Universal Brotherhood Path – June 1900

HEAVEN AND HELL — F. M. Pierce

If consciousness is existence or life, then whatever exists must be endowed with consciousness adequate to its plane of evolution.

The rock embedded in the mountain-chain helps in its massive stability to build and sustain the towering continental divides. Dormant for untold ages it is finally released by the kindly elements, and as a separate unit or individual stone, it starts on its way to the valley, gaining experience or character, and symmetry and beauty of form, in the grind and turmoil of the dark canon, the cataract and the swirling pool, with here and there a rest place in the sands of the level stretches, until finally it becomes sand itself, and rich soil from which abundant harvests spring to feed the higher kingdoms, and to become of them a part, — of the plant, the vegetable, the animal, of the brute-man, man, and man-god, even up to the highest God. Through nature's stately moving, divine, alchemical process of evolution, its inner urging principle rises from the one consciousness of infinite elementary matter, to absorption into the one consciousness of infinite deity.

What but ignorance dares dispute this self-evident fact? — the ceaseless, orderly, majestic, compassionate evolution of the self-unconscious embedded soul in atoms, to finally become one with the all-consciousness of the divine. Is man less than the stone? Is the whole less than the part? Is not the evolution or life of one that of the other? "There is but one, eternal law."

Man is the flower and fruitage of the evolution of all the lower kingdoms. His tap root is the central life of all. As he grows straight and strong and godlike through their proper use, his entrained life, running down through the nether kingdoms, is made abundant and perfect in himself and them, or they and he are dwarfed and hemmed in by desolation and death, when he uses them ill, or not at all.

As he is master of these, either for weal or woe, so must he be master of the forces or laws governing earth-life.

And what of his rule and kingdom? The moaning ocean, the sighing winds, the groaning earth, and devastating breath of fire give answer. These manifested elemental gods, in maddening agony from their unused pent-up energy, break forth and devastate their sleeping, selfish, master's home, and swallow whole continents of living things, in rebellious protest, until aroused through terror, anguish and despair, he cries to all without himself — to mind-made gods and fiends — to help and save or to annihilate.

He has created hell in this his earthly home, and circumscribed its boundaries to his habitations. Between the upper and the nether millstones of the higher gods and lower elemental chiefs, his shell of selfish personality is, after untold and self-imposed suffering, ground away, and the pure and chastened soul or selfless man emerges from the chaos as the true and ever conscious master, to command peace and joy throughout his realm, by utilizing every energy of nature — himself a part — for common benefit of all.

He, the man-god, has forced the doors of his mental torture-house and dungeon, to live and reign in earth, now changed by him to Paradise or Heaven.

He sees that Heaven and Hell are states of his own consciousness in this his earthly and all future lives; that he alone, the master soul, makes both for himself and all that lives.



Theosophical University Press Online Edition