4. He builds them in the likeness of older Wheels,[257] Placing them on the Imperishable Centres (a).
How does Fohat build them? He collects the Fiery-Dust. He makes Balls of Fire, runs through them, and round them, infusing life thereinto, then sets them into motion; some one way, some the other way. They are cold, he makes them hot. They are dry, he makes them moist. They shine, he fans and cools them (b). Thus acts Fohat from one Twilight to the other, during Seven Eternities.[258]
(a) The Worlds are built “in the likeness of older Wheels”—i.e., of those that had existed in preceding Manvantaras and went into Pralaya; for the Law for the birth, growth, and decay of everything in Kosmos, from the Sun to the glow-worm in the grass, is One. There is an everlasting work of perfection with every new appearance, but the Substance-Matter and Forces are all one and the same. And this Law acts on every planet through minor and varying laws.
The “Imperishable [Laya] Centres” have a great importance, and [pg 169] their meaning must be fully understood, if we would have a clear conception of the Archaic Cosmogony, whose theories have now passed into Occultism. At present, one thing may be stated. The Worlds are built neither upon, nor over, nor in the Laya Centres, the zero-point being a condition, not a mathematical point.
(b) Bear in mind that Fohat, the constructive Force of Cosmic Electricity, is said, metaphorically, to have sprung, like Rudra from the head of Brahmâ, “from the Brain of the Father and the Bosom of the Mother,” and then to have metamorphosed himself into a male and a female, i.e., polarized himself into positive and negative electricity. He has Seven Sons who are his Brothers. Fohat is forced to be born, time after time, whenever any two of his “Son-Brothers” indulge in too close contact—whether an embrace or a fight. To avoid this, he unites and binds together those of unlike nature, and separates those of similar temperaments. This, as any one can see, relates, of course, to electricity generated by friction, and to the law of attraction between two objects of unlike, and repulsion between those of like polarity. The Seven Son-Brothers, however, represent and personify the seven forms of cosmic magnetism, called in Practical Occultism the “Seven Radicals,” whose coöperative and active progeny are, among other energies, Electricity, Magnetism, Sound, Light, Heat, Cohesion, etc. Occult Science defines all these as super-sensuous effects in their hidden behaviour, and as objective phenomena in the world of sense; the former requiring abnormal faculties to perceive them, the latter cognizable by our ordinary physical senses. They all pertain to, and are the emanations of, still more supersensuous spiritual qualities, not personated by, but belonging to, real and conscious Causes. To attempt a description of such Entities would be worse than useless. The reader must bear in mind that, according to our teaching which regards this phenomenal Universe as a Great Illusion, the nearer a body is to the Unknown Substance, the more it approaches Reality, as being the farther removed from this world of Mâyâ. Therefore, though the molecular constitution of these bodies is not deducible from their manifestations, on this plane of consciousness, they nevertheless, from the standpoint of the Adept Occultist, possess a distinctive objective if not material structure, in the relatively noumenal—as opposed to the phenomenal—Universe. Men of science may term them force or forces generated by matter, or “modes of its motion,” if they will; Occultism sees in these effects Elementals (Forces), and, in the direct causes [pg 170] producing them, intelligent Divine Workmen. The intimate connection of these Elementals, guided by the unerring hand of the Rulers, with the elements of pure Matter—their correlation we might call it—results in our terrestrial phenomena, such as light, heat, magnetism, etc., etc. Of course we shall never agree with the American Substantialists[259] who call every force and energy—whether light, heat, electricity or cohesion—an “entity”; for this would be equivalent to calling the noise produced by the rolling of the wheels of a vehicle an entity—thus confusing and identifying that “noise” with the “driver” outside, and the guiding “Master Intelligence” within the vehicle. But we do certainly give that name to the “drivers” and to these guiding “Intelligences,” the ruling Dhyân Chohans, as has been shown. The Elementals, the Nature-Forces, are the acting, though invisible, or rather imperceptible, secondary causes, and in themselves the effects of primary causes behind the veil of all terrestrial phenomena. Electricity, light, heat, etc., have been aptly termed the “Ghosts or Shadows of Matter in Motion,” i.e., supersensuous states of Matter whose effects only we are able to cognize. To expand, then, the simile given above. The sensation of light is like the sound of the rolling wheels—a purely phenomenal effect, having no existence outside the observer. The proximate exciting cause of the sensation is comparable to the driver—a supersensuous state of matter in motion, a Nature-Force or Elemental. But, behind this—just as the owner of the carriage directs the driver from within—stands the higher and noumenal cause, the Intelligence from whose essence radiate these States of “Mother,” generating the countless milliards of Elementals, or Psychic Nature-Spirits, just as every drop of water generates its physical infinitesimal Infusoria. It is Fohat who guides the transfer of the principles from one planet to the other, from one star to another child-star. When a planet dies, its informing principles are transferred to a laya or sleeping centre, with potential but latent energy in it, which is thus awakened into life and begins to form itself into a new sidereal body.
It is most remarkable that, while honestly confessing their entire ignorance of the true nature of even terrestrial matter—primordial substance being regarded more as a dream than as a sober reality—the [pg 171] Physicists should, nevertheless, set themselves up as judges of that matter, and claim to know what it is able and is not able to do, in various combinations. Scientists know this matter hardly skin-deep, and yet they will dogmatize. It is “a mode of motion” and nothing else! But the “force” that is inherent in a living person's breath, when blowing a speck of dust from the table, is also, undeniably, “a mode of motion.” It is as undeniably not a quality of the matter, or the particles of the speck, and it emanates from the living and thinking Entity that breathed, whether the impulse originated consciously or unconsciously. Indeed, to endow matter—something of which nothing is so far known—with an inherent quality called force, of the nature of which still less is known, is to create a far more serious difficulty than that which lies in the acceptation of the intervention of our “Nature-Spirits” in every natural phenomenon.
The Occultists—who, if they would express themselves correctly, do not say that matter, but only the substance or essence of matter, (i.e., Mûlaprakriti, the Root of all) is indestructible and eternal—assert that all the so-called Forces of Nature, electricity, magnetism, light, heat, etc., etc., far from being modes of motion of material particles, are in esse, i.e., in their ultimate constitution, the differentiated aspects of that Universal Motion which is discussed and explained in the first pages of this volume. When Fohat is said to produce Seven Laya Centres, it means that, for formative or creative purposes, the Great Law—Theists may call it God—stays, or rather modifies, its perpetual motion on seven invisible points within the area of the Manifested Universe. “The Great Breath digs through Space seven holes into Laya, to cause them to circumgyrate during Manvantara,” says the Occult Catechism. We have said that Laya is what Science may call the zero-point or line; the realm of absolute negativeness, or the one real absolute Force, the noumenon of the Seventh State of that which we ignorantly call and recognize as “Force”; or again the noumenon of Undifferentiated Cosmic Substance, which is itself an unreachable and unknowable object for finite perception; the root and basis of all states of objectivity and also subjectivity; the neutral axis, not one of the many aspects, but its centre. It may serve to elucidate the meaning, if we try to imagine a “neutral centre”—the dream of those who would discover perpetual motion. A “neutral centre” is, in one aspect, the limiting point of any given set of senses. Thus, imagine two consecutive planes of matter; each of these corresponding to an appropriate [pg 172] set of perceptive organs. We are forced to admit that between these two planes of matter an incessant circulation takes place; and if we follow the atoms and molecules of, say, the lower in their transformation upwards, they will come to a point where they pass altogether beyond the range of the faculties we are using on the lower plane. In fact, for us the matter of the lower plane there vanishes from our perception—or rather, it passes on to the higher plane, and the state of matter corresponding to such a point of transition must certainly possess special, and not readily discoverable, properties. Seven such “Neutral Centres,”[260] then, are produced by Fohat, who, when, as Milton has it:
Fair foundations (are) laid whereon to build ...
quickens matter into activity and evolution.
The Primordial Atom (Anu) cannot be multiplied either in its pregenetic state, or its primogeneity; therefore it is called the “Sum Total,” of course, figuratively, as that “Sum Total” is boundless. That which is the abyss of nothingness to the Physicist, who knows only the world of visible causes and effects, is the boundless Space of the Divine Plenum to the Occultist. Among many other objections to the doctrine of an endless evolution and involution, or reäbsorption of the Kosmos, a process which, according to the Brâhmanical and Esoteric Doctrine, is without beginning or end, the Occultist is told that it cannot be, since “by all the admissions of modern scientific philosophy it is a necessity of nature to run down.” If the tendency of nature “to run down” is to be considered so forcible an objection to Occult Cosmogony, how, we may ask, do your Positivists and Free-thinkers and Scientists account for the phalanx of active stellar systems around us? They had eternity to “run down” in; why, then, is not the Kosmos a huge inert mass? Even the moon is only hypothetically believed to be a dead planet, “run down,” and Astronomy does not seem to be acquainted with many such dead planets.[261] The query is unanswerable. But apart from this, it must be noted that the idea of the amount of “transformable energy” in our [pg 173] little system coming to an end, is based purely on the fallacious conception of a “white-hot, incandescent sun,” perpetually radiating away its heat without compensation into space. To this we reply that nature runs down and disappears from the objective plane, only to reëmerge after a time of rest out of the subjective, and to reäscend once more. Our Kosmos and Nature will run down only to reäppear on a more perfect plane after every Pralaya. The Matter of the Eastern philosophers is not the “matter” and Nature of the Western metaphysicians. For what is Matter? And above all, what is our scientific philosophy but that which was so justly and so politely defined by Kant as the “science of the limits to our knowledge?” To what have the many attempts made by Science to bind, connect, and define all the phenomena of organic life, by mere physical and chemical manifestations, brought it? To speculation generally—mere soap-bubbles, that have burst one after the other before the men of Science were permitted to discover real facts. All this would have been avoided, and the progress of knowledge would have proceeded with gigantic strides, had only Science and its philosophy abstained from accepting hypotheses merely on the one-sided knowledge of their “matter.” The behaviour of Uranus and Neptune—whose satellites, four and one in number respectively, revolved, it was thought, in their orbits from East to West, whereas all the other satellites rotate from West to East—is a very good instance, as showing how unreliable are all à priori speculations, even when based on the strictest mathematical analysis. The famous hypothesis of the formation of our Solar System out of nebulous rings, put forward by Kant and Laplace, was chiefly based on the assumed fact that all the planets revolved in the same direction. Laplace, relying on this mathematically demonstrated fact in his own time, and calculating on the theory of probabilities, offered to bet three milliards to one that the next planet discovered would have in its system the same peculiarity of motion eastward. The immutable laws of scientific mathematics got “worsted by further experiments and observations.” This idea of Laplace's mistake prevails generally to this day; but some Astronomers have finally succeeded in demonstrating (?) that the error has been in accepting Laplace's assertion for a mistake; and steps to correct the bévue, without attracting general attention, are now being taken. Many such unpleasant surprises are in store for hypotheses of even a purely physical character. What further disillusions, then, may there not be [pg 174] in questions concerning a transcendental, Occult Nature? At any rate, Occultism teaches that the so-called “reverse rotation” is a fact.