are evolved from the state of latency or pralaya into which they
passed at the close of the preceding manvantara, and both primordial matter
and primordial spirit come from the same source and are resolved again into
it. The process is one of evolution or progressive manifestation on various
planes of objectivity and potentialities latent in the spiritual germ. Worlds
must be understood, not with regard to standards of size, but as including a
universe of stars on the one hand and an atomic speck on the other. The births
and rebirths of worlds are not the haphazard productions of an eternal
consciousness, but are the offspring or productions of a consciousness-life-
substance periodically manifesting its inherent powers by the appearances of
different world systems — be these galaxies, solar systems, individual suns,
or planetary bodies or in the infinitesimal realms of atoms and their
component electronic monads. The entire process of the appearances and
disappearances of world systems is dependent on karmic causality
manifesting on all planes with characteristics and actions of consciousness
and consciousnesses.

Audlang is one of several heavens in which three gradually ascending planets

are contained. Audlang is one of the planes of substances different from our
matter, of which these unseen planets or globes are built. The meaning of
firmament is the vault of heaven or sky. It is often identified with air, called
the breath of the supporters of the heavenly dome. It also relates to the
supporters, pillars, or cosmocratores in many ancient cosmogonies, which are
said to uphold or support the world. “Waters” have the mystical significance
of ethers, and hence the division between the waters above and the waters
below does not refer to the common fluid. In the same sense firmament
signifies one aspect of the dividing line between one hierarchical division and
another, in which divisions or firmaments mutually support and complement
each other, and thus build up the web or fabric of the cosmic structure.


Hierarchies, or the interpenetrating of beings, is the structure and operation of
the universe. This applies not only to the entities comprising a universe but to
all its planes and spheres as well as the entities interlocking in an endless
series, one group linking to its superior or inferior in an evolutionary grade,
in turn being the link to the ascending or descending group. Thus everything
exists in and because of everything else. The essential nature or hyparxis of
the hierarchy flows forth from a hierarch, and is delegated in proportionate
lower degrees to inferior members of the hierarchy, so that all is organically
connected. The hierarchical system is inherent in the cosmic germ from
which the manifested universe springs and thus pervades the manifested
universe throughout all its parts from the highest to the lowest. The hierarchy
of spiritual beings extending from the highest solar or galactic monad, to the
least element forming its vehicles or being is built of divinities, who serve as
a sentient channel for the spiritual currents coming to our system from the
heart of the solar divinity, and who themselves shed glory and light and peace
upon that pathway from the compassionate depths of their own being.

The cosmos as a whole is a living organism, subdivided into an almost

innumerable subordinate series of hierarchical units with an assemblage of
beings of many kinds, each of which is a compound unit. In order that the
elements composing each such unit are linked together, the celestial bodies,
visible or invisible, form a unity with companion globes on invisible planes.
These globes are said to be in co-adnation but not in consubstantiality, which
means that, despite being of different grades of materiality, they form a
catenary unit of orbits. Although consisting of several globes, the only ones
visible to the human eye on earth are those which are on the same plane of
materiality. The visible globes belong to the manifested worlds and the
others to the unmanifested.


The genesis of worlds, cosmogenesis, as distinguished from anthropogensis,
the origin of humans, occurs at the commencement of a manvantara. It
constitutes the basis of the subject-side of manifested being, and is the source
of all manifestations of individual consciousness. Mulaprakriti, or primordial
cosmic substance, is the foundation of the object-side of all objective
evolution and cosmogenesis. Mulaprakriti is not restricted to earth, but
includes innumerable globes — nor is it confined to those worlds which
happen to be visible, but includes worlds on all the various planes of
manifested substance. It does not mean that the worlds were created ex nihilo
by divine fiat, nor that they were merely the productions from dead,
unconscious, albeit eternal and uncreated matter. Cosmogenesis is not a
process which has occurred only once, but a process which is repeated
indefinitely during manvantaras and after great pralayas.

There existed three Eves in Eden: the archetypal Eve, the feminine aspect of
the divine androgyne; the Eve of the early third root-race, after the separation
of the sexes but before the awakening of mind; and Eve the mother of Abel
and Cain. The first Eve was no woman but, like the first Adam, the spiritual
feminine aspect of an archetypal spiritual host; the second was no woman but
womankind; while the third was woman and mother as is now known. They
correspond to the three Adams: the first, the spiritual albeit masculine type of
the archetypal host; the second, the mindless first human race; and the third
the race whose eyes are opened. Between the Eve of Genesis and the Eve of
the early third root-race passed long ages, involving millions of years during
which the archetypal preparation of the globe for human habitation was
followed by distinct root-races and three Edens, with millions of years
between these later developments. Adam and Eve, once mind appeared in
them, enter the path of self-directed evolution, a reference to the second and
third Eves mentioned above.
There are entities which express themselves through a race or nation,
somewhat as the mind expresses itself through a collection of living units
which compose a person’s organism. However, the units of the human body
do not engender a unitary entity but, drawn together by similar karma and by
the magnetism of a human embodiment, form the vehicle for the expression
of an entity of a higher order. The individuals of a race or nation, though
drawn by similarity of karma and character into the same race or nation, do
not constitute a vehicle for the manifestation of any entity of a higher order.
Such a national or racial aggregation of individuals of like karma and
character create an atmosphere or manifestation which exists in the ideation
of the planetary spirit, both as an embodied idea and as an abstract spiritual
entity.

Karma is the causes and consequences of action which produces change. A

primary postulate of every philosophy, karma is unceasingly active
throughout nature and is rooted in harmony with operations existing from
eternity in the very nature of things. It is action and adjuster which preserves
equilibrium by compensating all actions, excessive or defective. Hence it is
called the law of retribution, implying neither reward nor punishment, based
on nature’s own harmonious equilibrium. Laws and operations are the
innumerable hierarchies of beings in all-various grades which not only
condition nature, but are in fact universal nature itself. By our actions we act
upon other people and ultimately react upon ourselves. These beings, then,
are agents of karma. The effect of karma on human beings is the natural
reaction from their actions, which may be described as only half-actions, for
they are not completed until the reaction has ensued. Since the consequences
of acts do not necessarily ensue immediately, it follows that at any stage of
our embodied careers we may experience the results of actions performed a
long time in the past.


Astrology associates the archangels with the planets: Raphael with the Sun,
Gabriel with the Moon, Michael with Mercury, Aniel (Anael) with Venus,
Samael with Mars, Zadkiel (Sachiel) with Jupiter, and Kafziel (Cassiel) with
Saturn. However, on occasion the planets of Michael and Raphael are
reversed.

These seven leading archangels take turns guiding the evolution of humanity
by leading particular civilizations to prominence. The rank of these
archangels is determined by their associated seven pranas.

These seven pranas, with seven classifications of human cognizance,

emanate from seven rays of the sun. These rays are named Sushumna (which
controls will and courage), Harikesa (which enables wisdom and love),
Visvakarman (which upholds truth), Visvatriarchas (which creates beauty),
Sannaddha (which provides knowledge), Sarvavasu (which grants loving
service), and Swaraj (which maintains ordered activity).

These rays are a concentrated stream of spiritual energy emanating,

ultimately, from the divine Absolute. Each ray is the embodiment/expression
of one of the great divine qualities, such as divine will, divine wisdom, divine
love, etc. Lower wisdom is like the limbs of a sleeping human. It is capable
of mechanical motions, of chaotic dreams and even sleep-walking, of
producing visible effects, but stimulated by instinctual not intellectual causes,
least of all by fully conscious spiritual impulses.


The existence of vast stores of latent energy in atoms, considering everything
as a question of physical dynamics, infers that an equivalent quantity of
physical energy must have been expended in creating the atom. Energy or life
is a fundamental attribute and function of the universe which radiate
outwards from within, and when expended on the astral plane is far more
productive in its results than the same amount emanating from the physical
plane. Forces are active monadic essences, which may be considered to be a
living, intelligent, self-conscious phenomena that, when actively used, has the
power to do work or to produce effects as energy.

From darkness comes light, from light comes color. Light is in the physical
world and is resolvable into a spectrum or band of colors, defined as a quality
of visual perception depending on the wavelength of light. We could see no
color at all unless we perceived color in our mind from the first, and thus
recognized the color because of its identity with what is within us. The
physical stimuli of color merely evokes what is already in our mind. Colors
and sounds have great potency in practical magic, as cosmic powers can be
evoked by an understanding use of proper colors and sounds. The colors
correspond with the notes of the musical octave, the planets, and the primary
elements. As such, it is the universal mind viewed from a visual aspect as
manifested light. Cosmic forces are interchangeable, their incomprehensible
aggregate being cosmic life. Therefore, any form of this cosmic life has not
only its particular keynote of sound, but likewise its particular keynote of
color, etc. Color is a surface property of an object, but there is no way to tell a
blind person what that sensory experience is, because it’s a purely visual
experience. The blind learn about red in the way others learn about quarks, or
concepts like justice or virtue — through use in verbal contexts.


Seven colors are associated with the seven leading archangels to include blue,
violet, yellow, green, magenta, orange and red. When these colors, or
vitalities, are absorbed into the body, they decompose in the spleen and
produce rays of enlightenment in the colors of white, yellow, red, green and
blue.

These enlightened rays of color flow through the body, clarifying spiritual
misconceptions, and circulate through the body’s chakras or psychic glands.
Additionally they give energy to all the various organs. These are known as
the five pranas. The tertiary ray colors serve as the Ida (lunar) and Pingala
(solar) paths which run alongside the central Sushumna subhuman nadi
(channel) of the body. These five pranas include pitah (yellow) which
maintains the heart beat and breathing as it enters through the breath and is
sent to all the cells of the circulatory system; apana (red) removes waste
products through the body via the lungs and excretory systems; adana (blue)
maintains sound production of the vocal apparatus while speaking, singing,
laughing, crying, etc; samana (green) controls the metabolic processes of
digestion of food to cell metabolism by regulating the heat processes of the
body; and vyana (white) regulates the expansion and contraction of the
cardio-vascular system and muscles.


Chakras are connected with the pranic circulations and ganglia of the auric
egg, and function in the physical body through the intermediary of the linga-
sarira, or astral model-body. They are located in different parts of the
physical frame, reaching from the top of the skull to the region near the
pubis. The human body, as a microcosm, contains every power, attribute, or
energy in the solar system. The forces that originally emanate from the sun,
and pass in and through the various planets, are transmitted to us in the
physical body. Thus each one of these solar forces has its corresponding
focus or organ in the human body, and these are the chakras. Amrita is the
mystical soma juice, which enables spiritual nature to overcome and govern
the lower elements of the human condition. Amrita is the liquid of supernal
and spiritual wisdom as a means for rising above all unawakened
temperaments and become at one with the cosmic life-intelligence-substance.

Bees have a portion of the divine mind from which ethereal particles
permeate the whole earth so that all beings draw from the earth the streams of
life. The spiritual or monadic consciousness manifests itself in innumerable
ways as nectar or amrita, and this same consciousness is consumed by
humanity. The lunar body or psychic nature is born as the “bee” of humanity
which attains the will and the urge to enter into the solar life of the spirit.
Mythical zoology points directly to an inner and mystical significance in
which “bee” is used not in the sense of the insect, but for a certain class of
elementals whose flying around and through the earth is governed directly by
lunar influences. When these bees sprinkle their nectar gathered in paradise,
which sets beings free from birth, aging, disease, death, sorrow, lamentation,
pain, grief and despair. What is this nectar? It is mindfulness occupying the
body. As an elixir it is the soma of immortality.
The elements of the present atmosphere are compounded from simpler
elements which existed on earth at earlier stages of earth’s evolution, and
which exist now on some other planets. The atmosphere of the earth has
become not only a chemical, but an alchemical crucible, in which there is a
perpetual exchange taking place in atoms which correlate and thus change
their equivalents on every planet. Neither sun nor stars have terrestrial
elements, for it is only in the outer realms that the integration of atomic
substances become sufficiently physical to permit the appearance of
terrestrial elements. There is a spiritual “laboratory” on the far outskirts of the
atmosphere, and when atoms and molecules cross this, they change and
differentiate from their primordial nature.

It is a matter of choice whether to regard light as primordial and deduce other

phenomena from it, or to consider luminosity as a result of the vibration of
molecules — since light is both. Light is the first of all manifested things, and
is the very essence of matter, not as a decoration of it. Nor is light necessarily
associated with heat, as even the humble glow worm attests. Self-luminosity,
with or without heat, is a characteristic of everything that is, although this
self-luminosity is by no means always visible to the human physical senses.
Every entity anywhere, great or small, as well as every aggregate of atoms, is
continuously and uninterruptedly self-luminous, continually emanating an
unceasing stream of radiation because of the energies ever active within
itself. This radiation is of several different kinds, of which ordinary or
physical light is but one manifestation. Everything is radiant — not only
luminous, but self-luminous, generating radiation of many kinds from within
itself. It is the imperfect ability of our vision to see these many forms of
radiation that causes us to be unaware of them. Our eyes have been evolved
to sense only one small gamut in the great scale of radiation of the universe
surrounding us. Visible light is a short scale of radiation, but matter itself in
all its forms is concreted radiation or crystallized light.


Evolution is an ancient and cardinal tenet of archaic wisdom formerly called
emanation. In humankind, three distinct lines of evolution take place and
converge: the spiritual, the mental or manasic, and the astral-vital-physical.
The manasic factor is derived from the perfected humanity of a previous
manvantara, whose entrance into the human stock of the third root-race
brought about the union of heavenly and terrestrial entities to create a
completely self-conscious being who mirrors every plane in nature. Just as
below human beings there are less evolved kingdoms, so above are beings in
whom fuller self-consciousness has been achieved and more divine
potentialities realized. All evolution beneath humankind tends towards
humanhood as its objective, although humanity itself has ever greater heights
to attain in the future.

Evolution presupposes two main factors: the entity which is evolving, and the
form which is evolved. These two are related as spirit to matter or as the
monad to its organism. Every one of the countless beings which constitute the
universe is essentially a spark of the universal divine fire, life, or spirit; and at
any time is at one stage or another of a continuous career of unfolding
growth. This unfolding or bringing into manifestation of the inherent, already
inwardly existing, characteristics of a being is therefore growth from within
development. The process is universal, since the universe consists of living
beings, all of which are growing because they are unfolding. Every spark
creates for itself a succession of forms by which it expresses more or less of
its inherent qualities. The physical vehicles are merely the physical end-
products before these physical embodiments are engendered. There are other
embodiments made of subtler grades of matter or consciousness-substance on
intermediate planes, and astral stuff created on the lower plane close to the
physical realm. Environment modifies growth, but without the urge of the
indwelling monad, there could be no action upon environment, nor any
reaction by environment.


Retardation means that certain individuals or groups are from time to time
hindered in their forward development because of evolution. The stage before
them is already occupied by a superior group of evolving entities, which
exercises upon the inferior group an influence the full expression of the
evolving faculties of the individuals of the lower group. This can be
illustrated by the evolution of the kingdoms of nature. Animals are subject to
a very definite law of retardation, because their immediate and future field of
evolution is occupied by the evolving human kingdom. However, it is equally
true that the human kingdom exercises upon the beast kingdom beneath it a
stimulating and elevating power. If one kingdom has not reached a certain
evolutionary standing on the ladder of life, it will have to wait in a more or
less inactive or dormant evolutionary condition until room is made for its
further progress by the kingdom preceding it. The animals, and all other
kingdoms, are undergoing retardation at the present time because they have
not yet evolved human qualities and powers. When the way is finally opened
for them to progress forwards, and if they are ready to do so, there is an
immediate acceleration, so that their progress from the beginning of such
acceleration is very quick. Such individuals develop rapidly when their time
comes because the law of acceleration is the opposite of the law of
retardation.


Evolution is not a process of accretion from without. Such accretion could
not produce an organism unless the full plan of that organism existed already
in latent ideation. Nor is evolution in the vegetable and animal kingdoms a
process of mere transformation by which one physical organism changes into
another. The changes take place because of the unfolding growth of the
indwelling entity. This indwelling entity builds for itself new forms suitable
to its own changed or unfolded states. The plan of evolution and orders of
beings on earth may be represented by a tree, whose main trunk is the human
stem, from which the various animal types have issued like branches, each of
them entering upon a special unfolding development and differentiation of its
own. The same observation applies to the vegetable and mineral kingdoms,
although their root-types issued from the human stem long before the animal
types appeared on earth.

Fundamental matter is the root of prakrit referred to as mulaprakriti or root

nature and is used interchangeably with pradhana as the essence of matter.
Mulaprakriti is that aspect of the Absolute which underlies all the objective
planes of nature. Ethereality is a state of matter more refined and less dense
than familiar physical matter. The differences between the higher divisions of
matter is analogous to the subdivisions of physical matter — solid, liquid,
gas, and fiery. Thus the characteristic of the solid is fixity of form and
restriction of movement; that of liquid, mobility; of gas, expansibility; while
the fiery element is exempt from gravitation. The major divisions of matter
must be graded on a somewhat analogous scale. There is a clear distinction
between akasha, astral light, and ether. Akasha in its higher portions is pure
spirit; the astral light is the highest division of the physical cosmic plane and
may even be called the most subtle part of the terrestrial atmosphere —
whereas ether is a material agent interpenetrating molecular matter, and is
therefore even more gross than is astral light. In one sense these three are the
highest, the very low, and the lowest parts of spirit or akasha itself.


There are no permanent bodies because everything is in a state of flux and
interchange. The physical universe is an ocean of life, partly embodied and
partly non-corporeal. Such terms as matter, energy, wave, and particle are
descriptive of various manifestations of this living ocean. The chemical
elements are centers or vortices in such an ocean, continually giving and
receiving emanations from each other. All forms of physical matter emit
radiation and radioactive phenomena. These emanations are partly actinic
rays and partly emitted particles. Their disintegration results in a continual
emission of both these forms, accompanied by an elevation of the
temperature of the radioactive body, a loss of its own mass, and the formation
of temporary unstable elements of lower atomic weight, until an end-product
of the emanations is reached. During the descending arc of cosmic evolution,
the process of concretion is predominant, and during the ascending arc the
process of disintegration or etherealization is predominant. Calculations as to
the age of the solid crust of the earth, based on disintegration rates indicates
that the rate of radioactive disintegration has been on the increase in
comparatively recent times, and will continue at a growing rate into the
geologic future.


Though the cosmic planes are different from one another, they are not
separated by gaps, just as the spectral colors are distinct and characteristic yet
merge imperceptibly into each other. Nor can it be supposed that at all stages
of evolution the scheme of planes was the same as now. There was a physico-
astral stage of humanity and other beings which now no longer exist on earth,
in much the same way as we find the fossils of types intermediate between
existing types but now extinct. No hard and fast enumeration can be made as
to the number of planes in the cosmos. The number assigned depends on the
particular purpose for which the definition is made.

To euhemerize is to interpret myths as having once being historical events.

The term is sometimes used as an equivalent to anthropomorphism. A great
deal of archaic mythology, however, is a half-forgotten and often distorted
racial tradition or memory of events in the lives of once semi-divine humans,
who actually were in most cases the initiates of the later third and early fourth
root-races.

A conjunction of two heavenly bodies occurs when, as seen from the earth,
they are in the same ecliptic longitude, according to astrology, or in the same
right ascension, according to astronomy. More than two bodies appearing in
exact conjunction is an exceedingly rare occurrence. The planets and the sun
and moon are usually considered, but the fixed stars may be included. Such
conjunctions have always been held in astrology to indicate, prefigure, or
cause important events and changes, and to mark the changes of cycles. The
conjunctions of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars together are specially mentioned.
The conjunctions of the sun and moon are related to human and animal
physiological conception. Also, the fact that the planetary orbits have nodes
and apsides with their own periods of revolution allows for the calculation of
longer periods.


Aura-soma is a method of chromotherapy and a divination system based on
color. It shares similarities with other forms of divination such as tarot, the I
Ching and the Kabbalah.The central idea of Aura-soma is that color is a
unifying universal language which relates to all theologies and schools of
psychology. It is part of the underlying order of the universe with each color
relating to a different aspect of life.

Red is the color associated with the Muladhara or first chakra located at the
base of the spine. The first chakra affects the legs and feet and influences
walking, the anus, and elimination. Positive qualities associated with this red
earth element are steadfastness, courage, loyalty, and perseverance. Negative
qualities of excess red energy may create humans who are stubborn and
bigoted.

Orange is the color of the Svadhisthana second chakra located in the pelvis
area. Being a color derived from red and yellow, orange represents kind-
heartedness in an individual. Orange symbolizes the rising sun, and makes
humans alert and cheerful. Astonishing results are ascribed to the use of the
color orange to treat mental illness. A person with an excess of orange may
express confusion, tiredness, and pessimism.

Yellow is the color of the Manipura third chakra located in the solar plexus.
Yellow is applied to combat glandular diseases and diseases of the lymphatic
system, and to strengthen the nervous system. Yellow is said to have effects
that greatly assist metabolism and glandular activity. A person with an excess
of this color could express lack of concentration, malice, and deviousness.


Green is the color of the Anahata fourth chakra located in the heart region.
The color green is located in the middle of the color spectrum and has a
harmonizing effect. Green is the color of possession and of the will to
possess. Green is also the color of concentration. Green is a positive influence
in the treatments of cysts, eye diseases and diabetes, promoting the relaxation
of the body’s organs and stimulating detoxification of the body. A person
with an excess of green could experience lethargy, lack of motivation,
insecurity, and jealousy. Pink is a secondary color that can also be associated
with the heart chakra.

Blue is the color of the Vishuddha fifth chakra located in the throat. Blue is
the color of peace and infinity and can be applied for relieving headaches and
migraines, the pains of stomach, muscle cramps, and even liver disorders. As
a general rule, the color blue is said to have a very positive effect on all kinds
of pain conditions. An excess of this color in a person could bring about
doubt, distrust, apathy, and melancholia.

Indigo is the color of the sixth Ajna chakra located in lower part of the
forehead. Indigo is believed to be a cooling color that develops psychic
perception and intuition. It is applied for eye, ear, nose, and mental problems.
It is also used to treat addiction. This chakra is referred to as the third eye.
The third eye is a mystical and invisible eye which provides perception
beyond ordinary sight. The third eye is the gate that leads to inner realms and
spaces of higher consciousness.
The linga-sarira is the astral model around which the physical body is built,
and from which the physical body develops as growth proceeds. The astral
realms are not one single plane, but a series of planes growing gradually
more ethereal as they approach the inner spheres of nature’s structure. The
linga-sarira is formed before the body is formed, and serves as a pattern
around which the physical body is molded into maturity. It is as mortal as is
the physical body, and disappears with the physical body, dissolving atom by
atom with the physical corpse. The linga-sarira has great tensile strength. It
changes continuously during a lifetime, although these changes never depart
from a human pattern. It is composed of electromagnetic matter, which is
more refined than the matter of the physical body. The world was composed
of such matter in past ages before it became the physical sphere it now is.
After a long period of descent into matter, astral form oozed forth from itself
into a coat of skin, corresponding to the Garden of Eden as the present
physical flesh-form of humanity appeared.

The astral body sustains a døppelganger or fluidic form known as the linga
sharira or lha Body. This is the subtle shadow of the physical body which
can be difficult to see with the naked eye. This etheric body is composed of
four ethers and is called the “vital body” since ether is the way of ingress for
vital forces from the sun and the fields of nature which promote assimilation,
growth, and propagation. Additionally, there is a type of spiritual sight, that
humanity will eventually develop, called etheric vision. The sthula sarira or
the gross body is the physical body that eats, breathes and moves. The lha
body is very important to physical health and gives nourishment and energy
to the physical body. Its shape is exactly like that of the physical body,
causing it to appear as a double body. After death, the consciousness leaves
the physical body but continues its journey as the lha Body. The lha Body
stays on the physical plane, maintaining its prior shape until the physical
body is fully decayed.


The physical body, usually considered as the lowest substance-principle of
the human constitution is the result of the harmonious co-working on the
physical plane of forces and faculties streaming through their astral vehicle or
linga-sarira, the pattern or model of the physical body. The sthula-sarira is
the concreted effluvium or dregs of the linga-sarira. Hence, the sthula-sarira
is the vehicle or carrier on the physical plane of all the other human
principles. The physical body is built up of cosmic elements from all parts of
the universe. The millions of tiny lives that make up our bodies are much
more enduring than is the body itself as a unit. These little lives are
constantly undergoing birth and rebirth and constantly changing or evolving.
Thus the human body also changes as the years pass by. The physical body is
the outermost, and therefore the feeblest, expression of all the wondrous
qualities and forces working in humans. The human body was once a globe of
light, and will again become ethereal and radiant as humanity, in its
evolutionary development, rises upwards along the ascending arc. As the
inner human unfolds, so bodies on all planes of human constitution become
more refined, ethereal, and perfect in their coordinated activities. Humans
really are complete without the sthula-sarira because even the physical body
is the expression of humanity’s constitution on the physical plane. The human
constitution can be a complete human entity even when the physical body is
discarded, but the sthula-sarira is needed for evolution and active work on
this sub-plane of the solar cosmos.


Panchikarana is how matter came into existence, originating from the
primordial five elements of earth, air, fire, water and ether. Panchikarana is
the method and process of subtle matter (or the prior stage of matter) to
transform itself into gross matter. In addition to the solids, liquids, and gases
which compose the chemical regions of the physical world, there is a finer
grade of matter called ether that permeates the atomic structure of the earth
and its atmosphere. It is disposed in four grades of density and is considered
to be a kind of physical matter. Suksma sarira, or the subtle body, is the body
of the mind and the vital energies which keep the physical body alive. The
subtle body is composed of the five subtle elements before they have
undergone panchikarana.

The issuing of streams of light and life from a sun is an act of emanation —
the unfolding of what is latent in a germ is an act of evolution — but equally
so an emanation, for all the attributes of the developing germ flow forth from
the inherent life which is unfolding itself. Emanation is the process by which
hosts of individual monads issue from their original parent-source and evolve
for subsequent unfolding from each monad, and what is latent in it.
Emanation is the manifestation of worlds and living beings from a unitary
divine source so that it is opposed both to the doctrine of special creation and
to the materialistic scientific theory of evolution.

The barhishads are those who attend to or who are engrossed in material or
pragmatical concerns and who developed a human astral-physical form.
These lunar ancestors evolved from astral bodies or shadows, thus forming
the first astral-physical races on the earth. They created the semblance of
humanity out of their own divine essence to become the first race, and thus
shared its destiny and further evolution. They could not give to humanity the
sacred spark which expands into the flower of human reason and self-
consciousness, for they did not have it to give.



Ursa Major is the vital support or carrier not only of destiny but of the
heavens. The saptarshayahs are seven rishis or sages, who preside over this
constellation and maintain the universe in karmic supervision. These rishis
are individuals who were formerly embodied on the earth but through
successive incarnations gained mastery over the limitations of the material
realm and thus were able to transform their residual karma and their
physicality.

Bhrigu is one of the most celebrated of the rishis and is regarded as one of
the seven progenitors of humanity and sentient beings. The Bhargavas are
descendants of Bhrigu and are aerial deities connected with fire. They are
responsible for enclosing fire in wood and giving it to humanity and also
placing fire in the navel or center of the world.

Humanity is the summit of the animal kingdom. However, there are vast
spheres of cosmic inner space and inner consciousness inhabited by
numerous hierarchies of various evolving, intelligent, and semi-intelligent
beings. The more highly each kingdom is specialized along its peculiar lines,
the more sharply is it differentiated from the other kingdoms. Such distinction
tends to disappear and merge into a continuity when the entities in the
different kingdoms are in an elementary or germinal stage. Humanity is more
sharply distinguished from the lower kingdoms than the lower kingdoms are
from each other. To these lower kingdoms are added three kingdoms below
the mineral domain called elemental kingdoms.


Soma is a sacred juice which gives mystic visions and trance-revelations. The
Soma plant is the asclepias acida, which yields a juice from which the mystic
beverage, the Soma drink, is made. The descendants of the Rishis knew all of
Soma’s powers. But the real property of the true Soma was to make a new
person of the initiate after they are reborn, namely once they begin to live in
their astral body. The partakers of Soma find themselves both linked to the
external body, and yet away from it in their spiritual form. The latter, freed
from the former, soars in the ethereal higher regions, becoming virtually ‘as
one of the gods,’ and yet preserving in their physical brain the memory of
what they see and learn. Plainly speaking, Soma is the fruit of the Tree of
Knowledge. Those who drink it reach a place of splendor (Heaven). Soma is
a plant, but, at the same time it is an angel. Hence the Somapas are those
people who, having become infilled with the essence of their inner spirit,
were mystically spoken of as having drunk of the soma juice and thus being
under the ecstasy of intellectual illumination. Whether the mystical drink was
an actual drink, or merely a spiritual one, cannot be answered by a simple yes
or no. If this drink, however innocent in a single instance, were to be
constantly repeated, it would develop into a drug habit. In later Atlantean
times the drugging of initiates was common, and the results always disastrous
with Soma being the cause of one of the sorceries for which the Atlanteans
have remained infamous. Due to the heavy Atlantean karma still weighing on
us, many nations as late as historic times employed somewhat harmless
potations to bring about a temporary dulling or stupefying of the brain and
nervous system. However, if not moderated, such potations can cause quite
reckless behavior.


Nabhastala is the under side or bottom of clouds, the regions of the
atmosphere where clouds are, and hence the term is often used for ether or
the entire atmosphere of the earth, higher and lower. Fire is the active,
energetic, vitalizing, quickening principle on all planes. It is often paired with
water as spirit and form; contrasted with earth, as celestial and terrestrial; air
is spoken of as its vehicle, as is also ether, because the root of cosmic ether is
the celestial fire. The order of the elements varies, from different points of
view and on different planes of manifestation. From primordial chaos came
forth a fire that was cold, formless, and luminous — an essential
consciousness-substance. The first hot fires and flames issued at a later stage
of manifestation. Concealed within the sun is the triple formless invisible fire,
which precedes the septenary manifested fire of cosmos. Fire, whether
heavenly or terrestrial, is the most perfect and pure reflection of the one
universal flame. It is life and death, creator of the origin and end of every
material thing as a divine consciousness-substance. From one flame all lamps
can be kindled because fire imparts infinitely without loss. Like most other
things, fire has its nether pole and hence its infernal aspect, but the fires of
hell are purificatory. Fire was the great agent of purification in medieval
alchemy, for it removes the dross from the gold. The same is true on the
moral plane, for spiritual aspiration calls down an inner fire that purifies the
gold from the dross in the aspirant’s heart.

Manas generally indicates the thinking faculty. Thinking is closely associated

with volitions, because mental activity is one of the ways that volitions
manifest themselves. Thinking done by manas is more closely linked to
volition than to the discursive processes associated with apperception. Manas
is the mental activity which follows from volitions, whether immediately, or
separated by time and caused by the activation of a latent tendency. This is
the cosmic mind of the reincarnating ego.


The seraphim are the fiery serpents of heaven in the hierarchy of emanations
proceeding from the cosmic monad. The seraphim precede the cherubim in
emanational order, because in the hierarchical scheme the seraphim stand for
the creative fires, the spiritual archetypes, whereas the cherubim are the
builders of forms and hence are of the form class. Thus the seraphim belong
to the formless class which works through and in the cherubim or form class.
The seraphim, whose color is the spiritual red of fire, precedes both in time
and in hierarchical dignity the cherubim whose color is blue — the idea being
that before manifestation of both mind and form can occur in the cosmic
monad, such manifestation must awaken divine desire, signified as a fiery
spiritual red.

Heaven and hell denote states of consciousness experienced in daily life on

earth. A rough division of cosmic spheres makes heaven the highest, hell the
lowest, with the earth beneath heaven, and the underworld beneath it. The
crystalline spheres of medieval astronomy are called heavens surrounding the
earth concentrically. Far from being adjudicated by a deity to happiness or
torment, after death a person goes to that spherical region to which they are
attracted by the affinities which they have set up during their life. The
existence of almost endless and widely varying spheres or regions, all
inhabited by peregrinating entities, exist as regions in which the higher can be
dubbed the heavens and the lowest the hells, and the intermediate can be
called the regions of experiences and purgation. All spheres possessing
sufficient materialized substance to be called embodied spheres are hells by
contrast with the ethereal and spiritual globes of the heavens. Therefore, the
lower globes of a planetary chain may be called hells, and the higher globes
of the chain, by contrast, heavens. All evolving entities go to both the
heavens and the hells in accordance with their evolutionary necessities, and
for the purpose of purgation through the suffering of material experience.


Flame is a portion of fire, in which fire is a more abstract term, and flame a
more concrete and particular term. The intellectual and guiding cosmic
spirits, as well as the astrally and physically creative builders, are spoken of
as being a hierarchy of flames. The lords of the flame are intelligent architects
cosmically, being the givers of mind to humanity in which they are alluded to
as those whose fire is too pure for the production of physical mortal
humanity. Flame is also a projection of fire, as when a flame of the divine fire
descends into matter, or flames of fire descend upon or encircle the head of an
initiate. Flamma is an alchemical or hermetic term used to denote one of the
four elements, corresponding to the alchemical sulphur and spirit.

The lipikae are the scribes of the dhyani, enlightened and contemplative,
realms. As recorders or annalists they inscribe invisible (to humanity) tablets
of astral light. These tablets maintain the unseen gallery of eternity connected
with karma and laws of retribution. Eternity is the abstract sum total of
endlessly cyclical time periods meaning a cosmic mahakalpa as a
manifestation period or 311,040,000,000,000 human years. Originally
eternity signified time divided into endless cycles stretching from the
indefinite past through the present into the indefinite future, comprised within
encompassing boundless duration.

The lipikae inscriptions are a faithful record of every act and thought of all
beings that ever were, or ever will be, in the phenomenal universe. Because
the lipikae are connected to destiny in which the future is connected to the
past and is ever alive in the present, they are also associated with the science
of Astrology.


The karma which brings to a person conditions which are not chosen or
wished for in the present life, is consistent with free will because it is the
result of all previous actions, now expressed in results. These reactions of
causes which were set in motion in this or in former lives, being the result
which was inherent in previous choices, is a self-imposed destiny, but it is not
fatalism, because there is now freedom to decide again how to meet the
results of what previously had been chosen. Karma is mathematically exact,
both physically and metaphysically, but it is so constantly involved with new
elements of choice and of proportion that its effects of necessity are
measured. A gati is the path or sphere of existence entered upon by entities
impelled by past karma. If a person lives a noble and upright life, their gati
will be a sphere in the higher aspects. If a person deliberately lives an evil,
degenerate existence, their next sphere of existence will be a rebirth in some
degenerate sphere of activity. Similarly with the divinities and all other
entities find themselves in succeeding spheres of life and action strictly
according to karma. For karma is universal, and what one makes oneself to
be, that they shall become.

There are many types of karma, such as human, racial, national, family,
individual, etc. A chain of causation, stretched out in time, will be intersected
by any given present moment so that in speaking of a person, both past and
future, they are their own karma. However, since the whole universe is linked
together, it follows that the karma of all beings is linked and, in a profound
sense, identical. Karma in its moral aspect is cosmic justice. Karma is action
or activity of any kind — spiritual, intellectual, psychological, astral, or
physical. Human beings, living in the human planes, produce karma
corresponding to their environment. But individualized and active beings in
other spheres, produce karma corresponding with their own state.


The regents of the cosmos, acting as karmic agents of past destiny, are the
establishers of fate or destiny for a world or universe when beginning its
manvantaric evolution. These regents establish in the noumenal worlds the
roots, and in the phenomenal worlds the fruits, of the essential laws of being.
Fatalism is the belief that human beings have no free will. However, though
perhaps we cannot maintain our own personal will against the laws of the
universe except in very moderate degrees, we have considerable latitude to
make experiments and learn from our mistakes. Fatum means the laws of
nature or the will of the three fates, the Moirai. It also means our lot,
appointed by the destiny born of our own past thoughts, feelings, and acts.
Fate is very closely associated with karma.

The earth is visited periodically and at long intervals by comparatively

sudden changes, varying in geographic importance from a continental to local
catastrophes. The whole period of a cataclysm includes a gradual beginning,
a progressive intensification, a culmination, and a gradual diminution. Local
transformations are often sudden, sharp, or violent, whereas those embracing
a wide geographical field are usually much slower or of longer period,
frequently seeming to be nothing more than the merely secular changes
which human experience recognizes as customary. Cataclysms are due to the
influence of the sun, moon, planets, and ultimately also to the constellations.
As all physical phenomena are manifestations of what originally occurs in the
realms of mind and consciousness, the movements of the earth’s crust reflect
the movements in the minds of the beings inhabiting it, for all nature is an
organism and all things are ineluctably knitted together by cosmic forces.
There is a purpose in every work of nature, through actions that are all cyclic
and periodical. The forthcoming cataclysms at the end of the fifth root-race
are stated to be especially marked by the element fire.


“Correspondences” refer to the idea that there are both real and symbolic
communications existing between all things within the universe. Examples
include the esoteric concept of the macrocosm and microcosm, often
presented in the dictum of “as above, so below,” as well as the astrological
idea that the actions of the planets have a direct corresponding influence on
the behavior of human beings.

On our earth there is a hierarchy of light. Working in this sphere there are
lofty intelligences having their respective places in hierarchical degrees.
These masters are living forces in the spiritual life of the world where
awakened minds and intuitive hearts sense their presence. The head of the
terrestrial spiritual-psychological hierarchy is a mystagogue sometimes called
the Silent Watcher, who acts as a channel for all the spiritual forces flowing to
and from the earth, and who is connected inwardly with all the beings on
earth.

Cosmocratores are the planetary regents who fabricate the solar system and
are hierarchically superior to those who fabricate the material earth. They are
composed of three principal groups, similar to the groups of lipikas. The first
group rebuilds worlds after pralaya, the second builds a planetary chain, and
the third are the progenitors of humanity. Following their ideation of the
cosmos, they fashion systems out of ether and primordial materials such as
protyle, etc. The cosmocratores, as the masons of the world, work in the
vehicular or material side of nature and receive the instructions for their work
from the hierarchy on the spirit side, the divine architects.


Teachers are of various grades, belonging to different degrees of different
benevolent hierarchies. At the top are those who serve as inspirers and light-
bringers to the races of humanity. Below the highest come lesser teachers,
pertaining to the lesser cycles of time. The mythology of ancient peoples
contains references to divine instructors of various ranks. The term ‘teacher’
is applied especially to masters of wisdom, from whom comes the light that
guides and aids, but does not govern or control, working through many
channels to keep alive humanity’s spiritual intuitions. These masters of
wisdom send into the world messengers who have earned the right to work
for humankind, including the sublime duty of teaching. On the other hand,
false teachers have always abounded in the world, and the pupil needs to
discriminate between the false and the true. A true teacher is recognizable by
the universality of their teachings, which are not circumscribed by sectarian,
national, credal, party, or other limitations. The true teacher never constrains
the will of the pupil nor exacts unconditional acceptance of any doctrines, but
points the way in answer to the pupil’s needs, seeking to evoke and stimulate
the pupil’s own spiritual and intellectual strength and inner vision. Teachers
succeed one another and pass on teachings from age to age as in the
succession of the guruparampara chain.


Guruparampara refers to a long pedagogic chain, or lineage, of influence
extending from the highest spiritual guide down through vast numbers of
spiritual chiefs, ending at last in the teachers of our youth. There are two
kinds of guruparampara: those who rise one above the other in spiritual
dignity and in progressively greater esoteric degree, and those who succeed
each other in time and in one line in the outer world. Both kinds maintain the
same series, manifesting in two slightly different manners as a process of the
hierarchical structure of nature itself, although neither pupil nor final guide
may be aware that this is the case.

Arambha is the beginning formation of the universe out of pre-existing

material. The universe proceeds forth as a ‘new’ production of cosmic
intelligence or ‘points’ of individuality called monads. Such a new universe is
recognized as the karmic resultant of a preceding universe, the former ‘self’
of the present. The nidanas are the chain of causal concatenation, the twelve
causes of existence or manifestation which developed each one by itself,
usually in serial and periodic order and strictly in accordance with stored-up
karmic seeds of various kinds. The atomic core of selfhood veils itself in the
various sheaths of consciousness, which are the seeds or the very being of the
nidanas referred back to the self as their originators.


The first cause is a demiurgic root-impulse unfolding a universe.
Individualized activity must be finite, however immense, but not infinite or
eternal. If the universe is a chain of causation in which each link is the effect
of a precedent cause, then if there is no first cause there is no effects and the
principle of causality disappears altogether. Infinity has no first cause but is
the all-fecund womb of literally infinite numbers of productive demiurgic first
causes. We can therefore recognize the necessary limits of human conceptual
power, and only postulate a causeless cause.

Every thought leaves a seed in the mind of the thinker, no matter how
fugitive the thought was. The sum of such small seeds make up a larger seed
for thought, and thus constitute a human’s general character. Thoughts are
highly important because humanity is made of thought and built on thought;
as we think, so we act and will act, and as we act and think so will we suffer
or rejoice, and the whole world with us.


Pralaya refers to a period when the universe dissolves into a state of non-
existence. This occurs when the three qualities of matter are in perfect
balance. These qualities are referred to as the three gunas which are sattva
(purity as per equilibrium), rajas (passion as per activity) and tamas
(ignorance as per inertia). Nirguna signifies without qualifying attributes, and
as a noun signifies a fault or that which is devoid of good qualities. Pre-
cosmic substance is the substratum of matter in various grades of
differentiation. This substance is often referred to as “darkness” or “chaos.”
Pre-cosmic root-substance (mulaprakriti) is that aspect of the Absolute which
underlies all the objective planes of nature. Just as pre-cosmic ideation is the
root of all individual consciousness, so pre-cosmic substance is the
substratum of matter in the various grades of its differentiation. Substance is
not matter, but is the noumenon, or cause, of matter. Pradhana is the root of
matter from which the cosmos is created. In pradhana the three gunas are in
a state of equilibrium. Each of these three gunas is present in every particle of
creation but the variations in their activity manifest as the variety of creation.

Sattva is the quality of truth, goodness, reality, and purity. The three gunas or
qualities run all through the fabric of nature like threads inextricably mingled.
Each of these three qualities participate in the nature of the other two, yet
each one possesses its (svabhava) intrinsic characteristic. Not one of these
three can be considered apart from the other two. The three are fundamentally
three operations of the human consciousness, and essentially are
consciousness itself. As the human being is a microcosm of a macrocosm, the
same gunas of humanity can be discovered in the cosmos.


The three qualities (gunas) have both a good and an imperfect or evil side,
and each possesses in itself the other two qualities. For instance, there is
sattva-sattva, rajas-sattva, tamas-sattva, etc. Thus in the different hierarchies
in the cosmos, the beings composing these hierarchies may be classified not
only under one of the three gunas, as essentially manifesting that
characteristic, but likewise during their evolution they pass through the
phases of the other two qualities, although under the dominance of the main
quality from which they as individual conditions derive. The three qualities
are born from nature and bind the imperishable self to manifested life. Of
these the sattva quality by reason of its characteristics entwines the mind to
rebirth through its attachment to wisdom and knowledge; rajas produces
aspiration as well as propensity and thirst, and imprisons the ego through the
consequences produced from such action; tamas has its good side but
likewise is the deluder of all creatures, and imprisons the ego in a body by
characteristics such as indifference, idleness, and sleep. The fruit of righteous
acts is called pure and holy and appertains to sattva; from rajas is gathered
fruit both good and that which produces pain or sorrow; and tamas produces
steadfastness and immovability in a good cause, as well as in a bad sense
being the cause of senselessness, ignorance, and indifference. Those in whom
the sattva quality is established are said to be mounted on high; those who are
full of rajas remain in the middle sphere, the human world; while those who
are overcome by the evil aspect or quality of tamas sink below. Thus each of
the three qualities has its positive and negative side, and the initiate or adept
seeks to make all three qualities manifest in their life in their highest aspects.


Svabhava can bring forth only that which itself is, as its essential
characteristic and its own inner nature. Svabhava may be called the essential
individuality of any monad, expressing its own characteristics, qualities, and
type, by its self-urged evolution. Consequently, each individual svabhava
brings forth and expresses its own particular vehicles as its various svarupas,
signifying characteristic bodies or images or forms. The essential self sends a
ray from itself into manifestation, and the vehicles formed by this ray express
its unique individual essence and path of evolutionary growth and experience.
Every entity, in all ranges of being, reflects its own essential individuality
which is stamped on its innermost essence. Having attained a certain stage of
evolution or development (or quality, characteristic, or individuality) in a
preceding era, when the next period of evolution came, these entities could
produce nothing but themselves, or their own inner natures, as seeds do. A
seed can produce nothing but what it itself is, what is in it — and this is the
essence of the doctrine of svabhava. Svabhavat is the underlying cosmic
substance, the divine source, the self-existent and, to undeveloped minds, the
great vacuity — having its own svabhava. Svabhavat is really the plastic
essence of matter, both manifest and unmanifest. The svabhavika
philosophers teach the becoming or unfolding of the self by inner impulse or
evolution of the inherent seeds of individuality lying latent in every monad or
jiva.


The human sense organs, each of which has a physical means of expression
and of reception, are referred to as the eyes, nose, ear, tongue, body (for the
sense of touch), and brain (the organ of mind). The physical organs of sense
themselves are vehicles of the living impulses of sense acting from their seats
within the astral constitution, or shadayatana, commonly described as the
organs of sensation through which consciousness passes. The organ of
spiritual vision in the human body is the third eye. Like the other senses it has
its spiritual origin which expresses itself through its several forms,
corresponding to different planes. Some of the Atlantean magicians and
initiates had this inner sight, which was even in their material race highly
developed, so that their vision could pass any distance and penetrate opaque
bodies. In the order of evolution of the physical senses and their organs, sight
comes third, and was evolved as a physical sense in a preceding root-race.
The third eye was once external and an organ of physical vision, but retreated
inwards when it was replaced by the two eyes as existing at present. The third
eye has now become the pineal gland.

If we ordinarily call silence the absence of sound, it is also possible to call

sound the absence of silence. Humans must learn the fullness of the seeming
void, the voidness of the seeming full — and, applying this, name silence as a
mighty positive power, not a mere emptiness. Silence is that in which sound
becomes manifest. It is the container of sound, the privation of sound in the
rest of the senses, both external and internal. To some humans, silence may
seem an unutterable horror, but it must be faced to obtain the sublimities
beyond. Silence to our ears is, on higher planes a silence to our soul, but may
in either instance be a celestial harmony which our grosser nature cannot
absorb. Gnosis rests upon a square whose corners are silence, depth, divine
mind, and truth. There was a time when there was neither silence nor sound,
for these constitute a duality, and before this all was a cosmic oneness.


Learned pundits and philologists deny that sound has anything to do with
philosophy or ancient esoteric doctrines. But the mysterious connection
between sound and light is one of the most profound secrets. It is more
important to understand that everything great or small, high or low, has its
own keynote of sound, its mathematical number, so to speak. Hence every
atom has its own particular characteristic sound or note and it is possible to
control such an atom, or any other entity, provided one knows the
characteristic sound which mathematically represents such an entity. The
secret of all mantras, from the standpoint of practical magic, is not so much
the words themselves or the letters they hold, although these letters have a
certain meaning, but rather the finding of the keynote and chanting it.
Rhythm, in this sense, is the very essence of harmonic affinity.

The first root-race was devoid of mind on our plane. The second had a sound
language of vowels, and its speech was largely onomatopoetic in character.
The third root race developed a speech which was little better than animal
sounds, but towards its end these now fully developed human beings had
monosyllabic speech, after the awakening of their minds. Before that there
was communication by thought-transference. After monosyllabic speech,
came the agglutinative, spoken by some Atlantean races, and then the
inflectional language of the fifth root-race, represented by Sanskrit and its
derivatives, and the later closely related languages such as Greek and Latin.
The great number and variety of today’s languages are evidence of the great
antiquity of the human race and its extensive division and subdivision. The
elaborateness of languages spoken by so-called primitive peoples, especially
the frequently highly complicated and extensive vocabulary, for which their
modern representatives have but little use, shows that they are remnants of
once highly civilized peoples. The priests of Atlantis addressed their gods in
the mystical sound-language of those gods known as vach.


Each of the five elements is said to have its guna or peculiar quality, as well
as a corresponding organ of sense in the human being. Thus ether has sound
for its guna and the ear for its organ; air has tangibility for its guna and the
skin for its organ; fire or light has sight for its guna and the eye for its organ;
water has taste for its guna and the tongue for its organ; the earth has smell
for its guna and the nose for its organ. There are actually seven gunas in
nature, but only five have yet been evolved in any degree, and two remain
still to appear both as qualities and as sense organs in the distant future.

It was only during the third root-race that hearing became manifest as a
distinctly individualized physical sense apparatus. Vibrations of material
particles in and outside of the body aroused the sense of hearing as a physical
manifestation.Though the alternation of manvantara and pralaya conjoined
are the Great Breath, the alternating motion of this prana does not cease even
during the long pralayic ages. Breath is often used in the same sense as ray,
wind, spirit, or pneuma, to denote an active emanation which is at once active
and passive, positive and negative, donative and receptive, and is the
principle of polarity later in cosmic evolution. An instance is when the divine
breath incubates the waters of space, and worlds are produced. There may
also be right-hand and left-hand breaths, or breaths (winds) from the four, six,
or eight directions, each having its own specific quality and functions.

Pralaya is part of a cyclic model of endless wheels within wheels of various

duration marking the beginning (manvantara) or end (pralaya) of either a
cosmic, mundane, physical or metaphysical event. These may be realized as
nights and days and are heavily influenced by the planetary time cycles of
astrology and the zodiac. However, many planets in our solar system have no
globes on the human plane of perception.


Many of the properties attributed to atoms could be represented as vortices in
a frictionless, incompressible fluid. Analysis of the atom has failed to resolve
it into anything more than electric particles whose properties are functions of
their motions called vibrations. Fohat traces spiral lines and forms wheels or
centers of force around which primordial cosmic matter expands and
contracts and passes through stages of consolidation ending in globes, and
later through stages of etherealization. Vortical motion is a universal law seen
in the stellar universe and in the electronic constitution of the physical atom,
giving a fuller meaning to the word cycle. Wheel, cycle, globes, and
revolutions all pertain to the same fundamental concept of whirling,
revolving, or the gyrating motion of beings and substances. No motion can
take place except in matter, space, and time, where the revolutions of entities
include the time periods or cyclic returns of beings and events throughout
duration. Wherever there is a whirling or turning, whether of matter or of an
event in time, it is because it is a being or thing which is active in
reproducing itself in cyclic events. A cycle of time entails a moving entity
producing the cycle, albeit the moving entity may not be visible and indeed
may be incomprehensible. Motion, the divine breath, becomes a cosmic
whirlwind and sets in motion the particles in space, bringing about their
coagulation and concretion, and later their dissipation and dispersion.


A nebula is the first stage of manifestation of a planet or star. Dark nebulae
are masses of unknown substance sufficient to obscure the light of the stars
behind them. These are composed of primordial or dormant matter, or matter
at times in a state of atomic dissociation. The kinetic activities of world-
building in them have not yet begun, whereas the light nebulae represent the
processes of building. A true or irresolvable nebula is said to be gaseous
rather than a cluster of stars. Irresolvable nebulae are cosmic matter which
has reached a plane of condensation where it is ready for building into worlds
by the action of intelligent fohatic energy. The sun started as a very diffused,
tenuous gas or nebula, extending much farther than its present volume. The
combined influence of gravitation and of contraction by cooling resulted in
the separation of parts of the mass into rings, and these rings afterwards
coalesced into planets. The galaxy itself is alive — an animate organism —
and every solar system comprised in it is likewise alive and therefore an
organism. The term alive comprises mind or intelligence and spirit. Thus not
only is the sun alive, but every one of the planets (excepting the moons) is an
individual living entity, of which only the grossest or physical globe is
apparent to our vision and, therefore, is a composite unit formed of
component individuals. The solar system was originally formed from a vast
nebula consolidating into a physical world from inner worlds — astral matter
becoming physical matter — guided by innate mind in which the various
motions within the solar system arise from the innate vitality within it.


The stars of the entire galaxy are all intimately connected together, spiritually,
intellectually, psychically, vitally, and physically, which means a connection
extending back to a unity of origin in a past so greatly remote that its period
can be reckoned only in astronomical figures. In an exactly similar way all
the planets of our solar system, especially the so-called sacred planets of the
ancients, are connected in origin in a distant past. They are connected to the
hierarchies of intelligent beings of various classes which enter into creative
action when the central sun emits creative light preceding the later periods of
manvantaric activity. Those classes of cosmic architects open the
manvantaric drama by entering upon their respective functions, and once the
lines of structure are laid, the lower classes— high though they may be in
spirituality and intellectuality — begin their work as builders, which is
ceaseless until the manvantaric end.


Planets are the outer shell of living beings and have evolved from cosmic
seeds, passing through various stages including that of comets. They are
inhabited by denizens adapted to their conditions. Each planet of the solar
system is in its own particular stage of planetary evolution, one planet being
in one round of its own evolutionary course, another in a different round of
its evolutionary development; and the substances or matter composing them
are in different states of materiality, ethereality, or spirituality. The planetary
movements are regulated by mathematical law originally impressed not only
in the structure of the solar system, but in the characteristic nature of each
individual planet in the system, and mark cycles of time, great and small.
They shed influence on the earth and its inhabitants both as time indicators
and by their quality as living beings. Each celestial body is the vehicle of
what is in essence a divine entity and are undergoing courses of evolutionary
unfolding in time periods so vast that mathematics cannot compass them.
Every cosmic body is a composite entity of inner and invisible energies and
substances, and of an outer and visible physical body. These elements are the
principles of every self-contained entity or individual life-center. Every entity
in the universe is an inseparable part of its universe, therefore whatever the
whole contains, is found in miniature in every part.


The bhadra-kalpa is the present age, said to last 236 million years during
which 1,000 fully enlightened beings or sages will appear. The bhaumika
pralaya is a terrestrial or planetary dissolution or manifestation. The
bhaumika pralaya occurs when a planet has to transfer its life and energy to a
new laya-center of another globe where it begins the bhaumika manvantara,
the great life cycle of a new globe which is the re-embodiment of the inner
constitution or life essence of the former planet which is now dead and
decaying. Our earth, or any similar celestial body on this cosmic plane, is
looked upon as an entity which is becoming, growing, evolving, and is
therefore a living being. Frequently the earth is called prithivi, because it is a
manifestation of the guarding and guiding planetary spirit of the solar system.

“Invisible” planets exist within a space which is neither a limitless void nor a
conditioned fullness, but both—being insubstantial and on the plane of
absolute abstraction. As such, horoscopy must consider time as finite while
duration is endless. Time is a point within a circle of duration which has
neither limit nor boundaries, nor any name or attribute. Space is not mere
emptiness or a mere container, but a vast and incomprehensibly immense
plenum, pleroma, or fullness, divided into various departments, planes,
spheres, and worlds.

A circle is a mystic unity symbolized by the inclusive number one, the single
amalgamated source from which proceed creative rays and manifestations of
the mind. A point at the center of a circle is the cosmic germ of generation
out of which all later phenomena emanate or flow, and hence is the first
manifestation. The circle may be conceived as either one unbroken line,
having no parts, or as an infinitude of points — in which zero and infinity are
extremes which meet, and where spirit and matter are not yet separated —
thus it is spirit-substance.
A singular point is made by the intersection of two lines at the apex of a cone
where a decreasing magnitude reaches zero. This becomes the node of a
vibration, as when something passes from one state to another. Such
conjecture suggests that the centers of the nebulae have the nature of
‘singular points,’ at which matter is poured into the universe from some other,
and entirely extraneous, spatial dimension, so that they appear as points at
which matter is being continually created. This suggests that matter can be
created, and resorts to a fourth-dimensional theory to explain its mysterious
appearance. However, physical matter is formed or deposited from ultra-
physical matter, as energy-substance passing from one plane to another, so
there is no need for a fourth-dimensional theory.

The ever-unknown frontierless womb of boundless space is conventionally

represented by the circular zero. All the sections of a sphere are circles in
which its surface is an infinite plane having neither boundaries nor parts and
therefore measurable solely by the rules of geometry. A balance of centrifugal
and centripetal forces produces the sphere, as in a soap bubble. Its center and
its surface represent opposite poles, between which radiate expansive and
contractive energies. The earth is virtually a sphere. The heavens, the limits
of our vision, form the surface of an ideal sphere, whose center is
everywhere, and whose periphery is nowhere. The path of a point which
moves round an axis while continually approaching it or receding from it, the
spiral, also often used for a helix, is generated by compounding a circular
motion within a straight line. The spiral form is an apt illustration of the
course of evolution, which brings motion round towards the same point, yet
without repetition. The figures 8 and ∞, denoting the ogdoad and infinity,
stand for spiral cyclic motion. The course of fohat in space is spiral, and spirit
descends into matter in spiral courses. The complicated spirals of cosmic
evolution bring the motion back to the point from which it started at the birth
of a great cosmic age.


The physical plane of objectivity is referred to as the three-dimensional
world, because space is considered a system of points with three rectilinear
coordinates necessary to determine the position of a point. When one of these
three dimensions becomes zero, the volume of the body also becomes zero,
and it vanishes from the physical planes. Time may be considered a
dimension, because it is a quality or mode of measuring space from event to
event, so that by such mensuration the mind can picture not only the
continuous present, but likewise the past and future. Any entity possessing
three dimensions could not exist without the time element entering into the
equation. Unless a thing exists in time it obviously cannot exist at all, and
thus time can be called a dimension of space. As long as matter or physical
space exists, there will be a physical space with three dimensions and no
more, yet to which can be added the fourth dimension called time. Likewise,
consciousness, which is an attribute of abstract space like time, is yet another
dimension. The terms dimensions and dimensional arise because they apply
to the three standard manners of measuring physical objects, and likewise to
the time element or points of duration, but when applied to the higher modes
or qualities of a cosmic continuum, these words can be used only by
distorting the idea of mensuration they involve. Time is only an illusion
produced by our states of consciousness as we travel through eternal
duration. It does not exist where no consciousness exists in which the illusion
can be produced. A spiral line represents time returning upon itself in cycles,
and yet transcending itself at each cyclic sweep. Divided or phenomenal time
is often conceived as an offspring of space, the latter considered as a
container of manifestation.


Every celestial body is under the direction of a hierarchy of beings, spiritual,
quasi-spiritual, and astral, the higher of which are called celestial spirits.
These planetary spirits have evolved through past cosmic cycles of evolution
from a state equivalent to the human although the general hierarchy
pertaining to each planet is closely linked with the destinies of the present
life-waves of that planet. Evolution starts from a primal point and is fulfilled
in the pleroma or manifested sum total of a manifested universe, with special
emphasis on the inner and invisible ranges and planes. Therefore, it is the
cosmic abode of invisible divinities in all their many ranges and ranks,
together with the planes, worlds, and spheres composing the fullness. Such an
entirety is the whole, elaborately divided and subdivided into planes and
hierarchies of emanations, which are geometrically symbolized by squares,
circles, points, etc. A point is regarded as having no parts or magnitude, but is
postulated for the purpose of defining position, for it cannot in itself have
position unless space has been previously assumed. An abstract point cannot
have location or relation to anything as it is devoid of attributes, unless we
consider unity as an attribute. Such a point is equivalent to the whole
universe. The mystical significance of a point describes an emanative center,
a spot where energies from one plane enter another plane, a symbol of unity
and homogeneity, representing the phase before polarity has set in. When a
point appears in a circle it is the first differentiation in the periodical
manifestations of an ever-eternal nature.


The skandhas are various attributes forming the compound constitution of the
human being. They are the manifested qualities and attributes forming the
human being on all six planes of being, beneath the spiritual monad, making
up the totality of the subjective and objective person. They have to do with
everything that is finite in the human being, and are therefore inapplicable to
the relatively eternal and absolute. Every vibration of whatever kind —
mental, emotional, or physical, that an individual has undergone — is
derivative of and from one of the skandhas composing the individual’s
constitution. Skandhas are the elements of limited existence. The five
skandhas of every human being are: form as the material attributes;
sensations or perceptions; consciousness and abstract ideas; action as
tendencies both physical and mental; and knowledge as mental and moral
predispositions. The human skandhas are the causal activities which by
action and interaction attract the reincarnating ego back to an earthly life. The
exoteric skandhas have to do with the objective human, while the esoteric
with the inner and subjective human. At death the seeds of causes sown
which have not yet been realized remain latent in our inner principles as
“psychological impulse-seeds” awaiting expression in future lives. The
skandhas unite at birth and constitute the personality. After the death of the
body the skandhas are separated and so remain until the reincarnating ego on
its downward path into physical incarnation gathers them together again
around itself, and reforms the human constitution as a unit. The skandhas are
awakened into life one after another — first the highest ones, next the
intermediate ones, and last the inferior ones. The skandhas are closely
connected with the astral light, which also is the medium or register of
impressions.


 Subjective and objective are interdependent, having meaning only in relation
to each other. Subjective applies to whatever is referred to the thinking
subject, the ego, while objective is whatever belongs to the object of thought,
the non-ego. Subjective and objective express a relation between the act of
perception and the object perceived. The two words correspond to mind and
matter, but parts of mind itself may become objects of some higher
perceptive subject. Subject and object are contrasted on every plane, and this
contrast represents the experience of the perceiving ego. But the peak of
omniscience, or knowledge of things in themselves, is not reached until the
duality or contrast of subject and object vanishes into unity. The word
subjective is often used to mean unreal, in contrast with the physical world
which is regarded as real — despite the fact that the physical world is perhaps
of all things the most unreal of entities subject to knowledge. Thus an
apparition may at times be described as being purely subjective, meaning that
in such cases instead of being an actual external object it is a mental image
considered objectively by the mind itself.


In cosmology a horizontal diameter in a circle symbolizes the first
manifestation which gives birth to the universe. It also represents the
hermaphroditic third root-race of humanity. The diameter, when found
isolated in a circle represents female nature as the first world, self-generated
and self-impregnated by the universally diffused spirit of life — referring to
the primitive root-races also. An empty circle represents a boundless
unmanifested point within the first differentiation of potential space within
abstract space. While the horizontal diameter represents the third stage of
manifestation, the divine mother or nature, a cross within the circle is the
manifested world in which the vertical diameter is male, and alone in the
circle represents humanity after the separation of the sexes.

When a manvantara begins there is a wisdom energy which radiates a pre-

cosmic substance which acts as a demiurge, but not yet an architect. This
radiation is a divine thought that impregnates matter to create perception in
sentient beings. As such it functions as a manvantaric dawn.

The alpha and omega are the originators of a cosmic manvantara, and all the
hierarchies of spiritually inferior beings flowing forth from this manvantara
undertake the work of building, preserving, and finally destroying the solar
system when the manvantaric term is ended. Then the alpha or outflowing
energy recombines with the omega or inflowing energy and re-coalesces into
their original oneness.

Svabhavat is the essence that fills the universe and is the root of all things. It
is the abstraction known as mulaprakriti or cosmogenesis. Like the akashic
or etheric realms, svabhavat remains in obedience to a law of motion inherent
in it while progressing from an inactive state into one of intense activity. It
differentiates these states, and begins its work through that differentiation.
After a certain existence it passes away into prayala.
Rudras are highly intellectual and spiritual entities, having in previous
evolutionary periods attained self-consciousness by individually passing
through the equivalent of the human kingdom. The rudras represent the
aggregate of entities in the primary formation of worlds, as well as the
intellectually informing principles of humanity. They are said to be at war
with the shadowy entities and powers of the lower spheres, and hence are
sometimes spoken of as the destroyers of outward forms. They are also one of
the classes of the “fallen” or intellectually incarnating deities, the progenitors
of the true intellectual-spiritual self in humans. The rudras are even referred
to as the ten vital breaths or pranas because the ten vital breaths are the ten
varieties of intellectual energies flowing from them, and which, on the
intellectual plane, may be spoken of as the mental pranas.

Sishtas are those superior classes of each kingdom left behind on a globe
during its obscuration, serving as seeds of life for the returning life-wave in
the next planetary manifestation. They are the most highly evolved monads of
each of the forerunners who, because of the innate urge and karmic power
behind them, have preceded in their development the great bulk of their life-
wave. In the human life-wave, the sishtas will be the most evolved humans,
the great sages, those who have outrun the evolutionary development of the
human life-wave considered as a whole. They are called remainders merely
because they remain behind on a globe in order to provide the seeds for
inaugurating their own life-wave’s evolutionary progress, when that life-wave
once again reaches the globe on which the sishtas remain. While the sishtas
are dormant, sleeping, or resting, they are not inactive or in a dream-world.
However, they appear relatively dormant because the life-wave has passed
them by. Yet they still carry on all the functions, processes, and duties
required of the most advanced egos of that life-wave until the life-wave
returns to the globe on which these sishtas are waiting. The sishtas are the
mind of any life-wave — and hence the respective mind for each life-wave.


Diti is cosmically what may be called the first sheath or integument of aditi
which is generalized space. Thus, diti becomes the more or less divine spatial
extent of a cosmic unit, such as a universe, solar system, etc., although the
significance of diti points directly to lofty spirit. Diti is the principle of the
metaphysical nature of akasha. Diti represents, at one and the same time, the
divine mind of the ascetic, and the divine aspirations of mystic humanity
toward deliverance from the webs of illusion, to final bliss.

The terms space, extension, and spatial extension convey notions essential to
our mental processes, and we cannot even think of a point without having
first imagined an extended space for it to be located. When abstract space is
spoken of as a boundless extension, the latter word must be understood as the
addition of this, that, or some other cosmic plane. Therefore, on each such
plane resembling a spatial adjunct we recognize a physical space, great or
small. However, extension is not abstract space itself, for all extensions of
whatever character, and on whatever plane, are contained in abstract space. If
we speak of abstract space as a boundless extension, we must enlarge the
word extension to include the inner and the outer, the high and the low, and
all that is visible or invisible, past, present, and future.

The issuing of streams of light and life from a sun is an act of emanation,
while the unfolding of what is latent in a germ is an act of evolution — but
equally so an emanation, for all the attributes of the developing germ flow
forth from the inherent life which is unfolding itself. Emanation is the process
by which hosts of individual monads issue from their original parent-source
and evolve for the subsequent unfolding, from each monad, of what is latent
in it. Emanation is the manifestation of worlds and living beings from a
unitary divine source which is opposite both to the doctrine of special
creation and to the materialistic scientific theory of evolution.


Although often used interchangeably with being, which refers to abstract
continuity in spirit, existence means a manifestation of an entity in the
phenomenal worlds. Therefore being is the noumenon and existence is the
phenomenon in which the causes of existence (nidanas) can be dissolved.
The Absolute, a cosmic hierarch, is absolute existence as non-existence. Non-
existence is described as absolute being, and consciousness. The distinction
between being and existence, is the former is the noumenal One, and the
latter the phenomenal manifold through which the One is known.

Fohat is cosmic vitality manifesting in one of its forms as fire or as electricity

and magnetism in manifold appearances as an offspring of cosmic space or
cosmic waters. These waters are not liquid but ether — the fiery waters of
space. Fohat is a vital electrical power that transpires to create and unify all
cosmic energies. It is a living force created by will which acts on the cosmic,
terrestrial and human planes as they exercise their influences both
respectively and collectively on the unseen planes of affinity and approbation.
Fohat is the inseparable absolute monad uniting humanity with nature
through an attraction of atoms. Akarsha is attraction, contrasted with prishu
or presha which is repulsion. As an electrical fluid, fohat is present in the
construction and formation of a plan in the mind of nature. This plan is
sometimes called the Divine Thought of cosmic and human ideation in which
“word made flesh” is manifested. On the earthly plane fohat is felt as the
magnetism of desire. On the cosmic plane fohat is the constructive power that
carries out the formation of all phenomena.


The laws of nature are the action and interaction of the combined
consciousnesses and wills which pervade the cosmos. The will pours forth in
floods of light and life which follow the pathways of universal circulation
from the central heart of the solar system. They descend, plane by plane and
cycle by cycle, into the depths of matter, from which they arise again towards
their primal source. In this progressive descent and ascent, will is made to
manifest in each state of consciousness which it enters. There is, therefore,
the one fundamental cosmic will-ideation, breaking into innumerable streams
of willing entities during periods of manifestation, and operating in every
round of the endless ladder of life. Universal thought and will come into
manifestation through the collective hosts of spiritual beings who are the
vehicles through which the unmanifested appears. They are intelligent forces
that act according to laws imposed upon them by still higher powers. The
natural law which preserves the balanced motion of planetary rotation
explains how there is a will needed to impart a circular motion and another
will to restrain it. In the composite human being — the microcosm — there
are the divine, spiritual, intellectual, emotional, animal, astral, and even
physical wills. As will operates through human nature, the individual
consciously and unconsciously gives it a right or wrong direction, according
to the use of free will in choosing a course of conduct. The brain and body
show the different actions of the conscious, positive, volitional will and of the
negative, automatic, vegetative will. The latter energizes the mysteries of
organic functions carried on by various conscious or semiconscious elemental
entities who act instinctively under the intelligent, harmonious laws of nature
for the body’s welfare.


Fohat is the mysterious link between mind and matter serving as the
animating electrical charge of atoms, bringing them to life. Just as subject and
object can be synthesized into a unit, fohat synthesizes spirit and matter to
create a subjective spirit and objective matter. This process creates a plan for
a new universe. Each manvantara is headed by a different incarnate Manu
whose cosmic ideation arises as a type of wisdom of the Absolute from the
pre-cosmic ideation occurring at the beginning of a manvantara. This cosmic
ideation gives rise to fohat. Absolute wisdom mirrors itself in its ideation by a
transcendental process, superior to and incomprehensible by human
consciousness which results in the cosmic energy of fohat. Fohat is the
dynamic energy of cosmic ideation which exist as Divine Thought to become
the substance of “the laws of nature.” As such, fohat is the bridge of ideation
created by the architects of the visible universe. Fohat, as the unity of mind
and matter, and is the divine androgyne representing the active male potency
of the female reproductive Shakti in nature. As the primordial light in the
universe of manifestation, fohat is the ever-present electrical energy and
ceaseless destructive and formative power of daiviprakriti, the fons et origo
of all phenomena, the divine mother of evolution.

Fohat guides the ether (akasha) toward activity which differentiate into a
marvelous complexity and diversity thus creating the various natures of
phenomena. At first these natures are inert substances but evolve into
increasingly abstract planes of perception. Ananga means without limbs or
parts and is a graphic and suggestive title of all spiritual potencies, qualities,
or attributes. It is also a name for akasha, the sky or cosmic ether, and for
manas (mind). Archaeus is one phase of fohat manifesting as energy on lower
planes of the universe. It is a combination of intelligent energy and original
substance working as mind and vehicle.


Shakti is universal energy, the feminine aspect of fohat and one of the forces
of nature. It is energy that proceeds through itself, not being due to the active
or conscious will of the one that produces it. Viewed as a consort of deities,
this energy or active power is represented as feminine influences. Cosmically
the shaktis originate in the summit of the astral light or akasa, which is the
womb of the cosmic shaktis, but also their playground. In humans, shakti is
the mind in its higher aspect, and the activities of the various pranas in the
human constitution in its lower aspect. There is no essential distinction
between any divinity and its consort. Furthermore, all the shaktis are either
conscious entities in nature, or vital effluxes or emanations, or cosmic fluids,
with which nature is infused throughout. The kundalini is likewise born in the
mind in humanity, but descending through the human constitution has its
pranic or psychovital physical representations in the various chakras or vital
centers of the human frame. Thus the kundalini is an example of shakti or of
its fluidic effluxes in the lower portions of the human constitution. Cosmic
operations or cosmic justice are often viewed as terrible in their operation.
Hence shakti is often represented in iconography as surrounded with a
necklace of skulls or similar emblems which pragmatic culture misinterprets
as horrible and revolting.


Chit represents the intelligence side of nature, and its opposite, achit, is its
vehicle, the substantial or material side of nature. Chidachit refers to that
which is neither the one nor the other, but the link or intermediate division
between the mental form and the manifested form of phenomena equivalent
to fohat.

Somewhere between time and eternity lies a dimension called hyparxis.

Hyparxis is an ‘ableness-to-be.’ It does not indicate a change in time, or a
manifestation of eternity. Instead it refers to transformations in ‘inner time.’
Hyparxis combines what is actual with what is potential, thus creating a
‘present moment’ based on the internalized experience of external temporal
events, past, present, or future. Thus, the new age refers to no age at all, but
instead describes an elemental quality of being. The word utopia signifies ‘no
place.’ It is neither here nor there, of this world or transcendental to it. Its
existence as a non-existence can be seen as a singularity, but within this ‘no
place’ exists an infinity of space. Thus an invisible space between worlds is
created as a medium between the real and the ideal environments. The
aspiration for a space within a pre-existing place distinguish the utopian
impulses from the transcendental impulses, whereas transcendentalism seeks
escape from the “real” world in exchange for an ideal one, utopia instead
seeks a deeper connection with this world in the form of its inner potential as
a comprehension of the real.

Noumenon and phenomena are things displaying themselves to the senses.

Noumena and the noumenal world are objects of the highest knowledge,
truths, and values, as distinct from a thing knowable by the senses through
phenomenal attributes. Human understanding makes sense of and thus intuits
phenomena that appear to the mind. A crucial difference between the
noumenon and the thing-in-itself is that to call something a noumenon is to
claim a kind of knowledge, whereas the thing-in-itself is unknowable.


The pranic life-atoms of the human body make an electrical field which
permeates the astral-vital-physical constitution, and puts us in contact with
the natural flow of ethereal currents of electric and magnetic forces. These
forces emanate from great cosmic entities which are the intelligent agencies
for the karmic action of the laws of nature. They function in the noumenal
realm of causes which appear on earth as phenomena of all kinds to oversee
the destiny of both humanity and the planet. They act impersonally in
harmony with the combined effects of ethereal and terrestrial conditions. The
sun, moon, planets, earth, and human brain are all magnets in contact with a
common network of consciousness. The atoms, fluids, and gases have
stepped down, plane after plane, bringing us the karmic influences of the
hierarchies which compose the solar organism. They are the tangible carriers
of the cosmic electrical fire of divine, spiritual, mental, psychic, astral, and
material forces which fill the universe. The same impersonal agents of the
karmic law, under the influences of far higher spiritual agents, are equally
active and helpful during human cycles of ethical and spiritual aspiration and
progress.

Bath Qol is the voice of primordial light signifying the wisdom that was
received vocally. This wisdom is the daughter of a cosmic all-wisdom
referred to as prajna. The arani represents the father and mother elements in
nature, the creative, generative energy producing offspring from a receiver.
While the mother/father metaphor is visualized physiologically, it may be
interpreted as the creative power of the human mind to a celestial spark.
Aupapadukas are those who are self-born by reason of their own intrinsic
energy, without parents or predecessors from which existence or activities are
derived, as is the usual case in linear descent. There are aupapaduka
divinities of the solar system as well as organic entities. The core of any such
entity is aupapaduka incarnating out of inherent energy and not as the
offspring of a predecessor.


Samskara refers to any compound form in the universe whether a tree, a
cloud, a human being, or a molecule. Everything that is physical and visible
in the phenomenal world is a conditioned thing. Every action by an individual
leaves a samskara in the deeper structure of the person's mind. These
impressions then await volitional fruition in that individual's future.
Samjna is perceiving the qualities of an object. Its function is to create a
condition for perceiving again “this is the same,” or recognizing what has
been previously perceived. Samjna becomes manifest as the interpreting of
the object by the features that have been apprehended. Humans can make
sense of phenomena in various ways, but in doing so can never know the
“things-in-themselves” as the actual objects and dynamics of the natural
world in their noumenal and transcendent dimension.

As the symbol of generation, birth, and rebirth, the egg is the most familiar
form of that in which is deposited and developed the germ of every living
being, used not only on account of the mystery of apparent self-generation,
but from its spheroidal shape, the sphere and circle both being symbols of
encompassing space. The female emanator is first a germ, a drop of heavenly
dew, a pearl, and then an egg which gives birth to the four elements along
with akasha. Giving a fellow disciple an egg in the old Mystery schools
suggested the rebirth of nature when initiation ceremonies prevailed at the
spring equinox, thereby expressing the hope that they might be reborn. The
egg was the symbol of life in immortality and eternity, and also the glyph of
the generative matrix. The third root-race, produced their offspring from eggs
which was a method which still exist today among animals. This race and its
method of reproduction was the logical outcome of the so-called “sweat-
born” of the later second and earliest third root-races.


The progressive series of methods by which human life has reproduced its
kind on earth is closely related to the unfolding of composite human nature,
and is also a part of evolutionary history. The re-embodying ego manifested
its composite nature in the degree corresponding to the various gradations of
matter in and through which it slowly descended, plane after plane, to its
present state. This series of former kinds of embodiments, and of the
progressive modes of reproduction are found repeated in the development of
the human embryo, in the persistence of vestigial organs in adults, and in
reproductive methods which still prevail in the lower kingdoms of plant and
animal life. In the lowest forms of life, a homogeneous speck of protoplasm
divides into two. Next, in a nucleated cell, the cell nucleus splits into two
sub-nuclei which develop within the cell wall, or burst through to multiply
outside into independent entities. This fission is a copy of the reproductive
method of the first root-race. The next type of cell division is budding, where
a portion of the parent swells out at its surface, finally to separate and to grow
into a full-sized individual, as in many vegetables, the sea anemone, etc. This
repeats the way in which the primeval human race merged out of its first
reproductive method. At the next step, the parent organism throws off a single
cell which develops into a multicellular organism like the parent, as in
bacteria and mosses. The formation of these spores is followed by a type of
intermediate hermaphroditism with the bisexual organs inhering in the same
individual, as in plants. These “buds” grew more numerous and became
human spores or seeds as a type of “vital sweat.” Many of these buds at
certain seasons when the parent entity had become mature, would leave it, as
the spores or seeds of plants today. These seeds were taken care of by nature
and developed in their environment. At present, the occasional cases of
multiple human births hint at this long-past condition in procreation. The
present method of procreation, like all the preceding ones, is a passing phase
of human re-embodiment and will in time become human evolutionary
history when other methods will take its place.


Organisms reproduce in various ways: fission, gemmation, parthenogenesis,
hermaphroditic reproduction, and sexual reproduction. In the course of
evolution, organisms pass from one method to another. The passage from the
hermaphroditic method to one in which the sexes are separate took place first
in the animal kingdom, and shortly afterwards in the human kingdom. The
process of separation did not occur suddenly, but slowly. This is often called
the fall, and is so in one sense was a descent from spirit toward matter, and
served as an initiation of various beasts. In reality, it was simply a following
of the natural course of an unfolding progress in evolution. The separation is
symbolized by a circle with a vertical diameter. The hermaphroditic state is
repeated in the developing embryo where the organs of both sexes arise from
the same germinal layer of cells, and differentiation does not occur until the
middle period of fetal life. Today, the orderly unfolding of embryonic cells
into a human form is in keeping with the embodying ego’s karma, and is
therefore directed by creative spiritual entities and forces. Before humans
could become male and female physically, their prototype had to arrange a
form on the sexual plane astrally. That is to say, atoms and the organic forces,
descended into the plane of differentiation to carry out a balance as male and
female in its present stage of materiality. After the separation, the third eye
began to disappear, and death as we now understand it was not known until
then. Thus the primeval polarity of all things differentiated on the material
plane — including sexual humanity — was of immaculate origin and
purpose.


The otherwise unaccountable sterility which ethnologists note among certain
so-called primitive peoples is a physiological prevision by which karmic law
hastens the closing scenes for the remnants of a racial cycle. A process of
decimation is taking place all over the planet among races whose ‘time is up’
— among these stocks are the senile representatives of lost archaic nations.
The study of this sterility throws a strong light upon the origin of the
anthropoids. This dates back to hybrids resulting from the union of certain
imperfectly evolved groups of Atlanteans with females of a semi-human, if
not quite animal race, itself the progeny of the mindless Lemurians. This took
place at the period of the greatest materialization of physical humanity, when
the unnatural union was fertile because the mammalian types were not remote
enough from their root-type — the primeval astral human — to develop a
necessary barrier. Since then, nature has changed, and the general rule for the
crime of human bestiality is a resulting sterility.


The originating causes of sex are not rooted in the higher principles or
elements of the human composite constitution. It is the effect of former
thought-deposits, of emotional and mental tendencies and biases evinced in
preceding lives on earth. The predominating cause of a given sex in
incarnation is the strong attraction to the opposite sex during preceding lives,
as well as attraction to a male or female parent during inception. This
attraction, arising out of thought and emotional energy, feminizes the life-
atoms, or masculinizes them, as the individual case may be, and the natural
consequence is incarnation in a body of the sex to which attraction leads.
Thus a reincarnating ego may have several incarnations in bodies of one sex,
and then incarnate in bodies of the opposite sex for a number of times in
succeeding incarnations. How many times, therefore, a reincarnating ego may
embody in a male or a female body is not subject to any arbitrary rule but
depends solely upon the karmic impulses in the treasury of psychomental
experiences. Though the distinction of sex is biologically regarded as a
profound and nearly universal attribute, it is an evolutionary condition or
cycle of the reincarnating ego’s development in its present stage of
materiality. Therefore, it is a transitory event in its bipolar earthly experience.
As sex has been nature’s plan for humanity for some eighteen million years,
it will continue to be the natural plan for some ages to come. Some ages
hence, sex differentiation will give way to the activities of impersonal,
spiritual and creative energies.


The seasons are in part due to the inclination of the earth’s axis. If there were
no inclination — if the ecliptic coincided with the equator, and the earth’s
axis with the poles of the equator — there would be no seasons. In ancient
times there were no changes of season, but an eternal spring which lasted as
long as the lack of polar inclination endured. During this time earth’s axis
was without inclination, remaining at right angles with the plane of the
ecliptic. Spring, summer, autumn, and winter corresponded with other
quaternaries, such as the four points of the compass and the four elements,
and also represent a cycle of changes from birth to dissolution and rebirth.
The earth’s axis undergoes a secular movement of inclination with interims of
pauses and smaller changes, or what may be called librations. This secular
movement is on the whole continuous, so that in course of long ages the axis
of the earth becomes inverted, and the poles are reversed but, continuing their
movement, they finally return to the position of right angularity with the
plane of the ecliptic. Enormous changes take place during this cycle, not only
as regards seasons, but likewise as regards geological and marine convulsions
and cataclysms — evidences of which are apparent not only in the geological
record, but in many botanical and zoological migrations. Hence, what was at
one time land becomes sea, and vice versa.


The semi-fluid granular substance found in all forms of organic life known as
protoplasm is the primal type of matter which appears as either a
homogeneous, amorphous, or gelatinous substance, with the potential of
differentiating into every known form and function. The biological basis of
manifesting life on the physical plane is semi-astral matter operating at the
level where two realms, the lower astral and the ethereal-physical, merge into
each other. As a physicalization of vital astral substance, protoplasm links the
tangible world of forms to the invisible world of living forces and the root-
types in evolution. Astral matter, it must be noted, is a state of matter,
having, like gross matter, its own rudimentary, primordial, or undifferentiated
‘protyle.’ There are several protyles in nature corresponding to the various
planes of matter, each having its own condition which would be a distinct
basis of physical matter, and therefore quasi-astral. This ethereal gradation of
substances allows a medium the transmission of living impulses of
intelligences which are the direct cause of every protoplasmic seed
differentiating and evolving, each after its own kind. In the lower kingdoms
where all forms of plant and animal life begin in this substance, their
essential nature and instincts operate under the influence of a hierarchy of
cosmic entities which represent the laws of nature. In addition to this creative
supervision, humanity’s own spiritual essence is allied with these karmic
agents in working out human embodiments. The fertilized germ-cell of the
human embryo is a microscopic copy of the protoplasmic second human root-
race which was a conglomerate of highly ethereal astral cells filled with the
astral essence of protoplasmic fluids. Early humans propagated themselves by
fission, as do individual cells and unicellular organisms today. This procedure
is an early evolutionary stage in the process of the bringing forth the
underlying true human structural framework as we now know it.


The golden egg or womb is a matrix of imperishable substance. It is the
luminous ‘fire mist’ or ethereal stuff from which the universe was formed. It
is the mystery of apparent self-generation and evolution through its own
creative power repeating in miniature the process of cosmic evolution in the
egg, developed due to heat and moisture under the efflux of an unseen
creative spirit as a reflection of the heavenly matrix, the female space or
primeval chaos, in which the male spirit fecundates the germ of the visible
universe. The spiritual seeds of all classes of beings and things exist in
primordial cosmic chaos, and each seed is like all others, and therefore like
the species which gave rise to them through emanational evolution. These
seeds, particles, monads, or spiritual atoms were called homoiomere in the
classical world.

The human race from the beginning passed through different modes of
reproduction which depended upon the physiological characteristics of the
various phases through which humanity progressed from ethereal through
astral into physical types. At first humanity was sexless and then, through
various phases of seeding, budding, and egg-bearing, became androgynous.
The higher ethereal intellectuals of this race could not physically incarnate
even in the bodies of the early egg-born but were mortal in lower mental or
personal aspects where there was as yet no personal ego to survive. Although
the inner monadic fires existed in these beings, there was no proper vehicle
into which to pour their flames. As time passed human progeny appeared with
one or the other sex predominating, and finally during the later third root-race
appeared as distinct males and females.

Each phenomenon has a physical plane which includes its atmosphere, its
astral plane, and its mental plane, all interpenetrating one another, and
therefore occupying the same position in space, but all quite apart from and
not communicating with the corresponding planes of any other phenomenon.


Skandhas are the five bodily and mental factors which result in the rise of
craving and clinging. They constitute and explain a person’s personality.
These five factors are form, sensations received from form, perceptions,
mental activity or formations, and consciousness. These cravings range from
the highest down to and including those cravings of the astral-vital-physical
vehicle.

There is a faculty of the human mind, which is superior to all which is born
or begotten. Through it humans are enabled to attain union with superior
intelligences, to be transported beyond the scenes of this world, and to
partake of the higher life and peculiar powers of the heavens. Intuition may
be described as spiritual wisdom, gathered into the storehouse of the spirit
through experiences in past lives. Higher intuition is a filling of the functional
human mind with a ray from the divinity within, furnishing the mind with
illumination, perfect wisdom and, in its most developed form, virtual
omniscience for the solar system.

The adibhuta is the underlying spiritual substratum of material objects and

the first element that contains all elements. The adhibhuta is the original and
primordial element in nature and is the uncreated cause of all worlds and the
nameless source from which they emanate. This primordial element is found
in mulaprakriti, the fundamental root-substance which underlies all
manifestation. While all things spring from an original unity, the term
element is employed relatively to many things which are themselves
compound. The chemical elements, for example, may spring from a more
elementary protyle, and this from akasha, the common spiritual-ethereal
parent of the physical substratum. Thus, what is homogeneous in relation to
that which comes from it, may be heterogeneous in relation to that from
which it comes.


The anupadakas are considered parentless, because they radiate directly from
that which is neither father nor mother and remain unmanifested. Space is not
only a boundless three-dimensional extent in which objects and events have
relative position and direction, but also the container of a number of
unperceived dimensions constituted by different kinds of phenomena. All
phenomena have a place within cosmic space, which is a temporal
manifestation of an eternal pre-cosmic absolute abstract space.

Interplanetary ether (akasha) extends through the whole of space to the

farthest visible star, although our physical eyes may not perceive that star.
This is because ether is composed of physical and ultimate atoms in their
normal and uncompressed condition. But all the lower and more complex
forms of ether exist only in connection with the various heavenly bodies,
aggregated round them as atmosphere, though extending considerably further
from their surface.

Our atmosphere teems with invisible lives, of which germs are merely the
physically embodied or integrated samples, minute and very weak in power.
Our atmosphere contains likewise hosts of invisible beings of tremendous
energy. The early races of humanity did not require an atmosphere as we now
know it. There are organisms on earth at present which do not need oxygen
for their vital activities, and there are beings at every stage of time and on
every planet which are adapted to the external conditions which surround
them. Both the atmosphere and the solid earth are interpenetrated by other
spatial realms, invisible and intangible to us, but are as objective to their own
denizens as our world is to us.


Creation pertains to those primordial beginnings of manifested life which
precede the operations of nature when it has entered into its established habits
due to past karma. Such actions are the karmic results of preceding causes.
Ancient cosmogonies begin with the secondary creation in cosmic things. In
the beginning of the primary creation of the world, and on a smaller scale the
earth, there existed three elemental kingdoms, consisting of the three
elements fire, air, and water. These brought about the evolution of worlds
from primordial atoms as well as from a pre-primordial atom. In the
subsequent portions of primordial creation came the manifestation of the
various hierarchies called angelic. In the primary cosmogonical creation,
universal cognition developed as divine thought which became the vast range
of hierarchical minds which constructed, inhabited, developed, and even
emanated the manifested worlds. Primeval humanity issued as astral shadows
from the highly ethereal frames of their cosmic progenitors. They were
human in form only, because for ages they were “mindless” — having huge
ethereal and non-compacted bodies and a spiritual-intellectual spark within
—as there was as yet no active link, no active middle principle.


In cosmogenesis, the germ is the first well-developed localized cosmic entity,
luminous and semi-astral, that is to be a future world. Hence the germ is the
developed result of the first cosmic impulse of a primeval intelligent and
formative principle working downwards into manifestation. This stage in the
evolution of a cosmic entity is called the germ from which springs or evolves
the entity later to appear. This is the bond which connects entity with non-
entity as a nursery of human and spiritual beings. The germ becomes the
spiritual potency in the physical cell that guides the development of the
embryo, and is the cause of the hereditary transmission of faculties and all the
inherent qualities in humanity. Every germ-cell, human or other, is the
physical expression of inner, ethereal, and psycho-magnetic activities, and is
a compact bundle of inner forces and substances ranging from the divine
through intermediate degrees down to the astral and the physical realms.
Each germ-cell is the projection into the physical plane of an inner, psycho-
ethereal radiation, a point originating in the inner worlds and contacting
physical matter by a psychomagnetic affinity, and thus arousing a proper
particle or molecular aggregate of living physical substance into becoming a
reproductive cell. Passive germ plasm is immortal in that it is identical to its
earliest ancestor.

Astral archons are celestial beings who transfer their mystic fluids or
essences into their “shadows” or vehicles, thus enabling them to manifest on
the various planes of the universe. These beings are concerned with a kind of
hypostatic action or a transference of consciousness, vitality, and force from
higher to lower planes through various vehicles or sheaths in which
descending rays fall on the different planes of the universe that they traverse.


The universe is a living organism, composed of an infinite number of minor
organisms of various degrees of expression in both spirit and matter. These
groups of minor organisms, or worlds, are separated from each other in
consciousness, not in space, by planes. All the beings of any one plane have
senses relating to that plane and are therefore usually unconscious of other
planes. The suns and planets of any one plane interpenetrate the physical
sphere, and permeate it, so that beings actually pass through the worlds of the
entities dwelling in realms invisible to us. These invisible realms are made of
matter just as is our physical world, but it is less substantial and more ethereal
than ours. We do not cognize them with our physical senses because of the
dissimilar vibration of the different planes. While these higher planes are the
fountainhead of all the energies and matter of the physical world, to an entity
inhabiting these inner and invisible worlds, these are as substantial and real to
that entity as our physical world is to us. Just as we know in our physical
world various grades or conditions of energy and matter, from the grossest to
the most ethereal, so do the inhabitants of these other worlds know and
cognize their own grossest and also most ethereal substances and energies.

‘Asiyyah is the lowest of the four worlds or spheres which are emanated
during a period of world manifestation. This fourth world contains the
physical matter of the planets including the earth, which is subject to birth,
change, dissolution, and rebirth of its matter-forms. In the ‘asiyyatic world all
the potencies and functions of the preceding or superior worlds are operative
but are greatly diminished or weakened as being the farthest tip or extremity
of the descent of manifestation.


Akasha is the mysterious fluid termed ‘the all-pervading ether.’ It enters into
all the magical operations of nature, and produces mesmeric, magnetic, and
spiritual phenomena. Akasha is an eternal divine consciousness which cannot
differentiate, have qualities, or act because action belongs to that which is
reflected or mirrored from it. Both electricity and magnetism are considered
the vital fluids or effluxes of living beings, which flow forth from them and,
blending, produce the myriad forms of electric and magnetic phenomenal
activity common everywhere. These phenomena can be traced to their source
in cosmic akasha.

The changes occurring in the earth’s magnetism are due to akashic

magnetism incessantly generating electric currents which tend to restore
disturbed equilibrium. Hence all magnetic or electrical activity on earth is
produced by astral magnetism and electricity, incessantly generating electric
and magnetic currents which reproduce themselves in the physical sphere.

The lokas and talas represent planes of consciousness on the earth, through
some of which all humanity must pass. Everyone passes through the lower
lokas, but not necessarily through the corresponding talas. The lokas refer to
spheres corresponding to the planes of nature, while the talas can refer to
nether-worlds or hells. Each of these planes of consciousness has a spiritual
or consciousness aspect (loka) and a substantive material aspect (tala), like
two sides of a coin. The lokas may also be considered as the “principle” side
of a plane, while the talas are the element side. The ativahikas are a class of
beings inhabiting the lower lokas who help a disembodied monad or jiva in
its transit from its dead body to paramapadha, or the highest bliss.


Chiliocosm is a world made up of a thousand regions. Out of the many
regions only three are named: kama-loka (desire realm), rupa-loka (form
realm), and arupa-loka (formless realm). The universe is filled with
chiliocosms, each one corresponding to a hierarchy with its own integral
system of worlds, regions, or divisions, each division again being subdivided
to form the vast complexity of universal nature around us. Each such
hierarchy consists of divine, spiritual, intellectual, astral, or astral-physical
divisions running from the highest down to the lowest, and the three lowest
of each such chiliocosm likewise bear the names kama-loka (or kama-dhatu),
rupa-loka (or rupa-dhatu), and arupa-loka (or arupa-dhatu), these three are
commonly spoken of as the trailokya, applying to whatever universe,
hierarchy, or chiliocosm they may be in or belong. In the trailokya, the lowest
or kama-dhatu is lowest region of desire; the second or rupa-dhatu are
worlds of form of such ethereal and subtle character that they may be defined
as regions of a purely intellectual or mental character; whereas the highest or
arupa-dhatu comprises regions of so purely spiritual — not merely ethereal
— character that words cannot give an idea of their character.

Good and evil are attributes of relativity in nature as perceived by the minds
of percipient beings. Neither good nor evil per se exist independently in
nature. The cause for both is found, as regards the cosmos, in the necessity of
contraries or contrasts, and with respect to humanity, in their human nature of
ignorance and passions. Manifested qualities are in pairs of opposites, so that
contrast subsists not merely within the pair itself but also between the pair
considered as a whole and the One which is superior to it. Since throughout
nature such pairs of opposites are reconciled by a synthesizing unity, it
follows that the words good and evil are used in a relative sense, and convey
the notion of incompleteness as contrasted with an intuitively conceived
perfection. We cannot suppose that things can be good or evil in themselves,
except relatively, or even in their relations to other things.


The general term nature is used to denote a kind of secondary divinity, while
the progress of science has analyzed this into various laws and forces, which
paradoxically perform some of the same functions as the deities of
polytheism. Less sophisticated intellects have never ceased to believe in a
whole range of cosmic hierarchies, running from divinity down to the so-
called nature spirits, and traditional peoples have always looked upon these
as powers which are often dreaded and must be propitiated. As soon as we
depart from the simple primeval idea of a universe filled with intelligent
beings — and indeed formed of these beings themselves — of numerous
hierarchies, grades, and kinds, we arrive in a maze of abstractions and
contradictions. The ancient pantheons are in reality allegories or
personifications of the hosts and hierarchies of cosmic powers, divine,
intermediate, and terrestrial, in uninterrupted serial sequences. Where an
ignorant devotee might address prayers to some of these personifications, the
enlightened being would seek to evoke a human power within themselves,
corresponding with the cosmic power, of which humanity is a direct
reflection.


White magic, or theurgy, is knowledge used for beneficent purposes. Black
magic, or goetia, is knowledge used for evil purposes. Natural magic is the
knowledge and employment of the natural powers, forces, and substances of
nature — what is called science. If the knowledge gained through the study
of natural science is distorted in its use to selfish or ignoble ends, it becomes
de facto black magic.

Evocation involves the calling forth of simulacra of the departed by magical

processes, or the calling forth of nature spirits of various classes by will. The
spiritual aspects of human beings cannot, however, be called forth, except in
rare instances immediately after death, which means black magic. These
disembodied spirits do not actually come, but cause their simulacrum to be
formed, or send a messenger. The attempt to evoke the departed is an
interference with the courses of nature and is detrimental to the welfare of
departing egos. It is more common to evoke spooks from the kama-loka, or
denizens of the lower astral light. Appearances thus created are often of a
composite nature, to which the medium and sitters, whether knowingly or
not, contribute to actual materialization. Such practices come under the
general heading of necromancy.

Bhuta are entities that have lived and passed on, specifically spooks, ghosts,
simulacra, the reliquiae of the dead and the astral dregs and remnants of
human beings. The bhutas are the ‘shades’ of the ancients, the ghostly
phantoms of the astral world, or astral copies of the humanity that were. The
bhutas are magnetically attracted to physical localities similar to the remnants
of impulses still inhering in them. As such, the bhuta of a drunkard will be
attracted to barrooms. Bhuta-vijnana is the knowledge of demonology and
the art of exorcising demonic possession. It was one of the branches of
ancient medicine. Bhuta also refers to astral rejects of the animal kingdom.


The age-old belief in ghosts is consistent with the breaking up of composite
human nature into its component parts at death. The astral body, when freed
from its familiar physical duplicate, is still magnetically attached to the body,
and is sometimes seen haunting a new grave for a short time. Soon the atoms
of this shadowy form begin to dissipate. But the more ethereal and enduring
astral atoms cohere in the desire-form body of the deceased person’s lower
mental, emotional, and psychic nature. These so-called spooks are the umbrae
or larvae of the dead —the human reliquiae as eidola or the astral “images”
of the dead. These shells or reliquiae are usually invisible but are sometimes
seen by clairvoyants. The more coherent ones are the shells of gross or
wicked people and are influences of sensual or evil tendencies which
instinctively haunt the atmosphere of persons and places whose characters or
conditions are congenial to them and therefore magnetically attract them.
Even well-meaning sensitives and persons of mediumistic or psychic type,
being relatively aware of the astral plane, are susceptible, at times, to some of
these strangely perverse and obsessing influences. Ghouls are the astral or
astral-physical entities haunting cemeteries or burial grounds and we must
keep an eye upon the danger to humans or animals who come into contact
with them.

Bhutas are the rudimentary substances or vehicular elements of the objective

or substantial side of the principles of nature and therefore inseparable from
them. These cosmic elements are not the familiar things which are known as
physical substances, often taken as symbols, but possess certain appropriate
qualities of the actual elements of cosmic being. These familiar physical
substances of earth, water, air, and fire are the correspondences on earth, in a
mystic sense, of true cosmic elements.


The phenomena of table-rapping is supposed to be either due to tricks or
some kind of unconscious muscular action on the part of the sitters at a
seance, or by spirits of the departed. But there are a variety of degrees
between physical mechanism and self-conscious volition, just as there are
multitudes of living beings in widely differing states of materiality filling the
gap between physical organisms and the spirit world. Astral light is filled
with an enormous variety of beings, mostly of a low type, not using physical
bodies, not human in their nature, but having a sort of consciousness of their
own. The conditions provided by the vitality of the medium and sitters may
stimulate, and to a certain extent direct, these beings and thus at times cause
them to become active in the production of psychic phenomena. The human
organism in all its ranges is composed of a vast number of elements, physical,
astral, etc., which in normal life are held together in a unit and in
subordination to the general life of the person. Some of these elements may
become temporarily extruded, especially in mediums or those who have
cultivated mediumship. Thus a phenomena may be caused innocently by the
seance sitters themselves — or by astral or spiritual phenomenon produced in
a table when the sitters at a seance hold their hands over or on it.


Astral remains of the deceased tend to haunt the places where they dwelt in
life, and in certain conditions may bring about a connection between the
lower astral plane and the physical so that visible images are seen, voices or
footsteps heard, and objects moved. In some cases the astral image or
reliquiae may persist for centuries, making what is called a ghost or astral
corpse. When bones have been found under a haunted house the haunting has
ceased after the bones were ceremonially interred. Sometimes there is an
evident desire on the part a revenant to communicate information of some
sort, such as a hidden document or buried treasure. This is not because the
spirit is desiring to communicate such information, but because it had the
desire during life to guard the treasure and conceal it and reveal it to some
future individual.

There is a sharp distinction between the demons of a more ethereal type, truly
spiritual beings, and the lower earth-haunting demons who are distinctly
denizens of the lower astral and physical realms. As with so many cosmic
powers and their characters, these beings have been relegated to the position
of evil powers hostile to humanity, to be fled from instead of revered. The
whole idea of the adversary or devil is enshrined in the word daemones. But
fallen angels, represented as rebel spirits, were merely performing their
natural duty in evolution by forming the lower worlds. As personification of
evil, the word can only be truthfully applied to those beings that humanity
itself, by evil thoughts and passions, has generated to hover in the lowest
strata of the astral light or haunt the kama-loka. “Demon” is applicable in
general to all formative power, from the highest to the lowest and denotes the
formative manifestation in and on the lower planes of prakriti. All the
manifested cosmos is the material inversion or reflection of a divine essence
and its emanations which, in their aggregate, compose the spiritual
background and causal forces of the universe.



The six ayatanas are the five senses plus mind, regarded as the inner seats of
the lower consciousness which function through the ordinary five sense
organs plus the mind organ, the brain. They compose the chain of causation
or lower causes of existence. There are multiple planes of nature, such as
physical, astral, mental, etc. They belong to distinct layers of existence which
may not interact unless interconnected by intermediate matter or processes.
The atmic body radiates from a central point that is unified with the one-life
that envelopes the earth, acting through all living creatures on all levels of
existence. Atmic consciousness is undifferentiated awareness as
identification, not with individuality, not with groups of beings, but with all
pervading life itself. If there is a strong sense of individuality, then it is not a
pure atmic state but a reflection of it in the mental or astral levels.

Each plane has its corresponding state of consciousness which denotes the
range or extent of that state of consciousness, or of the perceptive power of a
particular set of senses, or the action of a particular force, or the state of
matter corresponding to any of these. There are both macrocosmic and
microcosmic planes. Each of the planes in the macrocosm has its subplanes.
The lowest macrocosmic plane is called the prakritic plane, which in turn has
its sub-planes. The sub-planes of the prakritic level corresponds to states of
human consciousness. Thus human consciousness essentially belongs to the
lowest of the cosmic planes. Each of these planes have their sub-planes that
correspond with the most ethereal on top and the grossest at the bottom. Thus
their order from top to bottom is atomic, sub-atomic, super-etheric, etheric,
gaseous, liquid, and solid. The physical plane is therefore divided into the
dense physical (consisting of the solid, liquid and gaseous) and the etheric
(consisting of the four higher sub-planes).


Daiviprakriti is elemental matter in its first and second stages of evolution
from above. The filmy ethereal wisps of light seen in a midnight sky is a
physical manifestation of daiviprakriti, because when these manifestations
are not actually resolvable nebulae, they are systems of worlds in the making.
Fohat is the energizing power working in and upon manifested daiviprakriti,
or primordial substance, as the cosmic intelligence, or cosmic monad.
Daiviprakriti and its differentiated energy called fohat, are the guiding and
controlling principles, not only in the cosmos, but in all the subordinate
elements and beings filling the cosmos. The sun is daiviprakriti working as
itself, and also in its manifestation called fohat, although the daiviprakriti and
the fohatic aspects are the all-permeant intelligence of a solar divinity. This
original, primordial prima materia, is the divine and rational emanation of the
universal Mind which— as the daiviprakriti or divine light — formed the
nuclei of all the ‘self-moving’ orbs in cosmos. It is the informing, ever-
present moving-power and life-principle, the vital raison d’être of all the
suns, moons, planets, as well as the earth.

Atoms move by instinct, similar to that which the animal guides its life. In
human beings are the divine instincts of love, forgiveness, and pity. Instinct
lurks in the unconscious nerve-center and manifests in the nervous system as
a reflex action. Instinct is the automatic or quasi-intelligent functioning of
rays flowing forth from the cosmic mind which pass through divine
intelligences, then through the spiritual intelligences, then through the hosts
of beings of less degree, and finally reach animate and inanimate entities.
Instinct is thus the functioning throughout nature as the action of cosmic
mind which merges into intelligence, then into self-conscious intelligence,
and finally into spiritual intelligence. Instinct may be automatic, but it must
have something’s or some one’s intelligence to guide it.


Solid states correspond to the physical planes, the liquid state to the astral or
psychic plane, air to mind, and fire to spirit. Each plane is associated with a
specific tree. The seeds from which these trees grew suggests a central point
within a circle, a chakra as mulaprakriti, representing a solar centrality
around which our earthly system rotates. As such, the tree of life is rooted in
divine “ground” and spreads through the shelves of space, bearing living
worlds upon its branches. The term anupadaka, “parentless” or without
progenitors, is a mystical designation corresponding to enlightened beings.
Those merged with the Absolute can have no parents since they are self-
existent, and one with the universal spirit (svayambhu), the highest aspect of
svabhavat. The hierarchy of the anupadaka is great, with its apex being the
universal spirit-quintessence. Every human is an anupadaka in a latent state.
When speaking of the universe in its formless, eternal, or absolute condition,
before it was fashioned by its architects, the universe was anupadaka.

Idolatry is the attaching of undue importance to form rather than to spirit, and
often becomes degraded into worshiping the images made in our imagination
and embodied in work of the hands. Imagination is a creative power which,
used in conjunction with will, calls forth not only creative forces, but
likewise their productions. Thus it can be used for spiritualization and for the
materialization of images conceived in the mind to bring about the results
desired, whether good or evil. Imagination may become our master, chaining
us to illusions we have created. When, however, we can direct this power and
resist its suggestions of fancy, it becomes a powerful instrument in shaping
our lives and destiny.


Rupa means ‘form.’ While it is used to express matter or material phenomena
it is also used to describe subtle and spiritual realities such as svarupa which
defines the form of the self or true nature. Modern science states that the self
is closely associated with the limbic system, or the paleomammalian cortex
structure of the brain. Phren similarly was an ancient Greek word for the
location of thought or contemplation located in the torso as opposed to the
head.

Through dhyana (contemplation), a hierarchy of contemplative beings is

evoked and humans enter a state of higher consciousness in which the ajna
chakra is stimulated and restores the “fallen angels” of the mind to their
elevated and pure status. Samadhi is a non-dualistic state of consciousness in
which the experiencing subject becomes one with the experienced object.
During samadhi the mind becomes very still as it merges with the object of
attention, and is thus able to observe and gain insight into the changing flow
of experience.

There are millions of devas enumerated in exoteric and esoteric sacred or

recondite scriptures. Deva is a very general term for various classes of
celestial beings. There are classes of ethereal or spiritual beings that are
behind humanity in their evolution, unself-conscious sparks who have yet to
go through the human stage to more fully bring forth the glory within them.
Then there are the celestial beings who have passed through the human stage
and are evolutionally higher than humans. There are also beings higher than
these, who have developed the most divine parts of their constitution.
Considered as inhabitants of the planes above humanity, devas are a
generalized term for those evolving life-waves or hierarchies of sentient
beings evolving on the superior globes of the cosmos.


Samadhi implies the complete abstraction of the percipient consciousness
from all worldly, or exterior, or even mental concerns or attributes. Samadhi
is the final stage of genuine yoga, and can be attained at any time by the
initiate without conscious recourse to the other phases or practices of yoga
enumerated in other inferior practices which are often misleading, and in
some cases distinctly injurious. Enlightenment is a particular state of
samadhi, during which the subject reaches the culmination of spiritual
knowledge. Samadhi is the highest state on earth that can be reached while in
the human body. Samadhindriya is the root and organ of ecstatic meditation
which sends out blossoms from the practitioner often in the form of light
rays.


When evolution starts on the downward arc, spiritual essences appear as a
vast host of individual monads or spiritually conscious atoms which, because
of their lack of the self-conscious human condition, are often perceived as
unself-conscious sparks — although this does not mean that they lack self-
consciousness on their own plane, for these monads never leave their own
planes. To speak of a monad incarnating means that a ray projected from the
monad “descends” from its plane to inflame the nascent power in lower
beings. These sparks, being the spiritual monads of living entities, gradually
emanate from themselves the successive vestures through which they
manifest. This process takes place serially on the downward arc, with the
eventual result that, at the end of the ascending arc, the unself-conscious
sparks become a self-conscious human race.

The higher planes of the cosmos are termed arupa planes, formless worlds,
where form as humans perceive it ceases to exist on an objective level. The
lower cosmic planes are called rupa-lokas or manifested planes. Formless
radiation exists as separate harmonious rays on the plane of the subjective
universe. These rays unite together as an infinitude of monads, each the
mirror of its own universe and thus individualized as an independent mind,
omniscient and universal. By the process of magnetic aggregation they create
for themselves objective, visible bodies, out of interstellar atoms. Arupa-
devas are formless celestial beings who were once human but who have
graduated out of the human stage into formless beings. Beneath humans are
classes who will be human in the future, such as elementals having a more or
less human form, and beasts of a less advanced formless class which can be
called animal elementals. There are celestial beings also referred to as devas
who are neither ex-humans, asuras, nor beasts, but may be considered as
celestial spirit-elementals.


Supreme beings must be propitiated through secondary powers, both
beneficent and malevolent, by means of intermediaries — priests or shamans.
Shamanism is one of the oldest religions in the world. It is spirit-worship,
though the spirits have lost their objective form, and exchanged physicality
for a spiritual nature. In its present shape, shamanism is an offshoot of
primitive theurgy, and a practical blending of the visible with the invisible
world. Its followers have neither altars nor idols, and their rites, which they
are bound to perform at least once a year, usually on the shortest day of
winter, cannot take place before any stranger to their faith. Whenever they
assemble to worship, it is always in an open space, or a high hill, or in the
hidden depths of a forest — similar to the old Druidic rites. Like shamans,
siddhas are the spirits (or consciousness) of great sages from spheres on a
higher plane than our own, who voluntarily incarnate in mortal bodies in
order to help the human race in its upward progress. Hence their innate
knowledge, wisdom and powers. In this sense, the siddha appellation may be
applied to the highest class of incarnated human protoplasts who bring the
higher mind to nascent humanity. As the siddhas are highly evolved sages or
saints who have become semi-divine and virtually a class of deity, they are
endowed with occult yogic powers known as siddhis, or extremely high
accomplishments of a spiritual nature. There are two classes of siddhis: those
pertaining to the lower psychic and mental energies, and those pertaining to
intellectual, spiritual, and divine powers — both are possessed by the
spiritual initiate. These siddhis should never be used for purposes of self, but
always for the benefit of humanity and all creatures.


The function of divinities is the watching over of all hierarchies below them,
some being guardians of the human host, others guarding and protecting the
less evolved kingdoms. The higher hierarchical ranges of divinities in our
universe are entities of the higher worlds in the hierarchy of Being, so
immeasurably high that they belong to the orders of purely divine spirits.
These beings belong to two general divisions, the formless and the form
divinities. Those having forms should not be imagined as necessarily having
human forms but do have highly ethereal forms, at times resembling the
human shape while at other times having a quite different construction. But
the formless divinities are beings of pure intelligence and of understanding,
pure essences, purely spiritual, formless as we conceive form. They represent
the guiding intelligences present within all invisible secrets, as well as the
astral and physical manifestations of nature. With such relatively complete
materialization of idea into form, the later Atlanteans began to worship
themselves, perceiving what was to them the powers of nature appearing
through themselves as human beings. Thus the degeneration of the ideal
proceeding so far that ultimately the worst kind of idol and nature worship
became relatively universal.

An avaivartika is a non-revolving, non-transmigrating, reembodying entity

who has advanced so far on the evolutionary path that they are no longer
enslaved by, or enchained in, the whirling waves of samsara. Avaivartyas are
those who will never return having passed beyond a certain grade of
evolution, freeing them from the need of returning to embodiments in lower
spheres.


The word samsara is commonly rendered as the wandering of the human
monad under karmic impulsions through enormously varying successions of
states, and in different spheres or worlds of the manifested as well as
unmanifested universe. It is the processes of metempsychosis and
transmigration with particular application to human monads and the doctrine
of reincarnation. Samsara is the passage through the three worlds of the
physical, astral, and mental planes and embraces the entire wanderings of the
monadic centers of beings. Samskara is intimately connected with causative
action and its consequences, i.e., with karma.  It is the creative mind weaving
together new ideas and notions in action which develops the propensities and
impulses to consequent reactions or effects. As a metaphysical term
Samskara is defined as illusion, as notion, a species of discrimination, mental
impressions, recollections, or psychological imprints.  It has the essential
significance as the causative impulses which impel action on the plane of
illusion in the form of mental expectations.

Transmigration means the passing of an entity from one embodiment to

another, without regard to the status of the entity or the form of the
embodiments. Actually the word refers to the diaspora of life-atoms,
especially those of the human vehicles after dissolution. According to their
affinities and degree of development, these life-atoms which have composed
the lower human principles transmigrate to other physical psychomental
bodies, there to pursue their own further evolution, unhindered by their
former body. Eventually, when the proper cyclic time arrives, they are all
again attracted back to the reincarnating human entity to which they formerly
belonged. Transmigration of the life-atoms is very important to the unity of
all life, the interaction of all nature, and the working of karma.


So far as the present terrestrial period is concerned, the mammalian fauna
alone are to be regarded as traceable to prototypes shed by humanity. The
amphibia, birds, reptiles, fishes, etc., are the results of astral fossil forms
stored up in the auric envelope of the earth and projected into physical
objectivity subsequent to the deposition of the first rocks. The divine arupa
(the formless universe of thought) reflects itself in chayaloka (the shadowy
world of primal form, or the intellect) which is the first realm of the
anupadaka. There are five enlightened beings who exist on this plane as
primeval monads from the world of incorporeal being, the arupa world,
where their intelligences have neither explicit shape nor name except in
esoteric philosophy. This is because they radiate directly from that which is
neither father nor mother but which is incomprehensibly obscured. The
concept of veiled intelligences refers neither to self nor sentient being, nor
soul, nor personality, but is instead the true “self” of nirvana. Thus, it is
erroneous to subsume nirvana under the rubric of anatta (non-self). Nirvana
is attained by total non-attachment, thus applying non-self to everything and
permitting pure consciousness to settle in its own flawless nature.

Mind is a name given to the sum of the states of consciousness grouped under
thought, will, and feeling. During deep sleep, ideation ceases on the physical
plane, and memory is in abeyance because the organ, through which the ego
manifests ideation and memory on the material plane, has temporarily ceased
to function. A noumenon can become a phenomenon on any plane of
existence only by manifesting on that plane through an appropriate basis or
vehicle. During sleep mind is consciousness in action, the phenomenon
corresponding to a noumenon which, in the absence of vehicles for its
expression, can only be described as mind in latency, with a possibility of
mental action.


Somnambulism, or sleepwalking is a condition in which a person moves
about as if entranced, like a human automaton. Though unconscious, they
may read, write, compose music or poetry, execute skilled movements, tread
dangerous heights safely, etc. They may not only carry out the various
activities of the waking state, but may perform both physical and mental feats
which they are normally incapable. Later, they may return to bed, still asleep,
and upon awakening retain no memory of this strange experience. The puzzle
of this psychophysiological state is the ability of the different selves of
composite human nature to function consciously upon several planes of their
own being. For instance, the ordinary somnambulist may be conscious in
their own astral body which is reflexly stimulating the instinctual cerebellum
which presides over bodily movements and functions. Such a case is
analogous to the unusual performances of an entranced medium. As in
common dreams, sleep walking is where one part of the brain, say the
cerebrum, may be asleep, while the cerebellum may be awake and active. In
rare cases, however, the somnambulist may so far transcend their usual
character that they are functioning above the astral level of their nature.


Nirvana is not annihilation, per se, but a state in which fundamental
consciousness is uninterrupted from eternity to eternity, although undergoing
continual change. But such change is not a difference of essence, but a
continuously enlarging and ever greater unfolding of the essence. However
limitless from a human standpoint, nirvana has a limit in eternity. Once
nirvana is reached, the same monad will re-emerge therefrom, as a still
higher being, on a far higher plane, to recommence its cycle of perfected
activity. When a spiritual entity breaks loose from every particle of matter,
substance, or form, to become a spiritual breath, only then does it enter upon
the eternal and unchangeable nirvana which lasts an eternity. Then that
breath, existing in spirit, is nothing because it is, as a form, a semblance, a
shape, completely annihilated and has become thusness itself. However,
when the physical, psychic, and spiritual vehicles are reduced, it is not
annihilation any more than a person in dreamless sleep is annihilated while
the higher self is in its original state of absolute consciousness.

Humanity evolved out of a primordial spirit-matter, and represents a regular

progressive scale of principles from meta-spirit down to the grossest matter.
Every atom and speck of matter, not of substance only, is imperishable in its
essence, but not in its consciousness. Immortality is an unbroken spiritual
consciousness, whereas personal consciousness cannot last longer than the
personality itself. Asava signifies attachments rising in the mind from the
impact of outside influences which intoxicate the mind and prevent it being
held to higher principles. The four asavas include sensuality, hunger for
excitement, dreamy speculation, and nescience.


Nominalists hold that nothing exists but individuals, and that universals are
mere names invented to express the qualities of particular things. Thus the
term “human” is a mere abstract idea, a figment of the mind, devised to
express certain qualities which we have abstracted from our experience of
human individuals, but having no existence except as a name. The Realists,
on the contrary, maintained that universals alone have substantive reality, and
that they exist independently of, and prior to, the individuals, which are
derivative from them or expressive of them. Between these doctrines are
those of the Conceptualists who hold that universals, while they exist only in
the mind, yet correspond to real similarities in things, which previous to
creation existed in the Absolute mind. These notions are illustrated by the
question as to the meaning of such words as motion, force, heat, or light. Are
the things studied by under those names generalizing terms, existing only in
the mind and posterior to the objects which manifest them? Or are they
realities in themselves, prior to the objects, and of which the objects are
manifestations? All natural phenomena arise in and are therefore emanations
from causal and originating cosmic intelligences, which perdure in essence
throughout eternity, but express themselves by means of phenomena or
effects at various times. Thus the phenomena which human intelligence
perceives as transitory are real in their essence, because that essence lies in
the perduring intelligence or intelligences from which they flow.


Annihilation requires an exegesis in which the positive state is essential
being, but without manifestation as such. When the spirit enters nirvana, it
loses objective existence, but retains subjective being. The spirit is not an
individual property of humanity, but is a divine essence which has no body,
no form, which is imponderable, invisible and indivisible, as that which does
not exist and yet is, as is said of nirvana. The difference between animals and
humanity is the former maintain principles leading to nirvana potentially, the
latter actually. This has resulted in the human form body, or nirmanakaya.
The spirit never descends hypostatically into a living human, but only
showers its radiance on the inner psychic compounds of the astral principles
of humanity. The human and its spirit have to conquer their immortality by
ascending towards the unity with which they will be finally linked and into
which they are finally absorbed. This is nirvana.

Dharmakaya is the spiritual body or state of a high spiritual being in which

the restricted sense of ego has vanished into a universal and hierarchical
sense, and remains only in the seed, latent and assuming pure consciousness,
pure bliss, pure intelligence and freed from all personalizing though. The
dharmakaya vesture is the threshold of nirvana or the nirvanic state referred
to as “nirvana without remains.” Having reached that state the enlightened
being remains entirely outside of every earthly condition and will return no
more until the commencement of a new manvantara. Free from returning
births, the dharmakaya state becomes parasamadhi, where no progress is
possible — at least as long as an entity remains in it. Such entities may be
said to be crystallized in purity and homogeneity.
Psychic powers pertain to the intermediate, psychomental part of human
nature, while spiritual powers pertain to the higher part. Spiritual powers
cannot be used for selfish and personal ends because their svabhava is
universality and impersonality, attributes which link humanity with the
surrounding universe. They emanate from the spiritual monad. Such powers
cannot be evoked by personal ambition or any form of acquisitiveness,
because they do not rise above the intermediate or psychic nature and make
no appeal to the spirit above. In fact, spiritual powers are the fruit of
renunciation, replacing the personal with the universal, the resigning of the
limited for the virtually limitless, the giving up of the small for the great.
Spiritual powers consist in a clear intuition of the truth, leading to right
conduct, and an ability to help and teach others. An all penetrating vision
must be included among spiritual powers. Likewise the siddhis and shaktis
comprise powers that are spiritual — the ones of permanent value are all
spiritual. Since psychic powers are in themselves intermediaries, as veils of
what is within and behind them, they should become adjuncts to spiritual
powers.

The vajra mystically refers to indestructibility and to the wondrous reflective

powers of the diamond. One who possesses the vajra reflects the suffering,
joys, and sorrows — and beauties — of the world, but can never be injured
by them. It has been said that the heart of the perfect person is a mirror — it
reflects all things, but holds nothing for itself alone. Thus also is the heart of
one wielding the vajra. It is the magic scepter of adepts, the symbol of the
possessions of siddhis as superhuman powers, wielded during mystical
ceremonies by initiated theurgists. It is also the symbol of power over evil
spirits or elementals. Vajra expresses the indestructibility and spiritually
adamantine quality of the unknown, without beginning or end — unknown to
the average worldly person, but recognized by full initiates as the source of
divine inspiration and intuitions.


One who reaches nirvana understands essences exactly as they are, because
the consciousness has become co-extensive and co-vibrational with the
cosmic monad. Such a person is free from the trammels of all the worlds of
illusion which they have thus far passed through. Nirvana is the vanishing
point of differentiated matter. The purely nirvanic state is an assimilation
with a passage of spirit back to the ideal abstraction of be-ness which has no
modifying relation with the manifested planes on which our universe exists
during this manvantara. Nirvana is a state rather than a locality, forming a
continuum of consciousness within the super spiritual. There are nirvanas of
different degrees including one so high that it blends insensibly with the
condition of the cosmic hierarch of our universe. The lower degrees of
nirvana, however, are attained at intervals by highly spiritual and very
mystically inclined people, who have had intensive spiritual training.

The noetic part of the human constitution is independent of the sensual and
emotional influences from the psychic nature, and by centering consciousness
in this noetic part of our being, we are at all times and in all places able fully
to control, master, and therefore direct, the vigorous and erratic movements
of the psychic nature. The noetic mind, because it is of a spiritual character,
has no direct action on the physical brain or nervous system, but acts through
the psychic part of the mind only through the finer elements of the cerebral
and nervous texture. The psychic part of our mind is intimately blended with
the physical organism, and the interaction between the two concludes that we
move in a vicious circle under the sway of forces difficult to control when we
center our consciousness in the psychic part of our constitution.


The sensory act of looking is different from perception and cognition.
Perception and knowledge arise from the seeking and actions of the mind.
The mind has qualities, but is different from its qualities. For example, desire
is one of many qualities of mind but mind need not always have desire, and
in the state of moksha, or liberation, mind is without desire. Desire, aversion,
effort, happiness, suffering and cognition are simply the linga (mark or sign)
of the mind. Anumana is an inference, conclusion, or deduction from given
premises. It is the one of the of the three pramanas or modes of cognition by
which perception or knowledge is sought.

Pure ideas are the domain of the mind in which the perceivable universe
exists to enlighten the mind. However, while the mind may be pure, it may be
deceived by complexities of perception or its intellect in which avidya
(ignorance) regards the transient as eternal, the impure as pure, the pain-
giving as joy-giving, etc. Moksha is liberation from rebirth or samsara. This
liberation can be attained while one is on earth (jivanmukti), or
eschatologically (videhamukti). It is the isolation of purusha from prakṛti,
and subsequent liberation from rebirth. It is the direct intuition of the real-
existence, intelligence and bliss and is devoid of birth, destruction,
recognition, and experience. For this reason it is called knowledge or
ritambhara prajna associated with the seed syllable dhih.


Modern science investigates the phenomena of physical nature and by
inferential reasoning formulates general laws. Its method is called inductive
and its data are so-called facts — i.e. sensory observations — as opposed to
deductive philosophy which starts from axioms. Yet science, in order to
reason from the accumulation of data, must necessarily use both induction
and deduction. The unity of human knowledge may be divided into religion,
philosophy, and science. Science and philosophy, as presently understood,
have the quality of being speculative, as opposed to religion, which is
supposed to be founded on faith and moral sentiments. The present
distinction between science and philosophy lies largely in their respective
fields of speculation. Modern science has limited its field of study to the laws
of physical nature in which the illusive and entirely phenomenal nature of
matter and energy, formerly assumed to be eternal and indestructible, is
realized as the chain of physical causation beyond physical limits. As such,
the physical world consists of phenomena occurring as an ultraphysical
substance. In the sciences dealing with biology, evolution, and anthropology,
legitimate inference from facts has been interfered with by preconceived
ideas. Science suffers from not postulating an astral or formative world
behind the physical. This astral world is in itself one stage in a rising scale of
invisible worlds. To ascertain the facts upon which to build a truly inductive
system, science must admit the means of direct perception other than those
afforded by the physical senses.


Motion is a fundamental principle in universal nature, coeval with boundless
space, ceasing not even during pralaya. Motion is known through its
manifestations, the most fundamental of which is vibration. The essential
characteristic of vibration is periodicity or cyclic motion. It appears in the
alternation of manvantara and pralaya in the cosmic Great Breath and in the
most rapid oscillations of minutest particles. The relative periodicity of
various vibrations is found to constitute a mathematical scale, according to
which phenomena may be classified. The principle of vibration involves
mysteries relating to the tremendous potency of sound, some of which are
familiar to physicists. Sound is a universal principle which manifests itself
physically as vibrations in the mass and particles of bodies. However, they
are only one of the productions of causal sound. We might as well define fear
as a trembling of the body, as we know that trembling is an effect produced
by the emotion. The same applies to heat, light, and other physical forces
which manifest themselves in vibrations. Vibration is the consequence of
inner hidden causal agencies. The vibrations ensuing from such inner
movements express themselves through bodies or veils and are always in
accordance with the causal rhythms and mathematics involving such
quantities as rate, intensity, and quality. There are vibrations of as many kinds
as there are different causal agents. Thus there are vibrations as effects on the
gross physical plane while other vibrations manifest themselves on the astral,
emotional, and psychological or lower mental planes. There are also
vibrations of a higher type which originate in the intellectual and spiritual
monads of the human being. As an expression of energy, all vibration is force
and energy, and hence capable of arousing energies or forces of exactly the
same quality or rate of intensity in other realms which they affect. There is
always the originating or causal agent for any specific vibration — thus the
thinker produces mental vibrational activity which is called thinking or
thoughts, or emotion or feeling.


Matter may be called a universal, and material bodies may be called
particulars — or life may be a universal, and living beings particulars. The
universal is defined as that which is left when all particulars or differences
have ceased to be. If the particulars are realities, then the universals become
abstract ideas and humanity would be merely an indefinite number of beings.
But if the universal is real, then humans are each a manifestation on
respective lower planes of being. Again, if living beings are real, then life
becomes an abstraction. But if life is a real entity in itself, then living beings
are its particular manifestations. The philosophy which starts with universals
and proceeds to particulars is called deductive. Inductive philosophy
proceeds from particulars to universals. Space, motion, duration, intelligence,
etc., are abstract realities which are regarded as universals, whereas from the
opposite viewpoint they appear as only abstractions from experience. The
deductive method has its uses in applied science, yet it tacitly assumes
certain universals and reasons them back from particulars.

Stoicism is most familiar as a great ethical system whose aim was to make
wisdom practical. It recognized a supreme and all-harmonious divinity of
hierarchical character and various subordinate deities, and the unity of
humanity with nature and of nature with this divinity. This divinity, however,
was not a personal deity, but a cosmic spiritual origin, recognized as one of
innumerable others in the boundless fields of illimitable space. Stoicism
recognized in humans the existence of wisdom and will, whereby they
transcend the distractions of lower forces and realize the ideal of harmony
with nature and resulting equanimity.This great system is worthy of being
enumerated among the outpourings of primordial wisdom and may be said to
have been the religion of the ancient world. Paganism reached one of its great
heights of ethical idealism under the Stoics, and it has reverberated in wave
after wave through succeeding ages down to the transcendentalism and “new
age religions” of our times.


Ritambhara prajna means the faculty of the mind which gives rise to
knowing. But this knowing is of a special kind. It is intuitive. Ritambhara
Prajna is intuitive knowledge. The word ritambhara can be split into two
parts: ‘ritam and ‘bhara’ meaning “full of truth.” The inner dynamic working
of the deep consciousness (chitta) is altogether different from the dynamics
of the rational mind. The ritambhara prajna is the ‘void’ or ‘shunyata.’ It is
not nothingness as the word shunya would have us believe. Shunya is used in
Sanskrit to signify zero. But its true sense is infinity which encompasses
everything and which confers a different dimension on time and space.
Ritambhara prajna is knowledge, not as ‘comprehension’ but as the principle
of knowing. It is energy in the irreducible, virgin form, which gets
transformed into the phenomenal universe. As such it knows its own power
and function. The universal mind has no boundaries of time past, time present
and time future. Everything coexists. Intuition as ritambhara prajna is the
ability to transcend the confinement of the physical mind and make a direct
contact with the principle of mind which is omnipresent. Humanity performs
all its cognitive, analytical and synthesizing activities of knowledge at the
rational level. This conditioning is so deep that the faculty of intuition inside
our consciousness has been forgotten. A deeper faculty of knowing and
understanding gives a direct access to the infinite consciousness which is
universal. This is matter in its most subtle ethereal form.

Mind is an imperceptible substance that is the substrate of human

consciousness, manifesting itself with or without qualities such as desires,
feelings, perception, knowledge, understanding, errors, insights, sufferings,
bliss, and others. Personal recollections and memories of the form “I did this
so many years ago” mistakenly presume that there is a mind as “self” that is
substantial, continuing, unchanged, and existent.


Time and space are an indivisible reality, but humanity divides them to
comprehend past, present, future, relative place of other substances and
beings, as well as direction and the mental coordinates of the universe.
However, this indivisible reality is eternal, independent and spiritual and
cannot be reduced or inferred from non-physical or physical ideation. Time is
an illusion produced by successive states of consciousness traveling through
eternal duration. It does not exist where no consciousness exists. The present
is only a mathematical line which divides part of eternal duration called the
future, from that part called the past. Nothing on earth has real duration, for
nothing remains without change — or stays the same — for the billionth part
of a second. The sensation of the actuality of the division of ‘time’ known as
the present, comes from the blurring of that momentary glimpse, or
succession of glimpses, of things which pass from the region of ideals called
the future, to the region of memories that are referred to as the past.

Philosophical systems based on consciousness, as contrasted with systems

based on materialism, affirm that the universe is an embodiment of mind or
the aggregated hierarchies of minds proceeding from a unitary divine root or
universal hierarch. Reality is essentially divine and spiritual in which the
psychic is noumenal to the physical, which is its phenomenon. Idealism
identifies reality with inner conscious experience, and asserts that only the
mental life is truly knowable. Subjective idealism denies the existence of
objective reality altogether, except perhaps as illusory. Objective idealism
recognizes the existence of objective worlds while regarding the ideal world
as the primary production in which the external world has a relative and
temporary reality. This view is a strictly logical one, for if we annihilate the
object, we must thereby annihilate the subject also. These two terms have no
meaning except relative to each other. Any theory of knowledge must have a
knower and thing known in which the latter is objective to the former.
Absolute idealism logically is as unthinkable as absolute materialism.


A familiar form of materialism is what has been called the atomo-mechanical
theory, which derives all phenomena from the movements of material atoms
in space. Matter is thus a perception derived from the interaction of the
physical senses with the physical plane of nature. Matter is one of the twin
aspects of universal life, coeternal with spirit and spirit’s veil or vehicle, and
hence is present on every plane of manifestation, from the highest to the
lowest. Materialism stands for an attitude of mind which exalts the senses,
together with appropriate intellectualism, into a summum bonum to devise a
philosophy that will justify such an attitude. This kind of materialism places
illusory power in the hands of humans, while depriving the real power of
penetrating discrimination, and the ability, while under this illusion, to use
the powers of nature correctly. In attempting to conceive of matter the mind
must be relieved of familiar notions of physically extended space, of
resistance, mass, bulk, and other properties peculiar to the physical plane of
consciousness, but which transfer to notions of other kinds of matter.
Inertness, and immobility are attributes of the physical plane, rather than of
matter itself. Yet the word matter has come to be significant of grossness,
animalism, and materialism, although it is but the shadow or veil of cosmic
spirit, a spirit manifesting under the multifarious forms of the planes of the
universe.

The attempt to represent phenomena as a chain of cause and effect must lead
to a point where the cause can no longer be traced — not in which causes
vanish, but in which there is an imperfection of the observation and of the
instruments used, so that the chain of causation continues until, because of
incapacity, it is unable to predict the behavior of even a particle. Subsequent
investigation may enable a further understanding of causation, but the process
cannot go on indefinitely without going beyond the physical plane.


Maya means that our minds are blinded and perverted by preconceptions and
imperfections, and thus do not interpret the world as it is. Maya, or illusion, is
an element which enters into all finite things, for everything that exists has
only a relative, not an absolute, reality, since the appearance which the hidden
noumenon assumes for any observer depends upon the power of cognition.
Nothing is permanent except the one hidden absolute existence which
contains in itself the noumena of all realities. Existence belonging to every
plane is a shadow cast on a reflective screen (i.e., Plato’s cave). But all things
appear real for the cognizer who is also a reflection. We cannot cognize
existence directly, so long as we have sense-instruments which bring only
material existence into the field of consciousness. In whatever plane
consciousness may be acting, both we and the things belonging to that plane
are, for that time, our only realities. By reacting against the consciousness of
a perceiving being, the perceiver is cast into the bonds of illusions, out of
which the deluded being has to strive in order to be free from the surrounding
maya.


The systematic investigation and instruction of facts and theories regarded as
important in the study of truth and philosophy, in common usage denotes the
mental and moral sciences being nearly equivalent to metaphysics, and
includes a number of divisions. A triad of philosophy, religion, and science
has merged into a unity, although science was at one time called natural
philosophy, so that the chief distinction was between faith and reason.

Philosophy is primarily monistic if it postulates a unity of origin in which all

existing entities return to a source that is distinct from them. This monism
attributes oneness or singleness to a concept e.g. existence. Various kinds of
monism can be distinguished. For example, neoplatonism maintains that
everything is derived from the One. In this view only one thing is
ontologically basic or prior to everything else. Existence monism posits that
there exists only a single thing, the universe, which can only be artificially
and arbitrarily divided into many things. Substance monism asserts that a
variety of existing things can be explained in terms of a single reality or
substance although many things may be made up of this stuff such as matter
or mind. There is one mind that connects and exists in all living beings,
regardless of their shapes or forms, and there is no distinction, no superior, no
inferior, no separate devotee soul mind, no separate god mind. This oneness
unifies all beings as divinity in every being, and all existence is a single
divine reality not different from the infinite.


All things are relative to each other. Nothing in the universe, whether
physical, astral, mental, or spiritual, is specified to the human mind except by
its relations to other things. All objects are manifestations of a universal
principle in which there are no absolutes. Immortality does not refer to a
particular state of existence, yet the various elements of nature have varying
degrees of immortality. Each element has its own cycle of existence, longer
or shorter, however for purposes of reasoning or calculation it is necessary to
assume certain things as constant. Good and bad are regarded as relative
terms but that does not mean good and bad differ from each other solely in
being relative to each other, but that what is good from one point of view may
be bad from another. As such, there is no difference between the devotional
and speculative functions of the mind, and science and philosophy do not
conflict with the innate sense of rectitude. Ethics are not based on
expediency, a social compact, or a special revelation, but are inherent in the
laws of the universe. Ethics means a self-sacrificing devotion to truth, a
resolve to live in harmony with all other lives, and a sacrificing of the
personal self to the greater self.


Human beings, in a state of unawareness of the universal mind, see their “I-
ness” as different from the mind in others, then act out of impulse, fears,
cravings, malice, division, confusion, anxiety, passions, and a mistaken sense
of distinctiveness. Mind is distinct from the ever-evolving individual
personality characterized with ahamkara (ego, non-spiritual psychological I-
ness Me-ness), habits, prejudices, desires, impulses, delusions, fads,
behaviors, pleasures, sufferings and fears. Human personality and ahamkara
shift, evolve or change with time and place. But mind is the unchanging,
eternal, innermost radiant absolute that is unaffected by personality,
unaffected by the ego of oneself, and unaffected by the ego of others. The
mind transcends individually, to realize its own true nature, its universal inner
essence which is divine and pure. The divine mind, as the one fire, after it has
entered the world, though one, takes different forms according to whatever it
burns. Likewise so does the internal mind of all living beings, though one,
takes a form according to whatever it enters yet remaining outside all forms.


In distinguishing between individuality and personality, individuality is
essential self-consciousness, the recognition as “I am I,” whereas personality
is “I am Ms. Smith.” In other words, individuality is the recognition of
oneself as a distinct non-partite ego, and personality is the identifying of
oneself with a particular aggregate of qualities, the latter serving as vehicle
for individuality. Being composite, at the death of the physical body the
personal ego disintegrates, and at the next embodiment a new personality is
brought together by the reincarnating ego. However, this new personality is
but a reconstruction of the old personality with only such changes that have
been brought about by karma over time.


The astral body is a subtle body intermediate between the universal mind and
the mental body, composed of a subtle material. It is related to an astral plane,
which consists of the planetary heavens. Pleroma is the spirit-world, the
archetypal ideal existing in the invisible heavens in contrast to the imperfect
phenomenal manifestations of that ideal in the universe. The astral plane is
the world of the celestial spheres or orbits, crossed by the mind in the astral
body on the way to being born and after death, and is generally believed to be
populated by angels, spirits or other etherial beings. The astral body is
equivalent to the linga-sarira, the ethereal model-body, usually invisible but
upon which the physical body (sthula-sarira) is modeled. There are three
ethereal forms or bodies which might properly be called astral bodies. These
include the mayavi-rupa known as the illusory form-body of thought and
substance projected by high initiates; the linga-sarira or the pattern-body
upon which is based the human constitution; and the kama-rupa or the
phantom or spook body which is seen occasionally in the vicinity of graves or
which occasionally materializes at seances.

The astral plane consists of the celestial spheres, and is an astrological

phenomenon. The whole of the astral portion of our earth and of the physical
planets, together with the purely astral planets of our system, make up
collectively the astral body of the universal mind. Yet, because there are
assorted types of astral matter, psychic changes occur periodically within the
universal mind. The astral vehicle is the immortal vehicle of the universal
mind as well as the spiritual (pneuma) vehicle, aligned with the vital breath,
which is considered mortal. The afterlife involves a journey through the
planetary spheres and then eventual reincarnation. As a result sentient beings
are composed of mortal body, immortal reason and an intermediate spirit.



Karana-sarira or causal body is the principle or causal element which brings
about not only the reembodiment of an entity, but also its evolution during a
manvantara through an endless series of reembodiments. It is the reproducing
agent, principle, or instrument in the constitution of a being which brings
about the repetitive reembodiments that such a being is impelled, and in one
sense compelled, by karma to undergo. Such a reembodiment can be of two
types — higher and lower. If the causal instrument is on a high plane, all
ingathered seeds of being will reproduce themselves in future existences as
the higher parts of an individual. If the main causal instrument or principle is
of a lower type, and reproduces existences for the reincarnating entity in
lower vehicles, then it is the desire mind or lower mind which is the karana-
sarira. Thus there are in the composite human constitution at least two such
karanic or causal elements, one of a higher and one of a lower character.
Various monads, by their reproductive action, are the causal principles or
instruments of the various and unending series of reembodiments that any
entity during the cosmic manvantara is undergoing. It is, therefore, these
various monads in their outer or vehicular aspect which are the karana-
sarira.


The eternal motion which brings everything into objective existence will
cause the death of the same entity on the previous subjective plane of life.
Then, when the lifetime of a current manifestation ends, the reverse of this
rhythmic motion causes the death of the entity from its objective existence,
back to be reborn into its subjective life. This law applies universally to solar
systems, planets, human beings, atoms, etc. The reincarnating ego is born and
dies on each of the successive planes of existence through which it descends
from spiritual realms to be reborn again on the material plane. The same
rhythmic motion is reversed in death with the same repeated births and deaths
ascending on the journey to a spiritual home. Death occurs not from a lack of
life, but because the ceaseless motion of vitality is wearing out the body. The
senility of old age means that elements are drifting in reverse towards the
other side of the veil. With the last heartbeat, the dying person is aware of the
passing life as the field of experience which is harvested in the inner world in
which they will later be born. The atoms of the body, freed from outer
spiritual cohering force, separate actively, each to find its appropriate field of
action in nature’s various kingdoms. There is a close connection between
death, sleep, and initiation, with sleep being an incomplete death and
initiation being a conscious experience of the after-life.
With the discovery of electromagnetism and the nervous system, there came a
new interest in the spirit world which included the stars, animal magnetism
and magnetic fluids. Certain of earth’s herbs were found to have excellent
astral and magnetic powers. The efficacy of various herbs correspond closely
with planetary illumination. Astral light is the medium of all light, energy and
movement. It maintains a luminiferous ether necessary for animal and plant
magnetism and plays an especially important role in the photosynthesis and
the electromagnetism of the plant world. The alchemical action of astral light
and its intimate connection with the physical sphere explains epidemics,
whether physical or psychological. Because it transmits thoughts and
emotions, its connection with karma is evident. The astral light is the source
of the physical world, just as akasha is the source of the astral light. Because
there is this constant interchange of starry fluids emanating from different
celestial bodies, the astral light has become the dregs of akasha, and is
virtually the same as the ether of science.


Death as a necessity becomes a recurrent process, precisely like birth or
rebirth, in which some group of lower sheaths enclosing the individual in
embodiment dissolve. Viewing the question from the consciousness aspect,
death means the exchange of one mode of consciousness for others. We are
neither mortal nor immortal, since we contain various elements of both. The
essence of individuality is unconditionally immortal but its sheaths or bodies
are mortal in various and relative degrees. Humanity is changing from instant
to instant — learning, growing, expanding, evolving — so that at no two
consecutive seconds of time or of experience is it the same. Therefore it is not
immortal. Immortality means enduring continually as you are. If you evolve
you change, and therefore you cannot be immortal in the part which evolves,
because you are growing into something greater. In this sense, portions of an
entity may endure for long periods of time, and thus be called immortal, but
they are not immortal in the sense of continuing to exist unchanged or in a
state identical to what they are now.


It is customary to regard the later Atlanteans as a race of sorcerers because
there were millions in Atlantis who earnestly essayed to preserve the wisdom
of their semi-spiritual forebears. There were wonderful civilizations during
the millions of years of Atlantean development surpassing in materialism
anything that is known today. The Atlantis continent was gradually sinking
while the new America was forming. When the climax of the geologic
changes in the earth’s surface arrived, a catastrophe occurred during which
the greater part of Atlantis and its population, largely sorcerers, perished
beneath the sea; yet many islands survived, some of them of large extent,
such as Ruta and Daitya. But the wiser and more holy inhabitants of the
civilization had left Atlantis before this, migrating to the high tablelands of
Asia and created the kingdom of Shambhala.

Shambhala is a mystical and unknown locality, as well as an actual land or

district and the seat of the greatest of spiritual adepts, sages and seers, on the
earth today. It may tentatively be located in a little known and remote district
of high of central Asia, more particularly in what is now called Tibet. A
multitude of airplanes fly over the place without seeing it, for its frontiers are
very carefully hidden and protected against invasion by China and other
countries and will continue to be so until the karmic destiny of the present
root-race brings about a change of location, which then in its turn will be as
carefully guarded as now.


Angelic beings reside either in the atmospheres of the planets of the solar
system (planetary angels) or inside the Sun (solar angels). These angels help
to guide the operation of the processes of nature such as evolution and the
growth of plants. The appearance of earthly angels is like a colored flame
about the size of a human being. Other planetary systems and stars have their
own angels. Anunnaki is a hierarchy of lower angels of earth or the
underworld, star gods who have sunk below the horizon and become judges
of the dead. Below the anunnaki are several classes of genii — sadu,
vadukku, ekimu, gallu — some of which are good, some evil. The anunnaki
are terrestrial elementals and the children and followers of Anu, a divine
personification of the sky. Angels frequently can be observed when the third
eye of the human ajna chakra is activated. Some angels originally incarnated
as human beings. All beings, including angels, possess etheric bodies but not
necessarily physical bodies. Such bodies are composed of etheric matter but
also constitute a layer of the “human atmosphere.”

Shadow signifies matter, for spirit is considered to be pure energy, and matter,
although essentially crystallized spirit, may be looked upon as the shadow or
vehicular world in which the energy, spirit, or pure light works. Matter is but
a generalizing term for an increasing ethereality ranging from the grossest
tangible substance, or absolute matter, up to the most ethereal or spiritualized
substance, referred to as the path of shadows.


Manifestation begins on the spiritual plane and as the life impulses reach
forth into grosser material realm the succeeding rudimentary elements are
born, each one from the preceding one, and from all preceding ones. For
instance, earth is born not merely from the element water, but likewise from
fire, and air. Humanity’s nature is tripartite and is composed of the physical
(planetary), emotional (astral) and mental (spiritual) bodies and in each
person one of these three bodies ultimately achieves dominance. One can
create a subtle body, and hence achieve post-mortem “immortality,” through
spiritual or yogic exercises. The mind (as separate from the physical brain) is
not something with which one is born, but something that one has to develop
through practice.

A human having a “familiar spirit” means a sorcerer or necromancer. Such a

person is a medium who is more or less under the control of an elemental
spirit, by whom he or she may be entranced and is to be distinguished sharply
from an adept or genuine theurgist, who is in self-conscious control of their
own higher faculties through initiation and long preparation. A goety is one
who uses incantations by song or speech to hold others under the spell of
sound, chants, or incantations. Bewitching, exercising a charm or spell over
another person or an animal, consciously or unconsciously, either for good or
ill, is termed a “fascination.” True fascination is never used by any of the
right-hand path, for such activity is invariably arousing the innate spiritual,
intellectual, and psychic powers inherent in others, without training the
individual to take command of these powers. Fascination is exercised by
snakes on birds, and by the human eye on beasts. It is used as an evil power
by sorcerers, and is exercised more or less consciously by ordinary people
upon each other. It is even taught today as an art for swaying the minds of
customers, or more obviously by advertisements offering to confer occult
powers for a fee.


The occult power of receiving from various articles impressions as to their
owners or to events connected with them, psychometry is the seeing or
reading with an inner sight incidents that have taken place in the
neighborhood of these physical articles. Psychometry has been applied to
such objects as fossils, fragments of ancient ruins, and old manuscripts, and
the psychometers have been able by touching these articles, putting them to
their forehead, etc., to describe ancient civilizations and bygone, forgotten, or
unknown pages in human or world history. Such phenomena show that
material objects retain the impressions of events with which they have been
associated, and exert an influence even upon people who do not have
psychometric power. This throws light on the subject of talismans, amulets,
relics, etc. Astral light is nature’s storehouse of images of events, and contact
with an object puts the psychometer in rapport with the impressions
concerned. The psychometer brings their inner self in contact with the
“essence” of the object. But as such phenomena involve the properties of
planes other than the physical, any attempt to explain them in terms of the
physical plane must necessarily be restricted. The physical plane limits both
the powers of nature and human faculties, but the psychometer rises to a
plane where some of these barriers are removed thus allowing unity and
intercommunication throughout all the environment.


Some spirit mediums instinctively possess the power of precipitation, but use
it without knowing its causes and rationale, and hence without conscious
control. A mental image is a reality, and in materializing it the operator copies
natural processes, since everything in the physical world is a materialization
of something in the inner world working through the astral world into the
physical. Precipitation uses psychic or psychophysiological faculties which
have to be acquired by training. These powers exist because of training in
previous lives. Were the adept to employ precipitation for conveying
intelligence to others, the precipitation would be achieved by the adept
gathering astral and ethereal substance from the surrounding atmosphere and
condensing it onto paper, often in a handwriting similar to that of the sender
— usually someone who is recently deceased.

The term occult defines anything which is undisclosed, concealed, or not

easily perceived. Early theologians spoke of “the occult judgment of God,”
while “occult philosopher” was a designation for the pre-Renaissance
scientist who sought the unseen causes regulating nature’s phenomena. In
astronomy, the term is still used when one stellar body “occults” another by
passing in front of it, temporarily hiding it from view. As the study of things
which are hidden and secret, occultism is viewed as secret in one age but may
readily be in a succeeding age more or less commonly known and open to
public investigation. Many things in medieval Europe were distinctly secret
and therefore occult, but are today the field of scientific investigation.
Occultism then has simply shifted its field of investigation and study to
matters still more secret, still more recondite, still more deeply hidden in
fields of nature which are now scarcely suspected. Occultism is founded on
the principle that divinity is concealed — transcendent yet immanent —
within every living being. As a spiritual discipline occultism is the
renunciation of selfishness which leads to wisdom, to the right discrimination
between good and evil, and the practice of altruism or dharma.


Reality, like truth and unity, cannot be an object of knowledge except by
intuition, which then functions on its own plane. Any mental faculty beneath
intuition is itself relatively unreal, and its findings or deductions partake of
the nature of their source in which such deductions are understandable only
by reference to their opposites. It is precisely this existence in the nature of
opposites which brings about the various illusions under which human
understanding necessarily labors. Words such as reality, truth, and good are
understood in reference to their opposites, and the opposite of reality is
appearance or illusion. There is but one fundamental or all-pervading reality,
by contrast with which all else is illusion or appearance. Reality, when
implying various conceptions, is a relative term, in that one thing is real by
comparison with another thing which is relatively unreal. A dream seems real
until we awake, and then our waking mind seems real. Yet this also will seem
unreal when we awaken to a still higher consciousness.


The etheric body inhabits an etheric plane which corresponds to four higher
sub-planes of the physical plane. The physical plane (a hyperplane),
maintains the lower states of solid, liquid, and gaseous matter. However, the
etheric reality and the etheric body are more closely related to prana, the
vital, life-sustaining force of living beings, present in all natural processes
within the universe. Even so, prana is part of the worldly, physical realm,
sustaining the bodies and the minds of sentient beings. Animus is very close
to the notion of mentality whereas anima is equivalent to prana. Because of
its equivalence to prana, it exists on several planes, from the spiritual to the
mental to the physical. Consequently there is an anima for every class of
celestial being as it is not limited only to sentient entities having bodies of
material substance.

The inherent capacity of choice, divine in its origin, which every being in the
cosmos exercises in some degree as, consciously or unconsciously, it evolves
forth its essential self. Every thing and being has its own essential
characteristic and, the universal urge towards self-expression and self-
consciousness, of necessity has its relative share of inherent free will with
which to work out its destiny. Since evolution is the unfolding of inner
capacities and attributes, it cannot be produced, however stimulated, by
something outside of itself. Divine will is the force behind evolution on all
planes of manifestation throughout the cosmos. Hence, each entity, as a unit
of the divine All, has its portion of free choice and power to bring forth what
is within itself. Free will is manifesting in vegetative or automatic action in
the whirling electrons of the atom. It includes characteristic actions of matter,
such as cohesion, polarity, and electricity in the varied growths of vegetation,
in the range of animal activities, in the evolving human being, and in
perfected humans.


There are three principal centers of the human body: the heart as the center of
spiritual consciousness; the head as the center of mental consciousness; and
the navel as the center of emotional consciousness. The heart is the organ
through which the higher ego acts, seeking to impress the lower self which
works through the brain. In this sense the heart is the most important part of
the body, and when developed leads to spiritual mastery. The heart
corresponds to prana. Cosmically, the sun is the heart of the solar system as it
sends forth and receives circulations on many planes which sustain the solar
system.

The sun is the store-house of vital force, which is the noumenon of electricity
and it is from its mysterious depths, that issue those life currents which move
through space and through the organs of every living thing on earth. Thus,
there is a regular circulation of vital fluid throughout our system, of which the
sun is the heart — the same as the circulation of the blood in the human body.
These streams of solar living fire are stepped down into vital electricity on
earth, and also in the psychic and astral-physical currents of lunar life which
influence generation and all terrestrial growth.

Blood is actively protean in representing the streams of higher vitality

manifesting in body, and spirit. Thus, its pranic oxygen is the agent of the
solar fire while its white and red corpuscles represent the psychic life-force
and the red kamic energies, all acting together in their material configuration.
They correspond to the lunar builders of the ethereal forms of early root-races
which needed no warm blood, no atmosphere, and no food. These spherical
ameboid cells have a primordial, changeable and auto-generative type of
propagation. Their relation to the formation of the red cells typifies that of the
early astral figures which gradually became physical and evolved into the
red-blooded, mind-endowed beings of the later races.


Sunspots, which appear dark only because of the intense brilliancy of their
surroundings, appear in the photosphere. The bright areas seen around them
are called faculae. The photosphere as well as the reverse layer and the
chromosphere are three different forms of aura with which the sun clothes
itself. This aura is the solar prana or vitality which becomes visible to the
human eye on account of the level of radiation which it emits. If our eyes
were not evolved to sense the particular radiation which we call light, we
would not see the sun, although we would sense it and realize its presence.
Likewise, every being alive, emits its own characteristic aura which, had we
the eyes to see it, we would discern as a coruscating, scintillating light around
the entity. Thus the human being emanates or radiates a vital aura, which is to
humanity exactly what the solar aura is to the sun.


An electro-spiritual force, Kundalini is a creative power which, when aroused
into action, can as easily kill as it can create. In its higher aspect Kundalini is
a power or force following winding or circular pathways carrying or
conveying thought and force originating in the higher mind. Abstractly, in the
case of humanity, it is one of the fundamental energies or qualities of the
pranas. Unskilled or unwise attempts to interfere with its normal working in
the human body may readily result in insanity or a malignant or enfeebling
disease. The vital body is the tetra-dimensional part of the physical body and
is the foundation of organic life. During certain spiritual yogic practices, the
Kundalini at the base of the spine rises in the vital body allowing the yogin or
yogini to separate two superior ethers from other ethers in order for them to
serve as a vehicle to travel out of the physical body. These two ethers are
closely related to the Ida (right hemisphere) and Pingala (left hemisphere)
yogic channels. The etheric reality or life principle is quite distinct from the
physical material reality, being intermediate between the physical world and
the astral world. The etheric body can be characterized as the life force also
present in the plant kingdom. It maintains the physical body’s form until
death. At that time, it separates from the physical body as the physical body
reverts to natural disintegration. Clairvoyants see this etheric body as a
“peach-blossom color.” Kundalini like the Ouroboros, the ancient symbol
depicting a serpent eating its own tail, represents the infinite cycle of nature’s
endless creation and destruction, life and death. Plato, in his work Timaeus,
described the Ouroboros as the first living thing created in the universe which
became the earth itself.

Apana is a down-breath and one of the vital airs, life-currents, or pranas

which vitalize, build, and sustain the human or animal body. It is the prana
which ejects from the system material which it no longer requires, such as
wastes, etc. It is opposite in function to the upward-tending breath, udana.


The theory that the phenomenon of organic life cannot be explained by the
properties of physical matter alone, and that consequently they must be due to
some nonphysical vital principle is known as vitalism. Attempts to define
such a principle have been vague. If it is spirit, then what can spirit be, apart
from matter, or how can it act on matter? Perhaps it is another kind of matter
— an ether, fluid, etc. If the physical universe is composed of inert particles,
what can explain their activity? It is necessary to postulate an immaterial
force, which in its origin is immaterial but in its manifestations substantial or
material. The words force and energy are used to denote effects occurring in
matter. Are these effects without causes? The matter and force of materialistic
science are highly metaphysical abstractions. No such thing as an inert
material particle exists or can exist, for all such inert matter is life or force in
one of its multiform phases of quiescence or equilibrium. Nor can there exist
an absolutely immaterial force, without relation of function or action in the
material worlds. The term matter has been applied to the static aspect of life,
and the term force to the dynamic aspect. No distinction valid for this
purpose can be drawn between organic and inorganic beings. If there is need
of a vital principle for animals and plants, working upon yet other than
essential stuff or substance, there is equal need in the case of minerals, but
there is no need to postulate such divorce between force and matter in either
case. The jiva or prana are not an immaterial spirits different from matter
acting on a lifeless body. They have substantiality, consisting of streams of
living beings, life-atoms which act on something other than itself, but which
actually composes the body. Any minute analysis of physical matter has not
succeeded in finding anything more rudimentary than living, moving, light,
and electricity — in short, an ocean of jiva.


The anima mundi is the world-soul, the divine-spiritual-astral-physical source
of emanations and creative principle of all being. In its highest and
intermediate portions, it corresponds to akasha. It is the essence of sentience,
consciousness and differentiation, moral and physical. In its highest aspect it
is nirvana, in its lowest aspect it is the astral light. Astral light is the cosmic
plane above the physical plane, which is to the physical earth and the other
bodies of the solar system what the linga-sarira is to the human physical
body. The astral light is the carrier of life-forces — jiva cosmically, and
prana individually — and the storehouse of cosmic energies on their way to
or from physical manifestation. It preserves an indelible record of all events
on the astral and physical planes because there is a continual interaction
between the two planes. No natural phenomenon, whether mental, psychic, or
physical, can exist without it.

The anima mundi is of an igneous nature in the world of form but becomes
ether and spiritual in its higher planes. Every human mind was born by
detaching itself from the anima mundi which is a radiation of the Absolute.
The various life-atoms in the lower spheres are identical with the lower
portions of the anima mundi which is the life-consciousness of the universe
from the divine to the physical. The anima supra mundi is the intelligent life
of the anima mundi or cosmically intelligent akasha.

Three principles of the human body include the sthulopadhi, or the physical
body in the waking conscious state, the sukshmopadhi, the same body in
svapna or the dreaming state, and the karanopadhi or “causal body,” which
passes from one incarnation to another. Avesa is the occupancy of a human
body by an adept during the presence of a divine influence on earth by taking
possession of, or temporary embodiment in, an outside entity or power,
whether divine or evil. It is a form of possession.
The physical plane of matter is one of the many planes in universal nature
which is coordinated with our physical senses. The physical plane of
consciousness is therefore the plane on which our consciousness functions
when we are using those senses. It is characterized by the familiar qualities
which science studies under the name of ‘properties of matter.’ In order to
understand biological evolution, it is necessary to admit the existence of the
next plane above the physical — the astral plane. The passage of the astral
prototypes of organisms from the astral plane to the physical is called
physicalization. Differentiation on the physical plane is caused by the
psychological and astral life-agents acting in the protyle or subatomic
particles of the physical plane. Temporary and abnormal physicalization takes
place in a spiritualistic materialization. The continuous interchange of the
physical materials of the earth provides for human nutrition, endurance, and
renewal. The similarity of material, chemical and otherwise, in the earth and
in humanity has prevailed from the time when the presentments of early root-
races appeared on the globe. The progressive refinement of matter reflects
humanity’s mental and spiritual evolution and will continue until, in the far
distant future, the human encasement will be transparent and luminous — an
ethereal body of actually condensed light. The inert physical body is built,
cell for cell, upon the invisible substance of the astral model-body or linga-
sarira. The latter contains the real organs of the senses and sensations, and
transmits the mental, emotional, and instinctual impulses to which the
physical body reacts. The lower mind acts upon the physical organs and their
cells, but only the higher mind can influence the atoms in these cells, and
arouse the brain to a mental conception of spiritual ideas. The universe, being
a living organism, functions consciously and has its analogy in the
physiological operation of the human body. Hence, scientists who tamper
with the natural arrangements of chromosomes or artificially combine
different embryonic elements, instead of solving the problem of life, are only
dealing with the manifestation of the creative powers of ideation.


Aside from ether there is a vital energy known as the odic force which
permeates all plants, animals, and humans on earth. The odic force is visible
in total darkness as colored auras surrounding living things, crystals, and
magnets, but viewing it requires hours first spent in total darkness, and only
very sensitive people have the ability to see it. An aura is a subtle invisible
essence or fluid emanating from and surrounding beings, which are classed as
animate and inanimate. To the eyes of clairvoyants the human aura appears as
a halo of light, variously colored according to the momentary psychic and
mental condition of the individual. Since everything in the universe is a
center of living energies of one kind or another, they must be surrounded by a
field of force, representing radiation into the surrounding space and upon all
objects within their sphere of influence. The aura is a psycho-mental
effluvium, and is a direct manifestation of the akasha surrounding every
individual and regarded as an essential part of an individual. Remote viewing
is the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen target, such as
an aura, purportedly using extrasensory perception or “sensing” with the
mind.

The odic force is closely related to the five layers or “sheaths” know as
koshas. The koshas cover the mind like layers of an onion. Because causality
proceeds downwards, each of the layers has its own characteristics and can
have its own expression of disease which requires individual healing. Each
bodily aura has its own complement of chakras related to characteristics in
the sheath layers which assist in the healing process.


Annamaya kosha is the sheath of the physical self which is nourished by
food. It is the coarsest sheath is based in the earth element. Through this layer
humanity identify themselves with a mass of skin, muscle, fat, bones, and
liquids. Pranamaya kosha is composed of prana, the force that vitalizes and
holds together the body and the mind. It pervades the whole organism and its
physical manifestation is the breath. It is a modification of vayu or air and
enters into and comes out of the body. As long as this vital principle exists in
the organisms, life continues. Manomaya kosha is composed of manas or
mind. The mind (along with the sensory organs) constitute the manomaya
kosha and approximates personhood. It is the cause of diversity, of “I” and
“mine.” Vijnanmaya kosha is composed of vijnana, or intellect and the five
sense organs. It is the sheath composed of more intellection and is associated
with perception. With its mental modifications and the organs of knowledge,
it forms the cause of humanity’s transmigration. Anandamaya kosha is
composed of ananda, or bliss and is based in the quanta/etheric elements. It is
the sheath of the causal body during deep sleep while in the dreaming state,
but in the wakeful states has only a partial manifestation. The blissful
anandamaya kosha is a reflection of truth and beauty.



The universe is built of hosts of evolving entities existing in all various
grades of evolutionary unfoldment. All are passing through a continual series
of changes with the shedding of sheath after sheath of their essential
consciousness. These entities continuously modify the vehicles through
which they express themselves on various cosmic planes. Evolution is the
changing characteristics of biological populations over successive
generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes that are passed
on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Atavism is the reappearance
of characteristics of a remote ancestor in its descendant as a reversion to type
or delayed heredity. Atavism is the activities of life through the life-atoms
collectively. It builds new forms and copies family resemblances of every
future being. Atavism is the germ-plasm, or aggregate of life-atoms which are
transmitted unchanged through generations in which the atom is the vehicle
of a jiva or monad endowed with memory.

If a number of animals of one species are exposed to an unduly cold climate,

many will die, while the survivors will become hardier. These hardier ones
are said to transmit their hardiness to their posterity, whereby the species
becomes modified to that extent. A continual succession of such small
changes, provoked by changes of environment, eventually produces the
differences distinguishing one species from another where the higher animal
types have in the course of time been derived from the lower. But what brings
about the combination of genes that results in the building of the ladder of
life from the lowest to the highest manifestations of consciousness? Natura
naturans may be viewed as the continuously striving, ever-changing nature,
yearning towards higher things, which brings about an uninterrupted
movement towards betterment. This is caused by the inner spiritual urge of
beings to express throughout time an ever fuller manifestations of latent
power and faculty in which inner and invisible worlds are the noumenal
causes of the exterior or physical world.



Heredity is the attraction of reembodying monads to the respective families
with which they have affinities of various kinds and the reembodying egos
carrying such individual characteristics or attributes which perpetuate them in
the family life-stream. The cause of heredity is a class of angelic beings who
lie concealed in the germ that will fall into generation. That germ will
become a spiritual potency in the physical cell that guides the development of
the embryo, and which is the cause of the hereditary transmission of faculties
and inherent qualities in humanity. That a child transmits many features from
the parents cannot be denied, but it is of no greater significance than the fact
that children also derive features from a variety of other sources which
contribute materials and subordinate agents by which the karma of the
individual is fulfilled. That karma is the innate character of the individual, as
embodied in the various spiritual, psychological, or astral vehicles which
contribute to the composite human being. Heredity, the transmission of
characteristics from parents to children, is not merely a physiological or
biological mechanism acting automatically or fortuitously, but is brought
about by the attraction to certain families, or certain parents, of reembodying
egos possessing, to a degree, the same characteristics which the parents
themselves have.

Gemmation is a form of asexual reproduction in which a new individual is

developed from a protuberance on the body of the parent with the new
individual either remaining attached, as in polyzoa and most corals, or
separating as in the method of reproduction followed by the humans of the
second root-race. At that time bodies were more ethereal and also differed in
certain reproductive processes from what takes place in humans today.
Besides a survival of analogous methods of reproduction in some of the
present lower forms of life, there are also similar instances in the power
which some creatures have of reproducing lost limbs, and in the power of
cicatrization of wounds in the higher mammals.


The points of similarity between the series of forms that prevail from the
simplest types of life to those of higher animals, and the resemblances in
embryonic development of different organisms, are interpreted as evidence of
a common descent. This implies that the embodying entity is the product of a
progressive series of forms. However, the original unit of every manifested
being is an unselfconscious spark of divine life which becomes involved in
all grades and forms of matter during vast periods of time and varied rounds
of experience. The human embryo, in rapidly epitomizing its individual
history, maintains strange conditions which were normal in the early root-
races. Its brain, in the second month, forms more than twenty percent of the
body, as compared with about two percent in the adult body. The early
embryonic and adult heart have similar relative proportions. This dominance
of brain and heart, the external prominence of the pineal gland, the organ of
spiritual sight, etc., all point to type-forms suitable for the spiritual and
intellectual unselfconscious egos manifesting in the early human career.
Today the reincarnating ego, with its vast ages of experience in matter, is an
organizer which summarizes its past, in overseeing the building of its body
according to karmic specifications. Primeval humanity, though ethereal, was
potentially human, and had retained from previous life cycles the form-
pattern and seed-types of all the lower evolutionary grades. Hence came all
the subhuman creatures that developed and became specialized in their
evolutionary turn.


Evolution does not end with humanity. Earth’s biosphere evolved before
humans existed. One-cell organisms developed into metazoans, and some of
the members of this classification later developed complex nervous systems
with the capability to acquire intelligence. When humanity evolved, a
noosphere, the sphere of human thought and the cognitive layer of existence,
was created. As evolution continued, the noosphere gained coherence through
a process of ‘planetization.’

Our thoughts are mental manifestations of ideas, primarily a prototype

existing in the cosmic mind and manifested in forms by the action of cosmic
energy, working in matter. Therefore ideas must be regarded as innate.
However, ideas are the fundamental roots of manifested things, as viewed
under the aspect of consciousness rather than under that of matter. Hence the
faculty of ideation, considered cosmically, is created in what lies latent in the
ideation of humanity as a whole. This is quite different from the faculty of
making mental images of sensory experiences called phantasmata which is a
degree of the process called astral ideation.

A chaya is the astral image or body of a person. The chayas are the astral
body-projections of early spiritual beings or pitris who played an important
part in the evolutionary development of humankind. In the first root-race, the
pure, celestial and great pitris of various classes were commissioned to
evolve their images (chaya), and make them into physical humans. Following
this inauguration, the pitris endowed early humanity with divine intelligence
and the comprehension of the mysteries of creation. This first human race
were astral chayas who are said to have oozed out of the pitris.


Cells contain a semi-transparent substance occurring in all vegetable and
animal matter, which is the basis of organic life and has the name protoplasm.
The cell is a collective entity containing subordinate symbiotic entities. Its
structure is divided into two major parts: the central nucleus which contains
the genetic material, and the surrounding cytoplasm. Human cells sprang
originally from an inner human entity, functioning as the lower mind of the
Absolute. The earliest human root-races were astral protoplasts that
reproduced by division as cells do today. The late second and early third root-
races reproduced by throwing off germ cells which then grew into a new
entity. Because each cell is an individual being or organism with its own
inherent characteristics and possibilities, some of these vital cells thrown off
by early humans were used by entities that evolved into the higher mammals.
When any one of the cells forming part of early human bodies freed itself
from the psychical and the physical control that then existed, it was enabled
to follow, and instinctively did follow, the path of self-expression.

Today psychical and physical dominance of the human incarnated entity over
their body is so strong that their cells have largely lost their power of
individual self-expression through the biological subjugation by the
overlordship of the human entity. Had human cells not been so dominated
they would, by the amputation of a limb for instance, immediately begin to
proliferate along their own tendency-line, to build up bodies of their own
kind, each one following out that particular line of life force, or progressive
development, which each cell would contain in its dominant cellular
structure, thus establishing a new ancestral or genealogical tree.


The noosphere requires that evolution is creative and cannot necessarily
manifest by natural selection but is “emergent” in increasing complexity to
include the evolution of mind. The tendency of specialized animal or plant
species to revert to their primitive racial type conflicts with the idea that
changes result from the gradual accretion of small differentiations. Heredity
is not a string of beads, connected one to the other without any thread running
through the whole. Each bead springs from the connecting vital thread or
line, so that the characteristics of all ancestors are transmitted in latency,
ready to appear at any time, should circumstances favor such a manifestation.

During the ‘planetization’ process spiritual energy becomes more

concentrated and available as a critical element in humanity’s evolution. This
energy is a quantitative property which must be transferred to an object in
order to effect the object. The quantity that can be converted in form is not
created nor destroyed but spirals toward a final point of divine unification as
the apex of thought/consciousness. The evolution of humanity has consisted
in the gradual incarnation of a spiritual being into a material body. Humanity
has disembarked from a spiritual world into a world of matter. As such, the
evolution of the plant and animal kingdoms did not precede, but rather
accompanied the process of human incarnation. Each human being has the
task to find a balance between the opposing influences of spirit and matter
and each is helped in this task by the mediation of an entity which stands
between and harmonizes the two extremes.


The human spirit has emanated the desire body to be transmuted into the
emotional spirit. The life spirit has emanated the vital body to be transmuted
into the intellectual spirit. The divine spirit has emanated the dense body to
be transmuted into the pneuma of transcendent consciousness. As such, the
etheric body is the vehicle of prana. The astral body (the linga sharira) is the
vehicle of desires and emotions. The mental body (mayavi-rupa) is the
vehicle of the concrete or lower mind. The causal body is the vehicle of the
abstract or higher mind. Each body has its own aura and set of chakras, and
corresponds to a particular plane of existence which merges after death
entirely into the causal body.

The linga sharira is the invisible double bioplasmic body and serves as a
model or matrix of the physical body, which conforms to the shape,
appearance and condition of this double. The linga sharira can be separated
or projected a limited distance from the physical body. When separated from
the physical body it can be wounded by sharp objects. When it returns to the
physical frame, the wound will be reflected in the physical counterpart, a
phenomenon called “repercussion.” The sutratma is a life-giving linkage
from the higher self down to the physical body. It connects the physical body
to the etheric or astral body and finally to the mental body as the inseparable
ray between the universe and the self. Both the astral and etheric bodies are
aspects of the linga sarira. The sutratma not only serves as a link between
the two bodies, but it also limits the astral body from wandering great
distances. If the astral body moves farther away from the physical body to a
distance of 164 feet the sutratma pulls the astral form back into the physical
body.



The mental body is the intermediate between the emotional and the astral
bodies in terms of the layers in the human energy field or aura. The mental
body is considered an aura that includes thought forms. The human being is
of a composite nature, and its aura will be composite, including astral-vital,
psychomental, and spiritual emanations. Any of these may be perceptible
according to the plane on which the perceiver is able to function. But the
aura, even though not commonly visible to most humans, is nevertheless
perceptible by the effects which it produces upon those subtle senses which
all beings possess. Humans are affected by auras, both consciously and
unconsciously, and thus auras form the influence which people exercise on
each other. Animals are in some ways far more sensitive to auras than are
humans.

The auric egg is the source of the human aura, taking its name from its shape.
It ranges from the divine to the astral-physical, and is the seat of all the
monadic, spiritual, intellectual, mental, passional, and vital energies and
faculties. In its essence it is eternal and endures throughout all time. Every
being or thing throughout the universe, and indeed the universe itself, has, or
rather is, its own auric egg. Its primal substance is akasha and appears to be
ovoid or egg-shaped in outline, more or less dense, extremely brilliant with a
central portion surrounded by an enormously active interworking cloud of
pranic currents.

Anda is the world egg containing the seeds of what later in cosmic time will
develop essential life powers, whether as a planetary chain, solar system,
galaxy, or cluster of galaxies. Bija is a seed or life-germ, whether of animals
or plants, of the original and causal source of the urge for life to express
itself. Shakti anda is the first step of creation and is also called pure creation
because at this level its divine nature is not obscured, as it manifests a state of
diversity in unity.

The karana sarira, or the causal body, is the seed of the subtle body and the
gross body. It is nirvikalpa rupa, or undifferentiated form, which originates
with avidya, ignorance or nescience of the real identity of the mind, and gives
rise to the notion of jiva as an entity imbued with a life force. The causal
body has an infinite ignorance that is indescribable and characterized by
emptiness and darkness. The karana sarira is constantly in search for the “I
am,” because it has nothing on which to hold for its stability. This causal
body is the most complex of the three bodies because it contains the
impressions of former experience, which results from past karma. Because
human beings are composed of three sariras or ‘bodies’ emanating from
ignorance, they are often equated with the five koshas (sheaths), which cover
the mind. The fourth body is turiya or pure consciousness. Turiya is the
background that underlies and transcends the three common states of
consciousness, also known as the three bodies, which are waking
consciousness, dreaming, and dreamless sleep.

To a large extent dreams are a reflex of our sensory impressions and of our
thoughts during the waking state. The principles concerned in these dream
cases is kama, desire and the lower aspect of the mind, which act and react
with the various nerve centers and the organs at the base of the brain. But if
the word dream is to be distinguished from dreamless sleep on the one hand
and waking consciousness on the other, it must include a far higher kind of
dream which is the experiences of the higher aspect of mind. These
experiences, so different from those of the waking state, cannot be
transmitted to the mind except symbolically or in distorted form. Astral light
also plays an enormous part in most dreams. We may witness scenes which
cannot have formed in our waking experience. With prophetic dreams our
vision, untrammeled by physical senses, perceives in the astral light an image
of what will later happen on the physical plane thus causing a recollection of
what has been seen within the waking state.


The lowest principle of cosmic jiva is diffused through all nature and, among
its activities on all the cosmic planes, produces all living beings and entities
— humanity, beast, plant, mineral, and the kingdoms of the elemental world.
On cosmic planes of consciousness, the corresponding aspects of jiva are the
vehicles of cosmic thought or ideation which manifest consciously in entities
as the laws of nature. Likewise, in the human being, the psychoelectric field
of life-currents, vital fluids, or pranas provides the avenues for transmitting
thought, feeling, emotion, and instincts. Cosmically, life is one of the
spiritual-substantial aspects guided by cosmic intelligence. This cosmic vital
fluid or principle, called fohat, is the universal source of both energy and
matter and the carrier of consciousness. There are many grades or conditions
of life, just as there are many orders of living beings who are its aggregate
expressions. Thus there is the relatively animate and inanimate, as when
comparing a mineral with a plant or a corpse with a living body. But the
mineral has life of its own kind, and what has left the corpse is one kind of
life, while the life in the physical atoms remains.

Sleep is a small death, and death may be called a larger sleep. In both, the
ego, liberated successively from various bonds, travels inwards and upwards
through different grades of consciousness and reaches the experiences proper
to those planes. Sleep is also used figuratively, in contrast with waking, to
denote a state of non-manifestation, when there is no contrast between
subject and object where sleeping on one plane may coincide with waking on
another. In sleep the ego becomes unconscious on the physical plane in its
brain — except in the cases of dreaming. The connection between the mind
and the bodily senses is quiescent and there is no direct self-conscious
cognition of physical objects and events. In short, the ego is functioning on a
different plane of consciousness. Distinct states of consciousness into which
the human egoic self can enter are the manifestations during embodiment of
what takes place on a more profound and radical scale at death.


The reason we cannot remain continuously in the waking state, but must seek
another aspect of consciousness during sleep, is that our senses are all dual,
and act according to the plane of consciousness on which the thinking entity
energizes. Physical sleep affords the greatest facility for action on the various
planes. Sleep is a necessity, in order that the senses may recuperate and
obtain a new lease of life. Sleep is a sign that waking life has become too
strong for the physical organism, and that the force of the life current must be
broken by changing the waking for the sleeping state. In describing the aura
of a person just refreshed by sleep, and that of another just before going to
sleep, the former will be seen bathed in rhythmical vibrations of life currents
— golden, blue, and rosy which are the electrical waves of life. The latter is
in a mist of intense golden-orange hue, composed of atoms whirling with an
almost spasmodic rapidity, showing that the person begins to be too strongly
saturated with life or the life essence is too strong for the physical organs, and
must seek relief in the shadowy side of the dream element, or physical sleep,
as one of the states of consciousness. Human beings, animals, and plants die
not because of a lack of life, but because their vehicles become finally worn
out, precisely because the life-currents within have become too strong, and
the building power of the vehicles are less able to repair the damages of the
life-force. Paradoxically, it is the life-force which itself brings about both
sleep and death.


A hallucination is a state produced by either physiological disorders, by
mediumship, or by intoxication. But the cause that produces hallucinatory
visions is deeper than physiology. Such visions, especially when produced
through mediumship, are preceded by a relaxation of the nervous system,
generating an abnormal magnetic condition which attracts the sufferer to
observe waves of astral light. It is the latter that furnishes the various
hallucinations. These, however, are not always empty and unreal dreams. No
one can see that which does not exist or which is not impressed in or on the
astral waves. A seer may perceive objects and scenes (whether past, present,
or future) which have no relation to the seer themselves, while also
perceiving several things disconnected with each other at the same time, thus
producing grotesque and absurd combinations. Both drunkard and seer,
medium and adept, see their respective visions in the astral light. But while
the drunkard, the lunatic, the untrained medium, or one suffering from brain-
injury, see because they cannot help it, and evoke the jumbled visions
unconsciously to themselves, the adept and the trained seer have the choice
and control of such visions. They know where to fix their gaze, how to steady
the scenes they want to observe, and how to see beyond the upper outer
layers of the astral light.

Human mediumship is either a voluntary or involuntary subjection to the

lower planes of astral substances which, while more ethereal than ordinary
matter, are frequently more gross, more powerful, and usually more malefic.
Entrance into these astral realms produces a species of astral intoxication. In
untrained mediumship the atoms and molecules of the astrally controlled
body, which the alien astral entity uses to mold into a form and to move with
its own desire-impulses, retain an astral psychomagnetic imprint. Such
mediumship therefore becomes irresponsible as a source of genuine
knowledge and prevision, and less capable as a guardian of truth.


Hysteria is a protean disorder regarded as a functional neurosis with
abnormal sensations, emotions, or paroxysms. Hysteria manifests itself
chiefly by emotional instability and by the ease with which it is influenced in
impulsiveness, a remarkable egotism, and a desire to talk and to simulate.
There is a constant capricious change of mood and activity with psychic
faculties at times displayed in clairvoyance, hallucinations, cataleptic and
somnambulistic states, etc., showing an active functioning in the astral body
for various periods of which only a vague or no remembrance is retained.
Hysteria is an obsessing astral entity, not always wholly human, but playing
upon the human mind in unnatural and useless ways. The patient’s
unconscious will include various past lives in which developed neurotic
tendencies now karmically attracting harmful psychic influences. Among the
various types and grades of astral entities are those dominated and enslaved
by special forms of desire such as an intense love of attention and egotism.

Ecstasy, astonishment, trance, rapture, or visions are a transference of

consciousness from the physical plane to another inner and superior plane,
accompanied by awareness and memory of the experience as either an astral-
psychic experience or a psycho-spiritual one. The former is delusive and
fraught with harm, while the latter is a state of illumination resulting from the
true asceticism of a spiritual disciple, and in its highest form is the same as
the ultimate meditation stage of the yogi.

The antaratman is the inner self or primeval heart of an individual. The goal
of the yogi is ultimate union with the antaratman. Antaryoga is a state of
deep thought or abstraction signifying a high stage of inner spiritual and
intellectual recollection in which all the superior part of a person’s
constitution is gathered together and focused into a single point of
consciousness. It is involved in the attaining of the higher states of
consciousness such as turiya-samadhi.


The svabhava of a sun brings forth its svarupa, a sun-body. The svabhava of
a human being brings forth a characteristic svarupa, a human body, and so
forth. Therefore, any jiva or monad of necessity embodies itself in vehicles
or sheaths flowing forth from its own essence or vitality. Such a sheath,
vehicle, or body is the svarupa of the indwelling svabhava, the character or
individuality of the jiva or monad. The svarupa, as intrinsic nature, of fire is
both heat and light. However, when it expresses through water (when water is
heated), only the heat principle is expressed (water does not glow, but
becomes hot). However when it expresses through an iron ball (when an iron
ball is heated), both heat and light principles are expressed and the iron ball
both glows and is hot.

Unity and duality, with their development as plurality in manifestation,

subsist throughout the universe. Every duality is comprised in a unity existing
on a higher plane of being than its dual manifestation in which such duality
reproduces itself in the webwork of pluralities composing the manifested
universe. Thus, light and dark are the dual manifestations of that which is
called light and darkness. Spirit and matter are the dual manifestations of the
one life. But the most fundamental duality is the alternation between
manvantara and pralaya, which are aspects of an ever-productive ineffable
source. Monistic and dualistic philosophies appear to accentuate each its own
side, but in reality each view implies the other.


As the unmanifested One becomes the duad, duality pervades the cosmos,
often represented as male and female, or as active and passive, spirit and
matter, mind and body, positive and negative, etc. These expressions are
preferred because of their lack of personal attributes. A synonym for the
female principle is root-matter or mulaprakriti. The male and female
principles are not entities in themselves but aspects of a unity; and since
every element is compound, the words male and female as applied to any
element, signify only a temporary predominance of the one or the other
quality. Again, the distinction is not one of fundamental nature but of
relationship, so that what is female in relation to one thing may be male in
relation to another.

The seed of a plant is a globule of physical matter, but the actual seed is ultra-
physical. All seeds are vital life-forces working in and through physical
germs, and hence these true seeds are ethereal organisms, structures
composed of a higher order of matter. Thus there is a succession of vital
seeds pertaining to one individual entity, each such seed being the ultimate
unit of that organism on a particular plane. There is the physical seed of a
plant, containing the astral seed — a unit on its own plane — containing a
still subtler seed belonging to a higher plane, and so forth. Ultimately a seed
is a life-atom, in itself the expression on a particular plane of a monad which
is a thought in divine ideation.


Bhutasarga is elemental creation and cosmically is the first differentiation of
universal indiscrete substance, or primordial akasha. It is the first stage of the
pre-cosmic elements in which the seeds or germs (bhutas) reappear,
sometimes as ghosts, anew from the preceding cosmic manvantara. Bhutavat
refers to those seeds of cosmic being which, through evolutionary unfolding
in previous manvantaras, remain as crystallized seeds to blossom forth in the
unfolding new universe at the opening of the succeeding manvantara. At this
time, the world is described as being composed of four spheres (anda) which,
like eggs, contain a series of phenomenal elements (tattva).

The ’olam hab-beri’ah is the second world or sphere of creation of the four
worlds (’olamim) which are emanated during the period of world
manifestation. It is considered to contain pure or spiritual forms and original
ideas from which creation commences. This sphere is a continuation of the
emanation of the first ’olam. The substance of the beri’atic world is of a
highly ethereal or quasi-spiritual type. From this world emanates the third
world, ’olam hay-yetsirah. Adinidanasvabhavat is the basic material from
which the manifested physical world is built. Adishakti is a primeval power
and the divine force or energy emanation of the feminine aspect or veil of any
spiritually formative potency and is the truly supreme spirit without form.
The divine power, shakti, gradually descends from ananda shakti (bliss) into
iccha shakti (the power of will), jnana shakti (the power of knowledge) and
kriya shakti (the power of action), while at the same time manifesting the
basis for creation. At the creation stage there is no actual division or
limitation because this anda contains shakti tattva, thereby including all the
pure tattvas. These tattvas are elements or principles of reality and are the
basic concepts to understanding the nature of the Absolute and the universe.


The sphere of maya causes the divine nature and purity that exists in the
shakti anda to be forgotten. The divine creation becomes covered with five
defects that make the infinite, eternal, perfect in itself, all knowing, and all
powerful nature, as manifested in the shakti anda appear limited. The five
defects are seen as cloaks blocking the mind from recognizing the Absolute.
Maya hides the divine nature of the Absolute and creates a sense of
separateness. The five cloaks (kanchukas) are the cloak of time, the cloak of
limited knowledge, the cloak of desire, the cloak of causality, and the cloak
of being limited. The prakriti anda describes the world as it is perceived from
the common human level of consciousness. It contains the shakti of the
individual intellect, the ego, the sensory mind, the five sense organs, the five
organs of action, the five subtle essences (smell, taste, form, touch, and
sound) and the last four physical elements (water, fire, air, and ether).

The universe is sound (shabda) which brings forth existence. Creation

consists of vibrations at various frequencies and amplitudes giving rise to the
phenomena of the world. The anahata-shabda is the resonating circle of
sound produced without material substance. It is a mystical bell-like sound at
times heard by the dying which lessens in intensity until the moment of
death. It is also heard by yogis or contemplatives at certain stages of
meditation. The anahata-shabda is a reflection of the inherent sound-
characteristic of akasha.


Sound is more than a name describing an attribute — it is an actual efflux or
production of the universal working of akashic fluid. It is an entity and a real
force in nature, and the said phenomena of auditory sensations. Like the
terms light, heat, air — all of which are entities — sound will have different
levels of meaning according to the particular manifestation or plane
concerned. The akashic fluid, whose characteristic production is sound,
occupies the apex of a triangle, combining both the active and passive
potencies of creative energy. Sound is therefore a tremendous creative power
as it has called worlds into being out of chaos, in every cosmogony. This
power descends to humanity through their divine ancestry, as well as from the
higher parts of their constitution. This power of sound is known to adepts and
used by them via mantras, being called mantrika-shakti. Everywhere the
power of mantras and incantations has been recognized. Orators use mantras
— they call them slogans — with instinctive knowledge of their efficacy, and
set afloat phrases that stir the public mind and strongly influence events.
Sound is a property of akasha, the primary of ether, sometimes called space.
The ether of space has the vibratory soundboard of nature in all its
differentiations. Sound is directed in its operations by fohat and its power of
is connected with both rhythmic and sympathetic vibration. A powerful voice,
sounding the right tone, may shatter a wineglass, and thus the imagination
may suggest dangerous applications of this principle.


Usually the universe as perceived by humanity’s physical senses. It is
disputed whether space exists apart from objects or is a property of objects,
and also whether it is objective or subjective. Such difficulties arise from our
attempt to abstract an extension from the reality of which it is an aspect, just
as we attempt to abstract matter and energy. The physical basis of the
universe appears under three aspects, and the attempt to conceive each of the
three as separate existences and to construct the universe out of them is to
court contradiction and to proceed in an inverse order. Is space the ultimate
residue left after we have removed everything conceivable? In that case how
can we define it in terms of anything which is supposed to be derived from it?
We must either leave it undefined, as a primary postulate, or else define it in
terms of something which lies beyond the physical plane altogether. The idea
of whether dimensions belong to space or to material objects arises from a
false separation between these two, so that we speak of objects being in
space, just as we speak of life as being in matter. We think of space as an
absence of matter, as we think of darkness as an absence of light, and silence
as absence of sound; thus having created vacuums humans proceed to fill
them. It would be nearer the truth to say that light is the absence of darkness,
sound the absence of silence, and matter a form of the presence of space.
Those things which appear most real are derived from those which seem most
unreal, because they are not immediately physically perceivable. Space is
living, incomprehensibly conscious, and hence a divinity. It is the only real
world, while our manifested world born from and in it is an illusory one. The
fundamental hypostases are all derivative from ever-enduring, frontierless
space, which no mind can either exclude nor conceive. In this concept is
combined abstract space, motion, and duration called the spawn of the Great
Mother.


A mantra is a sacred utterance, a numinous sound, a syllable, word or
phonemes, or group of words in Sanskrit which have psychological and
spiritual powers based on codified esoteric traditions. These powers induce an
altered state of consciousness which may have a syntactic structure arranged
in spiritual and vibrational patterns. Ajapa is the form of mantra called
hamsa, consisting of a series of inhalations and exhalations.

Om is a syllable of invocation, considered very holy. It is placed at the

beginning of scriptures considered to be of unusual sanctity. Prolonging the
uttering of this word, both of the O and the M, with the mouth closed, echoes
and arouses vibration in the skull, and affects the different nervous centers of
the body for great good. The virtue or spiritual and magical properties
attributed to this word, however, arise out of the purity and devotion of the
one uttering it.

Pranava is the droning or humming sound, during the proper pronunciation

of the syllable “om.” In one sense pranava represents the macrocosm and in
another sense the microcosm. The fact that this term is given to the mystical
sacred syllable, and that it signifies a droning or humming sound, suggests
that originally the word was uttered aloud, although in secret whenever
possible. In Vedic Sanskrit, the anusvara (after-sound or subordinate sound)
was an allophonic nasal sound depicted as a diacritic dot used to mark the
specific type of nasal sound and used in a number of Indic scripts. Hence, om
is transliterated with a dot below the m (ṃ).


The prithivi anda is the terminal point of creation, or solid matter. There is
only one tattva in this sphere, the prithivi tattva. This tattva has a special
statute because it contains in essence all the other tattvas and is the home of
Kundalini Shakti. Tattvas (thusness, or an aspect of reality) explain the
structure and origin of the universe. They are usually divided into three
groups: shuddha (pure tattvas); shuddhashuddha (pure-impure tattvas); and
ashuddha (impure tattvas). The pure tattvas describe internal aspects of the
Absolute; the pure-impure tattvas describe the mind and its limitations; while
the impure tattvas include the universe and living beings that assist the
existence of mind.

With awareness of mind, sentient beings can make a shift in which they
become aware no longer of their mind, but become aware of their awareness
itself. At this moment a sentient being experiences awareness as a felt sense
or sense of being as awareness. This becoming aware of awareness is
entering into a transitional awareness. The being shifts from the being aware
of mind to becoming aware of awareness itself. The energy of awareness also
begins to manifest and the vitality and aliveness of this existential awareness
field is experienced as shakti. This existential experience of duality within
non-duality and non-duality within duality is the experience of self-liberation
that brings forth foundational change.


The first root-race were spiritual and ethereal, yet possessing latent but not
active intelligence, and therefore having no speech. Their habitat was near the
region of the North Pole, where they first appeared in distinct but overlapping
localities. Their method of reproduction was by melting into their progeny.
Later the race reproduced itself by fission. There was no death to individuals,
because the individuals became their own descendants, as exemplified in
certain elementary forms of life today. This race inhabited the planet when
there was more water than land on the earth, yet the earth’s destruction was
by fire.

The second root race was astral, though somewhat more concretely physical
and material. Their bodies were unlike what is now regarded as human,
bearing vaguely the human outline of a gelatinous, jellylike nature, as yet
without bones, organs, hair, or true skin. Reproduction was by budding,
although later these buds became numerous and the process became modified
to the casting off of spores or seeds, or to the exuding of drops of sweat.
These beings were mindless and unmoral, innocent, guided unconsciously by
their spiritual instincts, nevertheless largely under the sway of lower rather
than spiritual impulses with no working bridge of mentality between spirit
and matter.


The date of the beginning of the third root-race is set at some twenty-three
million years ago and eighteen million years ago is the date of the awakening
of mind and the separation of the sexes. The latter date is collated, according
to the geology of the later Triassic and earlier Jurassic periods. Their
geographical area was the enormous continent known as Lemuria and
outlying islands with the water-area predominating over the land-area. Its
eventual destruction came about through fire. The filamentous and boneless
structure of the semi-astral human bodies of the second root-race now
thickened and condensed, separating itself upon skeletal form into nervous,
muscular, and other physiological systems, combined with the appearance of
definite organs. With the hardening and specialization of the body, the
production of the reproductive cells became localized in special organs and
the mode of generation became oviparous. Later these human eggs were no
longer extruded as is the case with fowls today, but shrank in size and were
developed and fertilized within the body — first in a virginal manner, and
then before true sex appeared there ensued a fairly long period of
androgynous reproduction in which androgynous humans occasionally gave
birth to individuals in whom one or the other sex predominated. Time passed
with a recession of androgyny, and finally with the appearance of true sex as
it is understood today. This process extended over millions of years.


The satyrs of earlier traditions represent an extinct race of quasi-animal
humans. The third root-race united themselves with animal beings, thus
producing creatures with which the late Lemurians and early Atlanteans
mated. This unnatural union produced anthropoids although the first
miscegenation was between races to which the names human and animal did
not imply so marked a distinction as they do now, and the union was fertile
and not so unnatural and infertile as it would be today. The satyrs had bristly
hair, snub noses, pointed ears, incipient horns, and a tail. Later they acquired
goat’s horns and hoofs. They loved the music of pipes, dance, song, and wine
and, like nature spirits of western Europe, they were elfish and given to
pranks. The tradition of satyrs and other beings of this kind, though extinct as
a physical race, persist in astral form.

During the fourth root-race humanity reached its greatest phases of

materiality. The fourth root-race was roughly contemporaneous with is called
Tertiary times and came to an end in what was then known as the middle
Miocene period. Its total duration was millions of years. Often spoken of as
the Atlantean, the fourth root-race would be gigantic today, which is one
source of the universal tradition as to giants on the earth in far antiquity. After
the fourth root-race had reached its zenith, certain unevolved tribes
committed miscegenation with the most evolved of the then-existing simians.
There was an enmity lasting for ages between the benevolent and the selfish
populations of the fourth root-race, which continued with the adepts of the
nascent fifth root-race. The karma of Atlantean black magic still blights our
own fifth root-race, for the people of today were embodied as the more
compact humans of Atlantean times. The fifth root-race actually comprises
the many and extremely varied human stocks which exist on earth today,
simply because they all live in the time period of the fifth root-race.


When the time arrives, the future sixth root-race will be predominant on
earth. At that time new lands will have appeared, and many of the present
lands will be submerged. The surface of the globe will be entirely changed,
and there will be more land than water. Spirituality will be on the ascendancy
and materiality decreasing. The characteristics of sex will gradually
disappear, and humanity will slowly once again become androgynous.
Toward the close of the sixth root race humanity will begin to manifest the
first appearances of reproduction by kriyashakti (propagation by means of
will and imagination). At this time humanity will be showing a steadily
increasing tendency to evolve out of flesh and into more etheric vehicles. The
sixth root-race will be comparable with our own fifth root race but far more
advanced, spiritually, intellectually, psychically, and even physically, and the
attainment by humanity to adeptship, or white magic, will be notably more
easy than is the case at present. With the advent of each root-race a new
cosmic element comes into manifestation, and a new physical sense apparatus
appears. As a result, humanity in the sixth root-race will develop a sixth
sense.

During the final seventh root-race there is a return to conditions of purity

which prevailed at the beginning of the earth’s human evolution. But this
return does not mean going backward, but rather an emanative evolutionary
unfolding to the point where cyclic motion brings all things to the original
plane, but on a higher division. The great adepts and initiates will once more
produce mind-born progeny immaculately as the invisible North Polar
continent will once more become visible. When seven planetary root races
have been accomplished, there will ensue a still higher nirvana. This higher
nirvana is coincident with what is called a pralaya of that planet, which lasts
until a new planet forms, containing the same hosts of living beings as on the
preceding one.


The androgyne or hermaphrodite is a dual principle containing both the active
and passive powers of nature, as spirit-matter. Bipolarity is the contrast and
interaction between the energetic and formative sides of nature which is
universally prevalent. This duality is perhaps more accurately described as
positive and negative, or by spirit and matter, or again by consciousness and
vehicle. The early root races established their final form in commemoration
of the separation of androgynous humanity, their forbearers, into males and
females. Whatever sacred meaning may have entered into this primary
memorial of the ethereal forms and forces of androgynous humanity
becoming separate, physicalized, warm-blooded bodies, has been forgotten
and misunderstood in the exoteric rites which have come down to us. The
hermaphrodite in modern humanity is sometimes the source of virgin births
in which the hermaphrodite inseminates and fertilizes themselves. This rare
occurrence will depend on the hermaphrodite having a complete set of both
reproductive organs. Additionally, these beings are capable of producing
sesquizygotic, monozygotic and dizygotic twinning. The hermaphrodite
embodies nature’s universal polarity on its lower planes, which is an
emanation from the non-dual or non-bipolar mental and spiritual realms. In
an abstract sense, this is a personification of the universal polarity in nature
on its lower planes, wherein the so-called masculine and feminine principles
are the opposing but coordinating agencies, often called positive and
negative, in their creative and generative aspects. Thus, through emanational
cosmic evolution, the One breaks into its Two aspect of the cosmically
androgynous and phenomenal finite manifested universe. The asexual
procreative methods of the early root-races evolved to hermaphroditic status
in the early and middle third root-race. The present conditions of sex will
pass away after ages of experience as man and woman bring forth the innate
masculine and feminine aspects of the human ego. The human race in the
course of millions of years will become dual-sexed and finally sexless.


Poles are antithetical in quality and yet interdependent, each presupposes
the other, as without the other neither can exist. Similar poles repel,
dissimilar attract. As long as they are apart, there is force but when they
coalesce, they neutralize each other and the force becomes latent. The
most fundamental polarity is that of spirit and matter, which may also be
called positive and negative, active and passive, etc. This is repeated
endlessly on every plane and subplane. When the One becomes Two, it
becomes polar — when the Two re-becomes the One, it ceases to be polar.
The expansive and contractive forces (in themselves constituting a polarity)
are seen everywhere in evolution and involution. In magnetism, electricity,
and chemistry there exist familiar instances of polarity, in which these
general laws are illustrated. In the germinal cell, the One becomes the Two by
the extrusion of the polar bodies. Benjamin Franklin coined the terms
positive and negative to describe the attributes of electricity. Such usage is
misleading, for in both magnetism and electricity — as examples of fields of
nature where polarity is native and studied — the negative can be as
“positive” in its action as the so-called positive itself, and that action and
reaction in these fields are equal and equivalent. A thing may be positive on
one plane and negative on another plane or in another direction, or again
positive at one moment and negative at the next moment. Polarity is
sometimes defined by the terms male and female but, while using these terns
symbolically, we must refrain from qualifying them by ideas drawn from
merely physiological sex. In nature the masculine is no stronger or weaker
than the feminine as they are coequal, reciprocal, interacting, always
conjoined during manifestation, and paradoxically during manifestation
continuously separate, but always in action and reaction, the one equalling
the other.


Ardhanarisvara was the first cosmic androgyne. Cosmic entities are not
sexual or sexed in the human sense, for sex as known in the human and
animal kingdoms is a transitory phase of evolution. The application of terms
such as androgyne, masculine, or feminine to cosmic entities has reference to
states of cosmic forces or energy and substance which may be polarized or
unpolarized. Certain energies and substances in the animal kingdom, and to a
degree in the vegetable kingdom, are divided into opposites which bring
about sex conditions. When the forces are partially polarized, an androgynous
or hermaphroditic condition results.

Enochian is an occult language of the Enochian angels used in their

ceremonial magic for the evocation and commanding of various spirits. These
evocations have grimoiric similarities to the apocryphal Book of Enoch,
whose author was the great grandfather of Noah. The Book of Enoch
warrants special attention for the unique material it holds, such as the origins
of supernatural demons and giants or why some angels fell from heaven. The
origin of evil was caused by the fallen angels, who came on the earth to unite
with human women. These fallen angels are considered ultimately
responsible for the spread of evil and impurity on the planet. The first section
of the Book of Enoch depicts the interaction of the fallen angels with
humanity in which one of their leaders, Shemyazaz, compels the other fallen
angels to take human wives to “beget us children.” The human women,
because of Shemyazaz commandment, became “pregnant, and they bore great
giants…Who consumed all the acquisitions of men. And when men could no
longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind.
And they began to sin against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish, and to
devour one another’s flesh, and drink the blood.”


Senzar is the name given to the ancient mystery-language unknown to
modern philologists, that was known to all initiates of the inhabited and
civilized world. It is the secret sacerdotal language or mystery-speech of the
adepts of the chief esoteric schools and is still used and studied to this day in
the secret communities of the Eastern adepts, and called by them Zend-zar or
Deva-Bashya. In this language, besides its common use as a universal means
of intercommunication, were written the secret history of the archaic
continents and races, as well as prophecies of the future. It was taken down as
the secret sacerdotal tongue from the words of the divine beings, who
dictated it to the hierophants of central Asia. There was a time when this
language was known to initiates of every nation, when the forefathers of the
Toltec understood it as easily as the inhabitants of Atlantis who inherited it, in
their turn, from the sages who learnt it from earlier root races. Besides an
alphabet of its own, it may be rendered in several modes of writing in cypher
characters, which are more in the nature of ideographs than of syllables.

As a mystical figure, the Sphinx is one of the emblems made when the human
race fell into materialism, and sacred knowledge had to be withdrawn to
avoid profanation. The Sphinx preserves a mystery without revealing it to
those not qualified to know. This mystery, among other things, is connected
with the evolution of the human race from the spiritual and, at a far later date,
from the androgynous race. Sphinxes are found in Egypt, Assyria, and
Greece, usually man-lions, with female human heads, with or without wings.
When sacred symbols were anthropomorphized, the Sphinx leapt into the sea
to preserve her secret wisdom.


A grimoire is a textbook of magic, typically including instructions on how to
create magical objects like talismans and amulets, how to perform magical
spells, charms and divination, and how to summon or invoke supernatural
entities such as angels, spirits, deities and demons. Entities such as angels,
spirits, deities and demons result from states of mind in which the mind itself
is a grimoire. The evocation of these mental “spirits” reside in a state of
human contemplation sometimes referred to as dhyana. The fallen angels of
the mind can create blockages within the human chakra system and require
talismans or amulets to heal that system. Amulets may include such small
objects as a dzi stone or crystal, or a large talisman like a yantra or mandala,
as well as those created through meditation practices like the circular enso.

Divination is the utilization of inner faculties, whether by natural or induced

clairvoyance, or by employing the agencies which regulate events, apparently
casual, such as the fall of the cards, the marks in sand, the drawing of lots,
and other seership formats related to the subject of omens. The universal
correspondences in nature and the interrelation of all things, imply that the
most casual and trivial events have a connection with other events, so that the
one can be interpreted by means of the other, provided only that the diviner
knows the rules and has the insight and skill. Thus, in cartomancy, one deals
the cards with a mind concentrated on the knowledge desired, and their fall is
determined by unseen and little understood influences. It is evident, however,
that the condition and capacities of the diviner play an essential part in the
success of the operation, because a large portion of humanity is neither wise
enough nor well-balanced enough to meddle with such methods in which
there is a tendency for gratification of personal desires and curiosity.


As in augury and divination, the laws of correspondences and of the
interrelation of all parts of the cosmos imply that it is possible to interpret the
invisible and forecast the future by observing visible signs. The right
interpretation of omens demands knowledge and skill, and affords a fertile
field for self-deception and quackery. There was in ancient times a fairly
exact and accurate science of divination based on omens. Since the cosmos is
an organism, an organic whole in which every part is interconnected with
every other part, the smallest atom can affect a star as well as can a star affect
the smallest atom. If one were wise enough to interpret such interconnections,
it would be a fairly simple matter to understand the invisible from the
appearances of the visible, and likewise to foretell the future. Oomancy is the
ancient art of divination by eggs in which the diviner was able, by inspecting
the contents of the egg, to perceive whatever the bird born from it would have
seen, had it ever been born. Divination is a logical deduction from universal
correspondences and interrelation and interpenetration of all parts of the
universe. Divining is therefore only a question of knowledge and skill. The
germ of the future lies concealed in the present, making prediction possible
by one whose faculties have been awakened.


Premonition, a prophetic feeling that some calamity is about to happen,
differs from prevision in that it is a feeling rather than a picture. An event on
the physical plane may not be perceptible to our physical senses, yet our
more subtle inner senses are aware. Some people and many animals may
have a presentiment of an earthquake, through sensitiveness to certain astral
and physical conditions which precede the actual earth-shock. A case of, say,
avoiding a doomed airplane brings up the general question of prediction and
the problem of time. In these cases the inner sense may perceive an event
before it has happened on the physical plane, and such cases should not be
lightly dismissed as imaginary or mere coincidences. Prevision is foresight,
seeing an event with the inner eye before or at the time of its occurrence. As
the inner eye is independent of the time sequence on which physical eyes and
minds act, it is aware of things which to our physical perceptions belong to in
the future. Hence, if a contact is established between consciousness and the
inner sense, we may obtain a picture of events which have not yet come into
the present. Events on the physical plane are the effects of causes which are
preparing on invisible planes. Thus to the spiritual eye — the awakened eye
— all events past, present, or future, appear as an eternal Now, casting a
shadow from the waves of illusion to the consciousness which gives the
power of prevision, premonition, and foresight, etc.


The unfolding growth of the human embryo epitomizes the aeon-long history
of the embodiments of the race, repeating its individual course through all the
forms of matter — a process often referred to as recapitulation. It goes back
to past manvantaras in which this unfolding originated but with a
differentiation of purposes. Behind all the orderly unfolding of embryonic
cells is the subconscious directing influence of the monadic ego born from
and bathing in cosmic intelligence. In human beings the reincarnating ego is a
ray of a spiritual monad, whose self-consciousness and activity takes in the
solar system. This monad is karmically bound to oversee the evolving career
of the human ego. Its celestial parentage in the cosmic hierarchy makes
humans literally children of the sun, harmoniously worked out by the
reproductive material of a single cell. This intelligent influence acts upon the
embryo through the directive power of an astral fluid which work through,
and in conjunction with, the vital capacities and potentialities of the cell.

Crystals are structures in which a pattern of atoms or molecules repeats in

space. Crystals’ repeating patterns can also exist through time. These “time
crystals” are a new kind of matter, one that can never reach equilibrium.
Normal three-dimensional crystals have a repeating pattern in space, but
remain unchanged as time passes. Time crystals repeat themselves in time as
well, leading the crystal to change from moment to moment. To remove
physical or spiritual blockage from one or more chakras a hierophant may
place crystals on different parts of a disciple’s body, often corresponding to
specific chakras. Crystals may be placed around the body to construct an
energy grid, which surrounds the body with healing energy. Crystals nay be
used in specialized initiations, which certain individuals undergo in order to
transcend their human condition and evoke and become protégés or equals of
divine beings. The initiation process is often likened to a simultaneous death
and rebirth, because it is an ending of existence on one level and an ascension
to an existence on the next higher realm.


The points of light from distant stars which we view in the sky are separated
from each other not only by spatial distances but also by distances in time,
owing to the time taken by light to travel. Space-time is a mathematical
conception, useful in certain measurements demanded by modern science, but
not answering anything which can form a clear mental image. It is difficult to
picture a line drawn from the American President in Washington to Cicero in
the Roman Forum. We can view the universe under the form of a spatial
extension and an independent time, or we can view it under the form of a
dimensional continuum, wherein a coordinate representing position in time
takes its place along with others representing position in space. Our ordinary
threefold spatial extension is a concept of our physical experience, so that
there is no reason why we cannot conceive of another order if we find it suits
our purposes better. Nothing in the definition of geometrical space excludes
the possibility of other spatial constructions, coexistent with our space and
blended with it and with each other.
The formation of crystals shows the working of intelligent life forces in the
mineral world. The shapes of crystals show, in their harmony and proportion,
the mathematical and geometrical principles permeant throughout the
universe. A solution of salt, when evaporated, first crystallizes in triangular
shapes and ultimately builds up cubes, both of which are figures of
fundamental importance as alchemical symbols of the element of earth. Every
granule of salt has a particular form in which it crystallizes. Snow crystals
show the hexagonal patterns which display the septenate — a center from
which six radii proceed. The cube is derived from a square in the same way
the square is derived from the line. A cube opened out gives a cross of six
squares, four in the vertical line and three in the horizontal, one square being
common to both, which is an emblem of a human with their spiritual and
material nature meeting at the intersection. Clairvoyant sensitives can see
light emanating from crystals, and luminous phenomena are often seen at the
formation or disruption of crystals indicating that the process of
crystallization is a step in the evolution of the minerals to the next higher
kingdom.

Stages of evolutionary development in cosmic manifestation are symbolized

by the geometrical forms of a point, line, plane, and solid, which correspond
to a unit or monad, duad, triad, and quaternary. Lines are rays proceeding
from a center, and represent cosmic forces on the lower planes, the forces
familiar in physics. These are dual or bipolar. In geometric symbols, lines
may be combined, as in the cross, where common agreement makes the
vertical line masculine, the horizontal feminine; or in triangles, where the
side lines and the base line each have its particular meaning. A line drawn in
physical space may be regarded as a symbol for a real line, but to
comprehend what the latter is, we must abstract the idea from all notions of
physical space.


Egos are indirect or reflected consciousnesses, seeing themselves as apart
from other egos, each having its own individualized characteristics. But the
self is the purest and strongest intuition of being, as a universal principle, and
as the summit of the hierarchy called humanity. It is pure consciousness, the
essential principle which gives to every person knowledge of selfhood. The
self has no egoic consciousness, and seems to be unconsciousness. To
become self-conscious, a vehicle is needed, so that the self may see itself
reflected as in a mirror. In humans what is called the personal self is a
compound, in which the true selfhood ray shines dimly through many
screens. This causes various mental states to be regarded as pertaining to our
individuality, though they are actually influences which flow into and out of
the mind, and to which we attribute a false sense of ownership, as when we
say, “I am happy,” instead of “I am experiencing happiness.” Liberation frees
us from these false selves as we abandon the heresy of separateness, and see
the true self within us as being identical with that self in all beings.

The physical senses appeared in evolution in the order of hearing, touch,

sight, taste, and smell. These senses were not developed out of nothing but
are expressions on the physical plane of previous latent, inner causal
functions residing in the structure of the inner person. The physiological
senses are specializations of a general perceptiveness which has different
modifications in different animal species where the organs are different,
especially in the insects. Sensitives and clairvoyants may be able to receive
visual, auditory, or other impressions without the use of the physical organs,
where the usual functions of a sense organ may be transferred to another part
of the body. In the first human protoplasts, the senses were non-functional
although latent. As evolution unfolded, the functions and organs followed
suit, and appeared in the evolving physical vehicle.


True meditative concentration actually applies more to the heart than to the
mind, and is not a forcible mental practice but a general, although very
positive and impersonal, attitude towards life. It means the centering of our
wishes, thoughts, and acts on the ideal of self-identification with the spiritual
and universal. The hindrances to concentration which are to be removed are
those arising from anger, lust, vanity, fear, sloth, etc. Such obstacles are
removed by lifting the mind above them or by deliberately ignoring them,
since directly fighting with them serves to concentrate the mind on them, thus
defeating the aim. Thus the blending of the personal self with the impersonal
self is achieved by an orderly process of self-directed evolution as an
identification of oneself with the individual’s innate divinity and thereby
cultivating the spirit of impersonal love and the light of wisdom which it
evokes.

The kamaloka is a semi-material plane where the astral forms of disembodied

“personalities” called kamarupa remain. Eventually these forms fade out
from this plane by the complete exhaustion of the effects of the mental
impulses that created these eidolons of human and animal passions and
desires. The kamaloka is often referred to as the land of silent shadows.
Kamaloka is an astral locality, the limbus of scholastic theology, but a locality
only in a relative sense. It has neither a definite area nor boundary, but exists
within subjective space which is beyond humanity’s sensuous perceptions. It
is in the kamaloka that the astral eidolons, the larvae of all the beings that
have lived, animals included, await their second death. These are the entities
formed after death which then become the source of the new astral forms of
the next incarnation.


The human personality is constantly changing, even during a single life, and
even more greatly through rebirth. The higher states of individualized
consciousnesses, though they may endure for periods so vast as to seem to be
everlasting, must disappear for a time. At the time of the next incarnation the
ego and its astral form are karmically propelled towards the family or woman
to which it will be born. This new astral form is composed partly of pure
etheric essence and partly of the terrestrial elements of the punishable sins
and misdeeds of the last personality. The fetus will be modeled after this new
astral form with physical characteristics of the ancestral adivamsa. The
adivamsa was the first primeval race, the original family.

Certain humans were historically only partially conscious. These beings

miscegenated with the then existing simians or monkeys, which were
themselves the offspring of a similar miscegenation among earlier root-races.
These anthropoids descended partly from a human stem, but were not forms
ascending towards humanity in the sense of Darwinism. This descent resulted
in the structural and functional differences and resemblances between
anthropoids and humans.


Since the fourth root-race, no monads from the animal kingdom could enter
the human kingdom. From that time the earth started on an ascending arc of
evolution. However, the monads embodied in the anthropoids were able to
enter the lowest and least evolved branches of the human kingdom during
later root races. The descending arc represented an involution of spirit and a
concurrent evolution of matter resulting in a progressive materialization of
spirit and a continuous concretion of the texture of matter. The ascending arc
represents an evolution of spirit and involution of matter, resulting in a
progressive dematerialization which increasingly manifests the qualities of
spirit. As such, spirit and matter are fundamentally one essence at different
stages of development. These monads, now in anthropoid bodies, will
disappear from incarnation during the present root-race to enter their
paranirvana, remaining as astral monads until the next evolutionary round. A
few anthropoids, having attained the most advanced degree of evolution in
the anthropoid stock, will reach quasi-human status, although still in
anthropoid bodies, before the present root-race has reached its end. Many of
these anthropoids will probably have died out before the present root-race is
ended or by the beginning of the next root-race — a period of several million
years from now.


Augoeides is the “luminous body” which refers to the planets and the
heavens. Augoeides never descends hypostatically into the living being, but
sheds its three-fold radiance on the inner person located in the astral mind.
Augoeides denotes the radiant spiritual human ego. During a high degree of
initiation the initiate comes face to face with this radiant presence, seen as
luminosity streaming from the divine ego at the heart of the monad. When the
Augoeides touches with its rays the inferior monads in the human constitution
and awakens them to activity, these become the various lower egos or
manifested progeny of the divine ego. The forces of light are responsible for
elements or objects such as fire, air, rain and trees. These higher forces also
control much more intricate tasks governing the functioning of the cosmos
and the evolution of creation. The dichotomies of light and darkness are
metaphors for spiritual concepts. Both light and darkness are symbolically the
contradictory forces that motivate each individual in which such a dichotomy
is a spiritual concept rather than a genealogical category or species of being.
The powers of light and powers of darkness, although distinct and opposite in
operation, are in essence consubstantial, their distinction being a matter not of
essence but of orientation, revolution or transformation in which both powers
seek knowledge, for different purposes.


Light is not self-existent, but is the primordially spiritual effect of something
grander and more radical beyond it. This unknown divine substratum, the
original super spiritual intelligence-substance of the universe, is called either
darkness or absolute light. Thus absolute light and absolute darkness are the
same in which manifested light sprang from unmanifested light or darkness.
Light, voidness, and darkness are a triad, with voidness and darkness being
the father-mother and light, their progeny. Darkness preceded light in
cosmogony in which the emanation of light from darkness is the first step in
cosmic manifestation where darkness broods over the face of the deep (the
void). Light thus is the original substance or spiritual matter while darkness is
the pure spirit. Light and darkness on manifested planes constitute a duality,
correlative and interdependent in which neither is conceivable without the
other. However, what is darkness to our physical senses may be light to our
inner senses.

A vacuum, or emptiness, is the spiritual condition of a cosmic hierarchy

before it emanates its streams of manifestation as boundless space. The first
entities are atoms and a vacuum, which are equivalent to the manifest and the
unmanifest, latent and patent. The atoms are spiritual indivisibles, not the
atoms of science but monads, and likewise the vacuum of voidness, sunyata
or the arupa (formless) spheres. The atomo-mechanical theory of physics
starts with atoms and a vacuum and then tries to fill the vacuum. In doing so,
the notion of emptiness becomes confused with spatial extension, giving rise
to the idea of an extended and measurable void. The word is used to signify
the absence of something, as the absence of physical matter. But another form
of matter is still present which transmits light as well as other forms of
radiation. This is the cosmic void — which is a pleroma or utter fullness.


A perispirit is the subtle body that is used to connect with the perceptions
created by the brain. It is enveloped in a substance which appears as mere
vapor, but seems very gross though it is sufficiently vaporous to allow a spirit
to float in the atmosphere, and to transport itself through space. The perispirit
plays a key role in the phenomenon of mediumship, which actually involves
the interaction of the perispirit of the medium and that of a disembodied
spirit. When invited to our plane of existence by a medium, spirits who
inhabit worlds of a higher degree than ours are obliged to clothe themselves
with a garment composed of perispirit. The most elevated spirits, when they
appear to us, assume a terrestrial perispirit, which they retain during their
stay amongst humanity. It is through the perispirit that disincarnate spirits
can move objects. Thus, the perispirit is responsible for poltergeist
manifestations. Extrasensory perception is reception of information not
gained through the recognized physical senses, but sensed with the mind. The
term denotes psychic abilities such as intuition, telepathy, psychometry,
clairaudience, and clairvoyance, and their trans-temporal operation as
precognition or retro-cognition. Higher consciousness is the consciousness of
a transcendental reality. It is the part of the human mind that is capable of
transcending animal instincts and perceive the world from a location outside
the physical body including the subtle body or perispirit.


Telepathy is the transference of thought or feeling from mind to mind
independent of ordinary modes of communication. This very interesting
phenomenon may be noted as not only existing between human beings, and
humans and animals, but likewise between animals and insects — the last
being one of the commonest phenomena of natural history — and in the plant
kingdom. People have always known that they talk to each other through the
air, or through air vibrations which strike the ear and are conveyed to the
brain. The notion of transference from one mind to another across a distance
is a physical conception. We live in a common mental atmosphere, taking in
and giving out thoughts and feelings, which must often pass from mind to
mind, though we may not be aware of the fact. Having separate minds does
not mean that these minds are closed systems, and not mutually penetrable. A
thought entertained by one person may pass inwardly through planes of
consciousness until it reaches a point where minds are no longer separate, and
from whence it may travel outwardly to the brain of another person. It may
even be that what is required is not an explanation of thought transference as
an explanation of why thoughts are so seldom transferred — why human
minds are so separate. The explanation is the concentration of consciousness
upon affairs immediately concerning the subject which covers the individual
in a mental shell of interests, around which rush the influences emanating
from the thinker. Universality of empathy therefore is the key to successful
telepathic communication.