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OCCULT VIEW OF LAW OF HUMAN EVOLUTION, APPLIED TO FORM AND SPIRIT Primitive Man of the First Race Was Mindless and Little Better Than a Phantom—The Slow Development of Mind. “The Strange and Remarkable Occult Doctrine of the Law of Evolution’ was the subject of a lecture delivered last evening at the open meeting of the Butte Theosophical society by Mrs. Havilah Squiers. There was a large and interested audience present that listened with close and perhaps curi ous attention to some of the statements made by the speaker. The subject was treated entirely from an occult view, and in the course of her lecture Mrs. Squiers said: ‘The law of evolution as defined by scientists means, first of all, a law of continuity or casual relations through out nature; or, in other words, a con tinuous, progressive change, according to certain laws and by means of resi dent forces. ‘A law which holds good, therefore, throughout nature, must govern alike the cosmos and the individual, and its workings on the plane of the infinitely little should be a reflection, on a min ute scale, of the infinitely great, as we may see the whole landscape mirrored in a dew drop or the pupil of a baby's eye. “To begin with, then, the ancient wis dom says that the essential faculty possessed by all cosmic and terrestrial elements of generating within , them selves a regular and harmonious series of results is an irrefutable proof that they are animated by an extra or in tra-intelligence. Occultism does not deny the mechanical origin of the uni verse, but claims the absolute necessity of mechanics of some sort behind or within the elements. To become com plete and comprehensible a cosmogoni cal theory has to start with the pri mordial substance, diffused throughout boundless space, of an intellectual and divine nature. “Now, what is this substance? It must be the soul, the Spirit, the great intelligence, of the manifested cosmos, and to serve as a physical basis to this there must be its vehicle—primordia physical matter. That matter is homoo geneous, the basis and essence of all the matter we know. It is the original, primordial, prima materia, divine and intelligent, the emanation of the uni versal mind, which forms the nuclei of all the self-moving orbs in cosmos. It is the life principle, the intelligence, of the sun, moon, stars and of our earth: and occultists maintain that all the forces of the scientists have their origin in this vital principle, the one life of our solar system; and, while rejecting the gravity of science. It accepts in stead attraction and repulsion, seeing in those opposite forces the two us pects of the universal unit, this dual nature being the cause of all terrestrial phenomena. It is the link uniting spirit and matter, the mysterious energy that science calls force, by which ideas of universal mind are impressed upon uni versal matter, as the laws of nature are the life of the physical world. These laws of forces, roughly summed up as light, heat, sound, attraction, electricity and magnerism, are not then the blind forces of science working in the dark, but the manifestation of intelligent powers. “The occult theory describes the sun as a fountain of magnetism, giving and receiving the life principle throughout the system, and denies that the sun is a globe in combustion, but defines it simply as a glowing sphere, the re flection of the real sun which is con cealed behind it. As for the moon, she is considered by ancient sages, as by the scientists, to be virtually a dead planet, but the mother, and not the child of the earth. In reality, the earth is the satellite of the moon, and sub ject to her control, as is evidenced by the tides, the growth of planted many other phenomena. The moon was the earliest measure of time, and the as tronomy of the Hebrews and their ob servances were regulated by her move ments. “The universe exists for the sake of the soul's experience, and as man is, to accept the popular division, com posed of body, soul and spirit, his ev olution must be three-fold, physical, mental and spiritual The monadic essence, or life, manifests first in the mineral, vegetable and animal king doms before it becomes man. The min eral kingdom is the lowest point of descent or involution, and from thence begins the ascent to that point where a correspondence is finally established between the human and the divine con sciousness. The process of evolution upon the earth is by seven successive Waves of life-giving energy, called rounds, during each of which seven races inhabit the world, each race be ing adapted to its environment. But the human monad passes through many incarnations in each race, the develop ment of the individual soul being a long process. Between the individual incarnations and between the waves of evolution the human ego passes through a period of subjective exist ence, thus contemplating the analogy with the shorter cycles of day and night, life and death. The present humanity is a division of the fifth race and has passed the lowest point of ma teriality, and is beginning to reascend towards spirit. “The secret doctrine maintains that physical humanity has existed upon this globe for the last 18,000,000 years, and that this period was preceded by 300,000,000 years of mineral and vege table development. It is shown in ev ery scripture and cosmogony that man evolved primarily as a luminous, in corporeal form. The eternal cell, as taught by our newest science, is draw ing nearer and nearer to the teachings of the ancient wisdom, Weissmann holding that the cell, which divides and redivides, is moving continually down the stream of life, but never perishes .In studying the evolution of man as a thinking being the first step, ac cording to the old commentary, is to realize the difference between the mo nad, the universal unit, and the mo nads, or the universal unity. Between the animal and the man, whose monads are fundamentally identical, there is the impassable abyss of mentality and self-consciousness, and what is it that creates such difference between the two unless man is an animal plus a living God within his physical self? “Not only man, but all the primi tive models in every kingdom in nature began by being ethereal, transparent films. All analogy goes to show that man has not created the complete be ing he is now, however imperfect he still remains. There was a spiritual, a psychic, an intellectual, and an ani mal evolution from the highest to the lowest, as well as a physical develop ment from the simple an homeogeneous up to the more complex and heterogene ous. Man having passed through all the Kingdoms of nature in the previous three rounds or cycles of evolution, his physical frame, one adapted to the thermal conditions of those early periods, was ready to receive the divine pilgrim at the first dawn of human life 18,000,000 years ago. ‘In the animals, the higher principles lie dormant and only the life principle and the rudiments of desire can mani fest through the physical body, unfit to become the dwelling of mind till it reaches the human stage. “Every living creature, including man, evolved from one common, primal form, and man must have passed through the same stages in the evolu tionary process as the lower animals, the same stages that science traces to day in the growth of the embryo. “Darwin and his followers would trace man and the anthropoid ape to a common animal ancestor; ocenulcism would give them a common human parent, as it derives these apes from a union of primitive men, when they were mindless, with the animal races of their period. We are told that the first race was little better than phantoms, and devoid of all understanding; the second race, endowed with only the first primitive and weak spark of intel ligence, and the earlier third, little better than animals, and not yet fit temples for the living God. The Monad, although within the earthly frame, was still without the connecting link of mind, which should unite it to the slowly developing brain. For we are bidden to remember that the human Monad, whether immotalized in the stone atom, or invegetalized in the plant, or unanimalized in the animal, is still and ever divine. These early, mindless men were dumb, for language came only with the development of mind. It was with the third race that the separation of the sexes took place, then strife came into the world, and the opposite of natures bred passion, sin and death, and the golden age was at an end; sin was ushered into the world. ‘This was the fall of man, the de scent of the soul into matter, as Plato put it, and invelation, or the complete union of the spiritual with the physical having been effected, evolution, or the return to the spiritual, began. With the human branch, the brain continued to develop and having at last become a fitting vehicle for mind, the divine spark kindled the fire of intelligence in man, and he acquired the conscious ness of his own powers and ire of the fruit of the tree of knowledg e Only by the union with matter can the universal mind become individual mind; only by the purification of mat ter can it work out its own salvation and regain the glorious liberty of the sons of God. With each race, We are told, a new sense and a new element come to perfection. We of the fifth race have five senses, and already the fifth element, ether, is being recognized by science. Side by side with the po sition of humanity, at this moment, is the development of this fifth element of ether on the material plane. It mat ters not whether you turn to the phy sicist, the chemist, the electrician, you will see each one of these classes of scientific men has been investigating ether, studying ether, and Professor Crookes has said that in its vibrations, Vibrations hardly yet understood. No possibilities of the hidden powers of communication of human thought, pos sibilities of a new organ in the human brain, answering to these vibrations as the eye answers to the vibrations which we know as light. And so the way is beings prepared for the development of that sixth sense which will be the dis tinguishing characteristic of the com ing race, ‘Involution and evolution! The un folding of the qualities of God In man, the unfolding of there qualities into active powers. Beginning there was none, ending there never will be; spe cial creation there never was: man has ever been evolving; the object of his evolution being self-consciousness; his only teacher—experience; this gained only through a physical body. From God he came, innocent and pure, but without knowledge; to God he returns, clothed in wisdom, purified by experience. Starting out from the great ocean of spirit, a divine spark, he becomes a pilgrim; falling into matter, and under the dominion of physical sense, for a time he loses his way, but its water ever seeks its source, ns does the soul ever climb upward to its source; at last he conquers; con quers the lower nature, the animal na ture. He has fought the good fight; he has finished his course; he has carried the cross, he has won the crown, and clothed In the majesty of divinity, wis dom and love, he stands victor. He has overcome the world, the flesh, and ignorance. He is free.”
Newspaper Details
Anaconda Standard
Anaconda, Montana, US
Fri, Feb 07, 1902
Page 9
Full Page
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Anonymous
USA 13 Jul 2026
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