1nCnVqgFI

132 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
The Doctrine teaches that, in order to become a divine, fully conscious
God—aye, even the highest—the Spiritual Primeval Intelligences
must pass through the human stage.
And when we say human,
this does not apply merely to our terrestrial humanity, but to the
mortals that inhabit any world, i.e., to those Intelligences that have
reached the appropriate equilibrium between matter and spirit, as we
have now, ever since the middle point of the Fourth Root Race of the
Fourth Round was passed. Each Entity must have won for itself the
right of becoming divine, through self-experience. Hegel, the great
German thinker, must have known or sensed intuitionally this truth,
when he said, that the Unconscious evolved the Universe only "in
the hope of attaining clear self-consciousness," in other words, of
becoming Man; for this is also the secret meaning of the oft recurring
Puranic phrase, of Brahma being constantly "moved by the desire
to create." This explains also the hidden Kabalistic meaning of the
saying: "The Breath becomes a stone; the stone, a plant; the plant,
an animal; the animal, a man; the man, a spirit; and the spirit, a
god." The Mind-born Sons, the Rishis, the Builders, etc., were all
Men—of whatever forms and shapes—in other worlds and in preceding
Manvantaras.
This subject being so very mystical, it is most difficult to explain it
in all its details and bearings; for the whole mystery of evolutionarycreation
is contained therein. A sentence or two in the Shloka vividly
recalls to mind similar sentences in the Kabalah and the phraseology^
of the King Psalmist.* Both, when speaking of God, show him making
the wind his messenger and his " ministers a flaming fire." But in the
Esoteric Doctrine it is used figuratively. The "Fiery Whirl-wind" is
the incandescent cosmic dust which only follows magnetically, as
iron filings follow the magnet, the directing thought of the "Creative
Forces." Yet, this cosmic dust is something more; for every atom in
the Universe has the potentiality of self-consciousness in it, and is, like
the Monads of Leibnitz, a Universe in itself, and for itself // is an
atom and an angel.
In this connection it should be noted that one of the luminaries of
the modern Evolutionist School, Mr. A. R. Wallace, when discussing
the inadequacy of "natural selection" as the sole factor in the development
of physical man, practically concedes the whole point here
discussed. He holds that the evolution of man was directed and
• Psalms, civ. 4.
the