02.05. Fire on Heaven's Hearth

FIRE ON HEAVEN’S HEARTH

Water, however, is not confined solely to earth, but in the forms of vapor, visible as cloud, or rain, and invisible as rarefied water vapor, pervades the earth’s upper regions. But here we have, in the Hebrew concept of the heavens, the idea of heaven as the place where the waters of the Upper Firmament are associated with fire, -- sun or lightning. Hence to the word for water, mayim, they prefixed that great letter of their alphabet which is the symbol for fire, the letter shin, and this gives the word for "heaven" as Sh’mayim. This would convey all that range of meaning which flows from the idea of the original fiery power of the divine mind or spirit of God, interfusing itself in the essence of water-matter, to beget the universes. The waters of the Lower Firmament would be mayim, those of the Upper Firmament would be sh’mayim. How astonishingly these basic concepts find both illustration and corroboration in nature is seen when we reflect that the sound of this dynamic letter SH, meaning fire, is actually produced when one introduces fire into water; the hissing, sizzling sound. Actually in this naturograph we have in vivid pictorialization the basic idea involved in the creation itself, that is, the projection from God of the fiery power of his creative energies and their being injected into the innermost core or womb of matter. This is what is meant by the statements found in Hindu religious literature that the birth of creation took place or began with the shooting of the cosmic ray of Purusha, eternal Spirit, into the womb of Prakriti, or matter, the eternal universal Mother. With an explosive bang that the human mind will never forget modern science has demonstrated the fact of staggering significance that all matter is, one might say, on fire with energy. And, trembling with a wondering anticipation of the next even more staggering discovery that will forever rock the human mind, and end forever the age-old controversy between materialism and idealism, over the question whether the primordial energy that created the universe is merely physical force, or the power of thinking mind, the intellect of man approaches closer and closer to the recognition that the ultimate and original force that generated life and being must be Mind. Science has now resolved matter back into pure force, into energy; matter is energy that has somehow cooled down, and like anything gaseous or fluid that cools down, it has "jelled," become static, grown hard. It has crystallized and settled into concrete state. And having demonstrated this stupendous fact, now the speculative prying mind of man awaits in trembling suspense the confirmation of the next world-shaking idea, that energy is itself the potency of Thinking Mind. A phenomenon of modern life that has forced itself on our attention in the midst of the endless panorama of scientific discovery and achievement is the surprised recognition that much of the substance of our latest attainment in knowledge seems to have been in the possession of certain of the ancient peoples, more particularly the Egyptians, from whom it is evident that the sagacious Greeks derived the principia of the philosophical systematism which they developed to such grandiose heights in the Periclean period, some four centuries B.C. Hardly less brilliant was the rekindling of that light of the Platonic age which flared up after the dimming of the great flame following the fall of Athens, in the movement of what is known as Neoplatonism, about the second century A.D., when Ammonias Saccas established his school of "esoteric wisdom." This effort produced Numenius and Maximius of Tyre, after whom came four giants of the philosophical world, Plotinus, Porphyry and Iamblichus. Running like a thread of fire all through the master works of this group, -- to which a little later Plutarch may be added -- is the idea that the primary protyle, or first essence of which the creation is composed, the "stuff" of which all things are made, is, as modern thought suspects may be the very miracle of truth, -- is in very fact Mind!

Yes, affirm these profound thinkers, not only is matter crystallized force, energy; that energy in turn is fluid Mind. Buried for these many centuries in the forgotten books of these great philosophers, to be specific, in the magnificent work entitled The Six Book of Proclus on the Theology of Plato, there has stood a sentence, which had it been brought out and kept in recognition, might well have saved Europe fifteen hundred years of its Dark Ages, and brought modern science that much sooner: "The light of the sun is the pure energy of Intellect." No one can fail to see the redoubtable challenge of this pronouncement out of the wisdom of the long past. It makes pertinent the question whether, with all the present incredible scientific marvels, we have yet caught up with the acumen of ancient Egypt and Greece. For there is evidence that those sapient Egyptian priests, as likewise the Chaldean "astrologers," had at least a theoretical knowledge of the nature and constitution of the atom, though, so far as we would judge, no cyclotrons to demonstrate the physical actuality. The profundity of Platonic and then the Neoplatonic philosophy is an undiminished marvel in universities, where they are still studied. If these, and perhaps even Hindu thinkers had knowledge that the fiery force of Mind flamed on the hearthstone of every atom, they were theoretically in advance of where we stand today. We have made the discovery that the thinking process in the human brain generates both heat and light, or electric energy. Experiments conducted by attaching to the heads of students a sensitive electrical device registered the generation of small quantities of force sufficient to light up a small electric bulb and run a tiny motor. The Scriptures have analogized the mental creation of the universe in the Biblical phrase: "God spake, and the worlds sprang into existence." But back of all speech is thought. So it might be said that "what God hath wrought is what God hath first thought." If the evidence for this connection of creative energy with creative Mind is conclusive, we have a final -- and welcome -- settlement of the eternal squabble over the question of the nature and constituency of the universe; and the laurel wreath goes to idealism. The universe is the expression of the supreme divine Intellect, its majestic ideas having become concreted in what we have called matter. By an omnipresent instinct of reflecting intelligence, men have universally thought of one tangible thing in the realm of life as the appropriate symbol of all mental intelligence in the human area of consciousness -- the thing we call LIGHT. And we have found Proclus asserting that the light of suns is the pure radiance of Intellect. What a concept this gives us as we gaze into the "heavens" of a clear dark night, and see the infinite hosts of those suns twinkling through the dark of space! For if Proclus is right, those infinite points of light are the scintillating brain cells of the Mind of God! It is declared that a normal human brain has four quadrillion brain cells. We can generously allow God a few quintillions at least. We can see some billions, even if we can not count them. We have now proved that brain cells are very, very tiny -- on our scale of relative proportions -- units of the same energy that glows, seethes in flames of thousands of miles dimension on the surface of the sun, yet we know that in proportion to their size they are as far apart from each other as the suns in the spread of space. Here is perfect analogy, and if the Scriptures do not speak utter nonsense when they declare that man is made in the image of God, they mean that our brain cells match his, and his match ours, in function and in kind.

Man is declared in the secret wisdom of the ancient sages to be the microcosm, but still a full duplicate of the macrocosm. And Hermes of Egypt, probably the sagest of earth’s great sages, called by the Greeks "thrice-greatest," put this basic principle of understanding clearly before us in his ever-memorable statement: "True without falsehood, certain and most true, that which is above is as that which is below, and that which is below is as that which is above, for the performance of the miracle of the One Thing." And the Sophists of Athens said: "Man is the measure of all things." He has to be; for if he is the universe in miniature, he has to guage all things by himself. Hence the Greeks adjured us: "Man, know thyself, and thou wilt know all things." Hence also the ancient seers warned men of the folly and the danger of worshipping any supposedly divine power outside their own being and nature, since all the power of the creation was already impounded in the confines of a human life, needing only development to bring it to "the fullness of the Godhood bodily (Colossians 2:9)."

Water below, and fire above, in the cosmos, in man, is the manifest order of things. As for man, the below is his body, composed seven-eighths of water; the above is the fiery energy of thinking mind in his quadrillions of brain cells. In the phrase of the poet, in the being of man "heaven and earth have kissed each other." More than that, under the stress of polarity, they have entered into a mutual relationship in which they are destined to woo, win and wed each other, and in generation after generation give birth in their wedlock to new stages of the creation. In the mass of legendary fable concocted by the semantic genius of those sages of olden times was the tradition that when Messiah appeared, he would come up out of the sea. Truly enough now, with our eyes conditioned to a sort of new infra-red power to pierce the darkness in which the arcane cryptic figurism has been enshrouded, we can see how clearly this form of legendry tells the truth. For of course, since the "life of the soul," as the Scriptures tell us, "is in the blood (Leviticus 17:11)," the divine power that will rise to deify us must come up out of the sea-water endowed with the electric potency that is found to reside in the ocean waters. It should be realized that the blood is electrically charged, is itself dynamic with a measure of the magic of the suns. Were it not so, the mere physical forces of the heart’s pumping could not drive it out through the fine channels of the veins and draw it all back again. All cells of the body share the life that animates the whole, and it is certain that the veinous and arterial channel walls furnish some pumping power, some constriction and expansion in rhythm to push the blood along, in aid of the heart.

If viewed from the purely mechanistic or purely materialistic standpoint man is just a machine. The mistake of materialistic thought is in supposing that he is just a machine. He is a machine that is alive and is in every cell, to its degree, a thinking machine. We will approximate a truer view of man if we think of him as we might of a great printing press, every part of which, not dead but consciously alive, keeps feeling, thinking and voluntarily exerting itself to perform its function in the economy of the whole operation of printing. Had the world held on to this living conception of man, which it inherited from the occult legacy of a Golden Age in early human history, when, it is the legend, the gods still mingled with earth’s inhabitants, a rosier cinematograph would have been the panorama of the last two thousand years of the world’s dark record. The mechanistic, that is, the dead mechanistic concept of man’s nature, has been the index of the world’s, most particularly the Western world’s, degradation of man’s own concept of himself. As far as it can go, this concept takes no account of the inner spontaneous and unconquerable instincts and feelings welling up within the human consciousness, a hard cold posture of mind which tends to chill, to freeze and deaden the dynamic free-acting forces generically innate in the human constitution. The influence of the conscious mind upon the operation of the unconscious processes of the body, such as breathing, digestion, assimilation, heart beat, is not accurately known, but it must be unquestionably great. Therefore the thought that one’s body is a machine of purely non-living parts, which work by purely physical, and not by biophysical laws and chemistries, is itself a force that will tend to slow and deaden the body’s living activities. How potently a philosophy that pours into the body the power of a mental conception of its free-flowing, self-initiating mind energies would affect well-being for the human organism has been well attested by the more or less "miraculous" cures and healings registered by the upsurge of faith, confidence, hope and other positive attitudes of mind. Perhaps the most efficacious conception that the human individual can hold with regard to his own life and well-being is the idea that he is a dynamo of vibrant intelligent energy, a quantum of the conscious thinking Power that has generated and eternally activates the creation. If his thought lacks this element of the efficacy of spirit, he hardens his life and tightens around himself the prison walls that confine the free forces of his soul within the habitation they have built for their expression in the incarnation process. They are turned into a rigid, cumbersome incubus on the soul instead of being the plastic adaptive instrument for the soul’s free expression. As Browning put it, "wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in." And another poet has spoken of the soul as "cribbed, cabined and confined" in the body. In fact this aspect of the soul’s life received such emphasis in the great Greek philosophy that always the body was dramatized as not only the prison-house of the soul, but even its grave and tomb, since, when the soul descended into body, its subjection to the slow, sluggish tempo of the fleshly vehicle threw it into a torpor, a coma, a kind of actual "death," from which it had in the final outcome of its evolution to be resurrected. The Greeks in fact used practically the same word for "body" as for "tomb," the former being soma and the latter sema.

One can see the aptness of this symbolism when resort is again had to the typology of water for the body element and fire for the soul force. For naturally water extinguishes fire, kills it. St. Paul (Romans 7:1-25) says that the incarnation of his soul in body killed him (Romans 7:24). But, he added, he will regain his life, have his resurrection, through the power of the Lord Jesus Christ, which will overcome "the body of this death" and grant him life eternal (Romans 7:25). The ancient wise men, those Egyptian priests, always thought of soul entering body for its life work under the figure of fire plunging into water, or soul crossing the "Red Sea," meaning by this sea the body’s blood. Such conceptions and figures held thought in fluidity and tended to keep the body plastic, so as to be responsive to the impact of the thought power of the central brain intelligence upon the nerve life of all the cells of the body. Whatever possibility man has of living a radiant life inhered in this sort of mental attitude, which a materialist philosophy chills to inanity.

One will find a strange face of momentous significance in this connection right in the dictionary. It is that the great body of verbs indicating the initiation of movement begin with the letter "s" or its equivalent "sh." These are the letters which start, shove off all kinds of movement, such as strike, slap, stamp, smite, speak, slide, streak, skate, send, shoot, spear, slip, slump, spit, stride, step, sneak, steal, scrape, scream, sing and scores more. That this is no happy fancy of ours is confirmed by the definite fact that the ancient Egyptian language prefixed "s" (or "sh") to words denoting a state or condition, to make them mean the act of producing that state or condition. One example is maat, truth, from the stem ma, true, which when "s" is prefixed, becomes sma, meaning to confirm, establish, i.e., to "make true." This must have come from the fact that the introduction of soul into body (water) in incarnation, producing the "s" ("sh") sound, started all things off, set all things going for the life of the soul. That is, the letter’s sound suggested the initial step in life. The extent to which the ancient sagacity resorted to poetic tropism of this kind would not be believed generally.