Good and Evil pervade the whole universe of matter. Everything is polarised: magnetism is positive and negative, male and female. Night rests humanity from the day’s activity, and restores the equilibrium of human as well as of cosmic nature. Daemon est Deus inversus, Devil is God upside-down. Good and D’Evil, Agathodaimon and Kakodaimon, are convertible. Heat and Electricity, two out of three Mothers of Hermes, are also convertible. Pneuma and Anemos, Spiritus and Ventus are convertible. And so is Purusha and Prakriti, Spirit and Matter, Deity and Nature, Force and Matter. And Cain and Abel, Osiris and Typhon, Jacob and Esau. Even Activity and Passivity are readily convertible to each other. The former is the essential condition with which the student has to commence. Rishis and Patriarchs, too, are convertible in their numbers. Last but not least, Spiritualism and Animalism are convertible. But there can be no intercourse or relations between clean and unclean souls — whether embodied or disembodied. Neither can evil ever be uprooted but must linger in the whole expanse of the Kosmos.

The soul of the true philosopher is in perfect harmony with his divine spirit. It is the duty of every man who is capable of an unselfish impulse to do something, however little, for the welfare of Humanity, the great Orphan. Only those of exceptional purity and unconditional love for their fellow man and every living creature, may approach the sacred Majesty of Truth and hear within the sanctuary of the heart the Voice of the Silence. Raja Yoga deals with the inner man and therefore neither encourages sham, nor requires physical postures. Hatha Yoga is triply distilled selfishness. By encouraging mental passivity, it hastens the opening of mediumistic faculties resulting in gradual loss of self-control. Inductive reasoning from the known to the unknown should be promoted and practised. True contemplation is the yearning of the human soul to ascend in spirit towards its divine parent, by studying and assimilating the divine laws that govern Universe and Man, and by applying them in everyday life. In this sublime effort the soul relies on the immutable Law of Analogy that underpins the affinity between stars and man. This is the lost thread of Ariadne, which alone can guide us through the labyrinth of matter, and lead us from the unreal to the real. Those who pray silently and intensely gain their object, while those who merely mumble some formula get no answer to their prayers.

Why do celestial orbits perpetually shift their position and form? Speculations galore, enough for every taste and brain power, on the origin of rotation, and of the seven planes and comets. Science lies on a Procrustean bed of its own making. Count de Maistre and William Herschel cut the Gordian knot by saying that the planets rotate because they are made to rotate, for a will is needed to impart a circular motion, and another will to restrain the former under the perturbing influence of the Sun. The planetary orbits are far from immutable; on the contrary, they are subject to a perpetual mutation in their position and form. As orbits are alternately widening and narrowing, their great axis lengthens and diminishes, or oscillates at the same time from right to left around the Sun, raising and lowering itself periodically while pivoting around itself with a kind of tremor. Gravity is an obsolete law in starry heaven and mother earth. A comet whose tail defies the law of gravity right in the Sun’s face can hardly be credited with obeying that law. Science is like Cæsar’s wife, she must not be suspected, but she can be respectfully criticised, nevertheless. It is hardly surprising that many learned astronomers favour the Kabbalah and ancient systems to the modern dreary and contradictory expositions of the Universe. Spirit is the first differentiation of eternal Beness or That. It is the Causeless Cause of Cosmos, manifesting through a plurality of Creative and Intelligent, yet contrary, Forces — centripetal and centrifugal — possessing inherent powers of their own. Intra-Cosmic Forces are not suppositions and abstractions, they are acting realities whose attributes can be determined by direct observation and induction. Deity is Life and Law, and vice versa. Deity is a Soul in an orbicular Fire (Democritus). That Fire is the Sun, which is the image of divine Intelligence (Iamblichus), and an immortal Living Being (Plato), whose visible parts are its organs.

Gravity is an obsolete law in starry heaven. Among the materialists, gravity is the king of the all-potent imponderables. But among the students of the Sacred Science, gravity in one of the attributes of differentiation manifested as the law of attraction and repulsion between various states of matter. Newton did not use the word “attraction” with regard to the mutual action of bodies in a physical sense; to him, attractions were impulses; he believed that there is some subtle spirit, by the force and action of which all movements of matter are determined. For Pythagoras, Forces were Spiritual Entities (Gods independent of planets and matter, as we see and know them on Earth), who are the Rulers of the Sidereal Heaven. Light, heat, electricity, etc., are Affections, not properties or qualities of matter. Matter is the prerequisite and vehicle for the manifestation of Intelligent Forces on this plane. Newton had derived his knowledge of Gravitation and its laws from Jacob Böhme, with whom Gravitation or Attraction is the first property of Nature. Newton, whose profound mind had fathomed the spiritual thought of the great Seer in its mystic rendering, owes his great discovery to Böhme, the nursling of the genii who watched over and guided him. The voidness of the seeming full is the fullness of the seeming void. It was from Newton’s theory of a universal void that dates the immense scorn now shown by the moderns for ancient physics. Though the old sages had always maintained that “nature abhorred vacuum,” the mathematicians of the new world had discovered the antiquated “fallacy” and exposed it. More recently, modern Science vindicated, however ungracefully, archaic knowledge having, moreover, to also vindicate Newton’s character and powers of observation at this late hour. And now Father Æther is welcomed once more with open arms and wedded to gravitation. “Look back before moving forward” must become the motto of exact Science, in finding herself itself inexact every leap-year. Rough and up-hill is the path of Science; her days are full of vanity and vexation of Spirit. The metaphysical tenets of Kepler are purely occult. He was not the first to discover the theory of Attraction and Repulsion in Kosmos, for it was known from the days of Empedocles, the two opposite forces being called by him Hate and Love, or Repulsion and Attraction. Kepler also gave a pretty fair description of Cosmic Magnetism. Why should he be denounced then as most unscientific, for offering just the same solution as Newton did — only showing himself more sincere, more consistent, and even more logical? Where is the difference between Newton’s “all-powerful Being” and Kepler’s Rectores, his Sidereal and Cosmic Forces, or Angels?

The concepts of the West are the allegories of the East, and the truths of the Elect. Behind the veil of terrestrial phenomena, the Occultist sees in the Elemental Forces of Nature secondary Causes which are, in themselves, the effects of primary Causes produced and guided unerringly by Divine Intelligences. The idea of anything in Nature being inorganic or dead is materially fallacious, and is utterly rejected by Esoteric Philosophy. When matter appears inert, it is the most active. A stone block is motionless and impenetrable to all intents and purposes. Nevertheless, its particles are in ceaseless eternal vibration which is so rapid that, to the physical eye, the stone seems devoid of motion. Substance is the pre-cosmic substratum of matter, undifferentiated yet interrelated with Ideation, supersensuous but atomic, informed by the Divine Breath of its form. Substance does not mean matter in metaphysics. It is boundless Æther, formless and supernal, the ultimate essence of matter in Space and noumenon of evanescent matter on Earth. Ether is physical and infernal. Kosmos is Eternal Noetic Motion Unmanifested, the Great Breath of One Element. Father-Æther is the source and cause of All Cosmic Forces, which are differentiated aspects of Cosmic Substance, generated by substantial yet super-sensuous Powers. Our Cosmos is ruled by Creative and Intelligent Occult Forces: they are emanations of conscious living entities, acting behind the veil of matter. The forces we know of are but the phenomenal manifestations of realities we know nothing about, but which were known by the ancients. The truths of today are the falsehoods of yesterday. Conceit and prejudice strangle every truth. As only truth can dispel error, Truth should be the sole aim of Science and Justice. It is true that pure Force is nothing in the world of physics; but it is the All in the domain of metaphysics. Inertia is the Greatest of Occult Forces. A flying cannon ball moves only from its own inherent Force of Inertia. Eternal Vibration is the spiritual term for Motion Unmanifested, unconscious, innate, noumenal. It is the “Great Breath” of the One Eternal Element. Vortical Motion is the material term for Motion Manifested, conscious, external, phenomenal. Whatever may be the future name given to the Force of Inertia by scientists, to maintain that that Force does not reside in the atoms but only in the “space between them,” is not true. To the mind of an Occultist it is like saying that water does not reside in the drops of which the ocean is composed, but only in the space between those drops. The Atom belongs wholly to the domain of metaphysics. It is an entified abstraction and has nought to do with physics, strictly speaking, as it can never be brought to the test of retort or balance. Avogadro’s law holds the same place in chemistry as the law of gravitation does in astronomy. Occultists see in gravity only Sympathy and Antipathy, or Attraction and Repulsion, caused by physical polarity on our terrestrial plane, and by spiritual causes beyond our illusive earth. Matter, to the Occultist and to those men of Science who care too much for truth and too little for their vanity to dogmatise, is that totality of existences in the Kosmos, which falls within any of the planes of possible perception. If Scientists could fathom the ultimate nature of these Forces, they would have first to admit their substantial nature, however supersensuous. Science merely traces the sequence of phenomena on a plane of effects, illusory projections from the region that Occultism has long since penetrated. Light and heat, sound and cohesion, are the ghosts or shadows of matter in motion. However, there is no fundamental difference between light and heat, each is merely a metamorphosis of the other. Heat is light in complete repose. Light is heat in rapid motion. When light is combined with a body, it becomes heat; but when thrown off from that body, heat reverts to light. Occult Science may err in particulars but it can never become guilty of a mistake in questions of Universal Laws, simply because Divine Science was born on higher planes, and was brought on Earth by Beings who were far wiser than man will ever be. Occult Science may be less well-informed as to the behaviour of compound elements in various cases of physical correlations: still, it is immeasurably higher in its knowledge of the ultimate occult states of matter, and of the true nature of matter, than all the Academies of Science of our day may possess. Occult Science does not regard either electricity, or any of the forces supposedly generated by it, as matter in any of the states known to physical Science. None of these “forces,” so-called, are either solids, gases, or fluids. An Occultist would even object to electricity being called a fluid, as it is an effect and not the cause. But its noumenon, he would say, is a conscious cause. The force, which materialism considers as the cause of the diversity that surrounds us, is in sober reality only an effect, i.e., a result of that diversity. In other words, the cause of any force is not matter, but motion itself. And thus the great dogma, “no force without matter and no matter without force,” is dethroned and loses the solemn significance with which materialism has tried to invest it. If nature abhors vacuum, what is atom? To admit the divisibility of the atom, amounts to an admission of an infinite divisibility of substance, which is equivalent to reducing substance to nothingness. If the Universe is composed of atoms, then those atoms must be elastic. Absolutely non-elastic atoms could never exhibit a single one of those numerous phenomena that are attributed to their correlations. Without any elasticity the atoms could not manifest their energy, and the substance of the materialists would remain weeded of every force. Materialism is now enmeshed in a fatal circle of its own making. If the blind inertia of physical Science is replaced by the Intelligent Active Powers behind the veil of illusive matter, motion and inertia become subservient to those Powers. Acceptance of the infinite divisibility of the atom opens limitless horizons to Substance, informed by the Divine Breath of its Soul in every possible state of tenuity, states still undreamt of even by the most spiritually disposed chemists and physicists. But alas, the insanities of materialism and pessimism are incurable. The most Science can do is to assume the attitude of agnosticism. But to do this, requires a boundless love of truth and the surrender of the prestige of infallibility, which the men of Science have acquired among the flippant masses. Dualistic and anthropomorphic may be the philosophy of Vishisht Advaita, when compared with the non-duality of Advaita, it is yet supremely higher in logic and philosophy than the cosmogenesis exalted by Christianity and Science, its great opponents.

The Chinese mind is too philosophical to fashion a supreme being in its likeness. The higher aspirations of Christ and Buddha, the world’s great reformers, have nothing to do with the cold, practical philosophy of Confucius, who does not have the depth of feeling and the spiritual striving of his contemporary, Lao Tzu. From Lao Tzu down to Hiuen-Tsang, their literature is replete with allusions to the fair island of Shambhala (now an oasis of incomparable beauty) and the Wisdom of the trans-Himalayan Adepts. The Emptiness of Lao Tzu is the Absoluteness of the Buddhist, a state of perfect Uncreated Unconsciousness — a Presence which ever was, is, and will be forever. Lao Tzu mentions only five of the seven principles of man, and omits to include the highest (Atma) and the lowest (which is no principle but the cadaver). Analogy is the guiding law, the reliable Ariadne’s thread that can lead us through the otherwise inextricable paths of Nature. The “seven jewels” of the Japanese Yamaboosis, the mystics of the Lao Tzu sect, and the ascetic monks of Kyoto allude to the correspondence of the seven principles of man with our planetary chain of seven rounds. The Moral Doctrines of Lao Tzu: 1. Tao in Its Transcendental Aspect, and in Its Physical Manifestation. 2. Tao as a Moral Principle, or “Virtue.” 3. The Doctrine of Inaction. 4. Lowliness and Humility. 5. Government. 6. War. 7. Paradoxes. 8. Miscellaneous. 9. Lao Tzu on Himself.