Based on the notes of a talk given at theUnited Lodge of Theosophists in London, England
Although the chosen title is “Human Evolution in The Secret Doctrine” it could equally have been called “The Great Journey” because this is one of the terms used by the Masters of Wisdom to refer to this evolutionary cycle that we are currently involved in – this 4th Round period on this globe.
This is what “The Voice of the Silence” says on p. 37-38:
“In the “Great Journey,” [“Great Journey”, or the whole complete cycle of existences, in one “Round”.”] causes sown each hour bear each its harvest of effects, for rigid Justice rules the World. With mighty sweep of never erring action, it brings to mortals lives of weal or woe, the karmic progeny of all our former thoughts and deeds. Take then as much as merit hath in store for thee, O thou of patient heart. Be of good cheer and rest content with fate. Such is thy Karma, the Karma of the cycle of thy births, the destiny of those who, in their pain and sorrow, are born along with thee, rejoice and weep from life to life, chained to thy previous actions. Act thou for them “to-day,” [meaning in this lifetime] and they will act for thee “to-morrow” [meaning the next or a subsequent lifetime]. ‘Tis from the bud of Renunciation of the Self, that springeth the sweet fruit of final Liberation.”
Over the next few minutes we’ll discover some interesting, important, and relevant information and details about what the Theosophical teachings call the various “Root Races” such as the Atlanteans, the Lemurians who preceded them, and so on, but it’s important that we keep in the forefront of our minds that these Lemurians, Atlanteans, and so forth, were not somebody else…they were ourselves, in some of our long distant past incarnations.
H. P. Blavatsky emphasises this, saying on p. 146 of the second volume of “The Secret Doctrine”: “This is plain: the Humanity of the First Manvantara is that of the seventh and of all the intermediate ones. The mankind of the First Root-Race is the mankind of the second, third, fourth, fifth, etc. To the last it forms a cyclic and constant reincarnation of the Monads belonging to the Dhyan Chohans of our Planetary chain.”
So it truly is your great journey and our great journey, the great journey of the ONE Human Race, the ONE Human Family, which acquires expression, experience, and evolution through a cycle of numerous different temporary Root Races and their sub-races.
“The Secret Doctrine” is the name of Madame Blavatsky’s greatest and most important book but it’s also the English equivalent of the Sanskrit term “Gupta Vidya” meaning the Secret Knowledge, the Sacred Science, the Esoteric Wisdom or simply – the Secret Doctrine. And it’s said that at the end of the 19th century certain Adepts or Mahatmas of a hidden Esoteric Brotherhood beyond the Himalayas made available to humanity – in this book and in others – as much of that Knowledge as is permitted for us to have and to know at this point in our Great Journey.
“The Secret Doctrine” proceeds from universals to particulars, as does all true Esoteric Philosophy, and so the first volume is titled “Cosmogenesis” and deals with the origins, birth, and evolution of the Universe, the Cosmos, the Solar System, and our planet, while the second volume is “Anthropogenesis” and presents the Eastern occult teachings regarding the origins, birth, and evolution of our humanity in particular.
As most of the information we’ll be looking at here is derived from that second volume, we thought it might be useful to begin with the Three Fundamental Propositions.
Volume One opens with Three Fundamental Propositions which some have summarised as “DEITY – LAW – BEING.” The first is the ONE Absolute Infinite Omnipresent Eternal Divine PRINCIPLE…the second is the law of periodicity or cyclic law, the cyclic appearance and disappearance of the Universe and of everything in it, cycles within cycles, all within the great Universal life cycle…and the third is the ongoing progressive inner evolution of all life and the fact that this is governed for each being, each entity, by the Law of Karma and reincarnation or re-embodiment.
Volume Two begins by presenting three further Propositions. In the words of HPB:
“As regards the evolution of mankind, the Secret Doctrine postulates three new propositions, which stand in direct antagonism to modern science as well as to current religious dogmas: it teaches (a) the simultaneous evolution of seven human groups on seven different portions of our globe; (b) the birth of the astral, before the physical body: the former being a model for the latter; and (c) that man, in this Round, preceded every mammalian – the anthropoids included – in the animal kingdom.”
“Anthropoids” means the apes and this is actually one of the most important teachings in the whole of “The Secret Doctrine”…that man is not descended from the apes but that the apes are descended from man.
In order to provide a bit of explanation about terms such as “rounds,” “chains,” and “globes,” – Theosophy explains that each known planet – such as Earth, Mars, Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Jupiter and so on – is in fact a sevenfold system consisting of seven globes but in each case only one of these globes is on the physical material level. The other six are non-physical globes existing in close and inseparable connection alongside it for purposes of ongoing evolution.
The beings of each planet – and Theosophy says that each planet has its own beings – pass on together from globe to globe of their own planetary chain in an extremely slow and gradual but nevertheless definite and cyclic process of inner unfoldment and advancement. And they go round the whole chain of globes seven times and that’s called the Seven Rounds.
In our case evolution is currently active and proceeding on the physical globe of our Earth Chain so our sight and perceptions are confined solely to the physical material plane which is why we only currently see the physical material globes of the other planetary chains. We can go to the physical planet Mars, for example, and find that there are no beings there, no real activity or great signs of life going on there…and although “The Secret Doctrine” was written before the days of space travel, HPB tells us that that’s the case, saying that the physical planet Mars is currently in a state of minor Pralaya or temporary but quite lengthy inactivity because the evolutionary wave has passed on to one of the non-physical globes of the Mars chain.
But in our case, our planet is the 4th globe, the physical one, of the Earth Chain, and the 4th Round of the eventual 7 Rounds is currently underway. But we may ask ourselves, how did humanity get here in the first place? Where did we come from in order to wind up here? How did the human race begin on this 4th globe at the start of this 4th Round…and when was it for a start?
This Earth is the child – and in a sense, the reincarnation – of the Moon. Before this Earth existed, our human family was evolving up through the various Kingdoms of Nature on another planetary chain, which was living and vital and active…and then it came to the end of its Life Cycle and one by one each of its seven globes went out, like a light bulb switched off, and sent their principles and energies into another point in space which eventually resulted in the formation of a new planetary chain, the successor of the old one. That new one is our Earth and that old one is what we call our Moon or the Moon Chain, the Lunar Chain, which is effectively now a corpse and is gradually shrinking and will eventually disappear and disintegrate altogether.
The Earth was to be populated by the beings from its parent – the Moon. When this was, we don’t know. The Masters know but “The Secret Doctrine” says they’re extremely reticent about giving out even approximate dates and chronologies for the first two Root Races. It was certainly millions upon millions of years ago. But how it happened and where it happened, we do know and this is very interesting.
When the time was right, the highest and most evolved beings who had been on the Moon – and who are called the Lunar Pitris or Barhishad Pitris, the Lunar Fathers or Lunar Ancestors – were called out of their cyclic rest by the high Dhyan Chohans or angelic beings and instructed to go as seven groups, “seven hosts,” to seven different zones of “that mysterious and sacred land” which was to become “the cradle of the first man”…a land referred to as “the Imperishable Sacred Land” and “the eternal central Land”…somewhere in the crowning area of the North Pole.
One can read in p. 400-401 of Vol. 2 that at the beginning of this 4th Round on our globe, the whole Earth was covered with tepid water except for the North Pole. That was the only dry land and at that time it was perfectly inhabitable. It didn’t become a frozen mass of ice until much later. The North Pole is called the Atma of our globe in fact and is described in an Esoteric Commentary as the “Head” of Mother Earth, while the South Pole is called her feet, the Himalayas are called her belt, and the heart of the Earth “beats under the foot of the sacred Shambalah.” So it was on the seven zones of the Imperishable Sacred Land which crowns the North Pole that the 1st Root Race, the first humanity, was born and came into being. And so Theosophy designates it simply as the Polarian Root Race.
The Lunar Pitris, who were themselves of an ethereal or astral nature, were required to project or “ooze out” from themselves ethereal astral forms. As the Lunar Pitris were boneless and non-physical, so was this progeny of theirs which is described as having a shadowy, somewhat ape-like, and gigantic form. We have to remember that even the Earth itself wasn’t completely physically solid and properly material in those days and human beings didn’t become fully so until partway into the 4th or Atlantean Root Race. Man didn’t develop any type of bones until the 3rd Root Race, the Lemurian.
This is why, regarding the dinosaurs and other such animals which first appeared in the Lemurian Epoch and went from being ethereal and boneless to physical and solid, William Q. Judge was able to say in “Echoes from The Orient” (p. 42-43) that:
“At the time of the huge antediluvian animals they absorbed in their enormous bodies so much of the total quantity of gross matter available for frames of sentient beings that the astral man remained without a corporeal frame, as yet unclothed “with coats of skin.” For this reason he could exist in the same place with those huge birds and reptiles without fear. Their massive proportions inspired him with no terror, and by their consumption of food there was no lessening of his sustenance. And, therefore, being of such a composition that he left no impression upon mud or plastic rock, the death of one astral body after another left no fossil and no mark to be unearthed by us in company with the very beasts and birds which were his contemporaries. … his remains could not be deposited in any stratum until such time as he had grown to sufficient hardness. … While, therefore, our explorers are finding, now and then, the remains of animals and birds and reptiles in strata which show an age far greater than any assigned to the human race, they never come upon human skeletons. How could man leave any trace at a stage when he could not press himself into the clay or be caught by soft lava or masses of volcanic dust?”
The 1st, 2nd, and the first part of the 3rd Root Race, all lacked not only the physical body in the form that we have it today but the far more important quality of mind and individual self-consciousness. They were effectively mindless and senseless…and soulless in fact. They had their bodies and they had Atman, the Higher SELF, the One Universal Spirit and Divine Life which is one and the same in each and all but they had no point of connection between the two. Although they had individual bodies they were not real Individuals in any sense of the term.
The task of the Lunar Pitris had simply been to produce the basis for the physical, material – i.e. lower – nature of the mankind of our Earth. As the progenitors of the first humanity of our globe, they were collectively Vaivasvata Manu (the Root Manu of the 4th Round). The mind and egoic nature was destined to be provided by beings higher than the Lunar Pitris – beings known as the “Lords of the Flame,” the Solar Pitris, the Sons of Wisdom.
In the interests of time we can allow ourselves to skip over the 2nd Root Race, as not much is said about it in “The Secret Doctrine” except that in due time the 1st Race evolved into its own offspring which was its product “by budding and expansion”…that’s the phrase used. They were the Hyperborean Root Race, which ended up dwelling on the Hyperborean Continent – “the land which stretched out its promontories southward and westward from the North Pole to receive the Second Race, and comprised the whole of what is now known as Northern Asia.”
Each of the Root Races receives “its light and life” from its own special Dhyani or Planetary Spirit. HPB quotes an Esoteric Commentary which says “The first is born under the Sun; the second under Brihaspati (Jupiter); the third [i.e. the Lemurian] under Lohitanga (the “fiery-bodied,” Venus, or Sukra); the fourth [i.e. the Atlantean], under Soma (the Moon, our Globe also, the Fourth Sphere being born under and from the Moon) and Sani, Saturn, the Krura-lochana (evil-eyed) and the Asita (the dark); the fifth [i.e. the Aryan or Indo-Caucasian, the root race presently in evolution], under Budha (Mercury).” (“The Secret Doctrine” Vol. 2, p. 29)
This brings us on to the Lemurians, the 3rd Root Race, born under the influence of Venus which is said to be the planet which has the greatest influence upon and relationship with Earth. It’s called “the Guardian Spirit of the Earth and Man,” the elder sister of the Earth, and the Light-Bearer of our Earth in both the physical and the mystical sense. Everything that happens on Earth is felt by Venus, says “The Secret Doctrine,” and everything that happens on Venus is felt by the Earth. The two are indissolubly linked.
Lemuria and Atlantis have become something of an obsession in the New Age Movement and the huge amount of sheer fantasy and science fiction type ideas that have been published about it have unfortunately served to draw people’s attention away from the more serious and much deeper presentations of the original teachings of Theosophy.
“The Secret Doctrine” contains literally thousands of supporting references from a wide array of different sources in order to show and prove at least the probability if not the actual legitimacy and validity of its sometimes unusual and peculiar doctrines. Genuine Theosophy – that of HPB, her colleague William Judge, and the Masters – is the Esoteric Teaching which underlies all the world’s religions. It has no interest in and no need to resort to sensational psychic fantasies and popular New Age buzzwords.
So for one thing, it would challenge the New Age Movement’s peculiar preference and inclination for portraying the Lemurians and Atlanteans as being of white or caucasian appearance or resembling modern humanity. The Atlanteans were the predecessors of the caucasians and flourished millions of years ago, with its prehistoric pacific parent civilisation of Lemuria even further back. The majority of them bore relatively little physical resemblance to modern man at all. Many of the Atlanteans were gigantic in stature – from 15ft to 25ft and even taller, says “The Secret Doctrine” – and the Lemurians even more so.
The famous Easter Island statues were the work of some of the last Lemurians and are of the same height as those last – and gradually shrunken in height – Lemurians would have been. Theosophy says that the so-called “mythological” traditions about giants in all nations and cultures have their origin and basis in archaic fact.
The Lemurian epoch was so long ago and so far back in the primal infancy of physical man that the Lemurians – who are said to have possessed a “Third Eye” in the back of their heads which in modern man is degenerated into and represented by the pineal gland – these Lemurians never even developed any form of speech or verbal communication beyond a basic monosyllabic grunt and imitations of the shrieks and cries of the animals around them. The majority of their communications were through psychic means of clairvoyance and perceiving the thoughts of those around them. It was with the Atlanteans that proper language and proper speech were finally developed.
Lemuria was the huge Pacific continent and Atlantis the huge Atlantic continent. The great watery masses of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans are where these continents once stood. They weren’t called “Atlantis” and “Lemuria” in reality but these names were coined as descriptive terms in the 19th century for sake of easy reference and comprehension, although the name “Atlantis” goes back to Plato two and a half thousand years ago when he wrote the Timaeus and Critias. HPB explains in “The Secret Doctrine” that the name “Lemuria” was actually the invention of the zoologist P.L. Sclater sometime between 1850 and 1860 and that it was also used by the eminent German biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel in his “Pedigree of Man.” So, those who we call “Lemurians” did not call themselves Lemurians and those who we call “Atlanteans” did not call themselves Atlanteans. These are just convenient terms of reference.
In this vast Lemurian Epoch, many important and interesting things must have happened but there are three in particular which we should pay attention to. And it was over the course of this Root Race that human bodies went from being asexual or having no gender at all to being dual- or double-sexed, androgynous, and then underwent the separation of the sexes, resulting in single individual genders of male and female as we have it today.
But while the Lemurians were still androgynous, some of the Lords of Wisdom – or high divine beings – chose to incarnate in some of the androgynous Lemurians and after doing so they utilised the power of Kriyashakti – the divine energy of creative thought, will and imagination – to create higher and more developed physical forms as vehicles for the incarnation of still higher beings, referred to as the “Sons of Ad,” “Sons of the Fire Mist,” and “Sons of Will and Yoga.”
First, however, they created through Kriyashakti a body to serve as the physical vehicle for the incarnation on our Earth of one particular Great Being from higher realms, who was destined to thus sacrifice himself for the sake of mankind by becoming the Supreme Spiritual Head on our planet, remaining to this very day and dwelling – it is said – at Shamballa, that legendary but actual mysterious land and region somewhere around the area of the Gobi Desert in Central Asia.
Seemingly a direct incarnation in some way of the Logos, he is referred to in “The Secret Doctrine” by such titles as “The Wondrous Being,” “The Nameless One,” “The Initiator,” “The Great Sacrifice,” “The Solitary Watcher,” “The First and Holy Son of Kriyashakti,” “The Ever-Living-Human-Banyan,” “The Tree from which the Adepts Grow,” and not the Maha Chohan who is the Chief of the Trans-Himalayan Brotherhood but the Maha-GURU, the Chief of the entire Great Brotherhood. For those who may want to read more about this, the main reference is in Vol. 1, p. 206-211. He and the “Sons of Ad” came as the first great spiritual guides and instructors of humanity, which was soon to be endowed at last with mind and self-consciousness.
The “separation of the sexes” occurred first in the Animal Kingdom and afterwards in the Human Kingdom. Observing the new sexual method of reproduction amongst the animals, man now began to do the same. But the “sin of the mindless” occurred. Some of the Lemurians – still without mental consciousness and proper intelligence as yet – procreated with some of what are described as “the huge she-animals.” The progeny of this unholy union was “a race of crooked red-hair-covered monsters going on all fours” – described as “a dumb race to keep the shame untold.”
These creatures were the ancestors of our modern day apes. Man is not evolved from the apes but the apes are evolved from man, hence the similarity between the two. All human beings on Earth did pass through the Animal Kingdom in order to reach the Human Kingdom but from what we can understand it would seem that they did so aeons ago on the Moon Chain and not on our Earth. On this Earth, man preceded the animals…and as for the apes, they never had any existence whatsoever until primitive mindless man bred with some of the animals during Lemurian times.
It was after this unintended tragedy that the Sons of Wisdom incarnated in mankind, turning it from mindless “animal-man” as it was effectively, into real mankind, true humanity, in the 5th sub-race of the 3rd Root Race, said to have been 18,000,000 years ago, saying “Let us teach them better, lest worse should happen.”
Whether it was literally 18-million years ago or not, we can’t say definitely and absolutely because “The Secret Doctrine” often repeats that the exact and actual figures and dates can’t be given out to the public…not yet anyway and so replacements and substitutes are given instead. Eighteen is a very esoterically symbolic number, as is the number 9 which 1 and 8 adds up to. All the durations applied in Hindu chronology to the yugas, kalpas, manvantaras and so on, if you add up the numbers in each of the durations they always come to either 9 or 18. Vol. 2, p. 287 of “The Secret Doctrine” implies that this sin of the mindless actually occurred 2-million years ago in reality. But whenever it may have been, and even if the sin of the mindless had never occurred, the incarnation of these Lords of the Flame – the Agnishvatta Pitris, the Solar Pitris, Solar Angels, Manasaputras, Sons of the Universal Mind, Kumaras, Manasadevas, Fire Dhyanis, call them what you will – still inevitably had to occur.
HPB and the Masters seem to imply that it should ideally have occurred earlier but for whatever reason the Manasaputras delayed their “mass incarnation,” as we could call it, and as a consequence the “sin of the mindless” and probably other unfortunate things occurred which would otherwise have been avoided. But such is Karma.
But who and what are these Manasaputras, these Sons of Wisdom or Sons of Mind? They are – ourselves. We are – them. Man did not have an awakened 5th Principle, the Manas or Mind Principle, until then. So their incarnation in the evolved forms that had been built up and developed is referred to in the teachings as “The lighting up of Manas.”
Until then no-one ever had or experienced the after-death states of Kama Loka or Devachan, let alone attained to Nirvana, simply due to the fact that there were no self-conscious individualities on Earth, no-one with the ability or potentiality of either creating or experiencing anything after death. And until that time there was no death anyway, in the sense in which we know it today, for man did not yet have a fully physical or material body.
The Vedas and Upanishads speak of Yama, who in Hinduism as well as Buddhism is the personification of the “God of Death.” In the entry for “Yama” in “The Theosophical Glossary” HPB explains that in the esoteric system Yama is the personification of the 3rd Root Race because of this fact just mentioned. The birth of death – if we can use such a paradoxical phrase – was in Lemurian times.
Although divine in his highermost impersonal essence, as is everything in the Universe, he still lacked an individual soul and was more of the nature of “animal man” than a true human being. So there was no reincarnation in the true sense of the word, not until individualisation occurred through the “lighting up” of Manas, the awakening of individual mind and self-consciousness, through the incoming presence of the Ego or human soul.
The Manasaputra, an individualised ray of the Universal Mind, is our Higher Manas, our Higher Ego, not the Higher Self which is the universal impersonal Atman, but the Higher Ego, our permanent spiritual divine Individuality. What we commonly and mistakenly think of and refer to as “ourselves” on the ordinary everyday level is but a temporary and Karmically imperfect reflection of our Higher Ego, our Higher Mind-Entity, that “Being of Light” which so many people describe having met in their Near Death Experiences.
So our true “I,” our true Ego or Individuality, is one of these Mind-Entities and “The Secret Doctrine” says their exact nature is so mysterious and profound that it can only be barely hinted at and in a somewhat veiled manner. Yet it’s implied that they belong to the spiritual hierarchy that presides over the constellation of Capricorn, Makara in Sanskrit, and that being “celestial Yogis” of long past preceding Manvantaras, they – being impersonal individualities – chose to take upon themselves individual personalities here on Earth in order to help on the whole scheme of planetary and cosmic evolution.
What we have to realise and remember is that we ARE Them. Christian theology has twisted and distorted all this and described their Karmic fall into matter as the “Fallen Angels” cast out of Heaven and down to Earth. But in the words of HPB, “The “Fallen Angels,” so-called, are Humanity itself.” Man is either a fallen angel or a risen ape and “fallen angel” is far more correct.
And here is the true meaning of what the book of Genesis in the Bible is referring to in the famous passage that says in the early days of humanity the “Sons of God” took as their wives the daughters of men and that as a consequence there were “giants in the land.” “The Theosophical Glossary” talks about this – in the entry for “Jehovah” – and says that the so-called “Sons of God” means those Manasaputras who incarnated in or united with or wed themselves to the physical material bodily forms and entities on Earth who as a result grew UP and became “giants” in intellect, mentality and consciousness in comparison with what they had been.
Eventually the 4th Root Race, the Atlantean, came into being, originally on the Lemurian Continent, but later spreading out to take up residence on the islands of a huge continent situated in the area of the Atlantic Ocean. At the mid-point of the Atlantean Root Race, the “door into the Human Kingdom” was closed for the entire remainder of the duration of the evolutionary cycle of our planetary chain. It will be many millions upon millions of years before there can be any further evolution of entities from the Animal Kingdom passing into the Human Kingdom. That door of opportunity has been closed and the numbers of the Human Kingdom settled and finalised in the middle of Atlantean times.
Every member of the Human Kingdom today has been part of it since at least the middle of Atlantis.
This is all because the middle of that 4th sub-race of that 4th root race on this 4th globe in the 4th Round was the exact half-way and pivotal point of human evolution. In fact everything up to that point had been involution more than evolution, the descent from the most ethereal and spiritual, such as in the 1st Race, down to the lowest and most material possible point in the middle of the 4th Race. From then on, true evolution begins in the form of the ascending arc as we progress back upwards to an ethereal and spiritualised state but now with the addition of self-consciousness and acquired experience and intelligence, enabling us to lift up and help the evolution of the whole mass of manifested matter in the process along with all the lower kingdoms of nature. There is no separation between any living being or thing.
The only exception to the rule of “no more members of the human kingdom until the next planetary chain” is the apes. “The Secret Doctrine” informs us that the apes are all destined to die out and become extinct during this present 5th Root Race and that this will actually be a fortunate thing for them, as their Egos – known collectively as “the delayed race” – will finally be able to enter the Human Kingdom proper, some of them possibly by the close of the 6th Root Race but certainly all of them by the time that the 5th Round begins.
In due time the entire Lemurian continent was destroyed by volcanic action, earthquakes and subterranean fires and subsequently sank beneath the Pacific Ocean. Every great Continent and Root Race must eventually come to an end, under Cyclic and Karmic Law, being destroyed alternately by fire and water. Just as Lemuria was destroyed by fire, Atlantis was destroyed by water, our cherished country and European continent will one day be destroyed through cataclysmic operations of the fire element again and so on.
As the Principle of Mind incarnated and developed itself to an increasingly greater depth in the human beings, the Atlanteans went on to build huge cities and to develop a great civilisation and culture which eventually became something far surpassing that of ancient India and ancient Egypt…but not everything was as it should have been.
Pride, lust, and selfish desire began to arise. Some of the men – whose actions could now no longer be blamed on “mindlessness” – wilfully and consciously procreated with some of the descendants from the original Lemurian “sin of the mindless” and thus produced further monstrosities.
The Atlanteans began to worship and idolise the human body and the external “form” side of life, including the sexual act. They started to anthropomorphise their hitherto pure and spiritual concepts of the Divine, by portraying and worshipping It in human form, in their own material image and likeness. Some of them began to practice sorcery and black magic, particularly sexual magic and various rites which became the origins of modern day sexual tantra. The sexual faculty in the human being, described in “The Secret Doctrine” as “the creative power” and “the divine gift,” started to be abused in major ways.
And all this, which goes so strongly against the physical and metaphysical laws and harmony of Nature, led with great and damaging effect to the downfall and destruction of the Atlanteans and Atlantis.
As a result of their increasing degradation and degeneration, their spiritual faculties declined. The Third Eye – in the back of the head, that we mentioned earlier – started to become petrified and eventually disappeared completely, being withdrawn inside the head, where it remains to this day as the small organ known as the Pineal Gland which when awakened from its dormancy still has the power to produce genuine spiritual vision and accurate, even infallible, clairvoyant insight. This is not psychic clairvoyance, which is largely a mass of confusion and delusion, but spiritual clairvoyance. And this faculty, when awakened, is known as the Eye of Shiva or the Eye of Dangma or the Wisdom Eye.
Yet it is neither safe, easy, nor necessary for us to try to awaken and activate the Third Eye at this point in time. “The Secret Doctrine” emphasises that to do so safely and properly requires the utmost purity, celibacy, and chastity of life.
Sometimes people question this and wonder why it’s so but when we stop to think about the fact that it was the increasing materiality and sensuality of human beings that resulted in the obscuration and deterioration of the Third Eye and its faculties in the first place, it becomes plainly obvious that its reawakening or “re-opening” is dependent on the decrease of that materiality and sensuality on the part of the spiritual aspirant.
We can also briefly add that physical procreation is actually only a temporary phase that mankind is passing through. By the end of the 6th Root Race, which is when the Kali Yuga is said to finally come to an end, our present method of procreation will have become extinct and man will have ceased to be the physical material being that he now is.
The time came for Atlantis to be destroyed. “All Holy saved, the Unholy destroyed,” say the Stanzas of Dzyan. The destruction and sinking of the various islands and peninsulas proceeded gradually, slowly, and bit by bit over thousands of years, eventually resulting in the final great cataclysm – the flooding and submersion of the last island of Atlantis, referred to as Poseidonis – in 9,564 B.C. (11,579 years ago as of this year). That’s the date given by the Master K.H. in a letter to A.P. Sinnett. The last of the huge monstrous animals, now confined to myth and legend in the form of dragons and even stranger things, perished in these disasters.
Some of the relatively small number of people who escaped and survived, fled for refuge from the terrible turbulent deadly waters of destruction – some of them with the help of the good Atlantean Adepts – to the highest and driest points of land that they could find…the peaks and mountains of the Himalayas of Central Asia…and it was there that the very beginnings of the 5th Root Race occurred.
It first flourished in ancient India, once called Aryavarta, which became the mother of our present civilisation and so we generally refer to this Root Race as the Aryan Root Race, although it’s also called the Indo-Caucasian and Indo-European. The term “Aryan” was seriously misused and abused in the 20th century, as was the ancient Indian or true Aryan symbol of the swastika, by Hitler and the Nazis, but neither the term “Aryan” nor the swastika have anything bad or evil or negative about them in reality and no-one ever thought of them in such a way until the 1930s when their meaning was distorted on a world scale. At the time “The Secret Doctrine” was written, “Aryan” was largely just a synonym in the English language for “Indian” as anyone can see for themselves by referring to religious, philosophical, cultural, and academic works of the time. As a word it literally means “Noble” or “Worthy.”
Those who may like to read part of an eyewitness account of the destruction of Atlantis can find this in “The Secret Doctrine” Vol. 2, from p. 423 to 429. There’s also a short story based on this by Mr Judge, titled “Where The Rishis Were” and you can find that between p. 244-246 of “Letters That Have Helped Me.”
In terms of esoteric ethnology, Theosophy says that today’s oriental races such as the Chinese, Mongolian, Tibetan, Malaysian, Indonesian, Japanese, Vietnamese and so on are largely descended from the seventh and final sub-race of the Atlantean Root Race, as are the Eskimos or Inuits and Native Americans, while the indigenous peoples of Africa and Australia originate from earlier Atlantean sub-races as well as the seventh and final sub-race of the Lemurian Root Race. All the other ethnic groups are part of the various sub-races of the Aryan Root Race.
But this doesn’t mean that the souls incarnated in the oriental or African or aboriginal races and nationalities are somehow behind the others or lower or inferior than the others. There is no such thing as racial inferiority or racial supremacy. The distinctions just described refer to the physical bodily type and not to the indwelling soul. We all incarnate in all different sorts of races and countries in accordance with our Karma.
The present white European peoples and their direct descendants, whether in Europe itself or the USA or Canada or Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and so on – these comprise the current and latest, newest sub-race, the 5th sub-race of the 5th Root Race. It is the American people who will become the “pioneers” of the 6th sub-race of the 5th root race and this process is due to begin relatively soon. The 6th Root Race itself will also begin in the Americas and you can find these words about it from Mr Judge on p. 26 of “Echoes from The Orient”:
“We are preparing here in America a new race which will exhibit the perfection of the glories that I said were being slowly brought to the surface from the long forgotten past. This is why the Americas are seen to be in a perpetual ferment. It is the seething and bubbling of the older races in the refining-pot, and the slow coming up of the material for the new race. Here, and nowhere else, are to be found men and women of every race living together, being governed together, attacking nature and the problems of life together, and bringing forth children who combine, each one, two races. This process will go on until in the course of many generations there will be produced on the American continents an entirely new race; new bodies; new orders of intellect; new powers of the mind; curious and unheard-of psychic powers, as well as extraordinary physical ones; with new senses and extensions of present senses now unforeseen. When this new sort of body and mind are generated – then other monads, or our own again, will animate them and paint upon the screen of time the pictures of 100,000 years ago.”
Under the law of correspondence and analogy, which is one of the great keys to understanding esoteric teachings and symbolism, each of the numbers 1-7 of the seven root races and the seven sub-races and the seven globes and the seven rounds relates in some way or other to the correspondingly numbered Principle of the Seven Principles of the human constitution, the sevenfold nature of man. As Manas or “mind and intellect” is the 5th Principle and Kama or “desire and passion” is the 4th Principle, we may see that we are currently in the Manasic sub-race of the Manasic root race in the Kamic round on the Kamic globe. The 6th of anything will correspond to Buddhi and the 7th to Atma. So thankfully we are at last on the ascending arc of the Great Journey!
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FROM “THE SECRET DOCTRINE” BY H. P. BLAVATSKY
VOL. 2, p. 444-446, 420
Now, Occult philosophy teaches that even now, under our very eyes, the new Race and Races are preparing to be formed, and that it is in America that the transformation will take place, and has already silently commenced.
Pure Anglo-Saxons hardly three hundred years ago, the Americans of the United States have already become a nation apart, and, owing to a strong admixture of various nationalities and inter-marriage, almost a race sui generis, not only mentally, but also physically. “Every mixed race, when uniform and settled, has been able to play the part of a primary race in fresh crossings,” says de Quatrefages. “Mankind, in its present state, has thus been formed, certainly, for the greatest part, by the successive crossing of a number of races at present undetermined.” (“The Human Species,” p. 274.)
Thus the Americans have become in only three centuries a “primary race,” pro tem., before becoming a race apart, and strongly separated from all other now existing races. They are, in short, the germs of the Sixth sub-race, and in some few hundred years more, will become most decidedly the pioneers of that race which must succeed to the present European or fifth sub-race, in all its new characteristics. After this, in about 25,000 years, they will launch into preparations for the seventh sub-race; until, in consequence of cataclysms – the first series of those which must one day destroy Europe, and still later the whole Aryan race (and thus affect both Americas), as also most of the lands directly connected with the confines of our continent and isles – the Sixth Root-Race will have appeared on the stage of our Round. When shall this be? Who knows save the great Masters of Wisdom, perchance, and they are as silent upon the subject as the snow-capped peaks that tower above them. All we know is, that it will silently come into existence; so silently, indeed, that for long millenniums shall its pioneers – the peculiar children who will grow into peculiar men and women – be regarded as anomalous lusus naturæ, abnormal oddities physically and mentally. Then, as they increase, and their numbers become with every age greater, one day they will awake to find themselves in a majority. It is the present men who will then begin to be regarded as exceptional mongrels, until these die out in their turn in civilised lands; surviving only in small groups on islands – the mountain peaks of to-day – where they will vegetate, degenerate, and finally die out, perhaps millions of years hence, as the Aztecs have, as the Nyam-Nyam and the dwarfish Moola Koorumba of the Nilghiri Hills are dying. All these are the remnants of once mighty races, the recollection of whose existence has entirely died out of the remembrance of the modern generations, just as we shall vanish from the memory of the Sixth Race Humanity. The Fifth will overlap the Sixth Race for many hundreds of millenniums, changing with it slower than its new successor, still changing in stature, general physique, and mentality, just as the Fourth overlapped our Aryan race, and the Third had overlapped the Atlanteans.
This process of preparation for the Sixth great Race must last throughout the whole sixth and seventh sub-races (vide supra, the diagram of the Genealogical Tree of the Fifth Race). But the last remnants of the Fifth Continent will not disappear until some time after the birth of the new Race; when another and new dwelling, the sixth continent, will have appeared above the new waters on the face of the globe, so as to receive the new stranger. To it also will emigrate and settle all those who shall be fortunate enough to escape the general disaster. When this shall be – as just said – it is not for the writer to know. Only, as nature no more proceeds by sudden jumps and starts, than man changes suddenly from a child into a mature man, the final cataclysm will be preceded by many smaller submersions and destructions both by wave and volcanic fires. The exultant pulse will beat high in the heart of the race now in the American zone, but there will be no more Americans when the Sixth Race commences; no more, in fact, than Europeans; for they will have now become a new race, and many new nations. Yet the Fifth will not die, but survive for a while: overlapping the new Race for many hundred thousands of years to come, it will become transformed with it – slower than its new successor – still getting entirely altered in mentality, general physique, and stature. Mankind will not grow again into giant bodies as in the case of the Lemurians and the Atlanteans; because while the evolution of the Fourth race led the latter down to the very bottom of materiality in its physical development, the present Race is on its ascending arc; and the Sixth will be rapidly growing out of its bonds of matter, and even of flesh.
Thus it is the mankind of the New world – one by far the senior of our Old one, a fact men had also forgotten – of Pâtâla (the Antipodes, or the Nether World, as America is called in India), whose mission and Karma it is, to sow the seeds for a forthcoming, grander, and far more glorious Race than any of those we know of at present. The Cycles of Matter will be succeeded by Cycles of Spirituality and a fully developed mind. On the law of parallel history and races, the majority of the future mankind will be composed of glorious Adepts. Humanity is the child of cyclic Destiny, and not one of its Units can escape its unconscious mission, or get rid of the burden of its co-operative work with nature. Thus will mankind, race after race, perform its appointed cycle-pilgrimage. Climates will, and have already begun, to change, each tropical year after the other dropping one sub-race, but only to beget another higher race on the ascending cycle; while a series of other less favoured groups – the failures of nature – will, like some individual men, vanish from the human family without even leaving a trace behind.
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. AND YET, O PRESENT MOMENT! KNOWEST THOU NOT THAT THOU HAST NO PARENT, NOR CANST THOU HAVE A CHILD; THAT THOU ART EVER BEGETTING BUT THYSELF? BEFORE THOU HAST EVEN BEGUN TO SAY ‘I AM THE PROGENY OF THE DEPARTED MOMENT, THE CHILD OF THE PAST,’ THOU HAST BECOME THAT PAST ITSELF. BEFORE THOU UTTEREST THE LAST SYLLABLE, BEHOLD! THOU ART NO MORE THE PRESENT BUT VERILY THAT FUTURE. THUS, ARE THE PAST, THE PRESENT, AND THE FUTURE, THE EVER-LIVING TRINITY IN ONE – THE MAHAMAYA OF THE ABSOLUTE IS.”
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.
~ BlavatskyTheosophy.com ~
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