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A Treatise on Cosmic Fire - Section One - Division E - Motion on the Physical and Astral Planes
2. The Centers in connection with the Rays This will give us a large range of subject to be dealt with, and much food for thought, surmise and wise conjecture. All that is here stated is given simply as basic or foundation facts, upon which may be erected a structure of conjecture, and of logical reasoning, employing the imagination, and thereby effecting two things: These are an ability to expand our mental concept and to build the antahkarana, or that bridge which all who seek to function in the buddhic vehicle must build between higher and lower mind; hence the necessity for the use of the imagination (which is the astral equivalent to mental discrimination), and its ultimate transmutation into intuition. All teachers, who have taken pupils in hand for training, and who seek to use them in world service, follow the method of imparting a fact (oft veiled in words and blinded by symbol) and then of leaving the pupil to follow his own deductions. Discrimination is thereby developed, and discrimination is the main method whereby the Spirit effects its liberation from the trammels of matter, and discerns between illusion and that which is veiled by it. Not much can be here imparted, as the subject, if dealt with at all fully, would convey too much information to those liable to misuse it. As we know, the evolution of the centers is a slow and gradual thing, and proceeds in ordered cycles varying according to the ray of a man's Monad. [174] The life of the Pilgrim can be, for purposes of discussion, divided into three main periods: That period wherein he is under the influence of the Personality Ray. That wherein he comes under the Ray of the Ego. That wherein the Monadic Ray holds sway. The first period is by far the longest, and covers the vast progression of the centuries wherein the activity aspect of the threefold self is being developed. Life after life slips away during which the aspect of manas or mind is being slowly wrought out, and the human being comes more and more under the control of his intellect, operating through his physical brain. This might be looked upon as corresponding to the period of the first solar system, wherein the third aspect logoic, that of Brahma, Mind, or Intelligence, was being brought to the point of achievement .74 Then the second aspect began in [175] this present solar system to be blended with, and wrought out through it. Centuries go by and the man becomes ever more actively intelligent, and the field of his life more suitable for the coming in of this second aspect. The correspondence lies in similitude and not in detail as seen in time and space. It covers the period of the first three triangles dealt with earlier. We must not forget that, for the sake of clarity, we are here differentiating between the different aspects, and considering their separated development, a thing only permissible in time and space or during the evolutionary process, but not permissible from the standpoint of the Eternal Now, and from the Unity of the All-Self. The Vishnu or the Love-Wisdom aspect is latent in the Self, and is part of the monadic content, but the Brahma aspect, the Activity-Intelligence aspect precedes its manifestation in time. The Tabernacle in the Wilderness preceded the building of the Temple of Solomon; the kernel of wheat has to lie in the darkness of mother Earth before the golden perfected ear can be seen, and the Lotus has to cast its roots down into the mud before the beauty of the blossom can be produced. 74 "When the last cycle of man-bearing has been completed by that last fecund earth; and humanity has reached in a mass the stage of Buddhahood and passed out of the objective existence into the mystery of Nirvana - then "strikes the hour"; the seen becomes the unseen, the concrete resumes its precyclic state of atomic distribution. But the dead worlds left behind the onsweeping impulse do not continue dead. Motion is the eternal order of things and affinity or attraction its handmaid of all works. The thrill of life will again reunite the atom, and it will stir again in the inert planet when the time comes. Though all its forces have remained status quo and axe now asleep, yet little by little it will - when the hour restrikes - gather for a new cycle of man-bearing maternity, and give birth to something still higher as moral and physical types than during the preceding manvantara. And its "cosmic atoms already in a differentiated state" (differing - in the producing force in the mechanical sense of motions and effects) remain statu quo as well as globes and everything else in the process of formation." Such is the "hypothesis fully in accordance with (your) (my) note." For, as planetary development is as progressive as human or race evolution, the hour of the Pralaya's coming catches the series of worlds at successive stages of evolution; (i.e.) each has attained to some one of the periods of evolutionary progress - each stops there, until the outward impulse of the next manvantara sets it going from that very point - like a stopped time-piece rewound. Therefore, I have used the word "differentiated." At the coming of the Pralaya no human, animal, or even vegetable entity will be alive to see it, but there will be the earths or globes with their mineral kingdoms; and all these planets will be physically disintegrated in the pralaya, yet not destroyed; for they have their places in the sequence of evolution and their "privations" coming again out of the subjective, they will find the exact point from which they have to move on around the chain of "manifested forms." This, as you know, is repeated endlessly throughout Eternity. Each man of us has gone this ceaseless round, and will repeat it forever and ever. The deviation of each one's course, and his rate of progress from Nirvana to Nirvana is governed by causes which he himself creates out of the exigencies in which he finds himself entangled." - From The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett, p. 67.
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