Cosmic order

“ Thus may the cosmic race, whose aggregate census makes up the stellar universe, be perpetuated—individual solar systems, such as ours, being born, and growing old, and dying to live again in their descendants, while the universe as a whole maintains its unified integrity throughout all these internal mutations—passing on, it may be, by infinitesimal stages, to a culmination hopelessly beyond human comprehension. ”

“ As the universes expand, and as gravity and love reach out into time-organizing space, we are able to understand more and more of the First Source and Center. We observe gravity action penetrating the space presence of the Unqualified Absolute, and we detect spirit creatures evolving and expanding within the divinity presence of the Deity Absolute while both cosmic and spirit evolution are by mind and experience unifying on finite deity levels as the Supreme Being and are co-ordinating on transcendental levels as the Trinity Ultimate. ”

“ In all the known universe it moved against the forces of celestial mechanics because some intelligent mote that infested the surface of a planet once had a longing to visit the stars. In all the Solar System, most of the cosmic stuff was larger than it—but it alone defied the natural laws of space. ”

“ In my Kabala of Numbers and elsewhere I have repeatedly pointed out the fallacy of those systems 110which ignore the cosmic factors, which alone give symbolism its coherence. Nobody can reasonably ascribe any specific sound or numerical value to a planet, or any influence to any part of the heavens or to any period of time without having regard to some cosmical factor as the basis of the system to which these planetary or time significations belong. ”

“ Living individuals have no infinity save in this relation to the total death-substance and death-being, the summed-up cosmos.
Light and dark, these great wonders, are relative to us alone. These are two vast poles of the cosmic energy and of material existence. These are the vast poles of cosmic sympathy, which we call the sun, and the other white pole of cosmic volition, which we call the moon. To the sun belong the great forces of heat and radiant energy, to the moon belong the great forces of magnetism and electricity, radium-energy, and so on. The sun is not, in any sense, a material body. ”

“ Could we get a cosmic view of the solar system by leaving the world we live on for some suitable vantage-point in space, two attributes of it would impose themselves upon us—the general symmetry of the whole, and the impressively graded proportions of its particular parts. ”

“ So far as concerns the world which we actually inhabit, its first beginning, we must, he tells us, suppose [11] to have been a vast nebula of infinitely attenuated and light material, rotating upon its own axis. [12]
Given this first beginning of the cosmogonic movement, it is easy, on mathematical principles, to deduce and mathematically establish the further phenomena of the foundation of the cosmic bodies, the separation of the planets, and so forth. ”

“ Thus the key to the physical conception of the Universe is to be found, and alone found, in that beauty of order, and harmony of motion, which are so inseparably associated with the varied forms of matter, graduating through a series of units or atoms, each with its dual nature complete in itself, through a series of minor entities termed elements, which in their aggregations form meteorites, satellites, planets, suns and stars, and systems of stars and oceans of suns and stars, until all are united into one ultimate unity where all are blended into one complete and perfect whole ”

“ I think there can be no doubt that this research demonstrates the existence of a cosmic cloud pervading the stellar system. The fullness of interstellar space becomes a fact of observation and no longer a theoretical conjecture. ”

“ It seems to me that these modern discoveries as to the periodic decay and re-birth of cosmic bodies, which we owe to the most recent advance of physics and astronomy, associated with the law of substance, are especially important in giving us a clear insight into the universal cosmic process of evolution. In their light our earth shrinks into the slender proportions of a “mote in the sunbeam,” of which unnumbered [Pg 244] millions chase each other through the vast depths of space. ”

“ That study of our Earth in its entirety falls properly within the province of astronomy, is not only deducible from its relationship to the other planets, but demonstrable from the cosmic causes that have been at work upon it, and the inadequacy of anything but cosmic laws to explain them. ”

“ The intricacies of our own solar system being thus illumined, the restless activity of the human intellect was stimulated to search beyond for new problems and new mysteries. Even more fascinating than the movements of our sun and planets are all those questions that relate to the clustered stellar congeries hanging suspended within the deep blue vault of night. Does the same law of gravitation cast its magic spell over that hazy cloud of Pleiads, binding them, like ourselves, with bonds indissoluble? ”

“ It is permissible, therefore, to neglect the trifling irregularities and agglomerations in the distribution of star-matter, and to assimilate the entire stellar universe to a vast cloud of cosmic dust at relative rest, everywhere of the same density. It is then found that for this cloud of dust to maintain a permanent, stable configuration, the time direction of the universe as a whole, for an observer who is non-rotating with respect to the stars, must be straight. ”

“ But the great law, the law of gravitation, which regulates so beautifully the order of our planetary system, is not confined to that system: it extends through the whole universe. It may be seen carrying on its operations, and working its magical effects among the most distant orbs that are subject to our observation whether by the naked eye or by means of the highest powers of the telescope. You may see it in those beautiful systems of double and triple stars, that are now known to exist in various parts of the firmament. ”

“ The old generation of astronomers who believed in the complete inviolability of celestial order has been for the most part gathered to its fathers, and we now realize that change is the law of the universe. ”

“ Yet have we every reason which analogy can afford to believe that even the development of a whole universe such as ours should be regarded as but a minute local phenomenon of a universe infinitely higher in order, that universe in turn but a single member of a system of such universes, and so on, even ad infinitum. ”

“ If everything in the universe is ordered according to law, how is it possible for miracles, and in a more general sense, answers to prayer, to take place? Perhaps the comet may help us here. Could anything seem more miraculous, more to contradict the general experience of the solar system, with its planets ever revolving in closed orbits round the sun, than the appearance of a body which rushed straight toward the sun, took one half-turn round it, and then receded from it by a different path, never, never to return? ”

“ To do so would mean cosmic motion upon a straight line, while every consideration of celestial mechanics points to motion upon a curve. When shall we turn sufficiently upon that curve to detect its bending? ’Tis a problem we must leave as a rich heritage to later generations that are to follow us. The visionary theorist’s notion of a great central sun, controlling our own sun’s way in space, must be dismissed as far too daring. ”

“ We must therefore recognize that there may be a supra-cosmical as well as an intra-cosmical planetary action, and this follows from the argument that, matter being the ultimate expression of Spirit, the material planets have their spiritual counterparts. ”

“ The astronomer, I assert, can neither from any data at his command postulate nor prove the beginning nor the end of the reverberating motion that exists in his solar system, which is itself the fragment of a system that is circulating and revolving in and about itself, and in which, since the birth of man, the universe he knows has not passed the first milestone in the road that universe is traveling in space immensity. ”

“ And assuredly, as in the firmament that simple law of gravitation reigns supreme—making it indeed a kosmos—majestic, orderly, comely in its going—ruling, and binding not the less the fiery and nomadic comets, than the gentle, punctual moons—so certainly, and to us moral creatures to a degree transcendently more important, does the whole intelligent universe move around and move towards and in the Father of Lights. ”

“ For, viewing their surroundings through the vision plate, it seemed as if they swam through a sea of radiant light where every star was a beacon, each planet a steadfast buoy of glowing color. And in this gleaming pattern was a regularity, an orthodoxy as painstaking as if some master craftsman had allocated each glowing sphere with precise care.
Regularly discernible against the omnipresent back-drop of space were the solar galaxies, each a complete entity, aloof, removed from its fellows and confined to its own definite segment of space. Some galaxies were younger than others. ”

“ The new philosophy resolves all the cosmic phenomena into the concentration and diffusion of the unknowable elements called matter, motion, and force. The quantities of these elements remain always the same, but they are in a state of constant evolution, and all the cosmic phenomena result from this evolution, and are simply changes or transformations of the same force. ”

“ Why did you not reflect that the matter of which the celestial bodies are formed must have had an origin, that the revolutions of those bodies cannot be ruled by an abstract law, and that their enormous distances, as well as the expanse of their orbits through the immensity of space, compel the admission of an infinite being ranging infinitely above matter and necessarily prior to it? You should not have overlooked the fact that the heavens proclaim God's existence by their immensity far more eloquently than by the revolutions of the celestial bodies. ”

“ Then the commencement of the world was the commencement of the universe, its destruction would be the destruction of all. Now, thanks to the revolution in feeling that has been accomplished by the progress of astronomy, we have learned our own insignificance, and that amongst the infinite number of stars, each supporting their own system of inhabited planets, our earth occupies an infinitesimally small portion, and the destruction of it would make no difference whatever—still less its becoming uninhabitable. ”

“ In neither instance is the change of position of the relevant cosmic body - in our examples that of the sun or moon in relation to the earth - the 'cause' of the corresponding rhythmic events on the earth. Together with all other rhythmic events of equal periodicity, it is itself the effect of the activity of a force-sphere constituting the cosmic realm to which the relevant planetary body belongs. ”

“ Everything that is created is subject to destruction. And further, since the Cosmos exists by the goodness of God it follows that God must always be good and the world exist. Just as light coexists with the Sun and with fire, and shadow coexists with a body.
Of the bodies in the Cosmos, some imitate Mind and move in orbits; some imitate Soul and move in a straight line, fire and air upward, earth and water downward. Of those that move in orbits the fixed sphere goes from the east, the Seven from the west. ”

“ Fig. 39.—The Cosmography of Cosmas.
"God," he says, "in creating the earth, rested it on nothing. The earth is therefore sustained by the power of God, the Creator of all things, supporting all things by the word of His power. If below the earth, or outside of it, anything existed, it would fall of its own accord. So God made the earth the base of the universe, and ordained that it should sustain itself by its own proper gravity." ”

“ The new astronomy makes much of the three cosmic laws. Our earth, by a form of self-love called molecular attraction, ceases to be scattered dust, and takes on the shape of a rich and beautiful planet. ”

“ But are there any objects in the heavens unconnected with our system? If all the stars were like the earth, merely the appendages of our sun, then we never could discover whether we were at rest or whether we were in motion: our system might be in a condition of absolute rest, or it might be hurrying on with an inconceivably great velocity, for anything we could tell to the contrary. But the stars do not belong to the system of our sun; they are, rather, suns themselves, and do not recognise the sway of our sun, as this earth is obliged to do. ”

“ The fourth triunity absolutely controls the fundamental units of cosmic energy and releases them from the grasp of the Unqualified Absolute in direct proportion to the appearance in the experiential Deities of subabsolute capacity to control and stabilize the metamorphosing cosmos. ”

“ Heaven and earth are simply contained in the great whole of the infinite Universe. How, he asks, can we know that there is not a larger Cosmos, over and above the manifestation of Cosmos that we can see? ”

“ Now, we have in this general law a means of passing beyond the bounds of the Solar System, and forming no indistinct conceptions as to the existence and character of worlds circling around other suns. For these orbs, like our sun, contain in their substance many of the so-called terrestrial elements, while it may not unsafely be asserted that all, or nearly all, those elements, and few or no elements unknown to us, exist in the substance of every single star that shines upon us from the celestial concave. ”