Chapter X (part 6)

The mind will have to open its doors to objects each possessing such an enormous, such an infinite number of signs and characteristics that to comprehend them by means of the reason is absolutely impossible. And if one wants to comprehend them by his reason he will certainly be forced to dismember these objects somehow, to take them at first in some one sense, from one side, in one section of their being. What is "man" out of space and time? He is all humanity, man as the "species"— Homo Sapiens , but at the same time possessing the characteristics, peculiarities and individual ear-marks of all separate men. This is you, and I, and Julius Caesar and the conspirators who killed him, and the newsboy I pass every day—all kings, all slaves, all saints, all sinners—all taken together, fused into one indivisible being of a man , like a great living tree in which are bark, wood, and dry twigs; green leaves p. 121 flowers and fruit. Is it possible to conceive of and understand such a being by our reason? The idea of such a "great being" inspired the artist or artists who created the Sphinx . ______ But what is motion? Why do we feel it if it does not exist? About this last, Mabel Collins, a theosophical writer of the first period of modern theosophy, writes very beautifully in her poetical Story of the Year . . . . The entire true meaning of the earthly life consists only in the mutual contact between personalities and in the efforts of growth. Those things which are called events and circumstances and which are regarded as the real contents of life—are in reality only the conditions which make these contacts and this growth possible. In these words there sounds already quite a new understanding of the real . And truly the illusion of motion cannot arise out of nothing. When we are travelling by train, and the trees are running, overtaking one another, we know that this motion is an illusory one, that the trees are immobile, and that the illusion of their motion is created by our own. As in these particular cases, so also in general as regards all motion in the material world, the foundation of which the "positivists" consider to be motion in the finest particles of matter, we, recognizing this motion as an illusory one, will ask: Is not an illusion of this motion created by some motion inside our consciousness? So it will be. And having established this, we shall endeavor to define what kind of motion is going on inside our consciousness, i.e., what is moving relatively to what? H. P. Blavatsky, in her first book, Isis Unveiled , touched upon the same question concerning the relation of life to time and motion . She writes: As our planet revolves every year around the sun and at the same time turns once in every twenty-four hours upon its own axis, thus traversing p. 122 minor cycles within a larger one, so is the work of the smaller cyclic periods accomplished and recommenced. The revolution of the physical world, according to the ancient doctrine, is attended by a like revolution in the world of intellect—the spiritual evolution of the world proceeding in cycles, like the physical one. Thus we see in history a regular alternation of ebb and flow in the tide of human progress. The great kingdoms and empires of the world, after reaching the culmination of their greatness, descend again in accordance with the same law by which they ascended; till, having reached the lowest point, humanity reasserts itself and mounts up once more, the height of its attainment being, by this law of ascending progression by cycles, somewhat higher than the point from which it had before descended. The division of the history of mankind into Golden, Silver, Copper and Iron Ages, is not a fiction. We see the same thing in the literature of peoples.