Theos-Talk Archives (July 2006 Message tt00099)

[ http://www.AnandGholap.net - Online Books on Theosophy ]

"So stupendous is the ascent up which some men have climbed, and some are climbing, that when we scan it by an effort of the imagination we are apt to recoil, wearied in thought by the mere idea of that long journey.  From the embryonic soul of the lowest savage to the liberated and triumphant perfected spiritual soul of the divine man – it seems scarcely credible that the one can contain in it all that is expressed in the other, and that the difference is but a difference in evolution, that one is only at the beginning and the other at the end of man’s ascent.

Below the one stretch the long ranks of the sub-human – the animals, vegetables, minerals, elemental essences; above the other stretch the infinite  gradations of the superhuman – the Chohans, Manus, Buddhas, Builders, Lipikas; who may name or number the hosts of the mighty Ones? Looked at thus, as a stage in a yet vaster life, the many steps within the human kingdom shrink into a narrower compass, and man’s ascent is seen as comprising but one grade in evolution in the linked lives that stretch from the elemental essence onwards to the manifested God.

We have traced man’s ascent from the appearance of the embryonic soul to the state of the spiritually advanced, through the stages of evolving consciousness from the life of sensation to the life of thought. We have seen him retread the cycle of birth and death in the three worlds, each world yielding him its harvest and offering him opportunities for progress. We are now in a position to follow him into the final stages of his human evolution, stages that lie in the future for the vast bulk of our humanity, but  that have already been trodden by its eldest children, and that are being trodden by a slender number of  men and women in our own day."
 
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Anand Gholap