One of those pregnant and significant ideas which Theosophy scatters so
lavishly around is this—that the same scale is repeated over and over
again, the same succession of events in larger or smaller cycles. If
you understand one cycle, you understand the whole. The same laws by
which a solar system is builded go to the building up of the system of
man. The laws by which the Self unfolds his powers in the universe,
from the fire-mist up to the LOGOS, are the same laws of consciousness
which repeat themselves in the universe of man. If you understand them
in the one, you can equally understand them in the other. Grasp them in
the small, and the large is revealed to you. Grasp them in the large,
and the small becomes intelligible to you.
The great unfolding from the stone to the God goes on through millions
of years, through aeons of time. But the long unfolding that takes
place in the universe, takes place in a shorter time-cycle within the
limit of humanity, and this in a cycle so brief that it seems as
nothing beside the longer one. Within a still briefer cycle a similar
unfolding takes place in the individual—rapidly, swiftly, with all the
force of its past behind it. These forces that manifest and unveil
themselves in evolution are cumulative in their power. Embodied in the
stone, in the mineral world, they grow and put out a little more of
strength, and in the mineral world accomplish their unfolding. Then
they become too strong for the mineral, and press on into the vegetable
world. There they unfold more and more of their divinity, until they
become too mighty for the vegetable, and become animal.
Expanding within and gaining experiences from the animal, they again
overflow the limits of the animal, and appear as the human. In the
human being they still grow and accumulate with ever-increasing force,
and exert greater pressure against the barrier; and then out of the
human, they press into the super-human. This last process of evolution
is called “Yoga.”
Coming to the individual, the man of our own globe has behind him his
long evolution in other chains than ours—this same evolution through
mineral to vegetable, through vegetable to animal, through animal to
man, and then from our last dwelling-place in the lunar orb on to this
terrene globe that we call the earth. Our evolution here has all the
force of the last evolution in it, and hence, when we come to this
shortest cycle of evolution which is called Yoga, the man has behind
him the whole of the forces accumulated in his human evolution, and it
is the accumulation of these forces which enables him to make the
passage so rapidly. We must connect our Yoga with the evolution of
consciousness everywhere, else we shall not understand it at all; for
the laws of evolution of consciousness in a universe are exactly the
same as the laws of Yoga, and the principles whereby consciousness
unfolds itself in the great evolution of humanity are the same
principles that we take in Yoga and deliberately apply to the more
rapid unfolding of our own consciousness. So that Yoga, when it is
definitely begun, is not a new thing, as some people imagine.
The whole evolution is one in its essence. The succession is the same,
the sequences identical. Whether you are thinking of the unfolding of
consciousness in the universe, or in the human race, or in the
individual, you can study the laws of the whole, and in Yoga you learn
to apply those same laws to your own consciousness rationally and
definitely. All the laws are one, however different in their stage of
manifestation.
If you look at Yoga in this light, then this Yoga, which seemed so
alien and so far off, will begin to wear a familiar face, and come to
you in a garb not wholly strange. As you study the unfolding of
consciousness, and the corresponding evolution of form, it will not
seem so strange that from man you should pass on to superman,
transcending the barrier of humanity, and finding yourself in the
region where divinity becomes more manifest.