THE SOLAR LOGOS AND THE PLANETARY LOGOI
WE have mentioned, in the preceding chapters, the Solar Logos. It will now be fitting to consider Him, in His relation to the solar system, and also His principal Ministers, Who are often called the Planetary Logoi, though a more accurate name is the Planetary
Chain Logoi.
In the Logos of our solar system we have as near an approach to a personal - it would be better to say an individual - God as any reasonable man can desire - For of Him is true everything good that has ever been predicated of a personal deity. Such attributes as partiality, injustice, jealousy, anger, cruelty, etc., we can, of course, set aside once and for all as being impossible for any deity worthy of the name, and as belonging merely to human imaginings. So far as His system is concerned, He possesses omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence. The love, the power, the wisdom, the glory, all are there in fullest measure.
Yet He is a mighty Individual - a trinity in unity, and God in very truth, though removed by we know not how many stages from the Absolute, the Unknowable, before which even solar systems are but as specks of cosmic dust.
It is probable that we cannot image Him at all; hence many devout people prefer not even to try to make any image of Him, but simply to contemplate Him as pervading all things, so that we ourselves are also He, all other men are He, and in truth there is nothing but God.
The Sun is His chief manifestation on the physical plane, and that may help us a little to realise some of His qualities, and to see how everything comes from Him. It may be regarded as the lens through which His power shines forth.
We may note here that every fixed star is also a sun like our own, each one being a partial expression of a Logos. The physical Sun may be considered as a sort of chakram or force-centre in Him, corresponding to the heart of man, the outer manifestation of the principal centre in His body. Although the whole solar system is His physical body, yet His activities outside of it are enormously greater than those within it. This solar system, which seems so stupendous to us, is to Him but a little thing; for, though He is all this, yet outside it and above it all He exists in a glory and a splendour of which we know nothing as yet. Thus, though we can agree with the pantheist that all is God, we yet go very much further than he does, because we realise that He has a far greater existence above and beyond His universe. ”Having pervaded this whole universe with one fragment of Myself, I remain” (Bhagavad Gita, X, 42).
He thus exists far above His system: upon it He sits as on a lotus throne. He is, as it were, the apotheosis of humanity, yet infinitely greater than humanity. We might think of the Augoeides (vide The Causal Body, p. 101) carried up higher and higher, and to infinity. Whether that form is permanent, or whether it can be seen at a certain level only - who shall say ?
Hence the rationale of the well-known symbol of the ”Great Bird,” which is used to denote the Deity in the act of hovering over His universe, brooding over the waters of space, or darting onward along the line of His evolution. To repose between the wings of the Great Bird means so to meditate as to realise union with the Logos: and it is said that the man who reaches that level may rest there for untold years.
It is probably beyond the power of words to express the method of union of humanity with Him. We human beings may, in one sense, be as cells in His body, but we are certainly very much more than that For His life and power are manifested through us in a way out of all proportion to that which would be a parallel relationship at a lower level, viz., that of the cells in our own physical bodies to ourselves as spiritual entities.
In His manifestation on the lowest cosmic plane, we may take it that His First Aspect is on the highest level - that of Âdi - the Second on the Anupâdaka or Monadic plane, and the Third in the higher part of the Âtmic plane.
Hence, as an Adept, in the course of his development, gradually raises His consciousness plane by plane, he comes first to the Third Aspect, and realises his unity with that, moving on only after long intervals to full union with the Second and the First Aspects.
In the Ancient Mysteries of Greece, the Logos was symbolised by the child Bacchus, who was represented as playing with certain toys. One of these was dice, consisting of the five platonic solids. These are:
The Tetrahedron, bounded by 4 equilateral triangles;
The Cube, bounded by 6 squares;
The Octahedron, bounded by 8 equilateral triangles;
The Dodecahedron, bounded by 12 regular pentagons;
The Icosahedron, bounded by 20 equilateral triangles.
Adding to these at one end the point, and at the other end the sphere, we have a set of 7 figures, which correspond to the 7 planes of our solar system. Each of them indicates, not the form of the atoms of the different planes, but the lines along which works the power which surrounds those atoms.
This throws some light on the well-known saying of Plato that ”God geometrises.” It seems that the ancients studied the geometry of Euclid, not as we do, for itself, but as a guide to something higher.
Another of the toys of Bacchus was the top, a symbol of the whirling atom.
A third toy was a ball, representing the Earth, that particular globe of the chain to which the thought of the Logos is specially directed at the present time.
A fourth toy was a mirror, which has always been a symbol of the astral light, in which the archetypal ideas (of which we shall speak later) are reflected and then materialised.
Whilst the child Bacchus - the Logos - plays with his toys, he is seized by the Titans and torn to pieces. Later these pieces are put together and built into a whole. This allegory of course represents the descending of the One to become the many, and the reunion of the many in the One, through suffering and sacrifice.
The Hindus have, of course, long held that the Deity plays, and they have called the great work of evolution the Lîlâ, or play of Shrî Krishna.
The whole of our solar system is a manifestation of its Logos, and every particle in it is definitely part of His vehicles. All the physical matter of the solar system taken as a totality constitutes His physical body; all the astral matter within it constitutes His astral body; all the mental matter, His mental body, and so on. From the Solar Logos comes forth all life in the successive Outpourings (vide The Causal Body, pp. 13, 14, 70). The First Outpouring comes from His Third Aspect, giving to previously existing atoms the power to aggregate themselves into the chemical elements the action described in the Christian scriptures as the Spirit of God moving over the waters of space.
When, at a later stage, the kingdoms of nature are definitely established, there comes the Second Outpouring, from His Second Aspect, which forms group-souls for minerals, plants and animals, this being the descent into matter of the Christ principle, which alone renders possible our very existence. In the human kingdom, the ego himself is a manifestation of the Third Outpouring, which comes from His First Aspect, the eternal and all-loving Father.
Before the solar system was brought into manifestation, the Logos formed the entire scheme of it in His mind, and by doing so brought it all simultaneously into existence upon His mental plane. He has thus thought it out, not only as it is now, but as it has been at every moment in the past, and as it will be at every moment in the future.
At what level His mental plane may be we cannot tell; it may be what we call the cosmic mental plane, or it may be higher still. The cosmic mental plane is two whole sets of planes above our set of seven.
To the cosmic mental plane H. P. Blavatsky gave the name the ”archetypal world”; the Greeks seem to have called it the ”intelligible world.” All that has been written and said about an ”instantaneous” creation of the whole system out of nothing refers to this formation of cosmic thought-forms.
Thus we may say that on that cosmic plane the whole of the System was called into existence simultaneously by His thought -an act of special creation; and it must all be now simultaneously present to Him. It may well be that His mighty consciousness to some extent reflects itself even on very much lower levels, so that men may occasionally catch faint glimpses of those reflections. This is one explanation of clairvoyants being sometimes able to foresee the future accurately, as unquestionably has been done, from time to time.
The Logos thinks out what He intends each of the Planetary Chains to do. He comes down to smaller, details, for He thinks of the type of man for every Root-Race and sub-race, from the beginning of all, through, for example, the Lemurian, the Atlantean, the Âryan and the succeeding Races. We shall deal later with certain of the Officials - if we may employ that term - Who are in charge of, directing and controlling the evolution taking place in the solar system: but we may mention here that there is in charge of each scheme of evolution an Entity known as a Planetary Logos: a more accurate name is a Planetary Chain Logos, for He is in charge of the whole series of 7 chains in a scheme of evolution.
These 7 subsidiary Logoi are great individual entities: and yet at the same time they are aspects of the Solar Logos, forcecentres, or chakrams, as it were, in His body.
Their relation to Him is like that of the ganglia or the nerve-centres to the brain. All evolution which comes forth from Him comes through one or other of Them.
Each of these centres has His special location or major focus within the body of the Sun, and also a minor focus which is always exterior to the Sun. The position of this minor focus is always indicated by a physical planet. Diagram XII is an attempt to illustrate the idea.
The exact relation, however, can hardly be made clear in our three dimensional phraseology. But we may say that each centre has a field of influence practically co-extensive with the solar system. If a section of this field were taken, it would be found to be elliptical: one of the foci of each ellipse would always be in the Sun, and the other would be the special planet ruled by that subsidiary Logos.
All the physical planets are included within that portion of the system which is common to all the ovoids, so that each revolving ovoid must have its projecting segment. Hence the system as a whole has been compared with a flower with many petals.
There is, however, another reason for this comparison with a lotus. Although the planets appear to us as separate globes, there is in reality a connection between them in a manner of which some idea may perhaps be gained by those who have trained themselves to a conception of four dimensions of space.
An analogy may be of some assistance. If the hand be held, with the palm upwards, so as to form a kind of cup, but with the fingers separated, and then a sheet of paper be laid on the tips of the fingers, the circles at the points of contact between the fingers and the paper would represent the physical planets, apparently quite isolated from one another.
These circles are, however, all connected together in another direction, as parts of the hand, although the idea of the hand would be quite beyond the comprehension of a two-dimensional being living only in the plane of the circles.
Similarly, in a higher dimension, all the physical planets are connected together into one whole, being from this higher point of view but the points of petals which are part of one great flower. The heart of that flower throws up a central pistil which appears to us as the physical sun.
Diagram XIII is an attempt to portray the idea. Normally, neither the physical, astral nor mental planes of one of our planets communicate with the corresponding planes of another planet. On the buddhic plane, however, there is a condition common to, at any rate, all the planets of our chain.
Notwithstanding the above, there is a condition of the atomic matter of each of the planes which is cosmic in extent, the 7 atomic sub-planes of our system, taken apart from the rest, constituting one cosmic plane - the lowest, sometimes called the cosmic-prakritic.
From one point of view it seems as though we were in truth an expression of the Planetary Logos Himself, and as though the evolution were taking place within His body, the globes being centres in that body, or rather, not the globes that we see, but the spirit of them-their higher principles.
From this point of view Globe A would be the expression of His brain or mental body, and all these forms would exist in His mind. For our mental plane is not only the third sub-division of the lowest cosmic plane; it is also at the same time the lowest sub-division of an aspect or manifestation of the Logos.
We may take it that He manifests Himself along seven lines or through seven aspects, and that each of these that we call planes is the lowest form of one of these aspects, so that the atomic part of our mental plane is really the lowest sub-plane of the mental body of the Planetary Logos.
The willow-leaves of the Sun are manifestations upon the physical plane maintained by Devas for a special purpose, at the cost of a certain sacrifice or limitation of their activities on the higher levels which are their normal habitat. Recollecting that it is through the willow-leaves that the light, heat and vitality of the Sun come to us, we may readily see that the object of their sacrifice is to bring down to the physical plane certain forces which would otherwise remain unmanifested, and that these great Devas are acting as channels, reflectors, or specialisers of divine power working at cosmic levels for the benefit of our solar system.
