La Légion étrangère-C&P at your own risk !!

[JACkory]

The Earth's climate has changed throughout history. From glacial periods (or "ice ages") where ice covered significant portions of the Earth to interglacial periods where ice retreated to the poles or melted entirely - the climate has continuously changed.

Scientists have been able to piece together a picture of the Earth's climate dating back decades to millions of years ago by analyzing a number of surrogate, or "proxy6," measures of climate such as ice cores7, boreholes8, tree rings, glacier lengths, pollen remains, and ocean sediments, and by studying changes in the Earth's orbit around the sun.

This page contains information about the causes of climate change throughout the Earth's history, the rates at which the climate has changed, as well as information about climate change during the last 2,000 years.

Causes of Change
Known causes or “drivers” of past climate change include:

Changes in the Earth's orbit: Changes in the shape of the Earth's orbit (or eccentricity9) as well as the Earth's tilt and precession10 affect the amount of sunlight received on the Earth's surface. These orbital processes -- which function in cycles of 100,000 (eccentricity), 41,000 (tilt), and 19,000 to 23,000 (precession) years -- are thought to be the most significant drivers of ice ages according to the theory of Mulitin Milankovitch11, a Serbian mathematician (1879-1958). The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Earth Observatory offers additional information about orbital variations and the Milankovitch Theory12.
Changes in the sun's intensity: Changes occurring within (or inside) the sun can affect the intensity of the sunlight that reaches the Earth's surface. The intensity of the sunlight can cause either warming (for stronger solar intensity) or cooling (for weaker solar intensity). According to NASA research13, reduced solar activity from the 1400s to the 1700s was likely a key factor in the “Little Ice Age” which resulted in a slight cooling of North America, Europe and probably other areas around the globe. (See additional discussion under The Last 2,000 Years.)
Volcanic eruptions: Volcanoes can affect the climate because they can emit aerosols and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Aerosol emissions: Volcanic aerosols tend to block sunlight and contribute to short term cooling. Aerosols do not produce long-term change because they leave the atmosphere not long after they are emitted. According to the United States Geological Survey14 (USGS), the eruption of the Tambora Volcano in Indonesia in 1815 lowered global temperatures by as much as 5ºF and historical accounts in New England describe 1815 as “the year without a summer.”
Carbon dioxide emissions: Volcanoes also emit carbon dioxide (CO2), a greenhouse gas, which has a warming effect. For about two-thirds of the last 400 million years, geologic evidence suggests CO2 levels and temperatures were considerably higher than present. One theory is that volcanic eruptions from rapid sea floor spreading elevated CO2 concentrations, enhancing the greenhouse effect and raising temperatures. However, the evidence for this theory is not conclusive and there are alternative explanations for historic CO2 levels (NRC, 2005). While volcanoes may have raised pre-historic CO2 levels and temperatures, according to the USGS Volcano Hazards Program15, human activities now emit 150 times as much CO2 as volcanoes (whose emissions are relatively modest compared to some earlier times).
These climate change “drivers” often trigger additional changes or “feedbacks” within the climate system that can amplify or dampen the climate's initial response to them (whether the response is warming or cooling). For example:

Changes in greenhouse gas concentrations: The heating or cooling of the Earth's surface can cause changes in greenhouse gas concentrations. For example, when global temperatures become warmer, carbon dioxide is released from the oceans. When changes in the Earth's orbit trigger a warm (or interglacial) period, increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide may amplify the warming by enhancing the greenhouse effect. When temperatures become cooler, CO2 enters the ocean and contributes to additional cooling. During at least the last 420,000 years, CO2 levels16 have tended to track the glacial cycles (IPCC, 2001). That is, during warm interglacial periods, CO2 levels have been high and during cool glacial periods, CO2 levels have been low (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Fluctuations in temperature (blue) and in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (red) over the past 400,000 years as inferred from Antarctic ice-core records. The vertical red bar is the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels over the past two centuries and before 2006. From A. V. Fedorov et al. Science 312, 1485 (2006)17. 18. Reprinted with permission of AAAS19* 18.


Changes in ocean currents: The heating or cooling of the Earth's surface can cause changes in ocean currents. Because ocean currents play a significant role in distributing heat around the Earth, changes in these currents can bring about significant changes in climate from region to region.
Top of page

Rates of Change
Studies of the Earth's previous climate suggest periods of stability as well as periods of rapid change. Recent climate research suggests:

Interglacial climates (such as the present) tend to be more stable than cooler, glacial climates. For example, the climate during the current and previous20 interglacials (known as the Holocene and Eemian interglacials) has been more stable than the most recent glacial period (known as the Last Glacial Maximum). This glacial period was characterized by a long string of widespread, large and abrupt climate changes (NRC, 2002).
Abrupt or rapid climate changes21 tend to frequently accompany transitions between glacial and interglacial periods (and vice versa). For example, a significant part of the Northern Hemisphere (particularly around Greenland) may have experienced warming rates as large as 16ºF in 50 years at the end of the Younger Dryas event 11,500 years ago as the planet was emerging from the last ice age (IPCC, 2001).
While abrupt climate changes have occurred throughout the Earth's history, human civilization arose during a period of relative climate stability.

Top of page

The Last 2,000 Years
During the last 2,000 years, the climate has been relatively stable. Scientists have identified two minor departures from this stability, known as the Medieval Climate Anomaly (also referred to as the Medieval Warm Period) and the Little Ice Age:

The Medieval Climate Anomaly: Between roughly 900 and 1300 AD, evidence suggests Europe, Greenland and Asia experienced relative warmth. While historical accounts and other evidence document the warmth that occurred in some regions, the geographical extent, magnitude and timing of the warmth during this period is uncertain (NRC, 2006). The American West experienced very dry conditions around this time.
The Little Ice Age: A wide variety of evidence supports the global existence of a "Little Ice Age" (this was not a true "ice age" since major ice sheets did not develop) between about 1500 and 1850 (NRC, 2006). Average temperatures were possibly up to 2ºF colder than today, but varied by region.
Together, these two periods define the upper and lower boundaries of the climate's recent natural variability and are a reflection of changes in climate drivers (the sun's variability and volcanic activity) and the climate's internal variability (referring to random changes in the circulation of the atmosphere and oceans). The issue of whether the temperature rise of the 20th century crossed over the warm limit of the boundary has been a controversial topic in the science community. The National Academy of Sciences recently completed a study to assess the efforts to reconstruct temperatures of the past one to two millennia (see Figure 2) and place the Earth's current warming in historical context (NRC, 2006).


Figure 2: Reconstructions of (Northern Hemisphere average or global average) surface temperature variations from six research teams (in different color shades) along with the instrumental record of global average surface temperature (in black). Each curve illustrates a somewhat different history of temperature changes, with a range of uncertainties that tend to increase backward in time (as indicated by the shading). Reference: NRC, 2006. (Figure reprinted with permission from Surface Temperature Reconstructions© (2006) by the National Academy of Sciences, Courtesy of the National Academies Press22 18, Washington, D.C.)


According to the study23 18 (NRC, 2006):

There is a high level of confidence that the global average temperature during the last few decades was warmer than any comparable period during the last 400 years.
Present evidence suggests that temperatures at many, but not all, individual locations were higher during the past 25 years than any period of comparable length since A.D. 900. However, uncertainties associated with this statement increase substantially backward in time.
Very little confidence can be assigned to estimates of hemisphere average or global average temperature prior to A.D. 900 due to limited data coverage and challenges in analyzing older data.

[Dr. Drum]

Currently reading:



Suggest you all check it out.

[Kensterberg]

From the AP, via MSNBC.com:

Neanderthal Genome Decoding In Progress.

NEW YORK - A bone fragment that scientists had initially ignored has begun to yield secrets of the Neanderthal genome, launching a new way to learn about the stocky and muscular relative of modern humans, scientists say.

Genetic material from the bone has let researchers identify more than a million building blocks of Neanderthal DNA so far, and it should be enough to derive most of the creature’s 3.3 billion blocks within the next two years, said researcher Svante Paabo.

“We’re at the dawn of Neanderthal genomics,” said gene expert Edward Rubin of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.

Such research will “serve as a DNA time machine that will tell us about the biology and aspects of Neanderthals that we could never get” otherwise, Rubin said.

And the Neanderthal data will shed light on what DNA changes helped produce modern humanity by revealing which changes appeared relatively late in human evolution, after the ancestors of Neanderthals and of humans split apart, scientists said.

Two analyses of bone fragment
Paabo, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues present an initial analysis of Neanderthal DNA in this week’s issue of the journal Nature. Rubin and his collaborators present their own analysis in this week’s issue of Science.

Both are based on DNA extracted from a bone fragment that lay in a Croatian cave for 38,000 years. “It’s rather small and uninteresting and was thrown into a big box of uninformative bones” at a museum in Zagreb, Croatia, Paabo said.

So it wasn’t handled very much, which meant that its DNA was not extensively contaminated by that of modern-day people, a major plus for the new DNA work, he said. Only about one-seventh of an ounce or less of the bone will be enough to get a rough draft of the Neanderthal genome, he said.

DNA analysis indicated that the bone fragment came from a male.

Split came 500,000 years ago
Todd Disotell of the Center for the Study of Human Origins at New York University, who did not participate in the research, said he found it “really amazing (that) 38,000-year-old fossils are yielding enough DNA to eventually get a whole genome.... Just the fact that they can do this is amazing.”

He also called the two new papers impressive “tours de force.”

The two teams basically agree, within their margins of error, that the evolutionary lineages of Neanderthals and modern humans split somewhere around 500,000 years ago, he said. That number had been suggested by far more limited DNA analysis before, so it’s comforting to see it backed up with more extensive analyses, he said.

Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans coexisted in Europe for thousands of years, until Neanderthals died out some 28,000 years ago. Scientists have been debating whether the two groups interbred and whether modern humans carry some genetic remnants of Neanderthals.

Rubin said his analysis, like some previous work, found no evidence of such intermixing, though it’ll take more DNA to rule it out.

Paabo’s analysis didn’t directly address whether modern humans have DNA from Neanderthals, but it did raise speculation that DNA from anatomically modern humans might have found its way into Neanderthals. Scientists will have to examine more Neanderthal DNA to study that, he said.

Rubin also said analysis so far suggests human and Neanderthal DNA are 99.5 percent to nearly 99.9 percent identical.

© 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
URL: www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15732243/from/RS.4/

[sisyphus]

there was an interesting article in thorn's new national geographic 'bout this the other day... and the discovery of a new 6million year old girl's wee dusty bones...seeming human from the waist down, and more like an ape from the waist up...

[phil]

Speaking of big monkeys ...


The Sunday Times November 12, 2006


That way son

After his election humiliation George Bush has slunk back to Dad for help. It's Shakespeare meets Freud, says Andrew Sullivan


The events of last week in America have an almost Shakespearean quality to them. It’s like some ghastly conflation of Richard II’s doom-laden “Down, down, I come” and Richard III’s “winter of our discontent”. Richard II is how Bush would like the world to see him — a king of noble motives brought low by injustice and fate. Richard III is . . . well, ask Karl Rove, the hunch in W’s back.

At the centre of this epic psycho-political drama is a royal family of sorts in a war for survival: the Bush dynasty, a story of a father and his son, their tortured relationship and what they have had to do to survive.

Last week George W Bush was forced back — once again — to the protective arms of his father. They call the first President Bush “Poppy” in the family, and it captures both the authority and the slight daffiness of the 41st president. His first son always lived in his shadow — both deeply admiring him and deeply resenting him, the way dauphins often do their monarchs.

In his own presidency, with the Yankee Bush clan reforged in the desert of Midland, Texas, Dubya tried to chart his own course, create his own destiny, become his own man. He would have two terms, not one. He would never raise taxes. And he would remove Saddam, not just corner him; liberate Iraq, not just contain it.

Last week the dream collapsed in the sands of Anbar and the voting booths of the Midwest. The first son, who always wanted to make a name for himself, to escape the suffocating legacy of a presidential father, was forced by the American people to go back to Poppy.

BY nominating Robert Gates to the Pentagon, Bush Jr was reduced to asking one of his father’s closest friends to clean up the mess. What was Gates’s last job? As president of Texas A&M University, Gates hosted Poppy’s own presidential library. What was his previous claim to fame? Poppy had appointed him CIA director. Poppy himself had been CIA director — manoeuvred into the shell-shocked institution after Vietnam by a wily young Donald Rumsfeld in the Ford administration. Gates was a CIA director’s CIA director. He was Poppy’s Poppy.

Is it possible to come up with a figure other than Gates more closely connected to the patriarch and not the dauphin? Actually, yes: James Baker. By asking Baker, another close confidant of the senior Bush, to head up a commission to solve the Iraq disaster, the president was forced again to return to the wise men of his prudent father’s circle.

The irony last week was even worse for the 43rd president. By firing his defence secretary, Bush was also firing his dad’s old enemy. He was surrendering one of his dad’s foes and replacing him with one of the old man’s closest pals.

In his latest book, State of Denial, Bob Woodward is clear about the long-held animosity between Poppy and Rummy. They couldn’t stand each other. “Bush senior thought Rumsfeld was arrogant, self-important, too sure of himself and Machiavellian. He believed that in 1975 Rumsfeld had manoeuvred President Ford into selecting him to head the CIA. The CIA was at perhaps its lowest point in the mid-1970s. Serving as its director was thought to be a dead end . . . Rumsfeld had also made nasty private remarks that Bush was a lightweight, a weak cold war CIA director who did not appreciate the Soviet threat and was manipulated by secretary of state Henry Kissinger.”

If you want to know why Bush Jr held onto Rumsfeld longer than any sane person should have, one clue lies in the paternal relationship. Surrendering Rumsfeld means that Poppy was right. Not just right about Rumsfeld’s skills and nasty streak. Right about the biggest things: war and peace, country and honour. Rummy was in some ways the personification of the son’s refusal to be his father. Rummy was the prickly, querulous, impolitic businessman, everything Poppy was not.

By picking one of his father’s old nemeses to head the Pentagon in 2000, W was also telling the old man to stay out of his affairs. And Poppy did. As Woodward also recounts, Bush Sr told his friend Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia: “I had my turn. It is his turn now. I just have to stay off the stage . . . I will not make any comment vis-à-vis this president, not only out of principle but to let him be himself.”

W was indeed himself, which makes the failure now that much harder. Last week was a moment of complete humiliation. Wednesday, for Bush Jr, must have been the most crushing psychological moment in his presidency.

Of course, this kind of analysis would be dubbed by the president mere psychobabble. But the facts are plain.

George W was the first son, but never the favoured one, of the Bush dynasty. Jeb, his younger brother, was always going to be president. W was the loser, the joker, the wastrel. But W was also, in his heart, desperate to emulate his father, while too driven by his own ego to listen to him. He desperately both wanted approval and just as desperately wanted to be free and independent.

It is self-evidently hard to be the son of a vice-president and president. It is hard to feel that every business deal you ever made was not because you were shrewd but because your father was powerful. It is hard both to support your father’s career and also to resent him. But that is the story of this president and, in part, of this administration.

When W was campaigning with his father in 1992, he described the oedipal conflict himself. At the New Orleans convention that year W confided to the Houston Chronicle that he was ambivalent about his father’s re-election campaign. He said his father’s defeat might be good for him, according to the invaluable early biography of Bush by Bill Minutaglio, First Son.

Then he brought himself up short and said to the reporter: “That is a strange thing to say, isn’t it? But if I were to think about running for office and he was president, it would be more difficult to establish my own identity. It probably would help me out more if he lost.”

The struggle between father and son began early. W was his mother’s boy, his father distant. “My father doesn’t have a normal life,” he once told a classmate, according to Minutaglio. “I don’t have a normal father.”

He was also a rebel. After a period at Yale and in the National Guard, W spent his twenties partying. One night when he was 26, he had
been out drinking and had driven home. He had drunkenly barrelled his car into a neighbour’s rubbish bin, which had become attached to the car, and Bush drove down the street with the bin making a hell of
a racket.

He pulled up, walked into the house, and was told that his father wanted to see him in the family den immediately. It was only a few weeks after the death of the über-patriarch Prescott Bush, W’s grandfather. But the young man was in a feisty mood, as the journalist David Maraniss revealed way back in 1989.

“I hear you’re looking for me,” W said to Poppy, slurring his words. “You wanna go mano a mano right here?”

Jeb, the favourite son, intervened. He told his parents that W had just been accepted by Harvard Business School, something W had kept from them. They were stunned, and the potentially violent stand-off was defused.

“You should think about that, son,” Poppy said. “Oh, I’m not going,” W replied. “I just wanted to let you know I could get into it.”

Of course, W went. And in that tortured interaction, all the subsequent psycho-drama can be found. Supremely rebellious and yet deeply loyal, all W wanted was to please and yet outdo his dad. In the end he achieved neither.

W went to the Ivy League but hated it for what he saw as the American elite’s snootiness and liberalism. At his news conference last Wednesday the president looked at the press corps and saw the same type of people. “Why all the glum faces?” he sneered bitterly. They reminded him of everything he loathed in his dad.

But the love was there as well. A family friend, Joe O’Neill, even ascribed Bush’s decision at 40 to stop drinking to the paternal factor. “He looked in the mirror and said, ‘Some day I might embarrass my father. It might get my dad in trouble.’ And boy, that was it. That’s how high a priority it was,” O’Neill told Minutaglio. “He never took another drink.”

W surpassed his dad by actually becoming a businessman. But his oil company exploits never worked out. He kept trying to find the magic oilfield that would reward his investors, but it never arrived. And there was always the suspicion that his family’s money and his father’s political power greased the wheels.

The more W tried to get past his father’s legacy the more it tracked him. Here is a passage from Minutaglio’s book that bears rereading this week. It’s about Bush’s early attempts to strike a big oilfield in Texas.

“The project was simply too large for him, and it was like putting a steel cap on a dream . . . Bush was extremely disappointed at losing . . . the chance to be deeply, independently capitalised without having to rely on his uncle’s investors. ‘We had never found the huge liberator,’ is what Bush once said to a Dallas writer.”

It’s almost too poignant a parallel to the present. Bush so wanted to be a huge liberator in another desert. But the wells were dry.

When Bush failed in business, his family contacts kept him financially afloat. He was kept on boards and bailed out of trouble by people eager to keep in his father’s good graces.

His connections were also inextricable from his successful bid to be governor of Texas. But when he won re-election as governor, he felt empowered for the first time as a political force independent of his father.

He had found Karl Rove, who had honed his skills in the gutters of Southern political campaigning. And he had an ease with people that his father lacked and a shrewdness he inherited from his mother.

It was a powerful combination, and when W ran for the presidency it was both to avenge his father’s defeat at the hands of Bill Clinton and at the same time a way to show how he was not like his father at all. Ideologically he was much closer to the religious right, he was adamant on taxes, he wasn’t prudent fiscally, and he wasn’t timid in the world at large.

By putting Rumsfeld, his father’s enemy, in the Pentagon he sent a signal that he was his own president and his own man. Gaining the presidency was emulating his father. But regaining it was the final moment when Bush surpassed his one-term dad. It was also the moment when this administration started falling apart at the seams.

W loves boldness. It’s his greatest strength and his deepest weakness. When it came to Iraq, his decision was laden with memory. His father had fought a war against Saddam. Its hallmarks were a vast multinational coalition, huge numbers of troops and distinctly limited goals. The son’s war would be different.

With Rumsfeld in the Pentagon, it would be with an extra-light force, with far fewer allies, and far more ambitious. It would not only defang Saddam, it would establish democracy. If his father always had trouble articulating the “vision thing”, as he once memorably put it, the son was all vision. In fact, the vision blinded him to the reality.

You can forgive W for the innovative, lightning decapitation of the Baghdad regime. In fact it was a stroke of genius. But you cannot forgive him for the hubris afterwards, for having no plan for the post-invasion, no troops to keep order, no strategy for everything his father had once worried so much about. His father would never have done such a thing. Wouldn’t be “prudent”, would it?

As Woodward recounts in his new book, the parents were worried all along. At a black-tie dinner on the eve of invasion, Barbara Bush took aside a Washington friend, David Boren, a former Democratic senator who had been the chairman of the select committee on intelligence during Poppy’s presidency.

“You always told me the truth,” Barbara opened, drawing Boren aside for a private chat.

“Yes, ma’am,” Boren replied.

“Will you tell me the truth now?”

“Certainly.”

“Are we right to be worried about this Iraq thing?”

“Yes. I’m very worried.”

“Do you think it’s a mistake?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Boren replied. “I think it’s a huge mistake if we go in right now, this way.”

“Well, his father is certainly worried and is losing sleep over it. He’s up at night worried.”

“Why doesn’t he talk to him?”

“He doesn’t think he should unless he’s asked,” Barbara Bush said.

This time there was no Jeb to intervene to avert a father-son clash. And the father was too decent and too loyal to force one.

Poppy’s closest allies did what they could before the war to stage an intervention. Brent Scowcroft, Poppy’s former national security adviser, wrote a newspaper article warning against war in Iraq. Scowcroft was a realist of the old Poppy school. He had no illusions about spreading democracy among Arabs; he’d been happy to deal with Saddam as a bulwark against Iran; he was content to stand back in 1991 as Saddam, left in power, murdered countless Shi’ites and Kurds, because the United States was not prepared to occupy what Churchill once called the “ungrateful volcano” of Iraq.

Scowcroft was Condoleezza Rice’s mentor. He was part of the Bush famiglia, governed by the clan’s code of omerta. For him to be disloyal in public was a warning shot from the old man. But the son didn’t listen. Too many of us were deaf.

There is another irony. Poppy was prudent but not bold. W was bold but not prudent. If Poppy had been as bold as his son back in 1990 and had actually invaded Iraq, the coalition would indeed have been greeted as liberators in Baghdad. There would even have been enough troops to succeed in an occupation. The anti-American suspicions that the Shi’ites retained from their bitter experience of being abandoned in 1991 and the rapid deterioration in Iraq’s civil society during the sanctions regime of the 1990s might never have come about.

The ironies are painful. If the father had been more like the son in 1990 the world might now be a very different place. And if the son had been more like the father in 2003, had responded to obvious errors and brought sufficient allies and troops to the task, he might have succeeded as well.

But the tragedy of history is that we never know what might have been: 1990 wasn’t 2003, and Poppy wasn’t W.

W stuck with Rumsfeld’s vision even when no one else would. Poppy stuck to caution even when he had a historic opportunity to remake the Middle East before the toxin of Islamism could become more potent. Each was his own man and each, in his own way, therefore failed. Except that the consequences of W’s failure are immeasurably greater than Poppy’s.

The truth about this president is that he still loves and reveres his father. This cathartic moment in American and world history might also be a catharsis within the Bush family. The ranks are already closing. With Gates and Baker now back in the fold, Poppy’s faction has solidified behind W’s. They want to help him out, to rescue his presidency, to rebalance American power in the world and to carve something from the wreckage in Iraq.

Last week the American people forced the family intervention. They knew what they were doing. If you combine W’s shrewdness with Poppy’s wisdom you might have the beginning of a new day in world politics. This Shakespearean drama is not over. We have merely finished Act IV. W has two more years. The Democrats will force him to move domestically to the centre, and Daddy’s team will not abandon the son in his hour of need. Their price was Rumsfeld’s head, and they now have it on a platter.

What they will do is not yet knowable. Much is on the table. As recently as two years ago Robert Gates authored a Council on Foreign Relations paper advocating direct negotiations with Iran. Baker’s Iraq Study Group has already deemed the goal of democracy impossible there. The American people, for their part, do not want defeat or a Vietnam-style retreat in Iraq. They just want a sane strategy, shorn of delusion, fanaticism and arrogance.

Whether Bush has the strength to reconcile with his father at this moment and do what is necessary is also unknowable. These are not characters in a play. They are still human beings, as unpredictable and inscrutable as Shakespeare saw them. The American voters just shifted the underlying plot; and the Iraqi people have their own painful decisions to make and loyalties to break.

Act V, in other words, is about to begin.

[RocDoc]

Tremendously interesting article....and very plausible.

Didn't at all need the monkey introduction, but then that's just you, Phil.

But thanks for this C&P nonetheless.

[JACkory]

the Kosmos is the pure noumenon of thought.

This advance on his part brings him very near to the esoteric and Vedantin tenet.*

Parabrahm (the One Reality, the Absolute) is the field of Absolute Consciousness, i.e., that Essence which is out of all relation to conditioned existence, and of which conscious existence is a conditioned symbol. But once that we pass in thought from this (to us) Absolute Negation, duality supervenes in the contrast of Spirit (or consciousness) and Matter, Subject and Object.

Spirit (or Consciousness) and Matter are, however, to be regarded, not as independent realities, but as the two facets or aspects of the Absolute (Parabrahm), which constitute the basis of conditioned Being whether subjective or objective.

Considering this metaphysical triad as the Root from which proceeds all manifestation, the great Breath assumes the character of precosmic Ideation. It is the fons et origo of force and of all individual consciousness, and supplies the guiding intelligence in the vast scheme of cosmic Evolution. On the other hand, precosmic 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.

Hence it will be apparent that the contrast of these two aspects of the Absolute is essential to the existence of the "Manifested Universe." Apart from Cosmic Substance, Cosmic Ideation could not manifest as individual consciousness, since it is only through a vehicle † of matter that consciousness wells up as "I am I," a physical basis being necessary to focus a ray of the Universal Mind at a certain stage of complexity. Again, apart from Cosmic Ideation, Cosmic Substance would remain an empty abstraction, and no emergence of consciousness could ensue.

The "Manifested Universe," therefore, is pervaded by duality, which is, as it were, the very essence of its EX-istence as "manifestation."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Footnote:
* See Mr. Subba Row's four able lectures on the Bhagavad Gita, "Theosophist," February, 1887.
† Called in Sanskrit: "Upadhi."
S D Vol. 1 - Proem, page 15

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Secret Doctrine
But just as the opposite poles of subject and object, spirit and matter, are but aspects of the One Unity in which they are synthesized, so, in the manifested Universe, there is "that" which links spirit to matter, subject to object.

This something, at present unknown to Western speculation, is called by the occultists Fohat. It is the "bridge" by which the "Ideas" existing in the "Divine Thought" are impressed on Cosmic substance as the "laws of Nature." Fohat is thus the dynamic energy of Cosmic Ideation; or, regarded from the other side, it is the intelligent medium, the guiding power of all manifestation, the "Thought Divine" transmitted and made manifest through the Dhyan Chohans,* the Architects of the visible World. Thus from Spirit, or Cosmic Ideation, comes our consciousness; from Cosmic Substance the several vehicles in which that consciousness is individualised and attains to self — or reflective — consciousness; while Fohat, in its various manifestations, is the mysterious link between Mind and Matter, the animating principle electrifying every atom into life.

The following summary will afford a clearer idea to the reader.

(1.) The ABSOLUTE; the Parabrahm of the Vedantins or the one Reality, SAT, which is, as Hegel says, both Absolute Being and Non-Being.
(2.) The first manifestation, the impersonal, and, in philosophy, unmanifested Logos, the precursor of the "manifested." This is the "First Cause," the "Unconscious" of European Pantheists.
(3.) Spirit-matter, LIFE; the "Spirit of the Universe," the Purusha and Prakriti, or the second Logos.
(4.) Cosmic Ideation, MAHAT or Intelligence, the Universal World-Soul; the Cosmic Noumenon of Matter, the basis of the intelligent operations in and of Nature, also called MAHA-BUDDHI. The ONE REALITY; its dual aspects in the conditioned Universe.

Further, the Secret Doctrine affirms: —
(b.) The Eternity of the Universe in toto as a boundless plane; periodically "the playground of numberless Universes incessantly manifesting and disappearing," called "the manifesting stars," and the "sparks of Eternity." "The Eternity of the Pilgrim" † is like a wink


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Footnote:
* Called by Christian theology: Archangels, Seraphs, etc., etc.
† "Pilgrim" is the appellation given to our Monad (the two in one) during its cycle of incarnations. It is the only immortal and eternal principle in us, being an indivisible part of the integral whole — the Universal Spirit, from which it emanates, and into which it is absorbed at the end of the cycle. When it is said to emanate from the one spirit, an awkward and incorrect expression has to be used, for lack of appropriate words in English. The Vedantins call it Sutratma (Thread-Soul), but their explanation, too, differs somewhat from that of the occultists; to explain which difference, however, is left to the Vedantins themselves.

S D, Vol. 1 - Proem, page 16

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Proem
of the Eye of Self-Existence (Book of Dzyan.) "The appearance and disappearance of Worlds is like a regular tidal ebb of flux and reflux." (See Part II., "Days and Nights of Brahmâ.")

This second assertion of the Secret Doctrine is the absolute universality of that law of periodicity, of flux and reflux, ebb and flow, which physical science has observed and recorded in all departments of nature. An alternation such as that of Day and Night, Life and Death, Sleeping and Waking, is a fact so common, so perfectly universal and without exception, that it is easy to comprehend that in it we see one of the absolutely fundamental laws of the universe.

Moreover, the Secret Doctrine teaches: —
(c) The fundamental identity of all Souls with the Universal Over-Soul, the latter being itself an aspect of the Unknown Root; and the obligatory pilgrimage for every Soul — a spark of the former — through the Cycle of Incarnation (or "Necessity") in accordance with Cyclic and Karmic law, during the whole term. In other words, no purely spiritual Buddhi (divine Soul) can have an independent (conscious) existence before the spark which issued from the pure Essence of the Universal Sixth principle, — or the OVER-SOUL, — has (a) passed through every elemental form of the phenomenal world of that Manvantara, and (b) acquired individuality, first by natural impulse, and then by self-induced and self-devised efforts (checked by its Karma), thus ascending through all the degrees of intelligence, from the lowest to the highest Manas, from mineral and plant, up to the holiest archangel (Dhyani-Buddha). The pivotal doctrine of the Esoteric philosophy admits no privileges or special gifts in man, save those won by his own Ego through personal effort and merit throughout a long series of metempsychoses and reincarnations. This is why the Hindus say that the Universe is Brahma and Brahmâ, for Brahma is in every atom of the universe, the six principles in Nature being all the outcome — the variously differentiated aspects — of the SEVENTH and ONE, the only reality in the Universe whether Cosmical or micro-cosmical; and also why the permutations (psychic, spiritual and physical), on the plane of manifestation and form, of the sixth (Brahmâ the vehicle of Brahma) are viewed by metaphysical

S D, Vol. 1 - Proem, page 17

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Secret Doctrine
antiphrasis as illusive and Mayavic. For although the root of every atom individually and of every form collectively, is that seventh principle or the one Reality, still, in its manifested phenomenal and temporary appearance, it is no better than an evanescent illusion of our senses. (See, for clearer definition, Addendum "Gods, Monads and Atoms," and also "Theophania," "Bodhisatvas and Reincarnation," etc., etc.)

In its absoluteness, the One Principle under its two aspects (of Parabrahmam and Mulaprakriti) is sexless, unconditioned and eternal. Its periodical (manvantaric) emanation — or primal radiation — is also One, androgynous and phenomenally finite. When the radiation radiates in its turn, all its radiations are also androgynous, to become male and female principles in their lower aspects. After Pralaya, whether the great or the minor Pralaya ( the latter leaving the worlds in statu quo * ), the first that re-awakes to active life is the plastic A'kâsa, Father-Mother, the Spirit and Soul of Ether, or the plane on the surface of the Circle. Space is called the "Mother" before its Cosmic activity, and Father-Mother at the first stage of re-awakening. (See Comments, Stanza II.) In the Kabala it is also Father-Mother-Son. But whereas in the Eastern doctrine, these are the Seventh Principle of the manifested Universe, or its "Atma-Buddhi-Manas" (Spirit, Soul, Intelligence), the triad branching off and dividing into the seven cosmical and seven human principles, in the Western Kabala of the Christian mystics it is the Triad or Trinity, and with their occultists, the male-female Jehovah, Jah-Havah. In this lies the whole difference between the esoteric and the Christian trinities. The Mystics and the Philosophers, the Eastern and Western Pantheists, synthesize their pregenetic triad in the pure divine abstraction. The orthodox, anthropomorphize it. Hiranyagarbha, Hari, and Sankara — the three hypostases of the manifesting "Spirit of the Supreme Spirit" (by which title Prithivi — the Earth — greets Vishnu in his first Avatar) — are the purely metaphysical abstract qualities of formation, preservation, and destruction, and are the three divine Avasthas (lit. hypostases) of that which "does


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Footnote:
* It is not the physical organisms that remain in statu quo, least of all their psychical principles, during the great Cosmic or even Solar pralayas, but only their Akâsic or astral "photographs." But during the minor pralayas, once over-taken by the "Night," the planets remain intact, though dead, as a huge animal, caught and embedded in the polar ice, remains the same for ages.

S D, Vol. 1 - Proem, page 18

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Proem
not perish with created things" (or Achyuta, a name of Vishnu); whereas the orthodox Christian separates his personal creative Deity into the three personages of the Trinity, and admits of no higher Deity. The latter, in Occultism, is the abstract Triangle; with the orthodox, the perfect Cube. The creative god or the aggregate gods are regarded by the Eastern philosopher as Bhrantidarsanatah — "false apprehension," something "conceived of, by reason of erroneous appearances, as a material form," and explained as arising from the illusive conception of the Egotistic personal and human Soul (lower fifth principle). It is beautifully expressed in a new translation of Vishnu Purana. "That Brahma in its totality has essentially the aspect of Prakriti, both evolved and unevolved (Mulaprakriti), and also the aspect of Spirit and the aspect of Time. Spirit, O twice born, is the leading aspect of the Supreme Brahma.* The next is a twofold aspect,— Prakriti, both evolved and unevolved, and is the time last." Kronos is shown in the Orphic theogony as being also a generated god or agent.

At this stage of the re-awakening of the Universe, the sacred symbolism represents it as a perfect Circle with the (root) point in the Centre. This sign was universal, therefore we find it in the Kabala also. The Western Kabala, however, now in the hands of Christian mystics, ignores it altogether, though it is plainly shown in the Zohar. These sectarians begin at the end, and show as the symbol of pregenetic Kosmos this sign , calling it "the Union of the Rose and Cross," the great mystery of occult generation, from whence the name — Rosicrucians ( Rose Cross )!

As may be judged, however, from the most important, as the best known of the Rosicrucians' symbols, there is one which has never been hitherto understood even by modern mystics. It is that of the "Pelican" tearing open its breast to feed its seven little ones — the real creed of the Brothers of the Rosie-Cross and a direct outcome from the Eastern


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Footnote:
* Thus Spencer, who, nevertheless, like Schopenhauer and von Hartmann, only reflects an aspect of the old esoteric philosophers, and hence lands his readers on the bleak shore of Agnostic despair — reverently formulates the grand mystery; "that which persists unchanging in quantity, but ever changing in form, under these sensible appearances which the Universe presents to us, is an unknown and unknowable power, which we are obliged to recognise as without limit in Space and without beginning or end in time." It is only daring Theology — never Science or philosophy — which seeks to gauge the Infinite and unveil the Fathomless and Unknowable.

S D, Vol. 1 - Proem, page 19

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Secret Doctrine
Secret Doctrine. Brahma (neuter) is called Kalahansa, meaning, as explained by Western Orientalists, the Eternal Swan or goose (see Stanza III., Comment. 8), and so is Brahmâ, the Creator. A great mistake is thus brought under notice; it is Brahma (neuter) who ought to be referred to as Hansa-vahana (He who uses the swan as his Vehicle) and not Brahmâ the Creator, who is the real Kalahansa, while Brahma (neuter) is hamsa, and "A-hamsa," as will be explained in the Commentary. Let it be understood that the terms Brahmâ and Parabrahmam are not used here because they belong to our Esoteric nomenclature, but simply because they are more familiar to the students in the West. Both are the perfect equivalents of our one, three, and seven vowelled terms, which stand for the ONE ALL, and the One "All in all."

Such are the basic conceptions on which the Secret Doctrine rests.

[JACkory]

Summing Up

THE first of these Seven chapters has been attempted and is now finished. However incomplete and feeble as an exposition, it is, at any rate, an approximation — using the word in a mathematical sense — to that which is the oldest basis for all the subsequent Cosmogonies. The attempt to render in a European tongue the grand panorama of the ever periodically recurring Law — impressed upon the plastic minds of the first races endowed with Consciousness by those who reflected the same from the Universal Mind — is daring, for no human language, save the Sanskrit — which is that of the Gods — can do so with any degree of adequacy. But the failures in this work must be forgiven for the sake of the motive.

As a whole, neither the foregoing nor what follows can be found in full anywhere. It is not taught in any of the six Indian schools of philosophy, for it pertains to their synthesis — the seventh, which is the Occult doctrine. It is not traced on any crumbling papyrus of Egypt, nor is it any longer graven on Assyrian tile or granite wall. The Books of the Vedanta (the last word of human knowledge) give out but the metaphysical aspect of this world-Cosmogony; and their priceless thesaurus, the Upanishads — Upa-ni-shad being a compound word meaning "the conquest of ignorance by the revelation of secret, spiritual knowledge" — require now the additional possession of a Master-key to enable the student to get at their full meaning. The reason for this I venture to state here as I learned it from a Master.

The name, "Upanishads," is usually translated "esoteric doctrine." These treatises form part of the Sruti or "revealed knowledge," Revelation, in short, and are generally attached to the Brahmana

S D, Vol. 1 - page 269

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


The Secret Doctrine

portion of the Vedas,* as their third division. There are over 150 Upanishads enumerated by, and known to, Orientalists, who credit the oldest with being written probably about 600 years B.C.; but of genuine texts there does not exist a fifth of the number. The Upanishads are to the Vedas what the Kabala is to the Jewish Bible. They treat of and expound the secret and mystic meaning of the Vedic texts. They speak of the origin of the Universe, the nature of Deity, and of Spirit and Soul, as also of the metaphysical connection of mind and matter. In a few words: They CONTAIN the beginning and the end of all human knowledge, but they have now ceased to REVEAL it, since the day of Buddha. If it were otherwise, the Upanishads could not be called esoteric, since they are now openly attached to the Sacred Brahmanical books, which have, in our present age, become accessible even to the Mlechchhas (out-castes) and the European Orientalists. One thing in them — and this in all the Upanishads — invariably and constantly points to their ancient origin, and proves (a) that they were written, in some of their portions, before the caste system became the tyrannical institution which it still is; and (b) that half of their contents have been eliminated, while some of them were rewritten and abridged. "The great Teachers of the higher Knowledge and the Brahmans are continually represented as going to Kshatriya (military caste) kings to become their pupils." As Cowell pertinently remarks, the Upanishads "breathe an entirely different spirit" (from other Brahmanical writings), "a freedom of thought unknown in any earlier work except in the Rig Veda hymns themselves." The second fact is explained by a tradition recorded in one of the MSS. on Buddha's life. It says that the Upanishads were originally attached to their Brahmanas after the beginning of a reform, which led to the exclusiveness of the present caste system among the Brahmins, a few centuries after the invasion of India by the "twice-born." They were complete in those days, and were used for the instruction of the chelas who were preparing for their initiation.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Footnote: * "The Vedas have a distinct dual meaning — one expressed by the literal sense of the words, the other indicated by the metre and the swara — intonation — which are as the life of the Vedas. . . . Learned pundits and philologists of course deny that swara has anything to do with philosophy or ancient esoteric doctrines; but the mysterious connection between swara and light is one of its most profound secrets."
(T. Subba Row, Five Years of Theosophy, p. 154.)
S D, Vol. 1 - page 270

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Occultism in the Upanishads

This lasted so long as the Vedas and the Brahmanas remained in the sole and exclusive keeping of the temple-Brahmins — while no one else had the right to study or even read them outside of the sacred caste. Then came Gautama, the Prince of Kapilavastu. After learning the whole of the Brahmanical wisdom in the Rahasya or the Upanishads, and finding that the teachings differed little, if at all, from those of the "Teachers of Life" inhabiting the snowy ranges of the Himalaya,* the Disciple of the Brahmins, feeling indignant because the sacred wisdom was thus withheld from all but the Brahmins, determined to save the whole world by popularizing it. Then it was that the Brahmins, seeing that their sacred knowledge and Occult wisdom was falling into the hands of the "Mlechchhas," abridged the texts of the Upanishads, originally containing thrice the matter of the Vedas and the Brahmanas together, without altering, however, one word of the texts. They simply detached from the MSS. the most important portions containing the last word of the Mystery of Being. The key to the Brahmanical secret code remained henceforth with the initiates alone, and the Brahmins were thus in a position to publicly deny the correctness of Buddha's teaching by appealing to their Upanishads, silenced for ever on the chief questions. Such is the esoteric tradition beyond the Himalayas.

Sri Sankaracharya, the greatest Initiate living in the historical ages, wrote many a Bhâshya on the Upanishads. But his original treatises, as there are reasons to suppose, have not yet fallen into the hands of the Philistines, for they are too jealously preserved in his maths (monasteries, mathams). And there are still weightier reasons to believe that the priceless Bhashyas (Commentaries) on the esoteric doctrine of the Brahmins, by their greatest expounder, will remain for ages yet a dead letter to most of the Hindus, except the Smârtava Brahmins. This sect, founded by Sankaracharya, (which is still very powerful in Southern India) is now almost the only one to produce students who have preserved sufficient knowledge to comprehend the


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Footnote: * Also called "the Sons of Wisdom," and of the "Fire-Mist" and the "Brothers of the Sun" in the Chinese records. Si-dzang (Tibet) is mentioned in the MSS. of the sacred library of the province of Fo-Kien, as the great seat of Occult learning from time immemorial, ages before Buddha. The Emperor Yu, the "great" (2,207 years B.C.), a pious mystic and great adept, is said to have obtained his knowledge from the "great teachers of the Snowy Range" in Si-dzang.
S D, Vol. 1 - page 271

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


The Secret Doctrine

dead letter of the Bhashyas. The reason of this is that they alone, I am informed, have occasionally real Initiates at their head in their mathams, as for instance, in the "Sringa-giri," in the Western Ghats of Mysore. On the other hand, there is no sect in that desperately exclusive caste of the Brahmins, more exclusive than is the Smartava; and the reticence of its followers to say what they may know of the Occult sciences and the esoteric doctrine, is only equalled by their pride and learning.

Therefore the writer of the present statement must be prepared beforehand to meet with great opposition and even the denial of such statements as are brought forward in this work. Not that any claim to infallibility, or to perfect correctness in every detail of all that which is herein said, was ever put forward. Facts are there, and they can hardly be denied. But, owing to the intrinsic difficulties of the subjects treated, and the almost insurmountable limitations of the English tongue (as of all other European languages) to express certain ideas, it is more than probable that the writer has failed to present the explanations in the best and in the clearest form; yet all that could be done was done under every adverse circumstance, and this is the utmost that can be expected of any writer.

Let us recapitulate and show, by the vastness of the subjects expounded, how difficult, if not impossible, it is to do them full justice.

(1.) The Secret Doctrine is the accumulated Wisdom of the Ages, and its cosmogony alone is the most stupendous and elaborate system: e.g., even in the exotericism of the Puranas. But such is the mysterious power of Occult symbolism, that the facts which have actually occupied countless generations of initiated seers and prophets to marshal, to set down and explain, in the bewildering series of evolutionary progress, are all recorded on a few pages of geometrical signs and glyphs. The flashing gaze of those seers has penetrated into the very kernel of matter, and recorded the soul of things there, where an ordinary profane, however learned, would have perceived but the external work of form. But modern science believes not in the "soul of things," and hence will reject the whole system of ancient cosmogony. It is useless to say that the system in question is no fancy of one or several isolated individuals. That it is the uninterrupted record covering thousands of generations of Seers whose respective experiences were made to test and to verify the

S D, Vol. 1 - page 272

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


The Pith and Marrow of Occultism

traditions passed orally by one early race to another, of the teachings of higher and exalted beings, who watched over the childhood of Humanity. That for long ages, the "Wise Men" of the Fifth Race, of the stock saved and rescued from the last cataclysm and shifting of continents, had passed their lives in learning, not teaching. How did they do so? It is answered: by checking, testing, and verifying in every department of nature the traditions of old by the independent visions of great adepts; i.e., men who have developed and perfected their physical, mental, psychic, and spiritual organisations to the utmost possible degree. No vision of one adept was accepted till it was checked and confirmed by the visions — so obtained as to stand as independent evidence — of other adepts, and by centuries of experiences.

(2.) The fundamental Law in that system, the central point from which all emerged, around and toward which all gravitates, and upon which is hung the philosophy of the rest, is the One homogeneous divine SUBSTANCE-PRINCIPLE, the one radical cause.


. . . "Some few, whose lamps shone brighter, have been led
From cause to cause to nature's secret head,
And found that one first Principle must be. . . ."



It is called "Substance-Principle," for it becomes "substance" on the plane of the manifested Universe, an illusion, while it remains a "principle" in the beginningless and endless abstract, visible and invisible SPACE. It is the omnipresent Reality: impersonal, because it contains all and everything. Its impersonality is the fundamental conception of the System. It is latent in every atom in the Universe, and is the Universe itself. (See in chapters on Symbolism, "Primordial Substance, and Divine Thought.")

(3.) The Universe is the periodical manifestation of this unknown Absolute Essence. To call it "essence," however, is to sin against the very spirit of the philosophy. For though the noun may be derived in this case from the verb esse, "to be," yet IT cannot be identified with a being of any kind, that can be conceived by human intellect. IT is best described as neither Spirit nor matter, but both. "Parabrahmam and Mulaprakriti" are One, in reality, yet two in the Universal conception of the manifested, even in the conception of the One Logos, its first manifestation, to which, as the able lecturer in the "Notes on the Bhagavadgita" shows, IT appears from the objective standpoint of

S D, Vo. 1 - page 273

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


The Secret Doctrine

the One Logos as Mulaprakriti and not as Parabrahmam; as its veil and not the one REALITY hidden behind, which is unconditioned and absolute.

(4.) The Universe is called, with everything in it, MAYA, because all is temporary therein, from the ephemeral life of a fire-fly to that of the Sun. Compared to the eternal immutability of the ONE, and the changelessness of that Principle, the Universe, with its evanescent ever-changing forms, must be necessarily, in the mind of a philosopher, no better than a will-o'-the-wisp. Yet, the Universe is real enough to the conscious beings in it, which are as unreal as it is itself.

(5.) Everything in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is CONSCIOUS: i.e., endowed with a consciousness of its own kind and on its own plane of perception. We men must remember that because we do not perceive any signs — which we can recognise — of consciousness, say, in stones, we have no right to say that no consciousness exists there. There is no such thing as either "dead" or "blind" matter, as there is no "Blind" or "Unconscious" Law. These find no place among the conceptions of Occult philosophy. The latter never stops at surface appearances, and for it the noumenal essences have more reality than their objective counterparts; it resembles therein the mediæval Nominalists, for whom it was the Universals that were the realities and the particulars which existed only in name and human fancy.

(6.) The Universe is worked and guided from within outwards. As above so it is below, as in heaven so on earth; and man — the microcosm and miniature copy of the macrocosm — is the living witness to this Universal Law, and to the mode of its action. We see that every external motion, act, gesture, whether voluntary or mechanical, organic or mental, is produced and preceded by internal feeling or emotion, will or volition, and thought or mind. As no outward motion or change, when normal, in man's external body can take place unless provoked by an inward impulse, given through one of the three functions named, so with the external or manifested Universe. The whole Kosmos is guided, controlled, and animated by almost endless series of Hierarchies of sentient Beings, each having a mission to perform, and who — whether we give to them one name or another, and call them Dhyan-Chohans or Angels — are "messengers" in the sense only that they are the agents of Karmic and Cosmic Laws. They vary infinitely in their

St D, Vol. 1 - page 274

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


The Nature of the Celestial Men

respective degrees of consciousness and intelligence; and to call them all pure Spirits without any of the earthly alloy "which time is wont to prey upon" is only to indulge in poetical fancy. For each of these Beings either was, or prepares to become, a man, if not in the present, then in a past or a coming cycle (Manvantara). They are perfected, when not incipient, men; and differ morally from the terrestrial human beings on their higher (less material) spheres, only in that they are devoid of the feeling of personality and of the human emotional nature — two purely earthly characteristics. The former, or the "perfected," have become free from those feelings, because (a) they have no longer fleshly bodies — an ever-numbing weight on the Soul; and (b) the pure spiritual element being left untrammelled and more free, they are less influenced by maya than man can ever be, unless he is an adept who keeps his two personalities — the spiritual and the physical — entirely separated. The incipient monads, having never had terrestrial bodies yet, can have no sense of personality or EGO-ism. That which is meant by "personality," being a limitation and a relation, or, as defined by Coleridge, "individuality existing in itself but with a nature as a ground," the term cannot of course be applied to non-human entities; but, as a fact insisted upon by generations of Seers, none of these Beings, high or low, have either individuality or personality as separate Entities,i.e., they have no individuality in the sense in which a man says, "I am myself and no one else;" in other words, they are conscious of no such distinct separateness as men and things have on earth. Individuality is the characteristic of their respective hierarchies, not of their units; and these characteristics vary only with the degree of the plane to which those hierarchies belong: the nearer to the region of Homogeneity and the One Divine, the purer and the less accentuated that individuality in the Hierarchy. They are finite, in all respects, with the exception of their higher principles — the immortal sparks reflecting the universal divine flame — individualized and separated only on the spheres of Illusion by a differentiation as illusive as the rest. They are "Living Ones," because they are the streams projected on the Kosmic screen of illusion from the ABSOLUTE LIFE; beings in whom life cannot become extinct, before the fire of ignorance is extinct in those who sense these "Lives." Having sprung into being under the quickening influence of the uncreated beam, the reflection of the great Central Sun that

S D, Vol 1 - page 275

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


The Secret Doctrine

radiates on the shores of the river of Life, it is the inner principle in them which belongs to the waters of immortality, while its differentiated clothing is as perishable as man's body. Therefore Young was right in saying that

[JACkory]

"Angels are men of a superior kind"

and no more. They are neither "ministering" nor "protecting" angels; nor are they "Harbingers of the Most High" still less the "Messengers of wrath" of any God such as man's fancy has created. To appeal to their protection is as foolish as to believe that their sympathy may be secured by any kind of propitiation; for they are, as much as man himself is, the slaves and creatures of immutable Karmic and Kosmic law. The reason for it is evident. Having no elements of personality in their essence they can have no personal qualities, such as attributed by men, in their exoteric religions, to their anthropomorphic God — a jealous and exclusive God who rejoices and feels wrathful, is pleased with sacrifice, and is more despotic in his vanity than any finite foolish man. Man, as shown in Book II., being a compound of the essences of all those celestial Hierarchies may succeed in making himself, as such, superior, in one sense, to any hierarchy or class, or even combination of them. "Man can neither propitiate nor command the Devas," it is said. But, by paralyzing his lower personality, and arriving thereby at the full knowledge of the non-separateness of his higher SELF from the One absolute SELF, man can, even during his terrestrial life, become as "One of Us." Thus it is, by eating of the fruit of knowledge which dispels ignorance, that man becomes like one of the Elohim or the Dhyanis; and once on their plane the Spirit of Solidarity and perfect Harmony, which reigns in every Hierarchy, must extend over him and protect him in every particular.

The chief difficulty which prevents men of science from believing in divine as well as in nature Spirits is their materialism. The main impediment before the Spiritualist which hinders him from believing in the same, while preserving a blind belief in the "Spirits" of the Departed, is the general ignorance of all, except some Occultists and Kabalists, about the true essence and nature of matter. It is on the acceptance or rejection of the theory of the Unity of all in Nature, in its ultimate Essence, that mainly rests the belief or unbelief in the existence around us of other conscious beings besides the Spirits of the Dead.

S D, Vol. 1 - page 276

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Many Bodies But One Soul

It is on the right comprehension of the primeval Evolution of Spirit-Matter and its real essence that the student has to depend for the further elucidation in his mind of the Occult Cosmogony, and for the only sure clue which can guide his subsequent studies.

In sober truth, as just shown, every "Spirit" so-called is either a disembodied or a future man. As from the highest Archangel (Dhyan Chohan) down to the last conscious "Builder" (the inferior class of Spiritual Entities), all such are men, having lived aeons ago, in other Manvantaras, on this or other Spheres; so the inferior, semi-intelligent and non-intelligent Elementals — are all future men. That fact alone — that a Spirit is endowed with intelligence — is a proof to the Occultist that that Being must have been a man, and acquired his knowledge and intelligence throughout the human cycle. There is but one indivisible and absolute Omniscience and Intelligence in the Universe, and this thrills throughout every atom and infinitesimal point of the whole finite Kosmos which hath no bounds, and which people call SPACE, considered independently of anything contained in it. But the first differentiation of its reflection in the manifested World is purely Spiritual, and the Beings generated in it are not endowed with a consciousness that has any relation to the one we conceive of. They can have no human consciousness or Intelligence before they have acquired such, personally and individually. This may be a mystery, yet it is a fact, in Esoteric philosophy, and a very apparent one too.

The whole order of nature evinces a progressive march towards a higher life. There is design in the action of the seemingly blindest forces. The whole process of evolution with its endless adaptations is a proof of this. The immutable laws that weed out the weak and feeble species, to make room for the strong, and which ensure the "survival of the fittest," though so cruel in their immediate action — all are working toward the grand end. The very fact that adaptations do occur, that the fittest do survive in the struggle for existence, shows that what is called "unconscious Nature"* is in reality an aggregate of forces manipulated


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Footnote:
* Nature taken in its abstract sense, cannot be "unconscious," as it is the emanation from, and thus an aspect (on the manifested plane) of the ABSOLUTE consciousness. Where is that daring man who would presume to deny to vegetation and even to minerals a consciousness of their own. All he can say is, that this consciousness is beyond his comprehension.

S D, Vol. 1 - page 277

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


The Secret Doctrine

by semi-intelligent beings (Elementals) guided by High Planetary Spirits, (Dhyan Chohans),whose collective aggregate forms the manifested verbum of the unmanifested LOGOS, and constitutes at one and the same time the MIND of the Universe and its immutable LAW.

Three distinct representations of the Universe in its three distinct aspects are impressed upon our thought by the esoteric philosophy: the PRE-EXISTING (evolved from) the EVER-EXISTING; and the PHENOMENAL — the world of illusion, the reflection, and shadow thereof. During the great mystery and drama of life known as the Manvantara, real Kosmos is like the object placed behind the white screen upon which are thrown the Chinese shadows, called forth by the magic lantern. The actual figures and things remain invisible, while the wires of evolution are pulled by the unseen hands; and men and things are thus but the reflections, on the white field, of the realities behind the snares of Mahamaya, or the great Illusion. This was taught in every philosophy, in every religion, ante as well as post diluvian, in India and Chaldea, by the Chinese as by the Grecian Sages. In the former countries these three Universes were allegorized, in exoteric teachings, by the three trinities emanating from the Central eternal germ and forming with it a Supreme Unity: the initial, the manifested, and the Creative Triad, or the three in One. The last is but the symbol, in its concrete expression, of the first ideal two. Hence Esoteric philosophy passes over the necessarianism of this purely metaphysical conception, and calls the first one, only, the Ever Existing. This is the view of every one of the six great schools of Indian philosophy — the six principles of that unit body of WISDOM of which the "gnosis," the hidden knowledge, is the seventh.

The writer hopes that, superficially handled as may be the comments on the Seven Stanzas, enough has been given in this cosmogonic portion of the work to show Archaic teachings to be more scientific (in the modern sense of the word) on their very face, than any other ancient Scriptures left to be regarded and judged on their exoteric aspect. Since, however, as confessed before, this work withholds far more than it gives out, the student is invited to use his own intuitions. Our chief care is to elucidate that which has already been given out, and, to our regret, very incorrectly at times; to supplement the knowledge hinted at — whenever and wherever possible — by additional

S D, Vol. 1 - page 278

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Hermes, or Aristotle?

matter; and to bulwark our doctrines against the too strong attacks of modern Sectarianism, and more especially against those of our latter-day Materialism, very often miscalled Science, whereas, in reality, the words "Scientists" and "Sciolists" ought alone to bear the responsibility for the many illogical theories offered to the world. In its great ignorance, the public, while blindly accepting everything that emanates from "authorities," and feeling it to be its duty to regard every dictum coming from a man of Science as a proven fact — the public, we say, is taught to scoff at anything brought forward from "heathen" sources. Therefore, as materialistic Scientists can be fought solely with their own weapons — those of controversy and argument — an Addendum is added to every Book contrasting our respective views and showing how even great authorities may often err. We believe that this can be done effectually by showing the weak points of our opponents, and by proving their too frequent sophisms — made to pass for scientific dicta — to be incorrect. We hold to Hermes and his "Wisdom" — in its universal character; they — to Aristotle as against intuition and the experience of the ages, fancying that Truth is the exclusive property of the Western world. Hence the disagreement. As Hermes says, "Knowledge differs much from sense; for sense is of things that surmount it, but Knowledge (gyi) is the end of sense" — i.e., of the illusion of our physical brain and its intellect; thus emphasizing the contrast between the laboriously acquired knowledge of the senses and mind (manas), and the intuitive omniscience of the Spiritual divine Soul — Buddhi.

Whatever may be the destiny of these actual writings in a remote future, we hope to have proven so far the following facts:

(1) The Secret Doctrine teaches no Atheism, except in the Hindu sense of the word nastika, or the rejection of idols, including every anthropomorphic god. In this sense every Occultist is a Nastika.
(2) It admits a Logos or a collective "Creator" of the Universe; a Demiurgos — in the sense implied when one speaks of an "Architect" as the "Creator" of an edifice, whereas that Architect has never touched one stone of it, but, while furnishing the plan, left all the manual labour to the masons; in our case the plan was furnished by the Ideation of the Universe, and the constructive labour was left to the Hosts of intelligent Powers and Forces. But that Demiurgos is no

S D, Vol. 1 - page 279

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


The Secret Doctrine


personal deity, — i.e., an imperfect ,i>extra-cosmic god, — but only the aggregate of the Dhyan-Chohans and the other forces.
As to the latter—

(3) They are dual in their character; being composed of (a) the irrational brute energy, inherent in matter, and (b) the intelligent soul or cosmic consciousness which directs and guides that energy, and which is the Dhyan-Chohanic thought reflecting the Ideation of the Universal mind. This results in a perpetual series of physical manifestations and moral effects on Earth, during manvantaric periods, the whole being subservient to Karma. As that process is not always perfect; and since, however many proofs it may exhibit of a guiding intelligence behind the veil, it still shows gaps and flaws, and even results very often in evident failures—therefore, neither the collective Host (Demiurgos), nor any of the working powers individually, are proper subjects for divine honours or worship. All are entitled to the grateful reverence of Humanity, however, and man ought to be ever striving to help the divine evolution of Ideas, by becoming to the best of his ability a co-worker with nature in the cyclic task. The ever unknowable and incognizable Karana alone, the Causeless Cause of all causes, should have its shrine and altar on the holy and ever untrodden ground of our heart — invisible, intangible, unmentioned, save through "the still small voice" of our spiritual consciousness. Those who worship before it, ought to do so in the silence and the sanctified solitude of their Souls*; making their spirit the sole mediator between them and the Universal Spirit, their good actions the only priests, and their sinful intentions the only visible and objective sacrificial victims to the Presence. (See Part II., "On the Hidden Deity.")
(4) Matter is Eternal. It is the Upadhi (the physical basis) for the One infinite Universal Mind to build thereon its ideations. Therefore, the Esotericists maintain that there is no inorganic or dead matter in nature, the distinction between the two made by Science being as unfounded as it is arbitrary and devoid of reason.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Footnote:
* "When thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are . . . but enter into thine inner chamber and having shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret." Matt. vi.). Our Father is within us "in Secret," our 7th principle, in the "inner chamber" of our Soul perception. "The Kingdom of Heaven" and of God "is within us" says Jesus, not outside. Why are Christians so absolutely blind to the self-evident meaning of the words of wisdom they delight in mechanically repeating?
S D, Vol. 1 - page 280

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Matter is the Shadow of Spirit


Whatever Science may think, however — and exact Science is a fickle dame, as we all know by experience — Occultism knows and teaches differently, from time immemorial — from Manu and Hermes down to Paracelsus and his successors.

Thus Hermes, the thrice great Trismegistus, says: "Oh, my son, matter becomes; formerly it was; for matter is the vehicle of becoming." * Becoming is the mode of activity of the uncreate deity. Having been endowed with the germs of becoming, matter (objective) is brought into birth, for the creative force fashions it according to the ideal forms. Matter not yet engendered had no form; it becomes when it is put into operation." (The Definitions of Asclepios, p. 134, "Virgin of the World.")

"Everything is the product of one universal creative effort. . . . There is nothing dead, in Nature. Everything is organic and living, and therefore the whole world appears to be a living organism." (Paracelsus, "Philosophia ad Athenienes," F. Hartmann's translations, p. 44.)

(5.) The Universe was evolved out of its ideal plan, upheld through Eternity in the unconsciousness of that which the Vedantins call Parabrahm. This is practically identical with the conclusions of the highest Western Philosophy—"the innate, eternal, and self-existing Ideas" of Plato, now reflected by Von Hartmann. The "unknowable" of Herbert Spencer bears only a faint resemblance to that transcendental Reality believed in by Occultists, often appearing merely a personification of a "force behind phenomena"—an infinite and eternal Energy




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Footnote:
* To this the late Mrs. (Dr.) Kingsford, the able translator and compiler of the Hermetic Fragments (see "The Virgin of the World") remarks in a foot-note; "Dr. Menard observes that in Greek the same word signifies to be born and to become. The idea here is that the material of the world is in its essence eternal, but that before creation or 'becoming' it is in a passive and motionless condition. Thus it 'was' before being put into operation; now it 'becomes,' that is, it is mobile and progressive." And she adds the purely Vedantic doctrine of the Hermetic philosophy that "Creation is thus the period of activity (Manvantara) of God, who, according to Hermetic thought (or which, according to the Vedantin) has two modes — Activity or Existence, God evolved (Deus explicitus); and Passivity of Being (Pralaya) God involved (Deus implicitus). Both modes are perfect and complete, as are the waking and sleeping states of man. Fichte, the German philosopher, distinguished Being (Seyn) as One, which we know only through existence (Dasein) as the Manifold. This view is thoroughly Hermetic. The 'Ideal Forms' are the archetypal or formative ideas of the Neo-Platonists; the eternal and subjective concepts of things subsisting in the divine mind prior to 'becoming'" (p. 134).
S D,Vol. 1 - page 281

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Secret Doctrine

from which all things proceed, while the author of the "Philosophy of the Unconscious" has come (in this respect only) as near to a solution of the great Mystery as mortal man can. Few were those, whether in ancient or mediaeval philosophy, who have dared to approach the subject or even hint at it. Paracelsus mentions it inferentially. His ideas are admirably synthesized by Dr. F. Hartmann, F.T.S., in his "Life of Paracelsus."

All the Christian Kabalists understood well the Eastern root idea: The active Power, the "Perpetual motion of the great Breath" only awakens Kosmos at the dawn of every new Period, setting it into motion by means of the two contrary Forces,* and thus causing it to become objective on the plane of Illusion. In other words, that dual motion transfers Kosmos from the plane of the Eternal Ideal into that of finite manifestation, or from the Noumenal to the Phenomenal plane. Everything that is, was, and will be, eternally IS, even the countless forms, which are finite and perishable only in their objective, not in their ideal Form. They existed as Ideas, in the Eternity, † and, when they pass away, will exist as reflections. Neither the form of man, nor that of any animal, plant or stone has ever been created, and it is only on this plane of ours that it commenced "becoming," i.e., objectivising into its present materiality, or expanding from within outwards, from the most sublimated and supersensuous essence into its grossest appearance. Therefore our human forms have existed in the Eternity as astral or ethereal prototypes; according to which models, the Spiritual Beings (or Gods) whose duty it was to bring them into objective being and terrestrial Life, evolved the protoplasmic forms of the future Egos from their own essence. After which, when this human Upadhi, or basic mould was ready, the natural terrestrial Forces began to work on those supersensuous moulds which contained, besides their own, the elements of all the past vegetable and future animal forms of this globe in them. Therefore, man's outward shell passed through every vegetable and animal body before it assumed the human shape. As this will be fully


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Footnote:
* The centripetal and the centrifugal forces, which are male and female, positive and negative, physical and spiritual, the two being the one Primordial Force.
† Occultism teaches that no form can be given to anything, either by nature or by man, whose ideal type does not already exist on the subjective plane. More than this; that no such form or shape can possibly enter man's consciousness, or evolve in his imagination, which does not exist in prototype, at least as an approximation.
S D, Vol. 1 - page 282

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Paracelsus Anticipated Tyndall

described in Book II., with the Commentaries thereupon, there is no need to say more of it here.

According to the Hermetico-Kabalistic philosophy of Paracelsus, it is Yliaster — the ancestor of the just - born Protyle, introduced by Mr. Crookes in chemistry—or primordial Protomateria that evolved out of itself the Kosmos.

"When Evolution took place the Yliaster divided itself. . . . melted and dissolved, developing from within itself the Ideos or Chaos, called respectively Mysterium magnum, Iliados, Limbus Major, or Primordial Matter. This Primordial essence is of a monistic nature, and manifests itself not only as vital activity, a spiritual force, an invisible, incomprehensible, and indescribable power, but also as vital matter of which the substance of living beings consists." In this Ideos of primordial matter, or the proto-ilos — which is the matrix of all created things—is contained the substance from which everything is formed. It is the Chaos . . . out of which the Macrocosm, and, later on, by evolution and division in Mysteria Specialia,* each separate being, came into existence. "All things and all elementary substances were contained in it in potentia but not in actu" — which makes the translator, Dr. F. Hartmann, justly observe that "it seems that Paracelsus anticipated the modern discovery of the 'potency of matter' three hundred years ago" (P. 42).

This Magnus Limbus, then, or Yliaster of Paracelsus, is simply our old friend "Father-Mother," within, before it appeared in Space, of the second and other Stanzas. It is the universal matrix of Kosmos, personified in the dual character of Macro- and Microcosm (or the Universe and our Globe) † by Aditi-Prakriti, the Spiritual and the physical nature. For we find it explained in Paracelsus that "the Magnus Limbus is the nursery out of which all creatures have grown, in the same sense as a tree grows out of a small seed; with the difference, however, that the great Limbus takes its origin from the Word, while the Limbus minor (the terrestrial seed or sperm) takes it from the earth.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Footnote:
* This word is explained by Dr. Hartmann from the original texts of Paracelsus before him, as follows. According to this great Rosicrucian: "Mysterium is everything out of which something may be developed, which is only germinally contained in it. A seed is the 'Mysterium' of a plant, an egg that of a living bird, etc.
"† It is only the mediæval Kabalists who, following the Jewish and one or two Neo-Platonists, applied the term Microcosm to man. Ancient philosophy called the Earth the Microcosm of the Macrocosm, and man the outcome of the two.
S D, Vol. 1 - page 283

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


The Secret Doctrine

The great Limbus is the seed out of which all beings have come, and the little Limbus is each ultimate being that reproduces its form, and that has itself been produced by the 'great.' The latter possesses all the qualifications of the great one, in the same sense as a son has an organization similar to that of his father." (See Comment. Book II. para. iii.) . . . "As Yliaster dissolved, Ares, the dividing, differentiating, and individualising power (Fohat, another old friend,) . . . began to act. All production took place in consequence of separation. There were produced out of the Ideos, the elements of Fire, Water, Air and Earth, whose birth, however, did not take place in a material mode, or by simple separation," but by spiritual and dynamical, not even complex, combinations—e.g., mechanical mixture as opposed to chemical combination — just as fire may come out of a pebble, or a tree out of a seed, although there is originally no fire in the pebble, nor a tree in the seed. Spirit is living, and Life is Spirit, and Life and Spirit (Prakriti Purusha) (?) produce all things, but they are essentially one and not two. . . . The elements too, have each one its own Yliaster, because all the activity of matter in every form is only an effluvium of the same fount. But as from the seed grow the roots with their fibres, and after that the stalk with its branches and leaves, and lastly the flowers and seeds; likewise all beings were born from the elements, and consist of elementary substances out of which other forms may come into existence, bearing the characteristics of their parents." ("This doctrine, preached 300 years ago," remarks the translator, "is identical with the one that has revolutionized modern thought, after having been put into new shape and elaborated by Darwin. It was still more elaborated by Kapila in the Sankhya philosophy") . . . . The elements as the mothers of all creatures are of an invisible, spiritual nature, and have souls. * They all spring from the "Mysterium Magnum." (Philosophia ad Athenienses.)

[Thorngrub]

JAC, U should check out that YouTube link over on the Spirituality & Religion board I posted the other day. (still think it's the last one) . . . It's of my new soon-to-be landlord, one Scot Aaron, who wrote this book called "God's Science: A New Look At The Bible, Stars, And Universes"




fascinating, if nigh-impenetrable, stuff here

[RocDoc]

HOO!

Whoa.
That's gonna bury Andrew Sullivan's Sunday Times article pretty godd, innit?

Blizzards of near-meaningless words and letters tend to go that way... 'impenetrable', yes.

[phil]

Summing Up


Where ?

I need the Reader's Digest article ...

BAD !!

[phil]

Think I'll repost the Bush Smala story on CE ...

[Kensterberg]

OK, glad I'm not the only one scratching my head over JAC's posts ... the author is talking a lot, but I'm not sure he's saying anything ... I recognize (most of) the words, but I can't be bothered to wade through the whole mess. Summary, por favor?

BTW, I think that stuff about Dubya and his father issues is spot-on.

[phil]

Turning ...