Now think: the Nag awakes. He heaves a heavy breath and the latter is sent like an electric shock all along the wire encircling Space. Go to your pianoforte and execute upon the lower register of keys the seven notes of the lower octave — up and down. Begin pianissimo, crescendo from the first key, and having struck fortissimo on the last lower note go back diminuendo, getting out of your last note a hardly perceptible sound — "morendo pianissimo" (as I luckily for my illustration find it printed in one of the musick pieces in K.H.'s old portmanteau). The first and the last notes will represent to you the first and last spheres in the cycle of evolution — the highest! the one you strike once is our planet. Remember you have to reverse the order on the pianoforte: begin with the seventh note, not with the first. The seven vowels chanted by the Egyptian priests to the seven rays of the rising sun to which Memnon responded, meant but that. The one Life-principle when in action runs in circuits even as known in physical science. It runs the round in human body, where the head represents and is to the Microcosmos (the physical world of matter) what the summit of the cycle is to the Macrocosmos (the world of universal spiritual Forces); and so with the formation of worlds and the great descending and ascending "circle of necessity." All is one Law. Man has his seven principles, the germs of which he brings with him at his birth. So has a planet or a world. From first to last every sphere has its world of effects, the passing through which will afford a place of final rest to each of the human principles — the seventh principle excepted. The world No. A is born; and with it, clinging like barnacles to the bottom of a ship in motion, evolute from its first breath of life the living beings of its atmosphere, from the germs hitherto inert, now awakening to life with the first motion of the sphere. With sphere A begins the mineral kingdom and runs the round of mineral evolution. By the time it is completed sphere B comes into objectivity and draws to itself the life which has completed its round on sphere A, and has become a surplus, (the fount of life being inexhaustible, for it is the true Arachne doomed to spin out its web eternally — save the periods of pralaya). Then comes vegetable life on sphere A, and the same process takes place. On its downward course "life" becomes with every state coarser, more material; on its upward more shadowy. No — there is [not], nor can there be any responsibility until the time when matter and spirit are properly equilibrized. Up to man "life" has no responsibility in whatever form; no more than has the foetus who in his mother's womb passes through all the forms of life — as a mineral, a vegetable, an animal to become finally Man.
(5) Where does it get the animal soul, its fifth principle, from? Has the potentiality of this resided from the first in the original magnetic impulse which constituted the mineral, or at every transition from the last world on the ascending side to sphere I does it, so to speak, pass through an ocean of spirit and assimilate some new principle?
(5) Thus you see his fifth principle is evolved from within himself, man having as you well say "the potentiality" of all the seven principles as a germ, from the very instant he appears in the first world of causes as a shadowy breath, which coagulates with, and is hardened together with the parent sphere.
Spirit or LIFE is indivisible. And when we speak of the seventh principle it is neither quality nor quantity nor yet form that are meant, but rather the space occupied in that ocean of spirit by the results or effects — (beneficent as are all those of a co-worker with nature) — impressed thereon.
(6) From the highest animal (non-human) form in sphere I — how does it get to sphere II? It is inconceivable that it can descend to the lowest animal form there, but otherwise how can it go through the whole circle of life on each planet in turn?
If it runs its cycle in a spiral (i.e., from form 1 of sphere I to form 1 of sphere II, etc. — then to form 2 of sphere I, II, III, etc., and then to form 3 of sphere. . . .nth) then it seems to me that the same rule must apply to the mineral and vegetable individualities if they have such, and yet some things I have been told seem to militate against that. (State them and they will be answered and explained.)
For the moment I must work on that hypothesis, however.
(Having swept through the cycle in the highest animal form the animal soul in its next plunge into the ocean of spirit acquires the seventh principle which endows it with a sixth. This determines its future on Earth, and at the close of the earth life has sufficient vitality to keep an attraction of its own for the seventh principle, or loses this and ceases to exist as a separate entity. All this misconceived.)
Seventh principle always there as a latent force in every one of the principles — even body. As the macrocosmic Whole it is present even in the lower sphere, but there is nothing there to assimilate it to itself.
(6) Why, "inconceivable?" The highest animal form in sphere I or A being irresponsible, there is no degradation for it to merge into sphere II or B as the most infinitesimal of that sphere. While on its upward course, as you were told, man finds even the lowest animal form there — higher than he was himself on earth. How do you know that men and animals and even life in its incipient stage is not a thousand times higher there, than it is here? Besides which, every kingdom (and we have seven — while you have but three) is subdivided into seven degrees or classes. Man (physically) is a compound of all the kingdoms, and spiritually — his individuality is no worse for being shut up within the casing of an ant than it is for being inside a king. It is not the outward or physical shape that dishonours and pollutes the five principles — but the mental perversity. Then it is but at his fourth round, when arrived at the full possession of his Kama-energy and completely matured, that man becomes fully responsible, as at the sixth he may become a Buddha and at the seventh before the Pralaya — a "Dhyan Chohan." Mineral, vegetable, animal-man, all of these have to run their seven rounds during the period of earth's activity — the Maha Yug. I will not enter here on the details of mineral and vegetable evolution, but I will notice only man — or — animal-man. He starts downward as a simply spiritual entity — an unconscious seventh principle (a Parabrahm in contradistinction to Para-parabrahm) — with the germs of the other six principles lying latent and dormant in him. Gathering solidity at every sphere — his six pr. when passing through the worlds of effects, and his outward form in the worlds of causes (for these worlds or stages on the descending side we have other names), when he touches our planet he is but a glorious bunch of light upon a sphere itself yet pure and undefiled (for mankind and every living thing on it increase in their materiality with the planet). At that stage our globe is like the head of a newly born babe — soft, and with undefined features, and man — an Adam before the breath of life was breathed into his nostrils (to quote your own bungled up Scriptures for your better comprehension). For man and (our planet's) nature — it is day — the first (see distorted tradition in your Bible). Man No. 1 makes his appearance at the apex of the circle of the spheres on sphere No. 1, after the completion of the seven rounds or periods of the two kingdoms (known to you) and thus he is said to be created on the eighth day (see Bible Chapter II; note verses 5 and 6 and think what is meant there by "mist" — and verse 7 wherein LAW the Universal great fashioner is termed "God" by Christians and Jews, and understood as Evolution by Kabbalists).