PHYSICAL FORCES AND SPIRITUAL INTELLIGENCES
by K.Chodkiewicz
THE BLAVATSKY LECTURE
delivered
at the Annual Convention of the
Theosophical Society in England, at Besant Hall, London
May 24, 1958
Science does not deal with ultimate origins.
Primitive man, who lived
his life closer to nature than we do, saw in the Sun the fiery God
of the day and in the Moon the Goddess of night; in wind, storm, rain
and lightning he felt the all-pervading breath of elemental powers
whom he personified as living beings, sometimes benevolent, but more
often destructive and frightening. Ancient mythologies and religions
peopled the earth and the skies with innumerable gods and goddesses
representing these elemental powers, whom they thought to be the spiritual
causes of all the external phenomena occurring in the visible world.
Madame Blavatsky mentions in The Secret Doctrine (I, 468), [All references
to The Secret Doctrine are made from the 1888 edition. ] that the
people of India still firmly believe in the powers of their Brahmins
over winds and storms. When Jesus (Luke, viii, 24) 'arose and rebuked
the Wind and the raging of the Water, and they ceased and there was
a calm', He certainly did not rebuke the inanimate wind and waves,
but the elemental forces causing them. We know from history that Xerxes
ordered the flogging of the waters of the Hellespont, thus punishing
symbolically the God and Ruler of these Straits, when the bridge he
was building there was destroyed by a storm. The Emperor Constantine
sentenced the philosopher Sopatrus to death for unchaining
the winds and thus preventing ships loaded with grain from arriving
in time to put an end to famine. The explorers and travellers in exotic
countries are of the opinion that the efficacy of weather magic, as
practised there, may not be illusory but related to some influences
of the human psyche, especially of primitive races, on the collective
elemental powers in nature.[J. Layard: Stone Men of Malekula,
1942: page 576. l, ] Before the First World War I myself saw villagers
and peasants in the Eastern Provinces of my country move in solemn
procession to the fields during spells of drought, chanting hymns
and praying for rain, and sometimes their incantations seemed to have
effect, for the rain really camel All these myths, beliefs, prayers
and incantations, which are
today generally labelled as 'superstitions', this magic of Nature,
so deeply ingrained in the souls of common people, seem to indicate
that these Spiritual Intelligences may exist; they may have and use
the physical forces as vehicles and instruments for their external
manifestation, just as we, Spirits, have and use our bodies to act
in the worlds of form. So they may constitute the ultimate and final
cause of many of the phenomena occurring in nature. It would be interesting
to examine and investigate some of these forces and phenomena from
the occult point of view and to try to find whether they can be explained
as materialist science does, mechanically, or if this kind of explanation
does not suffice and must be sought elsewhere. in worlds outside the
scope of the mechanistic cosmo conception.
Let us start with gravitation. There were, and still are. many different
theories of this universal force or phenomenon, but none explains
fully what gravity really is. In antiquity and the middle ages gravity
was thought to be a property of position and not an attribute
of matter. Aristotle believed that everything in the universe had
its proper station to which. when displaced, it endeavoured to return.
Stones fell because they endeavoured to reach the centre of the earth.
their proper place. whereas gases and fires moved towards their appointed
spheres above the earth and below the orbit of the moon.
Newton considered gravitation as the reaction of an ethereal medium.
the ether of space, which. being distorted by material bodies. extended
appropriate pressure against them. He was. however . conscious of
the fact that his law of dynamics only explained the working of this
force and not its origin or nature. In his third letter to Bentley.
he said:
'It is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without
the mediation of something else which is not material. operate and
affect other matter, without mutual contact. as it must do, if gravitation.
in the sense of Epicurus, be essential and inherent to matter. That
one body may act upon another at a distance. through a vacuum, without
the mediation of anything else by and through which their action may
be conveyed from one to another. is to me so great an absurdity that
I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty
of thinking. can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent
acting constantly under certain laws; but whether this agent be material
or immaterial, I have left to the consideration of my readers.'
Modern relativitists,
however, dismiss gravity as a force altogether. They explain gravitational
pull as a distortion of the space-time continuum, making it practically
a behaviour of space. But as this continuum is a conception only,
a mental structure, it is difficult to see how it can be 'distorted'
and act, as gravity certainly does. Behind all the known physical
laws of movement and energy there ever looms this enigmatic, simple
and irresistible force, always acting, never resting, eternally pressing,
pushing and pulling, attracting and repelling, binding and dividing.
The basic principle underlying the whole structure of Einstein's relativity
theory is the fact that the speed of light is a constant factor throughout
the whole known universe; that nothing can move in the space-time
continuum with a velocity exceeding that of light. But here gravity
seems to be an exception, and a very weighty one. It acts instantaneously,
without respect to distance, small or large. No plan has been yet
devised to measure the speed of its working. The creation of any gravitational
unit anywhere in galactic space seems to react simultaneously on all
surrounding bodies. It is the same with the destruction of such a
unit. Gravity also acts without any visible contact. When we think
in terms of matter only, how are we to explain the action of the sun
on our earth through the immense distance of 93 million miles and
through the complete void and emptiness of solar space? And, as Sir
Oliver Lodge remarks, 'It really does not matter whether the space
is measured in millions of miles or in millionths of an inch: the
puzzle is the same.' [Making of Man, 1924, page 26. ]
When we take Newton's First Law of Dynamics which states that: 'all
bodies attract each other in direct ratio to their mass,' we only
express an observed fact in nature but cannot explain its cause. It
is the same with the Second Law, that they attract each other 'in
inverse ratio to the square of their distance'. Here we could ask
with Maeterlinck, the Belgian philosopher [The Supreme Law,
page 151 ]'Why is it always and everywhere the square; why,
whatever may be the star, planet, nebula or white dwarf, whatever
its chemical composition, temperature; density or remoteness - why
never the double, the triple or the cube? Why should a number multiplied
by itself be the prime law and the magic formula of the universe?'
We shall therefore not be surprised, when the late Sir James Jeans,
being quite conscious of the inability to explain the real and final
cause of this all-pervading force, thus defined gravitational attraction:
'What we call the "law of gravitation" is, strictly speaking,
nothing more than a mathematical formula giving the acceleration of
a moving body.'[The Mysterious Universe, 1934, page III . ]
The atom of modern physics
is supposed to be constituted of a nucleus of protons and neutrons,
and electrons orbiting around this nucleus. The composition of the
proton is as yet unknown, but it is suggested that its basic structure
also contains electrons in various combinations (mesons, etc.). So
finally the electron remains a fundamental unit of all matter in the
universe. But this electron has practically no Newtonian mass and
seems rather to be a whirl of electric energy in perpetual motion.
In having no mass at all, it cannot be subjected to the attractive
pull of gravitational forces, and so here in the realm of the atomic
and subatomic worlds the 'law of gravitation' does not work and the
Newtonian laws of dynamics must give place to a new law, namely that
of relativity, as suggested by Einstein. The atomic gravitational
field we must, therefore, dismiss as non-existent.
Taking now the solar gravitational field into consideration, we also
find some difficulties with respect to Newtonian laws. If we imagine
our solar system as a big flat wheel, which it really is, with the
sun as the hub and the planets as its spokes, we would expect that
if the sun keeps the planets on their orbits through its gravitational
pull, the whole wheel should rotate uniformly, which means more slowly
nearer the centre and with rising speed farther away from the centre,
towards the rim. But it is practically vice-versa: the planets nearer
to the sun move with much greater orbital speed than the outer planets,
as proved by astronomical research.[The problem is fully dealt with
by C. E. Last, in his book Man in the Universe. 1954, page 56. ]
A postulate of the gravitational field is that in the centre of the
field should be a body of a mass larger than the bodies kept outside
the centre of the field by gravitational attraction. That is correct
with regards to our own and other solar systems, but it does not fit
into higher aggregations of stars. When we observe a globular cluster
of stars, with its almost perfect spherical form, we do not see the
central mass postulated by gravitational laws. The telescope shows
only separate stars (sometimes as many as 50,000), almost evenly distributed
in space with a small congestion towards the centre of the cluster.
But there is no super-sun in this centre, which could outweigh the
masses of the members of the cluster and act as a centre of attraction.
And yet the whole cluster moves as a unit through space and rotates
in such a manner as would make it seem to be endowed with a central
nucleus.
When we come to a still larger cosmic unit, such as our galaxy of
stars, the Milky Way , we are faced with the same puzzling question;
there is not a mammoth super-sun in the centre of the galaxy, yet
this galaxy rotates once every 200 million years on its axis, around
a gravitational centre somewhere near the constellation of Sagittarius.
Here, we see that the gravity postulate breaks down completely. There
must be something wrong with the whole hypothesis; its mechanical
and mathematical side seems to fit into some aggregations of matter,
but does not fit into either the atomic or the galactic worlds. Madame
Blavatsky saw this discrepancy quite clearly. In The Secret Doctrine
(Volume 1,page 497) she made the following remarks:
, ...Kepler gave a pretty fair description of cosmic magnetism.
That such magnetism exists in nature, is as certain as gravitation
does not; not at any rate, in the way in which it is taught by Science,
which never took into consideration the different modes in which the
dual Force - that Occultism calls attraction and repulsion - may act
within our solar system, the earth's atmosphere, and beyond
in the Kosmos.'
As gravitation is supposed to be the 'behaviour' of space, so another
force, inertia, is labelled 'a property of matter' of all material
bodies. It means that matter has no power or ability to change its
own state in space, whether it is at rest or in motion. A railway-truck,
stationary on the rails, cannot move by itself, it needs either a
push or a pull to change its position, and to achieve this change
of state an appropriate external force must be used. It may be a man
pushing the truck slowly inch by inch until it gathers momentum, or
it may be a railway engine which moves it; once started, it goes on
with persistence and terrific force and a very strong force or friction
is necessary to arrest this movement. This is generally done by putting
on the brakes. Friction is the factor which counteracts this motion,
first, friction between the wheels and the rails, secondly resistance
by the surrounding air. If the same truck could move above the ground
and in a perfect vacuum, it would run for ever, as nothing would be
present to slow it down.
People sometimes wonder how the 'Sputnik' No. 2 has circled the earth
for more than three months. It bas done so more than 1,000 times and
as the circumference of our globe is about 25,000 miles, this artificial
satellite has travelled about 25 million miles in space, only 5 million
miles less than the distance between the earth and Mars when nearest
to our globe. The 'Sputnik' initially needed only one mighty push
from the carrier rocket, and thereafter it has, of its own volition,
gone on and on. It would circle the earth for ever, if it ran in a
perfect vacuum, but this is not the case, as in the ionosphere in
which its orbit is, are thinly distributed atoms of chemical elements.
The collision of the satellite with these atoms, or molecules made
up of them, retards its speed and causes shrinkage of its orbit, ending
finally with its crash or burning up in denser air, as happens in
the case of meteors.
This is a very good example of the persistence of motion in matter.
It is the same with our earth. Once put in orbital motion (nobody
knows by whom) - it should go eternally in a straight line through
space. It does not, because the gravitational pull of the sun bends
this line into an ellipse, the orbit on which our globe circles around
the sun. And with our globe we and all other material objects constantly
accompany the earth in this irresistible movement, with the speed,
the astronomers tell us, of 18.5 miles per second. Let us
imagine what would happen if the whole earth with its outer solid
crust suddenly vanished into nothing, disappeared, become atomized
into cosmic dust or gas. Nothing would happen to us, or rather our
bodies. We would become tiny planets, each one of us, and we would
proceed to move in space on the same orbit and with the same
speed of motion. That is inertia of matter.
Here, occultists may ask what this inertia really is, what causes
a material body either to stay in one spot or to move incessantly,
without end. Why should one push be sufficient to cause an object
to move for ever? Whose energy is it, which suddenly shows
itself as this driving force? This motion is a characteristic property
of matter, and as we know, all matter is always in motion,
from the minutest atom to the mightiest galaxy. A static and motionless
universe is unthinkable and impossible. Everything is moving, vibrating,
attracting and repulsing, and this motion is eternal and never ceasing,
it lasts through eons of time and through the vastness of universal
space. Who or what is behind it?
It must be an attribute of the Absolute, and in our system it is a
manifestation and revelation of one aspect of the God of the System,
the Solar Logos, its Creator, Preserver and Ruler. The 'forces' mentioned
are the results of an outpouring of His divine energies, Fohatic vibrations,
radiated into the whole system on three lines of activity, through
Three Persons of the Trinity. Fohatic energy, flowing on the line
of the Holy Spirit, is transmuted into heat and light, magnetism and
electricity, cohesion and chemical affinity, gravitation and inertia.
The Book of Dzyan, the ancient cosmogonic treatise, clearly illustrates
this problem. In The Secret Doctrine, Stanza III, verses
8 and 9, we read:
8. Where was the Germ and where was now Darkness? Where is the
Spirit of the Flame that burns in thy lamp, oh Lanoo? The Germ is
That, and That is Light, the White Brilliant Son of the Dark Hidden
Father.
9. Light is Cold Flame, and Flame is Fire, and Fire produces Heat,
which yields Water: the Water of Life in the Great Mother.
In verse 8, we have a discourse between the Teacher and his pupil,
the Lanoo. The pupil has been instructed previously in the mysteries
of Pralaya and Manvantara and now is asked to say what is the Ultimate
Cause behind the Fohatic forces. As the pupil is probably not able
to give the right answer, the Master gives it himself, explaining
that the germ of all existence is That, which is simultaneously the
first Light, the White Brilliant Son of the Dark Hidden Father, primordial
matter in the state of Pralaya. The germ, the primordial matter, did
not vanish at the dawn of the new manvantara, it exists now in the
first act of Creation, as innumerable shining points of cosmic dust
within the Solar Nebula. The Spirit of the Flame, Fohatic energy,
which causes the chemical process of burning, cannot be seen in the
flame; without this energy, however , without the eagerness of the
atoms of oxygen to join other chemical elements, which is 'burning',
this process would be impossible. The Master advises the pupil that
spiritual energies are ultimate causes of chemical processes in nature,
and that matter and energy are only two different aspects of the same
inner Reality, called in Indian philosophy That. The neuter form of
the pronoun is used here to indicate that this Reality, the Logos,
is above the duality masculine - feminine, Spirit and Matter, and
so the subatomic units of the first act of Creation, the solar nebula,
are One with the Logos, are Logos Himself, are That.
In v. 9 the pupil is given further instruction on Fohatic forces,
solar energies, emanating from the 'Word', along the lines of activity
of the Three Persons, the Holy Trinity , and how the Logos builds
up and keeps alive His system. Fohat symbolizes the pure divine energy,
Cold Flame, radiating from the Logos Himself. This pure energy , flowing
in three quanta, three great Outpourings of Logoic Force, is transformed,
changed and adapted according to need, and shows as Fire, Heat and
Water. Fire here symbolizes Spiritual and mental energies, the Atma,
Buddhi and Manas principles, domain of the First Person of the Trinity,
God the Father. Heat means the psychic and the vital forces, Kundalini
and Prana, which build life in material frames, the field of activity
of the Second Person, God the Son. Water symbolizes all the physical
forces inherent in matter, the realm of the Holy Spirit.
Madame Blavatsky, in her commentary to these verses, saw the close
relation and intimate connection between the outer manifestation of
all these forces and their inner Spiritual source. She thus writes
in this manner: [The Secret Doctrine, 1,479. ]
'The Sun is matter, and the Sun is spirit. Our ancestors, the
"heathen", along with their modern successors, the Parsis,
were, and are, wise enough in their generation to see in it the symbol
of Divinity, and at the same time to sense within, concealed by the
physical symbol, the bright God of Spiritual and terrestrial Light.
Such belief is now regarded as superstition only by rank materialism,
which denies Deity , Spirit, Soul - and admits no intelligence outside
of the mind of man. ...'
In ancient Greece, in the Magnesia district of eastern Thessaly, between
the Vale of Tempe and the Pagasaean Gulf, lived the Thessalian tribe
of the Magnetes. There it was that people collected a black stone,
which was known to attract its own particles and also pieces of iron.
The name of the district was applied to the stone as 'magnes', or
its genitive 'magnetos', which in modern times became the 'magnetite'
of the mineralogists.
Later on it was discovered, we do not know by whom, that this stone
could impart its property to metallic iron, and so magnets came into
being. By rubbing a bar of hard iron with the magnetite, the bar became
a magnet itself. This bar could be straight or bent into U form, it
did not matter, the magnetic field once imparted was always there.
Someone, probably in China, in the eleventh century A.D., suspended
a magnetized rod or needle by its centre and found to his surprise
that it always turned in the same direction, roughly North-South.
This invention was introduced into Europe probably by Mohammedan sailors
and became the marine compass still in use today, guiding ships in
the right direction over the vast spaces of the oceans. Since then
magnetite has been called 'lodestone' or 'loade-stone', the stone
that gives a lead. Medieval alchemists are supposed to have discovered
that the attractive power of the lodestone was weakened by
the presence of garlic or of a diamond, a statement naturally flatly
rejected by modern physics.
The chemical composition of magnetite is an iron oxide, formula Fe304.
It is generally black and very hard and contains 72.4 per cent of
metallic iron. There are two more metals showing the same, although
much weaker attractive power, or rather the willingness to become
magnets, and they are Cobalt (Co) and Nickel (Ni), both on the evolutionary
line of iron and closely related to it. l [See First Principles
of Theosophy, diagram' 77 - 'The Periodic Law'.
William Gilbert of Colchester (1540-1603), published in 1600 his great
book De Magnete, and his chief contribution was the discovery
that our earth itself is a huge magnet. This discovery laid the foundation
for the systematic study of terrestrial magnetism. Michael Faraday
and Henry made observations in 1829 on magneto-electric induction,
which proved that a bar of iron can be magnetized temporarily by an
electric current circling around it, and so dynamos and all the other
electro-magnetic machines came into being. An extensive study of paramagnetic
and diamagnetic materials, and particularly of the effect of high
temperatures on their magnetic properties, was made by P. Curie. He
found that when iron or nickel are heated beyond a certain point (hence
known as 'Curie Point') any traces of their attractive power disappear
completely; they lose their magnetic properties. That has quite definitely
been proved.
Now the main point is how to explain the firmly established existence
of a powerful magnetic field around our earth. We know perfectly all
the details of this field; we found how these magnetic loops are distributed
and we know the periodic variations of the field, but we cannot explain
what causes this magnetic field, what keeps it alive and what makes
the magnetic currents flow in the way they do. If our globe is a huge
magnet, it must have within its inner core, near its centre, a bar
of iron or '.nickel, placed in' a general direction along the earth's
axis. But no such bar exists. The inner core of the earth
is supposed to be constituted by metals, predominantly iron and nickel,
but this huge sphere of metallic iron is completely molten, as seismological
evidence shows. Perhaps it is in another state, the so-called 'critical
state', owing to the tremendous pressure of the outer crust of the
earth; in any case the temperature of this mass must be very high,
hundreds of degrees above the 'Curie Point', so the magnetic properties
of the iron in the core cannot be there; our 'magnet-bar' is non-existent.
Not being able to account for the earth's magnetism in this way, geophysicists
thought that the earth, not being a 'permanent magnet', might by chance
be an 'electro-magnet', i.e. its magnetism could be caused by electric
currents flowing through the core of the globe. They tried (Elsasser)
to explain the earth's magnetism by convective currents in the earth's
mass, which produce an uneven heating of the crust and cause thermo-electric
currents along the Equator. Other astronomers however (Gamow), think
that these currents are too slow to produce the electro-magnetic effect.
A more ingenious hypothesis is suggested by R. A. Lyttleton. He thinks
that the conical movement of the earth's axis once in 26,000 years,
which causes the well-known precession of equinoxes, may be partially
responsible for the earth's magnetic field. This movement is supposed
to cause periodic shiftings of the molten iron core under the solid
crust of our globe and these movements could result in the creation
of the field. He, however, confesses that 'The explanation of the
cause of this magnetism and where exactly it originates, are still
among the great unsolved scientific problems, despite prolonged research
on the subject.' [The Modern Universe, London, 1956, PAGE 35.]
So there we are. We do not know why the magnetic needle points north and why the earth's magnetic currents flow, since according to theoretical considerations they really should not be there at all.
To that, we occultists
answer that the magnetic field is built from a type of etheric fluid
emanating from a powerful Nature Spirit whose physical body is our
earth, and who is referred to in Theosophical literature as 'The Spirit
of the Earth'. As our physical body has a kind of dim, primitive consciousness,
which we call the 'physical elemental', so is our earth kept alive
by such an elemental consciousness, which is responsible for the magnetic
field, created by its vital etheric currents. Without the constant
willingness of this powerful Elemental, the magnetic field would not
exist. It is his action and service; he is the 'Intelligence' behind
this phenomenon and this was probably known to medieval alchemists,
who considered the emanations of the lodestone a kind of etheric fluid,
which did not agree with the emanations of garlic and could not withstand
the strong radiations of a diamond.
Our earth is efficiently shielded against the constant bombardment
of meteors, and solar and cosmic radiations, by a protective layer
of atmospheric air, and without this shield the life on our globe
would be in continuous danger and could easily be annihilated. Scientists
have calculated that in every twenty-four hours the total number of
meteors of different sizes entering our atmosphere may reach something
like 750,000,000,000,000,000. [ A. C. Clarke, The Exploration
of Space, 1951, PAGE 90. 13] The vast majority of them are smaller
than grains of sand; some 5 million reach as much as a tenth of an
inch across, but only five to ten are large enough to pass through
atmosphere and hit the earth's surface. We may imagine what the surface
of our globe would be like if all this cosmic debris fell
upon it with a speed of about thirty miles per second or morel With
respect to the solar and cosmic radiation, scientists have found that
the layer of earth's atmospheric air is as impenetrable as a mass
of water 10 yards deep.
But that is not all. In 1666, the English scientist, Samuel Pepys,
found during the Dutch war that hundreds of people crowded in one
of London's parks, were listening to the boom of naval guns of the
Fleet fighting a battle in the English Channel. This gun fire, as
he verified, was not heard at all either in Dover, or on the other
side of the Channel. Similar observations were made in 1883, during
the Krakatau eruption, in Sunda Straits, the passage between Java
and Sumatra. The thundery roar of this volcanic eruption was heard
in Australia, Bangkok, the Philippines and in Ceylon, but in a large
area around the Sunda Straits there was a 'belt of silence'. The phenomenon
was difficult to explain but finally the German explorer Von den Borne,
observing the same phenomenon during the great explosion in Westfallen
in 1903 and comparing it with previous observations, suggested that
such sounds slowly diminish in intensity with the distance from the
centre until they die completely, after which they appear once more
farther away. Further research has shown that the sound of a big explosion
is heard in an area of about 60 miles radius, then comes an area of
silence, about 120 miles broad, then the explosion can be heard once
more, which means that a part of the sound-waves travelling upward
meet some level of the atmosphere which is an insulating layer, rebound
from it and return to the earth's surface at the same angle, i.e.
at greater distance from the centre of explosion.
Further investigations have shown that between 20 and 30 miles up
there exists a very thin and delicate layer of the gas Ozone. Ozone
(the word means 'smelling stuff'), was discovered in 1840, when the
great chemist Schönbein found that this smell was produced by
a special gas, formed in the air by electric discharges. We often
smell it after a storm. The vitalizing energy of ozone is so powerful
and so destructive for putrefying organic matter and disease producing
bacteria, that at the end of the century it was used for the purification
of the water supply in large towns and in many other cleansing processes.
What is ozone? The atoms of oxygen, combining with the atoms of nitrogen
to make our atmospheric air, do not appear in the air singly, but
join in two's, making oxygen molecules. In higher atmospheric
regions, in what we call the 'stratosphere', under the influence of
electric discharges, lightning, auroras, etc., these molecules are
split into single atoms, which now join together into three's and
build a new kind of molecule, ozone. Ozone is therefore an oxygen
molecule consisting of three oxygen atoms. This molecule is rather
frail, as it can last in very low temperatures only; in normal temperatures
it quickly disintegrates and the atoms return to their former molecular
structure. The smell of ozone fades very quickly after a storm.
Fabry and Buisson found that the layer of ozone high up in the stratosphere,
if placed at sea Ievel, would be between one-sixteenth and one-seventeenth
of an inch thick. In the stratosphere, however, under different atmospheric
pressure, it may be larger in depth. It has been further discovered
(Lindenmann and Dobson) that this ozone layer is caused, not by ultra-violet
radiation alone, but also by electrical discharges from the aurora.
It adapts itself to the changing temperature, change of seasons, etc.;
it becomes thicker or thinner, it hovers higher up or lower down,
according to its changing surroundings, but it is always
there, protecting life on our earth from the deadly ultra-violet rays
of the Sun. It has, far up in the stratosphere, a weighty influence
on the life of all earthly creatures, especially those living on land,
for the ultra-violet rays of the sun cannot penetrate deep into the
sea. The layer is a huge filter for the sun's radiation and without
it life would severely suffer by the excessive amount of ultra-violet
rays passing through the atmosphere. A thin layer of this gas, only
the thickness of a visiting card, is our only defence against ultra-violet
death, yet, if the ozone shield was twice the thickness, life would
be equally impossible, as it would cut off health and vitality from
our bodies.
Scientists cannot explain why ordinary oxygen molecules,
hovering in the air, suddenly change their structure into ozone, and
why it is oxygen and not for example nitrogen, which builds this protective
shell. It is also not known how these ozone molecules keep the ultra-violet
rays off and let through as much of them as is needed for life and
not detrimental to it.
From the occult point of view the answer is not difficult. As shown
in Occult Chemistry, an atom of oxygen consists of two rapidly
gyrating 'snakes', as its main subatomic components. We know that
a power wheel or any rapidly turning wheel, although it has many empty
segments between its spokes, becomes in motion an impenetrable surface.
A stone thrown on it never gets through. Something like that happens
with the oxygen atoms in a molecule of ozone. Six 'snakes' in such
a molecule, gyrating in pairs with inconceivable speed, create a living
shield, subatomic but strong as armoured plate, from which cosmic
particles bounce away. The ozone layer thus acts as a huge spherical
shell and verily protects life on this planet: We cannot regulate
the thickness of this shield, it is done by the Spiritual Intelligences,
powerful Nature Spirits and Rulers of the Elements who, with their
subordinates, keep the layer in its place. To occultists, the layer
is the Physical Body of these Intelligences, pulsating with their
life and energy.
We have, high above in the sky, more envelopes shielding us and our
home, the earth. The next above the stratosphere is the eerie and
turbulent world of the ionosphere, which is exposed to the undiluted
radiation of the sun with its visible light, X-rays, infra-red rays
and jets of hydrogen particles. It is also bombarded constantly with
cosmic rays, which cause havoc among other particles and atoms, stripping
them of their electrons and converting them into bare nuclei, called
in physics ions, hence the name 'ionosphere'. Here scientists
discovered three layers of such ions, which act as reflecting mirrors
for radio waves and make possible worldwide radio broadcasting. They
reflect the radio waves in the same manner as the ozone layer does
with the radio waves. The lowest is the D layer, located on the fringe
between the strato and ionospheres. Farther up, about 60 to 7°
miles above the earth's surface, is the E layer, sometimes called
the Heaviside - Kennelly layer, from the names of its discoverers.
Much higher up is a broad band known as the F (or Appleton) layer,
which reflects the short waves (100 m.), whereas the E layer is the
mirror for medium waves (300 to 400 m. ) and the D layer for very
long radio waves.
Here we may ask the question, who organizes these ionic shells,
who distributes them in space above the earth and what is the purpose
of this arrangement? We do not think that the Intelligences concerned
keep up these protective shells for the sake of worldwide radio broadcasts
only; these layers must have some important part to play and they
quite certainly protect us from some danger of which we are as yet
not aware.
It is interesting to note that H.P .B. in The Secret Doctrine
(1, 555) declares the Creative Word, i.e. Fohat, as the Builder of
ozone molecules. She writes as follows:
For Sound generates, or rather attracts together, the elements
that produce an Ozone, the fabrication of which is beyond chemistry,
but within the limits of Alchemy. It may even resurrect a
man or animal whose astral "vital body" has not been irreparably
separated from the physical body by the severance of the magnetic
or odic chord. As One Saved Thrice From Death by that power, the writer
ought to be credited with knowing personally something about it.'
The vast expanse of space around our globe is, for occultists, not
an empty place, devoid of every trace of life, but is full of living
beings and entities, of Intelligence on various levels of consciousness,
of Angels and Devas, nature and elemental spirits, which may manifest
themselves in our physical world as physical forces and energies.
They are the animating factors, causes of visible effects, although
they are hidden behind this veil of manifestation. We see only the
machines and know a little of how they work, but we are convinced
that the mechanicians must exist as well, Superior Minds which thought
of, and built, these machines and keep them running for ages, to our
benefit and that of other living Creatures.
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