Now the evolution of the external form, or body, round the astral, is produced by the terrestrial forces, just as in the case of the lower kingdoms; but the evolution of the internal, or real, Man is purely spiritual. It is now no more a passage of the impersonal Monad through many and various forms of matter—endowed at best with instinct and consciousness on quite a different plane—as in the case of external evolution, but a journey of the “Pilgrim-Soul” through various states of not only matter, but of self-consciousness and self-perception, or of perception from apperception.
The Monad emerges from its state of spiritual and intellectual unconsciousness; and, skipping the first two planes—too near the Absolute to permit of any correlation with anything on a lower plane—it gets directly into the plane of Mentality. But there is no plane in the whole universe with a broader margin, or a wider field of action, in its almost endless gradations of perceptive and apperceptive qualities, than this plane, which has in its turn an appropriate smaller plane for every “form,” from the Mineral Monad up to the time when that Monad blossoms forth by evolution into the Divine Monad. But all the time it is still one and the same Monad, differing only in its incarnations, throughout its ever succeeding cycles of partial or total obscuration of spirit, or partial or total obscuration of matter—two polar antitheses—as it ascends into the realms of mental spirituality, or descends into the depths of materiality.
To return to Esoteric Buddhism. The second statement is with [pg 199] regard to the enormous period intervening between the mineral epoch, on Globe A, and the man epoch, the term “man epoch” being used because of the necessity of giving a name to that fourth kingdom which follows the animal, though in truth the “man” on Globe A, during the First Round, is no man, but only his prototype, or dimensionless image, from the astral regions. The statement runs as follows:
The full development of the mineral epoch on Globe A, prepares the way for the vegetable development, and, as soon as this begins, the mineral life-impulse overflows into Globe B. Then, when the vegetable development on Globe A is complete and the animal development begins, the vegetable life-impulse overflows to Globe B, and the mineral impulse passes on to Globe C. Then finally comes the human life impulse on Globe A.[286]
And so it goes on for three Rounds, when it slackens, and finally stops at the threshold of our Globe, in the Fourth Round; because the human period (of the true physical men to be), the seventh, is now reached. This is evident, for as said:
... There are processes of evolution which precede the mineral kingdom, and thus a wave of evolution, indeed several waves of evolution, precede the mineral wave in its progress round the spheres.[287]
And now we have to quote from another article, “The Mineral Monad,” in Five Years of Theosophy:
There are seven kingdoms. The first group comprises three degrees of elementals, or nascent centres of forces—from the first stage of differentiation of [from] Mûlaprakriti [or rather Pradhâna, Primordial Homogeneous Matter] to its third degree—i.e., from full unconsciousness to semi-perception; the second or higher group embraces the kingdoms from vegetable to man; the mineral kingdom thus forming the central or turning point in the degrees of the “Monadic Essence,” considered as an evolving energy. Three stages [sub-physical] on the elemental side; the mineral kingdom; three stages on the objective physical[288] side—these are the [first or preliminary] seven links of the evolutionary chain.[289]
“Preliminary” because they are preparatory, and though belonging in fact to the natural, they would be more correctly described as the sub-natural evolution. This process makes a halt in its stages at the third, at the threshold of the fourth stage, when it becomes, on the plane of natural evolution, the first really manward stage, thus forming [pg 200] with the three elemental kingdoms, the ten, the Sephirothal number. It is at this point that begins:
A descent of spirit into matter equivalent to an ascent in physical evolution; a reäscent from the deepest depths of materiality (the mineral) towards its status quo ante, with a corresponding dissipation of concrete organism—up to Nirvâna, the vanishing point of differentiated matter.[290]