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Page 5
Through each of these eight hundred mortal lives, man is purifying and
developing his nature. When, at the end of each, his body dies, his
higher principles leave the lower to gradual dissolution, while they
themselves remaining still bound in space to this planet, pass into
_Devachan_, the state of effects. Here, entirely unconscious of what
passes on earth, the soul remains, absorbed in its own subjectivity. For
a length of time, stated as never less than fifteen hundred years, and
shown by figures to average not less than eight thousand, the soul,
enjoying in its own contemplation those things it most desired in mortal
life, surrounded in its own imagination by the friends and the scenes it
has loved on earth, reaps the exact reward of its own deeds. When Nature
has thus paid the laborer his hire, when his power of enjoyment has
exhausted itself, the soul passes by a gradual process into oblivion of
all the past--an oblivion from which it returns only on its approach to
Nirvana--and waits the moment for reincarnation. Yet it comes not again
to conscious life, unaffected by the forgotten past. _Karma_,--the
resultant of its upward or downward tendencies,--which has been
accumulating through all the course of its existence, remains; and the
new-born man comes into visible being with good or evil propensities,
the balance of which is to be affected by the struggles of one more
mortal phase of existence. Thus we go on through one life after another,
each time a new person yet the same human soul, ignorant of our own past
lives, yet never free from their influence upon our character, exactly
as in mature life we have absolutely forgotten what happened to us in
our infancy, yet are never free from its influence. In Devachan, which
corresponds, says our author, to what in other religions is the final
and eternal heaven, we receive, from time to time, the reward of our
deeds done in the body, yet still pass on with all our upward or
downward tendencies until, many millions of years in the future, during
our next passage through life on this planet, we shall come to the
crisis in our existence which shall determine whether we are to become
gods or demons.
Let me now turn back the page of history. A little more than one million
years ago this earth was covered, as now, with vegetable forms, and was
the dwelling of animals, as numerous, perhaps, and as various as now;
but there was no humanity. The time was come when man, who had passed
already three times round the planetary chain, and was nearly half way
through his fourth round, should again make his appearance on the scene.
Nature works only in her own way, and that way is uniform. The first man
must be born of parents already living. As there are no human parents,
he must be born of lower animals, and of those lower animals most nearly
resembling the coming human animal. Darwin has told us what the animal
was, yet the new being was a man and not an ape, because, in addition to
its animal soul, it was possessed also of a human soul. We all know that
man is an animal. Those modern students of science, who affirm that that
is the whole truth of human nature, take a lower view of their own being
than the Indian philosophers. Man is an animal plus a human and a
spiritual soul.
Behold, now, the earth peopled by man. Through seven races must he pass,
each with its various branches. Yet these races are not contemporaneous;
for Nature is in no hurry. One race comes forward at a time, reaches
the height of its possibility, then passes away during great physical
transformations, and leaves but a wreck behind to live, and witness,
in some new part of earth, the coming of another race. These races
and branch races and sub-branch races are to be animated by the same
identical souls. Hence, one race at a time; at first, even, one sub-race
only, for the next is to be of a higher order. After each root-race has
run its course, the earth has always been prepared by a great geological
convulsion for the next. In this convulsion has perished all that makes
up what we call civilization, yet not all men then living. Since some
souls are slower than others, all are not ready to pass into the second
race, when the time for that race has come. Hence fragments of old races
survive, kept up for a time by the incarnation of the laggard souls
whose progress has been too slow. Thus, we are told, although the first
and second root-races have now entirely disappeared, there still remain
relics of the third and fourth. The proper seat of this third root-race
was that lost continent which Wallace told us, long ago, stood where now
roll the waters of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, south and southwest of
Asia. Here we have, in the degraded Papuan and Australian, the remainder
of the third race. Degraded I call him, because his ancestors, though
inferior to the highest races of to-day, were far in advance of him. So
it must always be. Destroy the accumulations of the highest race of men
now living, and the next generation will be barbarians; the second,
savages.
The fourth root-race inhabited the famous, but no longer fabulous,
Atlantis, now sunk, in greater part, beneath the waters of the Atlantic.
Fragments of this race were left in Northern Africa, though perhaps none
now remain there, and we are told that there is a remnant in the heart
of China. From the relics of the African branch of this root-race, the
old Egyptian priests had knowledge regarding the sunken continent,
knowledge which was no fable, but the traditionary lore and history of
the survivors of the lost Atlantis.
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