[cover: A Master.]
(The Temple of the People, Theogenesis, pp. 103-104, 1981 — STANZA III, COMMENTARY 2.)
"The ancient fire worshippers had, underlying their philosophy, a true ideal of life, for fire is most certainly the fundamental reality back of all religions. The Bible postulates God as a consuming fire, and Darkness holds within itself suspended, as it were, the active principles of all fire, spiritual and material, which symbolize all aspects of manifested life. Imagine this darkness as the reservoir of all spiritual fire. Spiritual Energy — Cold Flame, Cosmic Energy — rouses to action, Sound, the creative word, and simultaneously comes into being Light, the androgynous male-female, the splendor of the Father — Light and Heat, or Energy.
It is most difficult for the finite mind to grasp a concept of the Infinite; and Light being the first manifestation of the Absolute, the Infinite Father, holds within itself all forces, all lives, all things, including darkness, for darkness is the negative pole of light. The process is reversed on the upward arc of a cycle of manifestation.
Sunlight travels at the rate of nearly 200,000 miles per second. Absolute Light — The Light of the Central Spiritual Sun — is beyond human computation. Where the motion of light, sound or electricity is alluded to in physics, the mass motion or etheric vibration is indicated. The molecular vibrations of light produce color; the atomic vibrations, sound. Each form created by the directive power of Fohat receives through the principle of form its rate of mass motion; that rate decreases and increases as that form passes through evolution, returning to its Infinite Source with an increase according to what that form or entity has accomplished in its life cycle. This is equally true of all lesser living forms.
Darkness has been designated as negation, nothingness. But darkness is of all things least understood. It is the mystery of mysteries, and is negation only in a limited sense. For it is the Robe of the Father, the Infinite, the Container of all Motion, Vibration, Force, Essence, Substance and Matter; the power, in the sense of energy, used by the Holy Spirit, and is substance in that sense. Its lower pole is indeed negation, chaos.
Matter is retarded motion. For illustration, take a globe of iron or steel. Increase the vibration of its atoms by energy from stage to stage, and you will find manifesting in rotation Sound, Light, Color, free force, absolute Motion and Darkness. Reverse the process, and you have an idea of the creation of a star or a Universe. Every atom, molecule, man, star or force has its positive and negative aspect; and the modes of motion and vibration now under consideration must be studied apart from the infinite whole, and to a great extent by intuition.
The axiomatic metaphor, “As above, so below,” on which many ancient philosophies have been built, is consistent with all revealed truth; and even a limited conception of spiritual evolution gives us a working hypothesis by which it is possible to gain some insight regarding the planes of manifestation with which all students have become more or less familiarized. Universal Light and Universal Mind are interchangeable terms. Once a design is conceived of the Spiritual Sun, which symbolizes all that we have attempted to define as the spiritual domain of the Cosmos, the lower division, which in contra-distinction to the Absolute and archetypal are known as manasic, psychic, astral and elemental become more intelligible. From the Spiritual Sun all of the Suns of the Universe evolved; and these can be, in a sense, compared to holes in the sky through which the Spiritual Sun shines, though each sun and planet of each one of the innumerable solar systems is an individualized entity that has reached its present high status through the same laws of evolution that are transforming stone, planet, animal and man on the earth’s surface."
