The Sun is the heart of the Solar World [System] and its brain is hidden behind the [visible] Sun. Thence, sensation is radiated into every nerve-centre of the great body, and the waves of the life-essence flow into each artery and vein.... The planets are its limbs and pulses.
It has been stated elsewhere[938] that Occult philosophy denies that the Sun is a globe in combustion, but defines it simply as a world, a glowing [pg 591] sphere, the real Sun being hidden behind, and the visible Sun being only its reflection, its shell. The Nasmyth willow leaves, mistaken by Sir John Herschell for “solar inhabitants,” are the reservoirs of solar vital energy; “the vital electricity that feeds the whole system; the sun in abscondito being thus the storehouse of our little Cosmos, self-generating its vital fluid, and ever receiving as much as it gives out,” and the visible Sun only a window cut into the real solar palace and presence, which, however, shews without distortion the interior work.
Thus, during the manvantaric solar period, or life, there is a regular circulation of the vital fluid throughout our System, of which the Sun is the heart—like the circulation of the blood in the human body; the Sun contracting as rhythmically as the human heart does at every return of it. Only, instead of performing the round in a second or so, it takes the solar blood ten of its years to circulate, and a whole year to pass through its auricle and ventricle before it washes the lungs, and passes thence back to the great arteries and veins of the System.
This, Science will not deny, since Astronomy knows of the fixed cycle of eleven years when the number of solar spots increases,[939] the increase being due to the contraction of the Solar Heart. The Universe, our World in this case, breathes, just as man and every living creature, plant, and even mineral does upon the Earth; and as our Globe itself breathes every twenty-four hours. The dark region is not due to the “absorption exerted by the vapours issuing from the bosom of the sun, and interposed between the observer and the photosphere,” as Father Secchi would have it,[940] nor are the spots formed “by the matter [heated gaseous matter] itself which the irruption projects upon the solar disk.” The phenomenon is similar to the regular and healthy pulsation of the heart, as the life fluid passes through its hollow muscles. Could the human heart be made luminous, and the living and throbbing organ made visible, so as to have it reflected upon a screen, such as is used by lecturers on Astronomy to show the moon, for instance, then every one would see the sun-spot phenomena repeated every [pg 592] second, and that they were due to contraction and the rushing of the blood.
We read in a work on Geology that it is the dream of Science that:
All the recognized chemical elements will one day be found but modifications of a single material element.[941]
Occult Philosophy has taught this since the existence of human speech and language, adding, however, on the principle of the immutable law of analogy, “as it is above, so it is below,” another of its axioms, that there is neither Spirit nor Matter, in reality, but only numberless aspects of the One ever-hidden Is, or Sat. The homogeneous primordial Element is simple and single, only on the terrestrial plane of consciousness and sensation, since Matter, after all, is nothing more than the sequence of our own states of consciousness, and Spirit an idea of psychic intuition. Even on the next higher plane, that single element which is defined on our Earth by current Science, as the ultimate undecomposable constituent of some kind of Matter, would be pronounced in the world of a higher spiritual perception to be something very complex indeed. Our purest water would be found to yield, instead of its two declared simple elements of oxygen and hydrogen, many other constituents, undreamed of by our modern terrestrial Chemistry. As in the realm of Matter, so in the realm of Spirit, the shadow of that which is cognized on the plane of objectivity exists on that of pure subjectivity. The speck of the perfectly homogeneous Substance, the sarcode of the Hæckelian Moneron, is now viewed as the archebiosis of terrestrial existence (Mr. Huxley's protoplasm)[942]; and Bathybius Hæckelii has to be traced to its pre-terrestrial archebiosis. This is first perceived by the Astronomers at its third stage of evolution, and in the “secondary creation,” so-called. But the students of Esoteric Philosophy understand well the secret meaning of the Stanza:
Brahmâ ... has essentially the aspect of Prakriti, both evolved and unevolved.... Spirit, O Twice-born [Initiate], is the leading aspect of Brahmâ. The next is a two-fold aspect [of Prakriti and Purusha] ... both evolved and unevolved; and Time is the last![943]
Anu is one of the names of Brahmâ, as distinct from Brahman, [pg 593] and it means “atom”; anîyâmsam anîyasâm, “the most atomic of the atomic,” the “immutable and imperishable (achyuta) Purushottama.”
Surely, then, the elements now known to us—be their number whatever it may—as they are understood and defined at present, are not, nor can they be, the primordial Elements. Those were formed from “the curds of the cold radiant Mother” and “the fire-seed of the hot Father,” who “are one,” or, to express it in the plainer language of Modern Science, those Elements had their genesis in the depths of the primordial Fire-mist, the masses of incandescent vapour of the irresolvable nebulæ; for, as Professor Newcomb shows,[944] resolvable nebulæ do not constitute a class of proper nebulæ. More than half of those, he thinks, which were at first mistaken for nebulæ, are what he calls “starry clusters.”