The Theosophical Forum – October 1939

ATTRACTION AND REPULSION — Lydia Ross

If Science — with a capital S — should come out boldly with the pronouncement that "love does make the world go round," that would be "news." The Man-in-the-street would be faced with a new issue: Has Science gone sentimental or super-sensible? Such a departure from accepted concepts of Mother Nature's operation of our globe, would certainly be a change of front 4-plus. Modern Science has worked steadily for several decades to free its own tangible realm of verifiable facts from the intangible elements of the personal equation. The realm of physics has become the field of causes which, in turn, are also the standard of realities. The mind, emotions, insight, imaginations, and all such elements of unstable play have been catalogued among the effects of material forces, and, at most, have been granted a psycho-physiological rating.

However, there are rare ultra-modern scientists who, having followed matter to its "singular points" of ethereality, believe that the secret of life must be found within man himself, rather than in the laboratory. For instance, note Eddington's "discovery" that when we look into our own nature, we find that the physical universe fails to be "co-extensive with our experience of reality." Jeans, in turn, concludes that the controlling power of the universe has something "in common with our own individual minds."

Scientists, in dealing with the atom — — which is a grade of astral substance with condensed energy — have reached the borderland of refined material where it merges into the next or lower level of ethereal substance. This emergence is as simple, as natural, and as scientific as where H2O emerges from its heavier state of water to expand into steam, and then manifest its energy as ethereal gas. Always, it is the One Life which finds fitting expression for its varied phases on all planes from the divine to the physical. The interplay of spirit and matter — or force and substance — is a universal law in the career of sun and planets as it is in that of human beings. Man's mind and emotions and aspirations are not by-products of his brain and functioning organs, but are essential elements of his composition, and are of greater dynamic force than are the forces of his body.

The Ancients did not divorce man from Nature, in their majestic science of Life. They saw him as the microcosm of the macrocosm. Evidently, man evolves, or revolves, through recurring cycles of daily, yearly, and lifetime experience of both inner and outer kinds. Inwardly, he is poised at some angle between his invisible aspirations and his lower desires, impelled into motion by the counter attractions of his better and his baser self. Likewise the revolving globe he lives on is an entity not poised quite upright itself as it turns around in its cycles of experience. It, too, is held in space by invisible attraction and repulsion, the dual forces of "gravitation." The globe, being a magnet, is responsive to the spiritual forces of the sun and to the material forces of the solar system. The sun draws the earth onward with the power of life and light and progressive well-being, and brings it and the solar family into new regions of space by overcoming the backward pull. The spiritual attraction felt by the earth for the sun is, in essence, what pure human love is, writ large — an enduring impersonal romance of fidelity and charm, on the inner plane of the sidereal kingdom.

Human love manifests at all levels of man's composite nature. From intensely selfish phases at the lowest level, it ascends the scale in ever greater degree to the plane where the impersonal mental nature merges into the spiritual nature. Here, in its higher ranges where it has free play, it is an irresistible force. It is not to be located in the research laboratory by analytical or synthetical methods. Nevertheless, the present chaotic state of a so-called civilized world without Brotherhood is convincing negative evidence of its vital existence.

Some one has said that the "heart has reasons which reason never knows." That explains some positive evidence of the coordinating and evolutionary force of love which appeared in The Science News Letter of May 13, 1939. We read that Dr. Harold M. Skeels, Psychologist of Iowa Board of Control of State Institutions, and Dr. Harold B. Dye, Supt. of the Institute for Feeble-Minded Children at Glenwood, Iowa, had a significant experience. Thirteen feeble-minded children from the orphanage were placed in the care of feeble-minded young women with the oversight of a house matron. As a result, some of these children made a gain of forty points in IQ, and all but one of them are now rated normal in intelligence. The doctors attribute the gain to a wealth of play materials, space and supervision for play, varied experience, and much love and affection. In the orphanage where they came from, twelve other children rated normal mostly, were found drifting back toward feeble-mindedness. This condition was ascribed to overcrowded cottages where there was enough medical and physical care, but the children were "mentally emaciated for want of adult affection and stimulation."

The News item did not state the gains of the backward young foster mothers who were given the care of something alive that appealed to the latent power in their hungry hearts and dormant minds. That, naturally, would enter into the reckoning of cause and effect. Altogether, the striking results have been regarded as a challenge to revise orphanage methods generally. Not the least significant part of the case is the doctors" recognition of the unique force of loving-kindness to turn the dim world of these little ones into a childhood's natural day of warmth and light. A medical psychology with so humanistic a "vision" of the needs of the whole nature argues for a scientific rating of "super-sensible" in its IQ. Dr. G. de Purucker's slogan rings true in the realms of Nature and in that of human nature: "Love is the cement of the Universe."



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