Extracted text
By Koresh — Part IX.
THE UNIVERSE has form. Form constituting a property of natural existence, Nature in any modification could not have existed without it. Form, then, is the natural concomitant of eternal being, and the form of being must continue as the perpetual and enduring monument of the continual descent and mutation of spirit to matter, and the complete expression of the function of its mobility and metamorphosis.
Dimension is a general property of form. Limitation is a specific characteristic of dimension. There are three appreciable and cognized dimensions; namely, length, breadth, and thickness. Size is determined by these three dimensions. The mind has faculties of form and size. If these are qualities of mind, they are also properties of natural existence, and pertain to matter. The mind can appreciate limitation as pertaining to form, but illimitability is unthinkable, and that which is unthinkable has no existence. Illimitability, then, is not a property of matter, and does not belong to it.
There are two senses in which dimension may be regarded; first, as having simple extense and direction of extense. A cube as a whole represents dimension; the faces of the cube, the direction of its axes, the three principles of which denote its six sides, its direction. We may conceive of a spiritual substance, a substantial but immaterial potency, as occupying equal space (the same extense) with the cube, as the spirit and soul within the body of man. This might be consistently denominated a second dimension; within this, another more refined spirit, constituting the third dimension; by a second mathematical dimension, we mean the outlines and occupation of form limited by length, breadth, and thickness. We have named three dimensions only.
Is There a Fourth Dimension?
Let us think of an atom of matter, the smallest conceivable or geometric point of a material substance. It has length, breadth, and thickness, with their accompanying directions. The mind can think of a reduction of the atom of matter, even to its vanishing point. This is its limitation toward its fourth direction. This is the limit of its fourth dimension. At this point it becomes spirit. It is not destroyed as substance, but at this point it is mutated to spirit; substance of another kind. The materialist may conceive of the existence of a fourth dimension of matter, but he cannot determine its character nor define its property, for at the moment the mind discovers this limitation it becomes spiritistic.
The integral mind is both materialistic and spiritistic. There are two distinctive and antithetical classes of mind; one, in its professed belief, is spiritistic, (the christian science mind is the type,) the other, in its professed belief, is materialistic, of which the ordinary material scientist and atheist are types. These are both partial or fragmentary. If the mind can think of the vanishing point of an atom, or matter limited by its decreasing dimension of form, it can also think of its largest limitation, or the increasing dimension of form. These two dimensions of that property of matter called form, are thinkable and therefore existent. Illimitability is unthinkable, and therefore non-existent.
That the universe has form, we may demonstrate by ten thousand proofs. Can we determine the characteristics of this form? The almost universal concept of the divine mind, or of the cause of all things functate and formate, is, that it is perfect. The mere belief that it is perfect does not prove that such is its or his character. The proofs of the divine perfection must rest upon an argument for which, now, we have not space. We may assume, however, inasmuch as such a belief is universal, or nearly so, that the divine mind, made up of the aggregations of all phases and qualities of love, and their correlate concomitants, (these being the components of mind,) is in a state of perfection, and that in the expression of mind into form it will manifest such expression as will involve the most of corresponding formate repleteness.
The sphere, as pertaining to curved lines, and the cube, as pertaining to straight lines,—the one the type of truth, the other of life——are the two characteristic forms of integrality. The compromise of these is the spiral. Assuming that the cause of all things is replete so far as cause is concerned, (and we hazard the assumption because there is little danger of contradiction,) we then predicate, upon this assumption, the axiom that the complex form of the sphere and the cube is the most complete expression of the divine power to formulate, and thus maintain that these characteristics of formation comprise the general embodiment of the will and intellect of causation.
In a former issue, we have shown the sphere or shell to comprise the outlines and limitation of universal form. All convergent lines from the circumferences of the sphere determine toward and terminate in the center, which must necessarily constitute the focal point of centripetal flow,—the central point of contact of all material things. The physical universe being the formulated expression of mind, the astral center of the physical universe must comprise the analogical correspondent of the astral center of the mind of the universe.
The physical universe is proximately moved by the potencies of alchemical, electrical, and magnetic action— “forces” generated by the very form and relation of the elements which enter into the constitution of the great cell or shell of generation. Remotely, it is moved by the mental potencies that are above and prior in quality to even the unconscious or material “forces;” such as physical lumen, caloric, electricity, magnetism, levity, and gravity. Universal form and its correlate universal function are persistent, never having had beginning only so far as the modifications of time—by the break in continuity—mark the end and the beginning of periods, and denote timic aspect, or that modification of continuity called time.
“In the beginning God created,” does not imply more than the beginning of a specific cycle; and such creation, or recreation, is manifest whenever a cycle closes in the beginning of a succeeding one. If function and form are correlate and persistent properties of perpetual being, (and there is a sense in which things were not created,) still the continuity of the universe must depend upon its recreation or creation in an existent form and function. This last is what is meant by creation.
Atheists, infidels, materialists, and spiritists may continue to rave and rant at the obduracy of man’s adherence to what they may denominate a book of fables; it yet remains as an enduring monument of a never-fading glory of conception, as far beyond the intelligence of the ranters as they are below, in descent, an ancestry from which they maintain they have degenerated. We mean, of course, the monkey, chimpanzee, and gorilla, of which modern atheism seems so proud to boast for ancestral origin. After thousands of years the Bible remains the bulwark and citadel of towering strength, unaffected by the onslaughts of its enemies. Religious systems, founded upon false interpretations of the Scriptures, may rise and fall, but the truths of the Bible never,—they are eternal.
Koreshanity regards the universe as one vast system, with such a perfect adjustment of parts as to embrace every department in a combination of coöperative unity and procedure, not merely as pertaining to the solar and stellar realms, embracing the earth inhabited by man, but inclusive of mineral arrangements, and vegetable, animal, and human life.
Man, both as to his individual and universal being, is the archetype of the cosmic structure and function. He is both origin and product of the integral coördination of universal mode and motion. The mind of man, inhabiting his organic form, is the positive pole of constructive energy, and the material cosmos has proceeded from his voluntary purpose and coördinate involuntary consociation. The laws of construction, with the potential and kinetic energies through which the depositions of circumferences are formulated and maintained, and primary and subsidiary centers pivoted, focalized, supplied, and regulated, correspond to the laws of organic unity consociating mind and body.
The universe is the great ovum of integral incubation. In-cube-ation is the modification of the lines and forms of the cube and sphere, adjusted to the purposes of use in the integral economy. The chick is incubated (hatched) from the egg; the infant is incubated in the matrix. Humanity as a whole is incubated within the great cell or ovum of universal life, and not, contrary to the universal law of development, on the outside of an uneconomic adjustment and compilation of matter, as men, throughout the world of boasted civilization, have been blindly taught.
The forms of the incubated are but the modified adjustments of curvilinear and rectilinear motions and modes; or, as applied to man, he is the cell doubled upon itself, and the laws of mental and organic life correspond, in him, to the laws of motion and arrangement in the functions and emplacements of the physical cosmos. The unique and complex cell, with its correlation of circumference and center, is the expressed or evoluted form of integral being, and the forms and laws of this cosmical integrality are the pattern of the integral government of man.
Freedom and liberty are words which in the mouths of the rabble have no significance. Axillary and orbital motion, modifications of the compromise of centrifugal and centripetal fluxions of “energy” and matter, are the products of two physical laws, the principles of which are revealed in these phenomena of moment. These laws, though physical, originate from correspondential laws of mentality. Axillary momentum is the third moment of physical energy, and the direct product of the conflict originating in the impact of the controversial ascending and descending fluxions of energy. Effluxions from the center toward the circumference, and influxions from the circumference toward the center, meet at their points of concurrent and revolutionary moment in the product of their compromise.
The revolutions of the great cosmic unity, called the physical universe, are motions resultant from freedom of action. That direction of motion which gives to us night and day, and the modification and variation called seasons, originates in choice of action. Though these are involuntary and unconscious, as modes and moments of the physical universe, they proceed from the laws and activities of mind, and correspond to freedom of will and choice of will in the domain of conscious life. As freedom of motion, embraced in axillary and orbital revolutions, is the liberty to move by virtue of law, and according to prescribed limitations and directions, so freedom of action, as a mental influence, must be governed by corresponding limitations and directions.
As direction of motion is the result of determinations of concurrent fluxions and specific compromises, so choice of action, which must originate in freedom of action, is according to the determinations of wisdom in the economic adaptation of uses to the ends for which uses are instituted.
Revolution, as an observed phenomenon of the physical universe, is a determinant of moment in the line of least resistance and in the direction of the greatest freedom. There is no freedom of revolution in opposition to the original impulse of the compromise. Correspondingly, freedom of mental action, or freedom of choice, is the liberty to move according to the affections of the will. If the affections are good, the choice is upward; if evil, it is downward; and freedom of will is liberty to move according to selection. There is no deviation or escape from this law and from its inevitable consequences, until other conspirations aggregate to determine a revulsion in the inclination of the moment.
The astral center, or star of centripetal limitation, (nucleus of the concurrent fluxions of the cosmic unity, and baptismal font of all generative procedure as pertaining to external Nature,) is essentially the pivot and crucible of transmutation. It is related to the greatest circumference as the central limit of energetic impulse. Its circumference marks and limits the correlate extreme of material existence, and center and circumference define the cosmic physical form.
If center and circumference are related as we have portrayed, then the focal point is in touch with every atom of matter; receives the impress of every phase and modification of form; vibrates responsively to every phenomenon, and, in the position of the camera obscura, photographs for reproduction the creation to which it owes its perpetuity, and which it again depends upon for recreation.
The physical universe as occupying space, circumscribed by its center and circumference, is a great egg or ovum. That part of it so far denominated by the term physical, includes all that which belongs to natural life of every kind and phase. We have employed the term physical in a restricted sense, as pertaining to that which is usually termed inorganic. Exclusive of organic life, and in this we include vegetable, animal, and human life, are the solar, stellar, planetary, lunar, and terrestrial domains, comprised of their mineral and metallic substances, with concomitant ‘energies.”’ These, as a complexion, are integumented by their metallic rind, and embodied, organically, in the forms which aggregatively comprise a great galvano-alchemical cell, the positive pole or extremity being the center, the negative pole, the circumference or rind of the cell; the space being interfilled with atmospheres of one series, and spheres of aggregative “energies” of other series.
It is this cell, not inclusive of the organic vegetable, animal, and human life within it, that we have included in the name physical universe. Henceforth, however, to the part of the great physical or natural integralism above defined, we shall give the title or name, alchemicoorganic. We are compelled to regard it as an organic structure because, though not endowed with the same degree or quality of life that actuates the biosmic or vito-organic (this includes vegetable, insect, animal, human, etc.), it still is organized into form, and, actuated by law and manifesting phenomena, is correspondentially the product of voluntary and involuntary mental expression. This division of the integralism, denominated alchemico-organic, in contradistinction to the organo-vital, is the outermost and last product of mental spirit, and grows from the activity of mind as the bark of a tree is deposited through the activities of the vital essences actuating its life.
The first dimension of space embraced within the two extremes, namely, the central star, or astral center, and the surface of the earth as the circumference of the outer atmosphere, contains not only the three atmospheres defined,—the first, our common air, composed chiefly of nitrogen (nitre former) and oxygen (acid former); the second, hydrogen (water former); the third, aboron,—but a solar atmosphere or solar realm around which the three atmospheres are posited as environments. On the border of these three atmospheres are three suns, or solar poles, as three projections of the central and, to us, invisible sun.
The three distinct atmospheres contain within each, a distinct system of stellar spheres and groupings or constellations, the three arranged as so many distinct stories or planes of stellar existence, emplacement, and motion. Within the three atmospheres is a distinct or discrete degree of great complexity, at the center of which the radiation and convergences of spirit-substance take the form of a wonderful tabernacle, covered with a multicolored and variegated manifestation of light. The cubical and spherical proportions of the universe are so marvelously fashioned here, from the photoic essences outflowing and inflowing, as to blend the straight and curved lines of geometrization into the formulate perfection of unity.
From all that has been annunciated of the Cosmogony of the Koreshan System, the proposition must have become so well defined in the minds of interested investigators, that the alchemico-organic world (universe) is a complex formulation in which form and function are coördinate and coequivalent factors, and that this relationship of form and function also comprises a perpetual structure so perfectly adapted in its parts and offices as to render it a self-sustaining cosmogonic whole. From this view of the case it will be understood that there is no such thing as creation in the sense usually designated, described, and believed.
We have already, in a detached and fragmentary way, defined in outline the general form of the alchemicoorganic complexity, called the universe, and have shown that in the coördination of form and function it comprises a great self-mobilizing dynamo, the creations of which are merely recreations, or perpetual timic revivals of self-creation, and that the wear and tear of the institution are but the counterbalancing of its constructive powers; in other words, the dis integrative processes are adequate to, and only meet the emergencies of, constructive order.
The universe, as an alchemico-organic dynamo, is a perpetual, self-reconstructing, and self-sustaining form and order. Its general form is that of the perfect egg or shell, with its central vitellus at or near the center of the sphere. In the direction of the celestial perspective, at night, the constellations in the heavens meet the vision, and the critical and honest observer can but note the systematic order in the arrangement of the stellar groups as their natural demarkations appear.
The visible system of stellar groupings is divided into polar hemispheres by the ecliptic, defined as the median line of a series of constellations called the Zodiac; a term signifying the cycle of God’s animal life. This circle is composed of twelve groups, the line of their orbit circumscribing an axis oblique to the polar axis of the earth, of about 23½ degrees; hence the ecliptic sustains a relation to the equatorial circle of 23½ degrees. This is called the obliquity of the ecliptic.
The Zodiac marks the sun’s annual path through the heavens. According to the present system of astronomy it is the apparent path of the sun, but the real orbit of the earth. The earth, which is a shell, (the concave surface being inhabited,) is practically stationary, while the stars move in their relatively fixed orbits within the shell; they being focal points of “energy.” At the vernal and the autumnal equinox the sun is on the line of the equator. At either of these seasons the Zodiacal circle in the heavens is over a corresponding belt on the surface of the earth, a terrestrial Zodiac marked by corresponding divisions.
The divisions in the heavens are called constellations, and are named in their order from Aries, the head of the circle, to Pisces, the foot or extremity. The divisions on the earth are called signs, and are named in their order; the signs bearing the same names in the same order as the constellations. While at one time during the year the belt in the heavens is over the belt on the earth, any special point of the celestial belt is not exactly at the same point on the terrestrial belt that it was at the same time the year preceding; the difference being fifty seconds of a degree every year. It is claimed that this movement of the equator on the ecliptic—called the precession of the equinox—was discovered by Hipparchus, about two hundred and twentyfive years B.C. It would require about 25,816 years for any given sign to pass through the entire ecliptic, were there no retarding or accelerating influence to modify the movement.
(To be continued.)
Editorial transcription checked against the cited scans; historical claims remain those of The Flaming Sword.
The Flaming Sword · Vol. 27, No. 9 · Sep 1913 · PDF pp. 5-8