Of the number of monads, willing to undertake the pilgrimage, only a few of those within the kinetic belt of the manasic globe have reached the pranic.  Only a few of those within the pranic kinetic belts reached the etheric.  And of all who have reached this earth, only a few may win their way back before the great day Be-With-Us.

The problem of man, and his relations to the universe, are an entirely different line of study from that of the Spiritual Monad, the over-soul of every prakritic atom.  Each prakritic atom has what may be called a soul, its three-fold astral cause; and an over-soul, or the three-fold spiritual archetype, or causeless cause.

Every combination of these atoms, whether a knife, a leaf, an animal, an earth, a sun, or a star, has this soul and oversoul.

Once the idea of what is meant by these terms becomes clear, the difficulty in understanding them vanishes.  The study of man is physical in its lower branches; metaphysical only in its highest and last analysis.  The study of the Monad is metaphysical from start to finish.  The two studies are apt to be confused, because metaphysically they are often joined for study, the teacher taking it for granted that the pupil fully understands the simple and easy physics of the problem of humanity.

This, in crude and bold outline, is the story of creation to the fall of man according to the ancient physics, translated into the words and phrases of modern physics.  The latter, in the latest discoveries of modern science, seem to have stolen a shive from the ancient loaf in the expectation that it would not be detected.  Each and every step forward that modern science has made in the past twenty years, each and every discovery of every kind in the physical field, has been but the affirmative of some ancient doctrine taught in the temples of the East before “Cain took unto himself a wife.”

Chapter Ten

The Septenary World

In the physical universe we have the four informing physical globes, so that as a whole or in its parts, it is “a string of seven globes,” reaching from the highest spirit to the lowest matter.  The awakened Universal Consciousness in vibration —­undifferentiated in the three globes above, differentiated in the four globes below—­in its last analysis is all one.  But there is a gulf between matter and spirit, radically dividing them, and in the physical universe we are concerned only with physics and physical laws, until we reach its outmost boundaries and come in touch with the spiritual planes beyond.