Interesting Links Between Past
And Present
Carlos Cardoso Aveline
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This
article was first published in
“Fohat”
magazine, Canada, Spring 2007,
pp.
7-9 and 21-22. It was then updated
and
published again by the monthly
electronical
magazine “The Aquarian
Theosophist”,
in its November 2007
edition,
from which we reproduce it.
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By mid-October
2007, former U.S. vice-president Al
Gore was awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize, sharing it with
the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC.
The Norwegian
Nobel Committee praised both “for their
efforts to build
up and disseminate a greater knowledge about
man-made climate
change”. Earlier in 2007, Al Gore had
received the Academy
Award for Documentary Film for
his “An Inconvenient Truth”. Al Gore is not
new to these
planetary
issues. Active in environmental
discussions
since the 1980s, in 1993 he published “Earth in the
Balance”, a book which
proposes a new worldwide
ecological and social ethics, and which is guided by a
feeling of planetary citizenship and universal
brotherhood.
(CCA)
“What has happened before will
happen again. What has been done before will
be done again. There is nothing new under the Sun.”
(Ecclesiastes, 1: 5-10.)
The Law of Cycles applies to everything in life. Not
only events, but also ideas are often recurrent. It is not an extraordinary event,
therefore, that something William Q. Judge wrote in his 1893 book “The Ocean of
Theosophy” later became a central idea in Al Gore’s 2006 famous film and book
entitled “An Inconvenient Truth”.
Both William Judge and the ex-vice-president of the United States
discuss the mechanisms by which a new Ice Age can suddenly spread over a large
area of the planet. And this is a living possibility in the 21st century, according
to many scientists and quite a few governments.
There is a specific paragraph by
William Judge which anticipates for more than one century an idea now defended
by Mr. Al Gore in his well-articulated, worldwide effort for stimulating planetary
consciousness and ethics.
Judge describes various aspects of geological and karmic adjustments into
a new age or cycle. The whole passage is significant, as climate-related events
can only be understood in their dynamic unity and interaction:
“In regard to great cataclysms occurring at the beginning and ending of
the great cycles, the main laws governing the effects are those of Karma and
Reembodiment, or Reincarnation, proceeding under cyclic rule. Not only is man
ruled by these laws, but every atom of matter as well, and the mass of matter
is constantly undergoing a change at the same time with man. It must therefore
exhibit alterations corresponding to those through which the thinker is going.
On the physical plane effects are brought out through the electrical and other
fluids acting with the gases on the solids of the globe. At the change of a great
cycle they reach what may be termed the exploding point and cause violent
convulsions of the following classes: (a) Earthquakes, (b) Floods, (c) Fire,
(d) Ice.” [1]
Judge goes on:
“Earthquakes may be brought on according to this philosophy by two
general causes; first, subsidence or elevation under the earth-crust due to
heat and steam, second, electrical and magnetic changes which affect water and
earth at the same time. These last have the power to instantaneously make the
earth fluidic without melting it, thus causing immense and violent
displacements in large or small waves. And this effect is sometimes seen now in
earthquake districts when similar electrical causes are at work in a smaller
measure.”
“Floods of general extent are caused by displacement of water from the
subsidence or elevation of land, and by those combined with electrical change
which induces a copious discharge of moisture. The latter is not a mere
emptying of a cloud, but a sudden turning of vast bodies of fluids and solids
into water.”
“Universal fires come on from electrical and magnetic changes in the
atmosphere by which the moisture is withdrawn from the air and the latter
turned into a fiery mass; and, secondly, by the sudden expansion of the solar
magnetic center into seven such centers, thus burning the globe.”
These various phenomena listed by Judge are not separate from one
another. For a number of years now, factors like widespread man-made pollution
and deforestation, as well as earthquakes, volcanoes, forest fires, droughts and floods have been combining to provoke a greenhouse effect on the planet. The
great paradox is that the initial warming caused by such a greenhouse effect may
be but the triggering mechanism for a new Ice Age.
The specific paragraph in Judge’s book whose idea has been adopted and
expanded by Al Gore, is:
“Ice cataclysms come on not only from the sudden alteration of the poles
but also from lowered temperature due to the alteration of the warm fluid
currents in the sea and the hot magnetic currents in the earth, the first being
known to science, the latter not. The lower stratum of moisture is suddenly
frozen, and vast tracts of land covered in a night with many feet of ice. This
can easily happen to the British Isles if the warm currents of the ocean are
diverted from its shores.”
While keeping these ideas in mind, one might make a pause to ask oneself: 1) Can we do anything about these planetary
events? 2) Are we human beings more than just passive spectators and victims
of this process? 3) Have our
civilization and its citizens, therefore, some definite responsibilities over
what happens to our planet?
Conventional science has finally got to a situation in which it can
answer “yes” to these three questions. As to Theosophy, it has never ascribed
the causes of human and planetary events to the personal will of any man-made
Gods. Both Theosophy and Science tend to say that human relationship to
environment must be one of the major
causes in many a big and small cataclysm.
Blavatsky students know - and some scientists suspect - that physical
events are unseparable from spiritual realities. Esoteric Philosophy goes
further and recognizes the Sun as being the “storehouse” of both spiritual and
physical energy for our planet and its inhabitants. Our star is the visible
vehicle for the Logos, the “Verbum”, or Ishwara, whose name is AUM according to the Aphorisms
of Patanjali (I-23-28). Taking these facts into calm consideration, one might
see a deeper meaning, occult in this sentence of Gore’s book:
“We are dumping so much carbon dioxide into the Earth’s environment that
we have literally changed the relationship between the Earth and the Sun.” [2]
Indeed the “greenhouse effect” has been provoking a growing obstruction
in our planet’s relation to the Sun’s vital energies. It interrupts the free
exchange of energies between the Earth and its own “higher atmosphere”. It also
leads to a climate change that will allow the planet to recover its balance. Of
course, only a deep and radical change
in our civilization can remove many man-made causes of the “greenhouse effect”; yet there is no other
path to go, and procrastination will not help us. Thinking of deforestation,
for instance, H.P. Blavatsky wrote as soon as 1879:
“We need only glance at the pages of history to see that the ruin and
ultimate extinction of national power follow the extirpation of forests as
surely as night follows day. Nature has provided the means for human
development; and her laws can never be violated without disaster.” [3]
H.P.B. was well aware of the
fact that the environmental impact caused by industrialized society was already
a powerful cause for climate change in her own time. She could see it would get
much worse in the future, for she ironically wrote in 1888 in one of her “Unpopular Philosopher Notes”:
“The outlook for the British Isles is hopelessly depressing. (…..) India
is exporting her superfluous ‘monsoon clouds’ to Europe via Port Said, and the
rain-God seems to have permanently established his sprinkling machine over
Great Britain. Siberia sends her hyperborean frosts to the southwards, and
herself flirts with the tropics. Kangaroos have appeared in Surrey; and parrots
may soon be heard warbling their saw-filing staccato, and birds of paradise sun
their jewelled plumes on palm trees in Archangel. Everything evidently is
upside down, the times are out of joint, and the screws of the Cosmic
‘Carpenter’ are working loose. In vain our men of Science waste their Greek and
Latin over the problem. What is it, what can the matter be? What makes all this
sidereal and terrestrial ‘tohu-bohu’ à la mode, of Chaos? The Globe is
shrinking, we hear; and the firmament thickening with foreign matter of all
sorts. The ceaseless soot and smoke from millions of chimneys, furnaces,
railway engines and other fires may perchance have angered the Powers above. Naturally
enough, for they must object to being smoked out of their Svargas and Valhallas
and other pleasant detached Elysiums, by the products of incomplete
fuel-combustion. As for our poor mother Earth, what with the ever extending
mines, canals, and tunnels, aqueducts, drains, sewers and subways, her
venerable hide is becoming so honey-combed as to resemble the skin of a
morphiomaniac addicted to subcutaneous injections. How long she will suffer her
robust flanks to be thus scarified, who can tell? (…..) For myself I confess my
utter incapacity to know where this exact line will be drawn.” [4]
During the first half of the 21st century, we are very much in the same
situation - only with more speed and danger, and still accelerating.
Thinking ahead of her time, HPB also anticipated the ethical viewpoint which the ecology
movement would adopt in the last quarter of the 20th century. Al Gore, a long-time
climate ecologist and a sympathizer of Fritjof Capra’s “Deep Ecology”, has
worked along similar philosophical lines. A U.S.A. Senator for many years, in
1993 he published his first book, “Earth in the Balance” (Plume Book), which
anticipated much of his 2006 film and book.
Gore writes on page 10 of “An
Inconvenient Truth”:
“The list of what is now endangered due to global warming also includes
the continued stable configuration of ocean and wind currents that has been in
place since before the first cities were built almost 10,000 years ago.”
And then:
“The climate change also offers us the chance to experience what very
few generations in history have had the privilege of knowing: a generational mission; the exhilaration of
a compelling moral purpose; a shared
and unified cause; the thrill of being forced by circumstances to put aside the
pettiness and conflict that so often stifle the restless human need for
transcendence: the opportunity to rise.
When we do rise, it will fill our spirits and bind us together. Those who are
now suffocating in cynicism and despair will be able to breathe freely. Those
who are now suffering from a loss of meaning in their lives will find hope.
When we rise, we will experience an epiphany as we discover that this crisis is
not really about politics at all. (…..)
It is about who we are as human beings. It is about our capacity to
transcend our own limitations, to rise to this new occasion. To see with our
hearts, as well as our heads, the response that is now called for. This is a
moral, ethical and spiritual challenge. We should not fear this challenge. We
should welcome it. We must not wait. In the
words of Dr. King, ‘Tomorrow is today’.” (p. 11)
Gore discusses the process of heating now taking place at the surface of
our globe due to the ‘greenhouse effect’. Rising temperatures are caused by the
rapidly growing excess of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Based on the best available
scientific data, he describes the advanced process of ice-melting in the
planetary poles.
As Theosophy students know, ice-melting
in the poles may be linked to the periodical
Polar Shifts in our planet. Polar shifts are discussed by HPB in “The
Secret Doctrine”. The large-scale ice-melting changes the whole distribution
and balance of “weight” along the planet’s surface. It thus can help affect the
poles’ orientation with regard to the Sun. The geological substance of our
planet is more plastic and fluid and less “solid” than one could think at first
sight. Hard rocks are the exception; fluidity is the rule. The whole process is
into a great extent electrical-magnetic.
The warming temperatures and
large scale melting of glaciers in the poles are in fact but the initial
effects of a much wider change in the physiology of the planet. Al Gore writes:
“Melting the Arctic could
profoundly change the planet’s entire climate pattern. Scientists call the
global climate a ‘non-linear system’, which is just a fancy way the scientists
have of saying the changes are not gradual. Some of them can, and have in the
past, come suddenly, in big jumps.” [5]
He proceeds:
“These scientists say the world’s
climate is best understood as a kind of
engine for redistributing heat from the Equator and the tropics into the poles.
Much more solar energy is absorbed by the Earth between the Tropic of Cancer [about 23 degrees North of the equator]
and the Tropic of Capricorn [about 23
South of the equator] because
the Sun is directly overhead everyday all year long.”
On the poles, we have the
opposite situation:
“By contrast, the Sun’s rays
strike only glancing blows at the North Pole and the South Pole. Each receives the sunlight for only half the
year, during which the other is completely in darkness. The redistribution of
heat from the Equator to the poles drives the wind and ocean currents - like
the Gulf Stream and the jet stream. These currents have followed much the same
pattern since the end of the last
ice age 10,000 years ago, since before
the first human cities were built. Disrupting them would have incalculable
consequences for all of civilization. And yet, the climate crisis is gaining
the potential to do just that.”
In the lines above, Gore
mentions the well-known fact that we got back from an ice age some 10,000 years
ago. It is interesting to note that, according to “The Mahatma Letters”, some
11,500 years ago Poseidonis, the last (and large) island of Atlantis, went down
in a sudden way [6]. Was it because
of a flood? Yes. Was the flood in its turn caused by a quick, large scale
ice-melting? Possibly yes.
A warming leads to an
ice-melting, and this leads to a new ice age, which lasts sometimes 1,000 years
(see the end of p. 149 in Gore’s book).
Thus the “melting” which sunk
Atlantis 11,500 years ago could be linked to the starting point of an ice age. Dates
seem to fit, since broadly speaking some
10,000 years ago we had the end of the ice age. But one can see
that Gore is talking about 10,000 years with much flexibility: this could have
been the time either of the start, or of the end of the most recent ice
age.
Discussing the events which
are taking place right now, Gore writes:
“And so all those wind and
ocean current patterns that formed during the last ice age, which have been
relatively stable ever since, are now up in the air. Our civilization has never
experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this. Today’s climate
pattern has existed throughout the entire history of human civilization. Every
place - every city, every farm - is located or has been developed on the basis
of the same climate patterns we have always known.”
What about the ocean currents
mentioned by William Judge? The former U.S. vice-president says:
“According to scientists, one
surprisingly fragile component of the global climate system is in the North
Atlantic, where the Gulf Stream encounters the cold winds coming off the Arctic
and across Greenland. (...) The currents of
the ocean are all linked (…..) in a loop called ‘The Global Ocean
Conveyor Belt’.”
Then, referring to some colour
drawings on a world map included in his book, Gore adds:
“The red parts of the loop
below represent the warm surfaces, the best known of which is the Gulf stream,
which flows along the east coast of America. The blue portions of the loop
represent the deep cold-water currents flowing in the opposite direction. (...)
Around 10,000 years ago, something happened that the scientists are worried
could happen again. When the last glacial ice sheet in North America melted, it
formed a giant pool of fresh water. The
Great Lakes are the remnant of that huge freshwater lake, which was held in
place on its eastern boundary by an enormous ice dam. Then one day the ice
dam broke and the fresh water rushed out
into the North Atlantic. (...) The Gulf Stream virtually stopped. So Western
Europe no longer received all of that heat from the evaporating Gulf Stream.
Consequently, Europe went back into an ice age for another 900 to 1,000 years.
And the transition happened fairly quickly. Some scientists are seriously
worried about the possibility of this
phenomenon recurring.”
In order to make a direct
comparison, let’s see now again that key paragraph by Judge. It says:
“Ice cataclysms come on not
only from the sudden alteration of the poles but also from lowered temperature
due to the alteration of the warm fluid currents in the sea and the hot
magnetic currents in the earth, the first being known to science, the latter
not. The lower stratum of moisture is suddenly frozen, and vast tracts of land
covered in a night with many feet of ice. This can easily happen to the British
Isles if the warm currents of the ocean are diverted from its shores.”
Similarity of ideas is
remarkable. This fundamental concept has not been completely forgotten between
the 1890s and more recent years, for in September 1958 Harper’s magazine published in the USA an article called “The Coming of the Ice
Age”, based on research done at the Columbia University’s Geological
Observatory. That article, which was discussed in “Theosophy” magazine, said:
“If they [researchers Maurice Ewing and William Donn] are right, the world is now heading into a new Ice Age.
It will come not as a sudden
catastrophe, but as the inevitable culmination of a process that has already
begun in northern oceans. (…..) As
Ewing and Donn read the evidence, an Ice
Age will result from a slow warming and
rising of the ocean that is now taking place. They believe that this ocean
flood – which may submerge large coastal areas of the eastern United States and western Europe – is going to melt
the ice sheet which has covered the
Arctic Ocean through all recorded history. Calculations based on the
independent observations of other scientists
indicate this melting could begin within roughly one hundred years. It
is this melting of Arctic ice which Ewing
and Donn believe will set off another Ice Age on earth.” [7]
There are also other
viewpoints to look at environmental and cyclic changes, and they are perhaps
complementary to this one. Sooner or later, fires and volcanoes might play a
major role in climate change, as HPB wrote, while commenting Eliphas Levi’s
texts:
“Eliphas Levi refers to the secret tradition, among Occultists, about
the great struggle that took place, in those far away prehistoric days of
Atlantis, between the ‘Sons of God’ - the initiated Adepts of Sambhala (…..) - and
the Atlanteans, the wicked magicians of Thevetat.
It is a well-established belief among the Eastern, and especially the Mongolian
and Tibetan, Occultists that toward the end of every race, when mankind reaches
its apex of knowledge in that cycle, dividing into two distinct classes, it
branches off - one as the ‘Sons of Light’ and the other as the ‘Sons of
Darkness’, or initiated Adepts and natural-born magicians or - mediums. Toward
the very close of the race, as their mixed progeny furnishes the first pioneers
of a new and a higher race, there comes the last and supreme struggle during
which the ‘Sons of Darkness’ are usually exterminated by some great cataclysm
of nature - by either fire or water. Atlantis was submerged, hence the
inference that that portion of the mankind of the fifth race which will be
composed of ‘natural-born magicians’ will be exterminated at the future great
cataclysm by - fire.” [8]
If fire and water alternate each other in that role, the third race must
have found its crisis by fire, and indeed H.P.B writes in “The Secret Doctrine”
about the time “when Lemuria was submerged, after it had been nearly destroyed
by volcanic fires”. [9]
A fire scenario in climate
change would be related to the excess of carbon dioxide and would include
various factors such as: a) deforestation; b) growing fires in forests and
other natural areas; c) a “withdrawal of moisture” as mentioned in Judge’s
quotation above; d) ice melting in the poles, causing a change in the
‘structural weight’ distributed along the surface of the globe; e) this would
then lead a number of volcanoes into activity. These combined factors could
cause an artificial “winter”, since the excess of carbon dioxide and other air
polluttants would block sunlight and prevent it from getting into the earth’s atmosphere. That could trigger a
new ice age, too, a period of time which would correspond to a small and
partial planetary pralaya, “a time
for relative rest” in the life of our planet.
The complex transition to the
new cycle evidently deserves much further study, and on an interdisciplinary
basis. We have a limited number of data and hints available so far, and many of
them are apparently contradictory. Yet
these fragmentary and incomplete data should be enough to stimulate us into
research.
It is not difficult to see
that the theosophical doctrine of cycles helps us understand something of the
karmic challenges and opportunities we are facing right now. Such a study
allows us to see under a brighter light the “dharma” and the duty of human
beings, in the next few decades and beyond them.
NOTES:
[1] “The Ocean of
Theosophy”, William Q. Judge, The Theosophy Company, Los Angeles, EUA, 1987,
172 pp., see Chapter 14, pp. 123-124.
[2] “An Inconvenient
Truth”, by Al Gore, published by Rodale, Inc., PA, USA, 2006, 328 pp. See
Introduction, p. 10.
[3] Quoted from HPB’s note “The Ruin of India”, in “The
Theosophist”, India, November 1879, p. 42.
[4] “From the Note
Book of An Unpopular Philosopher”, in
“Collected Writings” of H.P. Blavatsky, TPH, India, vol. X, 1988, 461 pp., see
pp. 105-106.
[5] “An Inconvenient
Truth”, by Al Gore, published by Rodale, Inc. See pp. 148-149.
[6] “The Mahatma
Letters to A. P. Sinnett”, TUP, Pasadena, California, USA, 1992, 494 pp. One
should see all of the letter XXIII-B and examine more especially the answer to
question 4. The mention to Atlantis’ dates is at p. 155 (TUP edition) or 313
(Chronological edition). There, the Master also gives the pages in which the
“partially veiled” story of Atlantis is narrated in the book “Isis Unveiled”,
by H.P.Blavatsky.
[7] “Theosophy”
magazine, Los Angeles, January 1959, p. 138. The article, spread as various notes
in the section “On the Look Out”, extends
from p. 138 through p. 141.
[8] “Footnotes to ‘Gleanings
From Eliphas Levi’ ”, by H.P.B., in “The Theosophist”, November, 1882, pp.
36-38. Also published at “Collected Writings” of H. P. Blavatsky, TPH, India, Vol.
IV, pp. 262-263.
[9] “The Secret
Doctrine”, H. P. Blavatsky, Theosophy Co., Los Angeles, vol. II, p. 340.
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