Ancient and Modern Physics | Page 5

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 you that the earth revolves daily and he will reply that it would be the job of his life. It can be done at great expense and great labor, but that is because we know the answer and can invent a way of showing it, not because there are any observations from which a deduction would naturally follow.
Nearly if not all our great discoveries