Part V

CHAPTER three pertains to the genesis of Mother Earth and her numerous family. It constitutes specific consideration and application of the general principles laid down in chapter two. Thus, as always, the teaching is unfolded from universals to particulars. The true history of our planet is revolutionary to popular speculations thereon. Theosophy’s sane explanation of “things as they are” puts to shame the conception of a ball of dead material, of unknown source, giving birth to its living inhabitants or acquiring them by some equally unnatural means.

Contrary to modern theories, “always speculative, changeable, and continually altered,” the earth is “an entity and not a mere lump of gross matter”. It is an entity because it combines in itself many degrees of intelligence, representing many stages of unfoldment. Earth is, in fact, a vast concourse of evolving beings; and since beings are seven-fold in constitution, the planet is seven-fold in its substance, its seven main degrees composing a vast scale of gradation, which ranges from etheric matter, tenuous beyond the wildest dreams of modern science to material more dense than present-day investigators have yet discovered. All of these cohere in one mass: the finer substances interpenetrating the denser, the denser concreted from and resting in the finer. The form of this mass being globular, each of its main states is called a “globe”. But the Teachers constantly warn against letting the term mislead: these “globes” are separate in states alone, not in location. The whole planet is a workshop for evolutionary purposes. Each plane of substance is for use to this great end and while so employed becomes a locus to the workman using it. Since consciousness can be focused on but one plane at a time, it is stated: “The earth is one of seven globes in respect to man’s consciousness only, because when he functions on one of the seven he perceives it as a distinct globe and does not see the other six”.

“Matter and spirit are co-existent and co-eternal”: Each state of consciousness functions in and through a corresponding degree of substance, which is really the objective aspect of that state. The possible range of consciousness falls into seven main states, ranging from the highest spiritual state to the lowest of physical, waking existence. There are, therefore, seven corresponding degrees of instrumentation for each being, these commingling and interpenetrating just as do the globes of the earth. They are named “sheaths” or “bodies”, the collectivity forming one seven-fold habitation for the spiritual Self that is “in itself without a body”.

The sheaths of the Soul draw their materials from the substance of the planetary globes. Hence the earth “is in perfect correspondence with man himself who has six other constituents of which only the gross body is visible to him because he is now functioning on the Earth — or the fourth globe — and his body represents the Earth.” At such time, while functioning on this fourth-plane earth, the fourth-plane representations of all the other members of the solar system are visible to Man. Accordingly it might well be inferred that when consciousness is focused on any of the inner, deeper states, as is always the case during sleep, there the corresponding objectivity of that plane would be seen, including the spherical outlines of our planet and the appearance in the sky of companion states of sun, moon, and fellow-planets of our system.

Some day the stupendous implications of this ancient doctrine must needs force modern science to admit that, in her investigations of Old Earth, she has still a world to conquer, with very little yet accomplished as a beginning. Religion, also, must eventually bow in awe before the mighty pageant of the seven-fold cycling worlds in their progressive march through Space; but if the religionist attempt to express his awe in pious praise of “God’s plan of creation,” he must be told that the “stuff” that worlds are made of is not fabricated from nothing. In ideal, these worlds never were not. They link with, and evolve from, one another in orderly sequence according to a changeless plan, ever unfolding, never completed — the Eternal Thought in the Eternal Mind of all beings. Evolution is the expansion of inherent intelligence. Its process is re-embodiment. Earth is an entity in fact, not symbology alone. Her life is that of the lives composing her, her pulsation that of her constituent congeries of beings. Inevitably, follow the conclusions that the synthetic life of the planet must reincarnate, and that its units once lived and gained experience in some prior planetary form. This is the teaching of Theosophy regarding the Earth, whose previously energized, now discarded, body is our moon.

Each cycle of manifestation and each system in it possesses an Ideal toward which humanity strives, together with degrees of possible perfectibility for all classes below the human stage. The time limit of each system, though enormous, is exact, the teaching states; for law and order prevail in everything. Thus when the cycle for that former planetary chain — “chain” having reference to the definite sequence and relationship of all the states making up a planetary — now represented by the moon, came to its decline all beings that were ready, all of each grade that had reached a certain degree of evolutionary perfection, withdrew their energies. Then, just as the body dies when its dweller discards it, the former planet died and is now slowly disintegrating. This corpse of our erstwhile home swings with us as we rush through space in our new habitat, reflecting her silvery rays upon the children of Earth, once her own — an object of beauty, mystery, and much speculation. Touching upon this subject of the moon in one of his magazine articles, Mr. Judge states: “Modern and ancient science alike unite in watching the Night’s great light as she performs her journey round us.”

COMPILER’S NOTE: The following is a separate item which followed the above article but was on the same page. I felt it was useful to include it here:

HINTS ON EVOLUTION

Having been in all the so-called “Seven creations,” allegorizing the seven evolutionary changes, or the sub-races, we may call them, of the First Root-race of Mankind —MAN was on earth in this Round from the beginning. Having passed through all the kingdoms of nature in the previous three Rounds, his physical frame — one adapted to the thermal conditions of those early periods — was ready to receive the divine Pilgrim at the first dawn of human life, i.e., 18,000,000 years ago. It is only at the mid-point of the 3rd Root Race that man was endowed with Manas. Once united, the two and then the three made one; for though the lower animals, from the amoeba to man, received their monads, in which all the higher qualities are potential, all have to remain dormant till each reaches its human form, before which stage manas (mind) has no development in them. In the animals every principle is paralysed, and in a foetus-like state, save the second (vital) and the third (the astral), and the rudiments of the fourth (Kama, which is desire, instinct) whose intensity and development varies and changes with the species. To the materialist wedded to the Darwinian theory, this will read like a fairy-tale, a mystification; to the believer in the inner, spiritual man, the statement will have nothing unnatural in it. —S.D. II, pp. 254-5.

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