THEOSOPHY – THE WORD

NATURE

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That it has many shortcomings she is fully aware; all that she claims for it is that, romantic as it may seem to many, its logical coherence and consistency entitle this new Genesis to rank, at any rate, on a level with the “working hypothesis” so freely accepted by modern science. Further it claims consideration, not be reason of any appeal to dogmatic authroity, but because it closely adheres to Nature, and follows the laws of uniformity and analogy.

The aim of this work may be thus stated: to show that Nature is not a “fortuitous concurrence of atoms” and to assign to man his rightful place in the scheme of the Universe; to rescue rom degradation the archaic truths which are the basis of all religions; and to uncover, to some extent, the fundamental unity from which they all spring; finally, to show that the occult side of Nature has never been approached by the Science of modern civilization.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p.viii]

By the third symbol – the circle divided in two by the horizontal line of the diameter – the first manifestation of creative (still passive, because feminine) Nature was meant. The first shadowy perception of man connected with procreation is feminine, because man knows his mother more than his father. Hence female deities were more sacred than the male. Nature is therefore feminine, and, to a degree, objective and tangible, and the spirit Principle which fructifies it is concealed. By adding to the circle with the horizontal line in it, a perpendicular line, the tau was formed – T – the oldest form of the letter.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p5]

These abstractions must of necessity be postulated as the cause of the material Universe which presents itself to the senses and intellect; and they underlie the secondary and subordinate powers of Nature, which, anthropomorphized, have been worshipped as God and gods by the common herd of every age.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p44]

The radical unity of the ultimate essence of each constituent part of compounds in Nature – from Star to mineral Atom, from the highest Dhyan Chohan to the smallest infusoria, in the fullest acceptation of the term, and whether applied to the spiritual, intellectual, or physical worlds – this is the one fundamental law in Occult Science. “The Deity is boundless and infinite expansion,” says an Occult axiom;...

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p120]

Moreover, the one eternal LAW unfolds everything in the (to be) manifested Nature on a sevenfold principle; among the rest, the countless circular chains of worlds, composed of seven globes, graduated on the four lower planes of the world of formation (the three others belonging to the Archetypal Universe). Out of these seven only one, the lowest and the most material of those globes, is within our plane or means of perception, the six others lying outside of it and being therefore invisible to the terrestrial eye. Every such chain of worlds is the progeny and creation of another, lower, and dead chain – its reincarnation, so to say.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p152]

It now becomes plain that there exists in Nature a triple evolutionary scheme, for the formation of the three periodical Upadhis; or rather three separate schemes of evolution, which in our system are inextricably interwoven and interblended at every point. These are the Monadic (or spiritual), the intellectual, and the physical evolutions. These three are the finite aspects or the reflections on the field of Cosmic Illusion of ATMA, the seventh, the ONE REALITY.

1. The Monadic is, as the name implies, concerned with the growth and development into still higher phases of activity of the Monad in conjunction with:

2. The Intellectual, represented by the Manasa-Dhyanis (the Solar Devas, or the Agnishwatta Pitris) the “givers of intelligence and consciousness” to man and:

3. The Physical, represented by the Chhayas of the lunar Pitris, round which Nature has concreted the present physical body. This body serves as the vehicle for the “growth” (to use a misleading word) and the transformations through Manas and – owing to the accumulation of experiences – of the finite into the INFINITE, of the transient into the Eternal and Absolute.

Each of these three systems has its own laws, and is ruled and guided by different sets of the highest Dhyanis or “Logoi.” Each is represented in the constitution of man, the Microcosm of the great Macrocosm; and it is the union of these three streams in him which makes him the complex being he now is.

“Nature,” the physical evolutionary Power, could never evolve intelligence unaided – she can only create “senseless forms,” as will be seen in our “ANTHROPOGENESIS.” The “Lunar Monads” cannot progress, for they have not yet had sufficient touch with the forms created by “Nature” to allow of their accumulating experiences through its means. It is the Manasa-Dhyanis who fill up the gap, and they represent the evolutionary power of Intelligence and Mind, the link between “Spirit” and “Matter” – in this Round.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p181-2]

The very fact that adaptations do occur, that the fittest do survive in the struggle for existence, shows that what is called “unconscious Nature”* is in reality an aggregate of forces manipulated by semi-intelligent beings (Elementals) guided by High Planetary Spirits, (Dhyani-Chohans), whose collective aggregate forms the manifested verbum of the unmanifested LOGOS, and constitutes at one and the same time the MIND of the Universe and its immutable LAW.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p277-8]

The great archaic system known from prehistoric ages as the sacred Wisdom Science, one that is contained and can be traced in every old as well as in every new religion, had, and still has, its universal language – suspected by the Mason Ragon – the language of the Hierophants, which has seven “dialects,” so to speak, each referring, and being specially appropriated, to one of the seven mysteries of Nature. Each had its own symbolism. Nature could thus be either read in its fulness, or viewed from one of its special aspects.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p310]

Not the “efforts” of the trained psychic faculties of an Initiate into Eastern metaphysics, and the mysteries of creative Nature. It is the profane of the past ages who have degraded the pure ideal of cosmic creation into an emblem of mere human reproduction and sexual functions: it is the esoteric teachings, and the initiates of the Future, whose mission it is, and will be, to redeem and ennoble once more the primitive conception so sadly profaned by its crude and gross application to exoteric dogmas and personations by theological and ecclesiastical religionists. The silent worship of abstract or noumenal Nature, the only divine manifestation, is the one ennobling religion of Humanity.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p381fn]

How much more grandiose, philosophical and poetical is the real distinction – for whoever is able to understand and appreciate it – made between the immaculate virgin of the ancient Pagans and the modern Papal conception. With the former, the ever-youthful mother nature, the antitype of her prototypes, the sun and moon, generates and brings forth her “mind-born” son, the Universe. The Sun and Moon, as male-female deities, fructify the earth, the microcosmical mother, and the latter conceives and brings forth, in her turn.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p399]

But there are two distinct aspects in universal Esotericism, Eastern and Western, in all those personations of the female Power in nature, or nature – the noumenal and the phenomenal. One is its purely metaphysical aspect, as described by the learned lecturer in his Notes on the Bhagavad-Gita; the other terrestrial and physical, and at the same time divine from the stand-point of practical human conception and Occultism. They are all the symbols and personifications of Chaos, the “Great Deep” or the Primordial Waters of Space, the impenetrable VEIL between the INCOGNIZABLE and the LOGOS of Creation.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p431]

Science cannot, owing to the very nature of things, unveil the mystery of the universe around us. Science can, it is true, collect, classify, and generalize upon phenomena; but the occultist, arguing from admitted metaphysical data, declares that the daring explorer, who would probe the inmost secrets of Nature, must transcend the narrow limitations of sense, and transfer his consciousness into the region of noumena and the sphere of primal causes. To effect this, he must develop faculties which are absolutely dormant – save in a few rare and exceptional cases – in the constitution of the off-shoots of our present Fifth Root-race in Europe and America. He can in no other conceivable manner collect the facts on which to base his speculations. Is this not apparent on the principles of Inductive Logic and Metaphysics alike?

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p477]

On the question of the “Seven Governors,” as Hermes calls the “Seven Builders,” the Spirits which guide the operations of nature, the animated atoms of which are the shadows, in their world, of their Primaries in the astral realms – this work will, of course, besides the men of Science, have every materialist against it. But this opposition can, at most, be only temporary.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p480]

For the Occultists who say that the author of nature is nature itself, something indistinct and inseparable from the Deity, it follows that those who are conversant with the occult laws of nature, and know how to change and provoke Dew conditions in ether, may – not modify the laws, but work and do the same in accordance with those immutable laws.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p489fn]

Nature behaving in actu ever esoterically, and being, as the Kabalists say, in abscondito, can only be judged by the profane through her appearance, and that appearance is always deceitful on the physical plane. On the other hand, the naturalists refuse to blend physics with metaphysics, the body with its informing soul and spirit, which they prefer ignoring.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p610]

Yet it [the great knowledge] is all there, and one by one facts and processes in Nature’s workshops are permitted to find their way into the exact Sciences, while mysterious help is given to rare individuals in unravelling its arcana. It is at the close of great Cycles, in connection with racial development, that such events generally take place. We are at the very close of the cycle of 5,000 years of the present Aryan Kaliyuga; and between this time and 1897 there will be a large rent made in the Veil of Nature, and materialistic science will receive a deathblow.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p612]

Most certainly chance is “impossible.” There is no “chance” in Nature, wherein everything is mathematically co-ordinate and mutually related in its units. “Chance,” says Coleridge, “is but the pseudonym of God (or Nature), for those particular cases which He does not choose to subscribe openly with His sign manual.” Replace the word “God” by that of Karma and it will become an Eastern axiom. Therefore, the sidereal “prophecies” of the zodiac, as they are called by Christian mystics, never point to any one particular event, however solemn and sacred it may be for some one portion of humanity, but to ever-recurrent, periodical laws in nature, understood but by the Initiates of the sidereal gods themselves.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p653]

..........

Thus physical nature, when left to herself in the creation of animal and man, is shown to have failed. She can produce the first two and the lower animal kingdoms, but when it comes to the turn of man, spiritual, independent and intelligent powers are required for his creation, besides the “coats of skin” and the “Breath of animal Life.” The human Monads of preceding Rounds need something higher than purely physical materials to build their personalities with, under the penalty of remaining even below any “Frankenstein” animal.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.II, p56]

It is the universal matrix or the “Great Deep.” Venus, the great Mother-Virgin, issues forth from the Sea-wave, and Cupid or Eros is her son. But Venus is the later mythological variant of Gaia (or Gaea), the Earth, which, in its higher aspect is Nature (Prakriti), and metaphysically Aditi, and even Mulaprakriti, the root of Prakriti or its noumenon.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.II, p65]

Occultism says: “The astral prototypes of the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms up to man have taken that time (300 million years) to evolve, re-forming out of the cast-off materials of the preceding Round, which, though very dense and physical in their own cycle, are relatively ethereal as compared with the materiality of our present middle Round. At the expiration of these 300 million years, Nature, on the way to the physical and material, down the arc of descent, begins with mankind and works downwards, hardening or materialising forms as it proceeds. Thus the fossils found in strata, to which an antiquity, not of eighteen, but of many hundreds of millions of years, must be ascribed, belong in reality to forms of the preceding Round, which, while living, were far more ethereal than physical, as we know the physical.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.II, p68fn]

Secondary gods or temporary powers in Nature (the Forces) are doomed to disappear; it is only the spiritual potentiality in man which can lead him to become one with the INFINITE and the ABSOLUTE.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.II, p79fn]

It is a strange law of Nature that, on this plane, the higher (Spiritual) Nature should be, so to say, in bondage to the lower. Unless the Ego takes refuge in the Atman, the ALL-SPIRIT, and merges entirely into the essence thereof, the personal Ego may goad it to the bitter end. This cannot be thoroughly understood unless the student makes himself familiar with the mystery of evolution, which proceeds on triple lines – spiritual, psychic and physical.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.II, p109]

In his turn, man grew more physical, by re-absorbing into his system that which he had given out, and which became transformed in the living anima crucibles through which it had passed, owing to Nature’s alchemical transmutations. There were animals in those days of which our modern naturalists have never dreamed; and the stronger became physical material man, the giants of those times, the more powerful were his emanations. Once that Androgyne “humanity” separated into sexes, transformed by Nature into child-bearing engines, it ceased to procreate its like through drops of vital energy oozing out of the body. But while man was still ignorant of his procreative powers on the human plane, (before his Fall, as a believer in Adam would say,) all this vital energy, scattered far and wide from him, was used by Nature for the production of the first mammal-animal forms.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.II, p170]

But the “supernatural” of Renan belongs to dogma and its dead letter. It has nought to do with its Spirit nor with the reality of facts in Nature. If theology asks us to believe that four or five thousand years ago men lived 900 years and more, that a portion of mankind, the enemies of the people of Israel exclusively, was composed of giants and monsters, we decline to believe that such a thing existed in Nature 5,000 years back. For Nature never proceeds by jumps and starts, and logic and common sense, besides geology, anthropology and ethnology, have justly rebelled against such assertions. But if that same theology, giving up her fantastic chronology, had claimed that men lived 969 years – the age of Methuselah – five million years ago, we would have nothing to say against the claim. For in those days the physical frame of men was, compared to the present human body, as that of a megalosaurus to a common lizard.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.II, p194-5]

There is one eternal Law in nature, one that always tends to adjust contraries and to produce final harmony. It is owing to this law of spiritual development superseding the physical and purely intellectual, that mankind will become freed from its false gods, and find itself finally – SELF-REDEEMED.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.II, p420]

Such is the course of Nature under the sway of KARMIC LAW: of the ever present and the ever-becoming Nature. For, in the words of a Sage, known only to a few Occultists:– “THE PRESENT IS THE CHILD OF THE PAST; THE FUTURE, THE BEGOTTEN OF THE PRESENT.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.II, p446]

But the Occultists, who regard physical nature as a bundle of most varied illusions on the plane of deceptive perceptions; who recognise in every pain and suffering but the necessary pangs of incessant procreation: a series of stages toward an ever-growing perfectibility, which is visible in the silent influence of never-erring Karma, or abstract nature – the Occultists, we say, view the great Mother otherwise.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.II, p475]

The Secret Doctrine points out, as a self-evident fact, that Mankind, collectively and individually, is, with all manifested nature, the vehicle (a) of the breath of One Universal Principle, in its primal differentiation; and (b) of the countless “breaths” proceeding from that One BREATH in its secondary and further differentiations, as Nature with its many mankinds proceeds downwards toward the planes that are ever increasing in materiality. The primary Breath informs the higher Hierarchies; the secondary – the lower, on the constantly descending planes.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.II, p492]

This number is closely connected with the moon, whose occult influence is ever manifesting itself in septenary periods. It is the moon which is the guide of the occult side of terrestrial nature, while the Sun is the regulator and factor of manifested life; and this truth was ever evident to the Seers and the adepts. Jacob Boehme, by insisting on the fundamental doctrine of the seven properties of everlasting mother Nature, proved himself thereby a great Occultist.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.II, p595]

Moreover, the quaternary though an even, therefore a female (“infernal”) number, varied according to its form. This is shown by Stanley. The 4 was called by the Pythagoreans the Key-Keeper of Nature; but in union with the 3 which made it seven, it became the most perfect and harmonious number – nature herself.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.II, p600-1]

It is the knowledge of the natural laws that make of seven the root nature-number, so to say, in the manifested world – at any rate in our present terrestrial life-cycle – and the wonderful comprehension of its workings, that unveiled to the ancients so many of the mysteries of nature. It is these laws, again, and their processes on the sidereal, terrestrial, and moral planes, which enabled the old astronomers to calculate correctly the duration of the cycles and their respective effects on the march of events; to record beforehand (prophecy, it is called) the influence which they will have on the course and development of the human races.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.II, p621]

Theosophists will remember that, according to Occult teaching, Cyclic pralayas so-called are but obscurations, during which periods Nature, i.e., everything visible and invisible on a resting planet – remains in statu quo. Nature rests and slumbers, no work of destruction going on on the globe even if no active work is done. All forms, as well as their astral types, remain as they were at the last moment of its activity. The “night” of a planet has hardly any twilight preceding it. It is caught like a huge mammoth by an avalanche, and remains slumbering and frozen till the next dawn of its new day – a very short one indeed in comparison to the “Day of Brahmâ.”

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.II, p660fn]

To the first of the two queries the answer is: We believe it because the first law in nature is uniformity in diversity, and the second – analogy. “As above, so below.”

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.II, p699]

Thus, when we say that Nature provides for every animal and plant, whether large or small, we speak correctly. For, it is those terrestrial spirits of Nature, who form the aggregated Nature; which, if it fails occasionally in its design, is neither to be considered blind, nor to be taxed with the failure; since, belonging to a differentiated sum of qualities and attributes, it is in virtue of that alone conditioned and imperfect.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.II, p732]

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Help Nature and work on with her and Nature will regard thee as one of her creators and make obeisance.
And she will open wide before thee the portals of her secret chambers, lay bare before thy gaze the treasures hidden in the very depths of her pure virgin bosom. Unsullied by the hand of matter she shows her treasures only to the eye of Spirit - the eye which never closes, the eye for which there is no veil in all her kingdoms.

Then will she show thee the means and way, the first gate and the second, the third, up to the very seventh. And then, the goal - beyond which lie, bathed in the sunlight of the Spirit, glories untold unseen by any save the eye of the Soul.

[Voice of the Silence Vs.66,67,68]

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But you must know and remember one thing: we but follow and servilely copy nature in her works.

[Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, Letter 12, Chronological Edition or Letter 37, Barker Numbering.]

... the adept sees and feels and lives in the very source of all fundamental truths – the Universal Spiritual Essence of Nature, SHIVA the Creator, the Destroyer, and the Regenerator. As Spiritualists of to-day have degraded “Spirit,” so have the Hindus degraded Nature by their anthropomorphic conceptions of it. Nature alone can incarnate the Spirit of limitless contemplation. “Absorbed in the absolute self-unconsciousness of physical Self, plunged in the depths of true Being, which is no being but eternal, universal Life,” his whole form as immoveable and white as the eternal summits of snow in Kailasa where he sits, above care, above sorrow, above sin and worldliness, a mendicant, a sage, a healer, the King of Kings, the Yogi of Yogis, such is the ideal Shiva of Yoga Shastras, the culmination of Spiritual Wisdom. . . .

[Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, Letter 17, Chronological Edition or Letter 55, Barker Numbering.]

If you hear seldom from me, never feel disappointed, my Brother, but say – “It is my fault.” Nature has linked all parts of her Empire together by subtle threads of magnetic sympathy, and, there is a mutual correlation even between a star and a man; thought runs swifter than the electric fluid, and your thought will find me if projected by a pure impulse, as mine will find, has found, and often impressed your mind. We may move in cycles of activity divided – not entirely separated from each other.

[Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, Letter 47, Chronological Edition or Letter 132, Barker Numbering.]

Modern science is our best ally. Yet it is generally that same science which is made the weapon to break our heads with. However, you will have to bear in mind (a) that we recognize but one element in Nature (whether spiritual or physical) outside which there can be no Nature since it is Nature itself, and which as the Akasa pervades our solar system, every atom being part of itself, pervades throughout space and is space in fact, which pulsates as in profound sleep during the pralayas, and [is] the universal Proteus, the ever active Nature during the Manvantaras; (b) that consequently spirit and matter are one, being but a differentiation of states not essences,...

[Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, Letter 65, Chronological Edition or Letter 168, Barker Numbering.]

Those who know they are dead in their physical body can only be either adepts or – sorcerers; and these two are the exceptions to the general rule. Both having been “co-workers with nature,” the former for good, the latter – for bad, in her work of creation and in that of destruction, they are the only ones who may be called immortal – in the Kabalistic and the esoteric sense of course.

[Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, Letter 70-C, Chronological Edition or Letter 210, Barker Numbering.]

The “obscuration” comes on only when the last man of whatever Round has passed into the sphere of effects. Nature is too well, too mathematically adjusted to cause mistakes to happen in the exercise of her functions. The obscuration of the planet on which are now evoluting the races of the fifth Round men – will, of course “be behind the few avant couriers” who are now here.

[Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, Letter 70-C, Chronological Edition or Letter 215, Barker Numbering.]

Evil has no existence per se and is but the absence of good and exists but for him who is made its victim. It proceeds from two causes, and no more than good is it an independent cause in nature. Nature is destitute of goodness or malice; she follows only immutable laws when she either gives life and joy, or sends suffering [and] death, and destroys what she has created. Nature has an antidote for every poison and her laws a reward for every suffering. The butterfly devoured by a bird becomes that bird, and the little bird killed by an animal goes into a higher form. It is the blind law of necessity and the eternal fitness of things, and hence cannot be called Evil in Nature. The real evil proceeds from human intelligence and its origin rests entirely with reasoning man who dissociates himself from Nature. Humanity, then, alone is the true source of evil. Evil is the exaggeration of good, the progeny of human selfishness and greediness. Think profoundly and you will find that save death – which is no evil but a necessary law, and accidents which will always find their reward in a future life – the origin of every evil whether small or great is in human action, in man whose intelligence makes him the one free agent in Nature. It is not nature that creates diseases, but man.... Therefore it is neither nature nor an imaginary Deity that has to be blamed, but human nature made vile by selfishness.

[Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, Letter 88, Chronological Edition or Letter 273-4, Barker Numbering.]

Meanwhile we may say that it is motion that governs the laws of nature; and that it governs them as the mechanical impulse given to running water which will propel them either in a direct line or along hundreds of side furrows they may happen to meet on their way and whether those furrows are natural grooves or channels prepared artificially by the hand of man.

[Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, Letter 90, Chronological Edition or Letter 280-1, Barker Numbering.]

We know of no phenomenon in nature entirely unconnected with either magnetism or electricity – since, where there are motion, heat, friction, light, there magnetism and its alter ego (according to our humble opinion) electricity will always appear, as either cause or effect – or rather both if we but fathom the manifestation to its origin. All the phenomena of earth currents, terrestrial magnetism and atmospheric electricity are due to the fact that the earth is an electrified conductor, whose potential is ever changing owing to its rotation and its annual orbital motion, the successive cooling and heating of the air, the formation of clouds and rain, storms and winds, etc.

[Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, Letter 93B, Chronological Edition or Letter 317, Barker Numbering.]

We are taken to task for not giving out to every man of learning who had joined the T.S. the fruits of the researches of generations of occultists who had all devoted their lives to it, and who had as often lost them in the great struggle of wrenching her secrets from the heart of Nature. Unless we did that – Occultism could not be recognised: it has to remain within the limbo of magic and superstition, spiritualism – in the sight of some – fraud in the opinion of others.

[Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, Letter 136, Chronological Edition or Letter 451, Barker Numbering.]

And to be in direct communication with the intelligence of Nature one must become an Adept.[Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, L.B.S.,App.I, p502]

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One who rejects a priori, or even doubts, the immortality of man’s soul can never believe in its Creator, and blind to what is heterogeneous in his eyes, will remain still more blind to the proceeding of the latter from Homogeneity. In relation to the Cabala, or the compound mystic textbook of all the great secrets of Nature, we do not know of anyone in the present century who could have commanded a sufficient dose of that moral courage which fires the heart of the true adept with the sacred flame of propagandism – force him into defying public opinion, by displaying familiarity with that sublime work.

[C.W.I, p102]

Hiraf is right again when he says that “knowing that their mysteries, if divulged,” in the present chaotic state of society, “would produce mere confusion and death,” they shut up that knowledge within themselves Heirs to the early heavenly wisdom of their first forefathers, they keep the keys which unlock the most guarded of Nature’s secrets, and impart them only gradually and with the greatest caution But still they do impart sometimes!

[C.W.I, p108]

But, in her eternal wisdom, Nature provides antidotes against moral as well as against mineral and vegetable poisons.

[C.W.I, p380]

We may add that the constant verification of such geological and meteorological predictions besides its scientific value is of the utmost philosophical importance to the student of theosophy. For it shows: (a) that there are few secrets in nature absolutely inaccessible to man’s endeavours to snatch them from her bosom; and (b) that Nature’s workshop is one vast clockwork guided by immutable laws in which there is no room for the caprices of special providence. Yet he, who has fathomed the ultimate secrets of the Proteus-nature – which changes but is ever the same – can, without disturbing the LAW, avail himself of the yet unknown correlations of natural Force to produce effects which would seem miraculous and impossible, but to those who are unacquainted with their causes.

[C.W.III, p150-1]

And to be in direct communication with the intelligence of Nature one must become an Adept.

[C.W.III, p294]

Nature is dual; there is a physical and material side, as there is a spiritual and moral side to it; and, there is both good and evil in it, the latter the necessary shadow to its light.

[C.W.III, p297]

What has become of the particles of matter which composed the physical bodies of “man’s predecessors on the earth”? They have long ago been ground over in the laboratory of Nature, and have entered into the composition of other forms. And the idea or design of the earlier forms has risen into superior idea or design which has impressed itself on later forms.

[C.W.III, p385]

The alleged law of Biogenesis is the result of the ignorance of the man of science of occult physics. It is accepted because the man of science was hitherto unable to find the necessary means to awaken into activity dormant life in what he terms an inorganic atom: hence the fallacy that a living thing can only be produced from a living thing, as though there ever was such a thing as dead matter in Nature!

[C.W.III, p112]

Animal heat is but so many life atoms in molecular motion. It requires no adept knowledge, but simply the natural gift of a good clairvoyant subject to see them passing to and fro, from man to objects and vice versa like a bluish lambent flame. Why then should not a broom, made of a shrub, which grew most likely in the vicinity of the building where the lazy novice lived, a shrub, perhaps, repeatedly touched by him while in a state of anger, provoked by his laziness and distaste to his duty, why should not a quantity of his life atoms have passed into the materials of the future besom and therein have been recognised by Buddha, owing to his superhuman (not supernatural) powers? The processes of nature are acts of incessant borrowing and giving back.

[C.W.V, p116]

You cannot be one with ALL, unless all your acts, thoughts and feelings synchronise with the onward march of nature. What is meant by the Brahmajñâni being beyond the reach of Karma, can be fully realized only by a man who has found out his exact position in harmony with the One Life in nature; that man sees how a Brahmajnani can act only in unison with nature and never in discord with it: to use the phraseology of our ancient writers on Occultism a Brahmajnani is a real “co-worker with nature.”

[C.W.V, p337-8]

When an adept has placed himself en rapport with the universal mind he becomes a real power in nature. Even on the objective plane of existence the difference between brain and muscular energy, in their capacity of producing wide-spread and far-reaching results, can be very easily perceived. The amount of physical energy expended by the discoverer of the steam engine might not have been more than that expended by a hard-working day-labourer. But the practical results of the coolie’s work can never be compared with the results achieved by the discovery of the steam engine. Similarly the ultimate effects of spiritual energy are infinitely greater than those of intellectual energy.

[C.W.V, p339]

Now it is universally admitted that the whole system of Nature is moving in a particular direction, and this direction, we are taught, is determined by the composition of two forces, namely, the one acting from that pole of existence ordinarily called “matter” towards the other pole called “spirit,” and the other in the opposite direction. The very fact that Nature is moving shows that these two forces are not equal in magnitude. The plane on which the activity of the first force predominates is called in occult treatises the “ascending arc,” and the corresponding plane of the activity of the other force is styled the “descending arc.” A little reflection will show that the work of evolution begins on the descending arc and works its way upwards through the ascending arc. From this it follows that the force directed towards spirit is the one which must, though not without hard struggle, ultimately prevail. This is the great directing energy of Nature, and although disturbed by the operation of the antagonistic force, it is this that gives the law to her; the other is merely its negative aspect, for convenience regarded as a separate agent.

[C.W.V, p340-1]

For, all religions divested of their man-made theologies and superlatively human ecclesiasticism rest on one and the same foundation, converge towards one focus: an ineradicable, congenital belief in an inner Nature reflected in the inner man, its microcosm; on this our earth, we can know of but one Light – the one we see. The Divine Principle, the WHOLE can be manifested to our consciousness, but through Nature and its highest tabernacle – man, in the words of Jesus, the only “temple of God.”

[C.W.V, p355]

But you must know and remember one thing: we but follow and servilely copy nature in her works.

[C.W.VI, p119fn]

The aforesaid instances sufficiently show that the scientist’s knowledge of nature is incapable of coinciding wholly and entirely with all that exists and may be found in it. Even without trespassing on other and different spheres and planets, and keeping strictly within the boundaries of our globe, it becomes evident that there exist in it thousands upon thousands of things unseen, unheard, and impalpable to the ordinary human senses. But let us admit, only for the sake of argument, that there may be – quite apart from the supernatural – a science that teaches mortals what may be termed supersensuous chemistry and physics; in plainer language – alchemy and the metaphysics of concrete not abstract nature, and every difficulty will be removed.

[C.W.VII, p75]

For, though the “fourth dimension” – if we must so call it – –exists no more independently of our perceptions and senses than our three-dimensional imagined space, nor as a locality, it still is, and exists for the beings evoluted and born in it as “a product of their understanding and their perceptions.” Nature never draws too harsh lines of demarcation, never builds impassable walls, and her unbridged “chasms” exist merely in the tame conceptions of certain naturalists. The two (and more) “spaces,” or planes of being, are sufficiently interblended to allow of a communication between those of their respective inhabitants who are capable of conceiving both a higher and a lower plane. There may be amphibian beings intellectually as there are amphibious creatures terrestrially.

[C.W.VII, p87-8]

This philosophy teaches that nature never leaves her work unfinished; if baffled at the first attempt, she tries again. When she evolves a human embryo, the intention is that a man shall be perfected – physically, intellectually, and spiritually. His body is to grow, mature, wear out, and die; his mind unfold, ripen, and be harmoniously balanced; his divine spirit illuminate and blend easily with the inner man.

[C.W.VII, p182]

We make no claims for any one religion. The supernatural does not exist in Nature, which is One, Absolute, and Infinite. We have never pretended that a miracle was a simple matter to us – a miracle being as impossible as a phenomenon, due to combinations as yet unknown to science, becomes possible as soon as it can be produced at will. We even say that every “manifestation with physical effects” (Spiritist vocabulary), whose nature escapes the perspicacity of natural sciences, is PSYCHOLOGICAL JUGGLERY. (Nota bene. Do not confuse this jugglery with that of Robert Houdin, please.)

[C.W.VIII, p72]

The truth of our doctrines rests on their philosophy and on facts of nature. To accuse us of claiming that our occult science surpasses that of Jesus or of Buddha is to slander us.

[C.W.VIII, p73]

Once Theosophy and its principles are known, it will be demonstrated that our philosophy is not only a “close relative of modern science,” but its forbear, though greatly transcending it in logic; and that its “metaphysics” is vaster, more beautiful and more powerful than any emanating from a dogmatic cult. It is the metaphysics of Nature in her chaste nakedness, both physical, moral and spiritual, alone capable of explaining the apparent miracle by means of natural and psychic laws, and of completing the mere physiological and pathological notions of Science, and of killing for ever the anthropomorphic Gods and the Devils of dualistic religions. No one believes more firmly in the Unity of the eternal laws than do the Theosophists.

[C.W.VIII, p76]

Theosophy, on the contrary, teaches that perfect, absolute justice reigns in nature, though short-sighted man fails to see it in its details on the material and even psychic plane, and that every man determines his own future. The true Hell is life on Earth, as an effect of Karmic punishment following the preceding life during which the evil causes were produced.

[C.W.VIII, p299]

We Theosophists, who do not limit nature, do not see the “cause of causes” or the unknowable deity behind that which is limitless, but identify that abstract Nature with the deity itself, and explain its visible laws as secondary effects on the plane of Universal Illusion.

[C.W.IX, p58fn]

“Is nature co-eternal with God?” It depends on what is meant by “nature.” If it is objective phenomenal nature, then the answer is – though ever latent in divine Ideation, but being only periodical as a manifestation, it cannot be co-eternal. But “abstract” nature and Deity, or what our correspondent calls “Self-existent cause or God,” are inseparable and even identical.

[C.W.IX, p168]

There are four (out of the many other) names of the various kinds of Esoteric Knowledge or Sciences given, even in the exoteric Puranas. There is (1) Yajna-Vidya, knowledge of the occult powers awakened in Nature by the performance of certain religious ceremonies and rites. (2) Mahavidya, the “great knowledge,” the magic of the Kabalists and of the Tantrika worship, often Sorcery of the worst description. (3) Guhya-Vidya, knowledge of the mystic powers residing in Sound (Ether), hence in the Mantras (chanted prayers or incantations) and depending on the rhythm and melody used; in other words a magical performance based on Knowledge of the Forces of Nature and their correlation; and (4) ATMA-VIDYA, a term which is translated simply “knowledge of the Soul,” true Wisdom by the Orientalists, but which means far more.

This last is the only kind of Occultism that any theosophist who admires Light on the Path, and who would be wise and unselfish, ought to strive after. All the rest is some branch of the “Occult Sciences,” i.e., arts based on the knowledge of the ultimate essence of all things in the Kingdoms of Nature – such as minerals, plants and animals – hence of things pertaining to the realm of material nature, however invisible that essence may be, and howsoever much it has hitherto eluded the grasp of Science. Alchemy, Astrology, Occult Physiology, Chiromancy, exist in Nature ...

[C.W.IX, p251-2]

Every hitherto far-hidden truth, whether concealed out of sight by Nature’s secretiveness or human craft, must and shall be unveiled some day or other.

[C.W.X, p231]

The “beacon-light” of Truth is nature without the illusory veil of the senses. It can be reached only when the adept has become absolute master of his personal self, able to control all his physical and psychic senses by the aid of his “seventh sense”, through which he is gifted also with the true wisdom of the gods – Theo-sophia.

[C.W.XI, p249]

These Hierarchies can only be symbolized as concentric circles of prismatic colors; each Hierarchy being represented by a series of seven concentric circles, each circle representing one of the prismatic colours in their natural order. But in each of these “wheels” one circle will be brighter and more vivid in colour than the rest and the wheel will have a surrounding Aura (a fringe, as the physicists call it) of that colour. This colour will be the characteristic colour of that Hierarchy as a whole. Each of these Hierarchies furnishes the essence (the soul) and is the “Builder” of one of the seven kingdoms of Nature, which are the three elemental kingdoms, the mineral, the vegetable, the animal, and the kingdom of spiritual man. Moreover, each Hierarchy furnishes the Aura of one of the seven principles in man with its specific colour. Further, as each of these Hierarchies is the Ruler of one of the Sacred Planets, it will easily be understood how Astrology came into existence, and that real Astrology has a strictly scientific basis.

[C.W.XII, p567]

... it is the Karma of the individuals who receive the seeds by asking for them, that will repay or punish those who fail in their duties to their HIGHER SELF. Nature is ever struggling even in its so-called inorganic and inanimate kingdoms towards progress and perfectibility by production; how much more the nature of conscious thinking man!

[C.W.XII, p583]

In the Egyptian and other cosmogonies, the first septenary group of emanating potencies is called the “Virgins of Light” and is represented collectively by the six-pointed star; this star “refers to the six Forces or Powers of Nature, the six planes, principles, etc., etc., all synthesized by the seventh, or the central point in the Star.

[C.W.XIII, p75fn]

Modern thought denies Divine Spirit in Nature, and the Divine element in mankind, the Soul’s immortality and every noble conception inherent in man.

[C.W.XIII, p154]

Ancient civilizations have never sacrificed Nature to speculation, but holding it as divine, have honoured her natural beauties by the erection of works of art, such as our modern electric civilization could never produce even in dream.

[C.W.XIII, p189]

It follows that this Substance – necessary and infinite, one and indivisible, is God, the only Self-existence, All-Perfection and absolute Infinitude. Take away the name of the Diety, and you have here the abstract ideas about the only creative Power of the World, of the Svabhavikas. “Nothing exists in the Universe but Substance – or Nature,” say the latter. “This Substance exists by, and through itself (Svabhavat) having never been either created or had a Creator.” “No” – echoes unconsciously Spinoza, “nothing exists in this world but Substance, and the modes of its attributes; and, as Substance cannot produce Substance there is no such thing as Creation.”

[C.W.XIII, p309]

But before accepting any of these theories we should feel thankful to Dr. Carpenter to finally show us what prepossession and expectancy which are given by such leading parts in the melodrama of those who are not ignorant of the fact that the ancients for long ages, previous to the Neo-Platonic school or the Hermetic philosophies, discovered, that in order that the human Voltaic battery should decompose and analyse the occult properties of nature, it required in addition to the physical a second and spiritual brain. Such a brain is either a gift of nature, in which case the person endowed with it is according to Cornelius Agrippa “a natural-born magician,” or, it is acquired by a long and painful self-development. For though, the common property of all, it yet may remain in its latent state during the course of a whole human life. At all events, science ought to accord to the inner man something higher than the possession of a mere machine of gray matter, evolving different states of consciousness, which vary but in their degrees of intensity.

[C.W.XIII, p347]

Plato’s motto “God geometrizes” was accepted by both Aryans and Jews; but while the former applied their Science of Correspondences to veil the most spiritual and sublime truths of Nature, the latter used their acumen to conceal only one – to them the most divine – of the mysteries of Evolution, namely, that of birth and generation, and then they deified the organs of the latter.

[C.W.XIV, p62]

It is upon these true Mathematics that the knowledge of the Kosmos and of all mysteries rests, and to one acquainted with them, it is the easiest thing possible to prove that both Vaidic and Biblical structures are based upon “God-in-Nature” and “Nature-in-God,” as the radical law. Therefore, this law – as everything else immutable and fixed in eternity – could find a correct expression only in those purest transcendental Mathematics referred to by Plato, especially in Geometry as transcendentally applied.

[C.W.XIV, p63]

No educated man or woman would turn away from any of the now called “superstitions,” which they believe to be based on nursery tales and ignorance, if they could only see the basis of fact that underlies every “superstition.” But let them once learn for a certainty that there is hardly a claim in the Occult Sciences that is not founded on philosophical and scientific facts in Nature, and they will pursue the study of those Sciences with the same, if not with greater, ardour than that they have expended in shunning them. This cannot be achieved at once, for to benefit mankind such truths have to be revealed gradually and with great caution, the public mind not being prepared for them.

[C.W.XIV, p64]

The Books of Hermes are the oldest repositories of numerical Symbology in Western Occultism. In them we find that the number ten is the Mother of the Soul, Life and Light being therein united. For as the sacred anagram Teruph shows in the Book of Keys (Numbers), the number 1 (one) is born from Spirit, and the number 10 (ten) from Matter; “the unity has made the ten, the ten, the unity”; and this is only the Pantheistic axiom, in other words “God in Nature and Nature in God.”

[C.W.XIV, p97]

It is in Visvakarman, the “omnificent” who becomes (mystically) Vikartana, the “sun shorn of his beams,” who suffers for his too ardent nature, and then becomes glorified (by purification), that the keynote of the Initiation into the greatest Mystery of Nature was struck. Hence the secret of the wonderful “similarity.”

[C.W.XIV, p142]

Logical and scientific observation of the phenomena in Nature, which alone leads man to the knowledge of eternal truths – provided he approaches the threshold of observation unbiassed by preconception and sees with his spiritual eye before he looks at things from their physical aspect – does not lie within the province of the masses. The marvels of the One Spirit of Truth, the ever-concealed and inaccessible Deity, can be unravelled and assimilated only through Its manifestations by the secondary “Gods,” Its acting powers. While the One and Universal Cause has to remain forever in abscondito, Its manifold action may be traced through the effects in Nature. The latter alone being comprehensible and manifest to average mankind, the Powers causing those effects were allowed to grow in the imagination of the populace. Ages later in the Fifth, the Aryan Race, some unscrupulous priests began to take advantage of the too easy beliefs of the people in every country, and finally raised those secondary Powers to the rank of God and Gods, thus succeeding in isolating them altogether from the One Universal Cause of all causes.

Henceforward the knowledge of the primeval truths remained entirely in the hands of the Initiates.

[C.W.XIV, p249-50]

Not of all the “Sons of Wisdom,” by any means, not even of the true Rosicrucian. For the latter would never put in such sickening relievo, in such a purely sensual and terrestrial, not to say animal light, the grandest, the noblest of Nature’s symbols. To the Rosicrucian, the “Rose” was the symbol of Nature, of the ever prolific and virgin Earth, or Isis, the mother and nourisher of man, considered as feminine and represented as a virgin woman by the Egyptian Initiates. Like every other personification of Nature and the Earth she is the sister and wife of Osiris, as the two characters answer to the personified symbol of the Earth, both she and the Sun being the progeny of the same mysterious Father, because the Earth is fecundated by the Sun – according to the earliest Mysticism – by divine insufflation. It was the pure ideal of mystic Nature that was personified in the “World Virgins,” the “Celestial Maidens,” and later on by the human Virgin, Mary, the Mother of the Saviour, the Salvator Mundi now chosen by the Christian World.

[C.W.XIV, p292]

No human born dogma, no institution, however sanctified by custom and antiquity can compare in sacredness with the dogma of Nature. The key of wisdom that unlocks the massive gates leading to the arcana of the innermost sanctuaries can be found hidden in her bosom only, and that bosom is – in the countries point to by the great Seer of the past century, Emanuel Swedenborg. There lies the heart of nature, that bosom whence issued primeval Humanity and which is the cradle of man.

[C.W.XIV, p466]

---

Nature is triune: there is a visible, objective nature; and invisible, indwelling, energizing nature, the exact model of the other, and its vital principle;and, above these two, spirit, source of all forces, alone eternal and indestructible. The lower two constantly change; the higher third does not.

[Isis Unveiled Vol.II, p587-8]

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