The Theosophical Forum – October 1942

MAN IN A JUST AND ORDERED UNIVERSE — G. de Purucker

There is no chance anywhere in Infinitude. Now just apply your reasoning faculty to that statement, and see how far afield it will carry you. The first deduction is this: There being no chance anywhere, therefore no fortuity, everything that happens is a link in a chain of causation — cause, effect — the effect immediately becoming a new cause, producing its effect, which in turn becomes a new cause, producing its effect. This is what we call Karman.

Everything that happens is therefore caused by law, which is just another word for cosmic vitality plus intelligence, plus what we call the ethical instinct, order; and these things are precisely what our studies of the universe show that it exhibits to our inquiring gaze. Everywhere we see order, law, procedures acting according to causational and effectual relations. If there were chance in but one atom of Infinitude, there would be chance throughout, for then Infinitude were not Infinitude, but an atom short of Infinitude, which is an absurdity.

Now with all you know of the teaching of modern science, and all you know of our beloved God-wisdom, carry your thought on logically a step farther: since whatever happens is causative and effectual, it is therefore justified in Infinitude.

We discern, in our investigations or researches into Nature, two things: an all-embracing, all-encompassing orderliness, or what we call the laws of Nature; and within this, embraced by this universal law, an infinitude of individuals or individualities, each one an entity, working under the mandate, as it were, of cosmic law — no entity can do otherwise. We have therefore unity, divine unity, working through virtually infinite multiplicity. Among these multiplicities are we human beings. There are also the gods, angels or Dhyani-Chohans, the plants, the animals, the atoms, etc., etc. They are all individuals working in and under, and as it were, subject to the mandate of this fundamental background of cosmic orderliness. You see how these thoughts are rigidly logical, carrying us step by step from point to point, until we reach not only new conclusions, but conclusions that are always in accord with everything that we know of universal nature. The point is to apply these to our lives, which means likewise to our thoughts and our feelings.

When a man realizes that there is no chance in the universe, that he is but one unit in a hierarchy and that these hierarchies are virtually infinite in number, and that so far as we human beings know they are endless, like the bodies in space, children of the Infinite Life as we are — when a man realizes all this, several things happen to him. When he thinks these thoughts and becomes through reflexion upon them convinced of their inevitable force, first he loses all fear of death. He realizes secondly that he is responsible for what he does, which means for what he thinks and for what he feels, and that there is no escape from the result of his thinking and feeling and acting; and that just in that impossibility of escaping the retribution or the reward of cosmic law lies mankind's highest and noblest hope.

To phrase the thought popularly, in the old-fashioned language of the Christian, he can escape neither heaven nor hell. He cannot escape reward, that will come unto him somewhen, somewhere, for the good that he has done in the world. It will seek him out wherever he may be, and brighten and cheer his life and give him renewed hope and renewed courage. And for the evil that he has wrought, the injustices, the crimes, the unfairnesses that he has committed, equally will these consequences in the chain of causation seek him out; and though he hide in the cleft of the mountain or the deep of the bottomless abyss, he cannot escape a just retribution, for eternal and universal nature is on his track.

There is no chance in Infinitude. See the immense weight of these thoughts as moral motors upon us. We see the reason for all the ethical, all the moral teaching of the greatest sages that the human race has ever produced, and we see the reason why their teaching is the greatest hope that mankind has.

And a third reflexion: We on this little earth of ours, so big to us, so small when compared with the giants of even our own solar system, should remember that each one of us, as an inseparable part of the cosmic structure, is equally weighty in importance to the cosmic law, so to speak, as is the mightiest giant of the stellar host. The Christian New Testament alludes to this in its teaching, strange to so many: Know ye not that the hairs of your head are counted? And that no sparrow droppeth unless it be in accordance with Divine Law? There is the same thought: that we are not merely the children of the gods, but embryo-gods ourselves, for we are the very offsprings of the divine life, the divine stuff in the universe. Otherwise what are we? Can you deny it, and say, "We are not; we don't belong to the universe, we are not in it; we don't come forth from it"? That is absurd.

And our divine origin makes us kin with every thing and every being that is. For not only are all mankind kin, but all beings and things that are, are our other selves. All spring from the same universal ocean which holds us around forever — the Mother Eternal, the Father-Mother. It is a wonderful thought.

The next time you pluck a flower, remember you are touching a younger brother; and that perhaps in the way we look upon these buds of beauty, young embryo-souls as it were, or monads in a young state on this plane, expressing their life and beauty and fragrance to us, so do the higher gods look upon us. I have often wondered how often do the gods pluck us because mayhap in their spheres we shed beauty and fragrance and they love us: Those whom the gods love die young. A whole mystery lies just behind that one thought. Death is no accident. Birth none. And yet never think for a moment that this chain of causation is the old scientific dead soulless determinism of the days of our grandfathers, when the idea was that everything moved just like a soulless machine, and never stopped. Did they not forget that to have a machine there had to be a machinist to build it and run it? They just used words then and were happy. It is not of that soulless determinism that I speak. But it is the structure of the universe arising in imbodied hierarchies of consciousnesses providing the cosmic variety, and the innumerable families of beings, and all enclosed in the encompassing, sheltering, protecting, aye, guiding and guarding, vastly great Hierarch, of whom we in common with all other things are the children — that Hierarch, which is not different from our inner self, but we, as it were sparks from it, the Central Flame of our Universe.



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