HPB-SB-14-76: Difference between revisions

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{{Style P-Subtitle|{{Style S-Small capitals|(From an Anglo-Indian to a London Theosophist.)}}}}

[There appeared in the Theosophist of last month a paper—“Fragments of Occult Truth” (No. IV.)—which dealt with the evolution of man. To my great regret it was found impossible to transfer it to these columns. It is equally impossible to present any intelligible summary of its contents. I can but hope that when these letters—the most able and clear presentation of truth from the point of view occupied by the writer and those whom he represents that we have yet had—are gathered into a volume, all who interest themselves in these matters will find opportunity of studying them consecutively. I may say, however, that the broad idea presented is that the evolution of man is not a process carried out on this planet alone, but is effected through various lives on various planets. This earth is but a link in a mighty chain of worlds, through which all individual spiritual entities have, alike, to pass. These worlds differing in their essential conditions of existence provide the spirit with various schools of training. On this earth, where spirit and matter are pretty evenly balanced, we have one set of conditions, low in the scale of progression. In other worlds, where spirit predominates, we have training of another sort. Evolution is accomplished by a “spiral” progress through these worlds, and is so far from being complete that the man of the future will hold a position in respect to us similar to that which we hold with respect to the ape of the Darwinian. This is the broad idea which is strikingly elaborated in the paper to which I am referring. The reader must, for the present, be referred to it for further information. What I have written is sufficient to make intelligible what follows.—M. A. ({{Style S-Small capitals|Oxon}}).]

When we come to examine the evolution of man on our own planet the explanation has to be drawn out on a larger scale than that which served for a sketch of the whole cosmogony. Our career on the preceding planets of the descending series is, for the present, over and done with. Few of us know enough of our lives there to be curious about details. But here, the phenomena of the world about us, and the period we are passing through are all replete with interest. Our wish would be to get explanations of the conditions out of which these have originated, and of the results to which they are tending, that should be as enlarged and precise as our knowledge of the actual present. But, in truth, an explanation on that scale of the phenomena immediately preceding and immediately following our present life would evidently require an exhaustive knowledge of all natural laws and operations lying outside the physical group we have grown familiar with. And the exposition of this knowledge would involve the complete development of sciences, the very alphabet of which is hidden from the world as yet; in short, it is no less impossible to comprehend all Nature’s detail—the infinitely little—completely, than it is to fathom the infinitely great. But just as the principles of evolution carried on through the series of worlds, of which our planet is one, have been found susceptible of an explanation, which, if not minute, is sufficiently definite to be intelligible, so it is possible now to sketch on a somewhat larger scale, corresponding to the nearer approach of the subject, the process of evolution carried on in the case of this single planet. The area of Nature to be dealt with is less enormous, and, therefore, a treatment of its phenomena down a corresponding level of detail gives us a closer insight into the process under investigation.