PENETRALIA
THE SECRET OF THE SOUL
We have now arrived at our final study, which we have approached step by step amid the labyrinth of the mysteries concealed beneath the Veil of Isis. We stand at last upon the very threshold of the sacred Adytum, the "Holy of Holies," from whence proceeds our final revelation of that inmost conception of Man's identity with his Creator—the Penetralia of his Being—the last secret of the incarnated soul.
The written word almost fails us—does fail in fact, when we come to the difficult task of externalizing ideas, the sublimity of which is so infinitely beyond the crystallized images of matter that, they can only be realized in their true glory, when the purified soul can view them from the ineffable heights of eternal spirit. We are lost, dazed, at the brilliancy of the spiritual imagery that opens out before us, in its fathomless stretch of the eternities that are past, of the ever- imperishable present, and the unborn eternities yet to be; all of them linked together in one grand chain of spiritual relationship and deathless identity; as Man, the Angel, God; and God, the Angel, Man; as the triune Cycle of Being, within the incomprehensible Cycle of Necessity; which constitutes Nature's cosmic university for the complete graduation, education, and purification, of that self-conscious, Deific atom of life, whose expression becomes the human soul. Ah! my brothers could you, but for one single instant, realize WHO you are, WHERE you are journeying, and WHAT your final destiny, every earthly moment at your disposal would be rightly used, and every hour considered too short for your efforts to aid your fellow-man. Selfishness, wealth, and power, would be so utterly contemptible in your sight that their possession would be considered a fearful affliction and a curse, the moment they exceeded the comfortable requirements of mundane existence.
Leave self and the world behind you for the present, and, for the moment, leave your life, with its manifold vanities, in the outer court, and together let us cross the threshold and enter the door of the Temple. There! At last we have entered the Sacred Sanctuary, my brother, and we stand face to face with the imperishable truth of our being—the truth which makes us free, the truth which must ultimately prevail, by virtue of its own inherent Divinity; and we realize Man as he really is, not as he outwardly seems to be. We view him as a molecule, composed of a congregation of separate atoms, all of them held in their places by the centripetal force of the central human atom of life. And yet, small as he is, small as his kingdom is, compared with the mighty creation of which he is a part, he possesses all the inherent qualities of the whole. This, then, is our first conception—Man, is a microcosmic molecule, an atom of divine life.
The scene changes within the chamber, and upon the shimmering, luminous veil, yet before us, we view the large and mighty planet called the Earth. Not as a revolving satellite of the Sun, but as she really is, a vital organ of the macrocosm, the stellar womb of the solar system, the matrix which produces the material organic form of humanity. When the Earth was without form and void," as we are informed in the mystical language of Genesis, the human soul had not yet reached the state, or grade, in the celestial university that desired the Earth and its temporary illusions. Hence this state was void, an unborn idea, the To Be, and darkness, symbolical of complete lack of life and intelligence, "was upon the face of the deep," silent space.
Again the scene changes, and one by one the numberless planets, planetoids, moons, meteors, comets, and other attendant bodies, pass before the eye of the soul as we gaze upon the curtain of this Sacred Penetralia, each orb belonging to some portion of the Astral Man, each great planet constituting some vital function of the macrocosmic organism, and conferring those qualities upon each and every single atom pertaining to that degree of life, so that the solar system becomes individualized as a grand cosmic organism, its attendant satellites constituting its vital organs, and the shining Zodiac its outward form. So, also, each planet is a living, cosmic individual, intensely alive; living, moving, breathing, and bringing forth its offspring of like substance, matter, in obedience to the potential demand of incarnating spirit. The Sun is alive, glowing with life, and constitutes the heart and arterial center of all the circulating fluids of the stellar anatomy.
Scientists may continue to predict, as they have been predicting, the day when solar radiation will cease, but their predictions will prove as worthless as the sighing of the summer wind, so far as reality is concerned. "It is an incomprehensible mystery to science," says Sir Robert Ball, in his "Story of the Heavens," "how the Sun has been able to maintain its heat with such regularity in the past, for there has been no appreciable change in the Earth's temperature for thousands of years." What it is to-day it was ten thousand years ago—yea, Sir Robert Ball, and will be in ten thousand years to come. You may wonder, and the Royal College may wonder, but in the meantime the mighty, pulsating Sun continues beating out its rhythmic vibrations of spiritual and dynamic life—continues, and will continue, to send the exhilarating current throughout every atom, to the remotest part of his solar dominions, and the same current RETURNS TO HIM AGAIN, UNDIMINISHED, for the purification which his glowing, transmuting photosphere alone, can give, to be sent forward again, upon its mission of light, life, and love, around the vital, organic worlds of the astral organism. There is nothing lost, no radiation of energy dispersed upon the unformed, lifeless ether. From the radiating solar focus of Divinity it comes, and to him, undiminished it returns, and so on forever and ever; until the last Deific atom has won its laggard way back to the shining throne of God.
The Sun breathes. The pulsating process of dynamic respiration, eternally repeated during the grand period of a solar lifetime, renews its vital energies, and supplies itself, with the full abundance of the ever-living spirit, transmitted from the shoreless ether in which it lives. It needs no other food, except the magnetic nutriment it receives from each vital organ, or planet, in return for the electrical life current it transmits to them. Just as the human lungs inflate themselves with the vital atmosphere, (which is only the ether, dynamically diluted by the Earth to harmonize with our conditions), to oxygenate the blood and add fresh fuel to the physical furnace, or supply finer essences to the nervous centers. Just as the human heart, with its continual, rhythmic pulsations, propels forth the circulating fluid to every part of the human frame; so does the central heart and lungs of the Grander Man of the Skies, (the Sun) send forth its vitalizing energy to every part of the universe.
Such are the crowding thoughts, born of interior knowledge, that flood the mind as we view these sacred revelations within the sacred chamber of the soul. As yet, we are gazing upon the undulating flow of the astral light. We yearn within our utmost being to become the center of the Penetralia and gaze upon the glorious radiance of the Adonai, from whose ineffable presence we are only screened by the last shining veil of semi-transparent matter, that waves and trembles with every spiritual aspiration. The soul sends forth its pleading cry for light: "Who and what is God?" Faintly, as the distant vesper sounds upon the cooling eve, comes the answer: "Who and what art thou? What canst thou see? What delectable blessing does Nature vouchsafe to the pure in heart?" We tremble with the awful, yet thrilling, revelation. We know dimly, yet fail to realize in our outward consciousness the full import thereof. We realize wherein the mistaken selfhood hath become the only begotten of the Father, but the revelation is too much, and too little. We know that, faint as the voice seemed to the yet unprepared soul, an echo only, IT WAS THE VOICE OF THE ADONAI BEHIND THE VEIL. And now we crave the knowledge of the Where and Whither.