Ancient and Modern Physics | Page 5

phenomena added to the energy. When the atom and its ether, prana, and
manasa are vibrating in chord, we have mind and mental phenomena added to the life and
energy." Each atom has energy, life, and mind in posse. In the living leaf the prakriti,
ether, and prana are sounding the threefold silver chord of life. In the animal, the manasa
is sounding the same note with them, making the fourfold golden chord of mind. Even in
the plant there may be a faint manasic overtone, for the potentiality of life and mind is in
everything. This unity of the physical universe with the physical atom, and with all things
created--earth, animal, or crystal--is the physical backbone of Oriental metaphysics.
Prakriti, ether, prana, and manasa are in our vernacular the Earth, Air, Fire, and Water of
the old philosophers--the "Four Elements."
The Oriental physics has been guarded most jealously. For many thousands of years it
has been the real occult and esoteric teaching, while the Oriental metaphysics has been

open and exoteric. It could not be understood without the key, and the key was in the
physics known only to "the tried and approved disciple." A little has leaked out--enough
to whet the appetite of the true student and make him ask for more.


Chapter Two
The Two Kinds of Perception
To the savage, matter appears in two forms--solid and liquid. As he advances a step he
learns it has three forms--solid, liquid and gas. He cannot see the gas, but he knows it is
there.
A little further on he learns that matter as he knows it is only a minute portion of the great
universe of matter--the few chords that can be struck on the five strings of his senses, and
limited to one octave or key.
Whether the particular matter he investigates has a solid, a liquid, or a gaseous form
depends upon its rate of vibration. If it is a liquid, by raising its rate of vibration one third
it becomes a gas; by reducing it one third it becomes a solid.
Each kind of matter has vibration only through one octave. It is known to us only by its
vibration in that octave. Each kind of matter has a different octave--is set on a higher or
lower key, so to speak, but all octaves of vibration are between the highest of hydrogen
gas and the lowest of carbon.
In mechanical compounds, such as air or brass, the rate of vibration of the compound is
the least common multiple of the two or more rates. In chemical compounds, such as
water or alcohol, the rate is that of the highest, the others uniting in harmonic fractions.
All matter as we know it through our senses--prakriti, as it is called in the Secret Doctrine
to distinguish it from non-sensual matter--is the vibration of an universal Something, we
do not know what, through these different octaves. The elementary substances (so-called)
are one and the same thing--this Something--in different keys and chords of vibration;
keys that run into one another, producing all sorts of beautiful harmonies.
Taking any one of these elements, or any of their compounds, all we know of it is limited
strictly to its changes during vibration through one octave. What happens when the
vibration goes above or below the octave has not yet been treated hypothetically.
While some elements are vibrating on higher and some on lower keys, we can consider
them all as vibrating within one great octave, that octave of the universal Something
which produces sensual matter, or prakriti.
But matter is not confined, we know, to this great octave, although our sensual

knowledge of it is strictly confined to it. How do we know it?
Knowledge comes to us in two ways, and there are two kinds of knowledge.
1. That which comes through our senses, by observation and experience. This includes
reasoning from relation.
2. That which comes through intuition--or, as some writers inaccurately say, "through the
formal laws of thought."
All the observation and experience of the rising and the setting of the sun for a thousand
centuries could only have confirmed the first natural belief that it revolved daily around
the earth; nor by joining this experience with other experiences could any deduction have
come from our reason that would have opposed it. Not our reason but our intuition said
that the sun stood still and the earth revolved daily. The oldest books in existence tell us
that this axial revolution of the earth was not only known in the very dawn of time but
that it has been known to every race (except our own of European savages) from before
the time thought was first transmitted by writing.
Ask the ablest living geographer or physicist to prove to