The Theosophical Forum – May 1946

CONCERNING THE SUN — Norman Arthur Lewis

Our friend and parent, the Sun, is by no means such an obvious character as his shining face might lead us to suppose. This tremendous demonstration of heat and light we observe whenever and wherever the Sun makes his entrance is assuredly only a kind of planetary opinion, a sort of earthly bias of thought, something deceptive about our own observation as a planetary spectator.

Occultly speaking, the great extrovert of our Solar System is most subtle, hidden, and interior in his action; and indeed we do violence to our own understanding when we consider him as mere heat, mere light, mere physical energy.

Into that great living and conscious heart flows the circulating something — we may call it energy, intelligence, consciousness, Divine Fire, Akasa, terms by no means synonymous, yet all contained in our meaning — into the Sun's North Pole flows the circulating force; and it is purified, renewed, revitalized in that great vortex of forces and energies. It passes out through the Sun's South Pole to travel its path of Being, of Life-Existence, throughout the billions of entities, of atoms, in our Solar System.

It is like the passage of blood through our human veins, or the almost instantaneous passage of an electrical impulse from one place to another, but most like nothing else but its own passage. After all, there is no lesser, more limited phenomenon to compare with this everywhere-present Now. The Master K. H. referred to it as "Radiant Energy," "all pervading, omnipresent life." In this sense, the term, "circulations of the Cosmos/ is only illustrative, since for our sort of perception, for our unfortunate insistence upon Time, and for our somewhat concrete idea of Space, these circulations are entirely too spontaneous for our actual comprehension of them.

The Sun is a great teacher, a celestial radio, the great heart, the great brain; the Sun is all and many things from a relative point of view, but truly we can have no greater or clearer understanding of it than our own ultimate embracing of the unqualified Great Thought, the whole space, the whole Love, the complete consciousness of this subtle immensity which at all moments supports the most obvious and limited of material objects. One cannot grasp, in an ordinary conscious state, the true function of this subtle body of force. Therefore, it would be well to remind ourselves that we will be discussing our subject in terms of a kind of mental diagram.

We have all seen diagrams with, say, object A and object B, with wavy arrows pointing from A to B, representing forces. As I discuss the Sun and Jupiter, I am going to ask that you substitute for the wavy arrows the "subtle immensity" mentioned above, that communication (too spontaneous for comprehension) of this primary or elementary energy from the Sun's South Pole to Jupiter.

Jupiter is a planet, and a receiver of the Sun's energy. Jupiter is an evolved life-center of a particular kind, and therefore has gathered to him the life-atoms karmically related to him in an aura, so to speak, of cosmic dust, meteoric fragments, bits of dead suns, odds and ends of attractive, neutral, and repellent matter. This aura is tailed the "meteoric continent" of Jupiter, and is the lens or screen, the magical curtain through which the Sun shines on Jupiter as the light of the Sun.

The planets keep themselves warm, much as our own bodies do, by their own vitality, their own vital heat. The electro-magnetic and subtler energies of the Sun, in encountering the resistance afforded by the particles comprising a planet, set up a vibration in these particles, which vibration constitutes heat and light. There is nothing of heat in the subtle energy itself, but its meeting with the planet generates heat. More fully explained, it is because the magnetic, electric, and electro-magnetic nature of the planet (another way of describing its physical existence), interacting and reacting with the magnetic continent, converts the subtle energy, and sets up a current of heat, energy, light, and other activity relative to the planet's own mode of being.

In this way, Jupiter, for instance, although farther from the Sun than the Earth is, is not colder than the Earth, but much, much hotter. It seems that the body of the benign and pleasant Jupiter is something of a furnace. There "fluids are gases, and solids are fluids," a shifting mass of molten matter. Jupiter is a younger planet, and has not cooled as the Earth has.

It is interesting and necessary to note that the meteoric continent or veil is of extreme importance in these processes. The quality and quantity of transformed energy Jupiter will be able to derive from the offerings of his "teacher" — that is, the actual solar energy expended on and by Jupiter, will to a great extent depend upon the quality and quantity of karmically related worldstuff Jupiter has attracted to himself.

As the circulations of energies travel into the Sun via its North Pole and out its South, so it is with Jupiter, the Earth, and all the planets. In regard to this polarity of the Earth, I quote Dr. de Purucker:

Even the ancient Greeks taught this. Do you remember Eolus and the cave of the winds? The cave of the winds was the Earth, and the winds were the winds of the spirit, the circulations of the universe figurated as winds: a cave of which the northern gate was made of horn, through which the gods descend — and through which they ascend also, but mostly descend And the south gate of the earth, of the cave of the winds, was made of ivory, signifying the elephants, as the horn does the tusked animals of the north. And out of the south gate go the hordes of men.

The forces of nature are fluids emanating from great cosmic hearts, beating and sending out the lifeblood, each one of its own special essence, force, and spirit, to the farthest reaches it can contain, or embrace.

Electricity, magnetism, heat, gravity, all the real forces of nature, can be called the fluid efflux from a cosmic being, or entity; the Sun for us, since we live in the body of this Solar System, within the aura of the Sun. The great forces are bipolar, could perhaps be stated, in terms of being and consciousness, as polarities of: not love and hate, not attraction and repulsion, but perhaps best as love and repulsion.

In the course of manvantaras and evolutions, through the long day of our Solar System, the various planetary chains live and die, are disembodied, have their nirvanic rest, and then come back again for renewed life, and do this several times. Their dead bodies, that is, bodies of former globes in the various planetary chains, remain as moons of the new globes, and follow their old orbits for a time. And so, in and out of manifestation, the planetary chains follow their course of life, until that great slowing down, when the Sun nears his great sleep, and the Solar Manvantara draws to a close.

At that time, once more, the Great Mind, the Great Vitality of the Cosmos, will be drawing inward, for all the world in the same way as the mind and being of a dying man draw inward. Then the planets, or whatever evolved states and vestigial moons of them will remain at that time, will be drawing back to the source, perhaps in the way the failing shoots of a fountain do when its wafer is shut off. The dissolution of our Solar System will have begun; and then, suddenly, the Great Thought will be forgotten, there will be an unheard explosion, and the vestiges of form and entity will have disappeared for the Solar Pralaya, or night of our universe.



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