Were the Oceans Once in the Skies?
Galahad College Extension Fellowship SIXTH LESSON LECTURE
THE beautiful Script to which you have just listened, fits with particular appropriateness into this entrancing subject which we continue to study this morning: Why we are what we are, and why our culture is what it is at this particular time in the evolution and maturity our planet. In what was read did you notice the confirmation of the scientific hypothesis of which we got the fundamentals yesterday, and which we continue today? By the power of Mind—colossal Mind best epitomized in the psyche of that grand character whom we now revere as Lord—it was possible for divine control to be exerted in the consummation of great natural processes. Etheric particles made Spiral Nebulae—Spiral Nebula in our instance cooled and formed a planet so tangible to our senses that we were able to begin, and carry on, a program of fleshly life that over countless millennia organized into our present attainments of civilization. By the same technique that brought it into being, we are told that it can be disintegrated. As the Script phrased it in the sacred form: “if I but gave the Word!”
We saw patently enough that in Galilee such mental control of so-called Matter was an awesomely definite thing. And make no mistake about it, we are still under jurisdiction of that Power, exerting and achieving such processes, day unto day and year unto year. Planetary creations still serve specific purposes. There is still need for the display of the divine essence to preserve the stage on which we play this human drama.
I am told that yesterday morning some quandaries arose as to my meanings in certain instances. Before going on with this tremendous study today, I want to elucidate further on some of the points on which I have been queried since yesterday’s lecture. For example, the question has reached me: How did Holy Spirit create etheric particles to begin with
Now Holy Spirit did not “create” etheric particles. Particles to be “created” have to partake of substance or the elements of substance. And ether is not a substance. It is a condition. We perpetually demand substance in this universe of Cause and Effect because we have not grasped that we can have all kinds of conditions without substance being a factor in any of them. You say: “Is it not true that we must have substance in order to get Form?” I put my answer in this guise: My voice is coming to you across this auditorium, is it not? It is “interpretable”—I hope!— and yet can you call it a thing of substance? True, it has substance to operate in— the stuff we call the atmosphere. When it travels through a disturbance of atmospheric or etheric waves, reaches the tympanums of your ears, and is transmitted into Seats of Consciousness in your pineal glands, it still remains intangible as a voice. It does not partake of substance. It does not partake of Form. It is, I repeat, a condition.
Now suppose that the projection of a Voice on ether was sufficient to get that ether started into a rotary motion where it snarled up in such terrific concentrations of condition that your senses perceived it as material. You would in effect be translating speech into matter. For want of a better way of expressing it, we might call the ether a condition in Divine Mind that causes Thought to function in such terrific galvanism that tangibility results, and out of tangibility comes Form. Holy Spirit therefore is not “creating” etheric particles. It is using a function within itself to so classify its energy that our senses can receive it in the phenomena we call materials.
I admit that in a world of Three Dimensions it sounds paradoxical. There is a fine point to be recognized in the declension, on which you might challenge me to better advantage in our afternoon esoteric classes when we come to take up our more profound Scripts on Cosmic Structure. What we want to do in this hall in our mornings together is to grasp tire Grand Sweep of Creation from the first stages of incandescent spiral nebulae to the cooling of planetary bodies, their geological processes, the advent of spirit-life upon them, and man’s concept of divinity as he becomes a factor in the eternal program. Then we must consider the various phases of this evolution expressed theologically—I will not say Religiously, for all men are essentially and instinctively religious—until we arrive at the point where the theological influence translates sociologically and economically. If the sociological and economic phases of spiritual evolution seem to be wrong at any given point, the present for instance, we can therefore trace the causes back to theology.
One other question handed me, merits consideration, also: What is meant by the Free Orbit of a planet? The suggestion is appended that all orbits, to be orbits, must be free.
I tried to make it plain that when a planet is in process of formation, we find by using psychometric methods of investigation, probing into the prenatal memories of those who have witnessed spiral nebula; in formation or sending them out into interstellar space to observe what may happen there, that such a body manifests only where there may be an empty field for it to manifest in. Such a field would be a point between equal poles of attracting forces—a place where, like Mohammed’s Coffin, such nebula material could remain suspended in the mid-point between gravitational pulls. But this by no means implies that such a suspension would be static.
Cooling nebula might be suspended between vast gravitational pulls and yet be coaxed into circular motion, especially if one gravitational pull, like that exerted on our earth by our sun, came from an orb in titanic rotation. We saw yesterday how the rotation of our earth was so fast at one time that it held our oceans suspended 17,000 miles from the crust of the earth on the swinging-milkpail-around-the-head principle. The waters were held at a distance from the earth by centrifugal motion, and yet they followed the earth’s revolutions. Just so might we say that the sun holds its planets away from itself while at the same time drawing them after its rotating surface in an affinity of direction.