Winds up hill all the way;
Yes, to the very end....
Starting upon the long journey immaculate, descending more and more into sinful matter, and having connected himself with every atom in manifested Space—the Pilgrim, having struggled through, and suffered in, every form of Life and Being, is only at the bottom of the valley of matter, and half through his cycle, when he has identified himself with collective Humanity. This, he has made in his own image. In order to progress upwards and homewards, the “God” has now to ascend the weary uphill path of the Golgotha of Life. It is the martyrdom [pg 289] of self-conscious existence. Like Vishvakarman, he has to sacrifice himself to himself, in order to redeem all creatures, to resurrect from the Many into the One Life. Then he ascends into Heaven indeed; where, plunged into the incomprehensible Absolute Being and Bliss of Paranirvâna, he reigns unconditionally, and whence he will re-descend again, at the next “Coming,” which one portion of humanity expects in its dead-letter sense as the “Second Advent,” and the other as the last “Kalkî Avatâra.”
Summing Up.
The History of Creation and of this World, from its beginning up to the present time, is composed of seven chapters. The seventh chapter is not yet written.
T. Subba Row.[413]
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 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 Vedânta—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, expressing the conquest of ignorance by the revelation of secret, spiritual knowledge—now requires 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.