Master M. once said to a certain pupil: "Since first appearing here, you have seemed to live many lives, but truly you have lived only one. In each re-birth you looked upon that one from a certain angle. Some day you will know your total of lives as bright deeds made permanent, and dark ones erased by karmic action. You will see these many lives not as an extended chain, nor as a great circle of links, but as countless iridescent spheres all interpenetrating, and enclosed in one large and radiant sphere which is your self and your one life."

Our seven-fold planet is the abode wherein is lived the one life of each human being. Every seeming life of the seeming many, whose total is this one real life, is in a circle extending from the atmic plane of the planet to the physical and return. This circle, without a resting point, is divisible into twelve arcs; six in the descent from the turning point of the atmic plane to the turning point of the physical, and six from that line to the atmic line of descent to the renewed physical.

Evidently the septenary globe, or globe chain so-called, is to man a habitation in which he glimpses Truth from seven viewpoints. Innumerable other viewpoints of Truth exist, but not for man until he outgrows the limitations of this planet, or, like certain advanced representatives of the race, he gains in part, the viewpoint of other planets in the septenary series. To no human mind is the solar viewpoint of Truth communicable except at certain astronomical cycles. Then the great Avatars, the world teachers, the enlighteners of the race, receive their messages, and are sent forth.

Since every globe-chain must develop a certain dominant principle, that principle is for that globe-chain the one to which all others are subordinate. For the Martian globe-chain that principle is Kama; for the lunar chain that principle was the Astral, while for our chain it is the orange physical.

The perfecting of the orange physical being the supreme task and desideratum both for man and his world, why did the revealers of the Ancient Wisdom seemingly depreciate the physical, and even exclude it from the septenary series? The answer is not difficult, as we shall show.

When as a simple mindless creature of but one discernible principle, man began his evolution in the first planetary round, that principle or body was the orange unmixed with grosser elements. Later he received from the lunar pitris other principles, among which was the untaught desire principle of Kama, and the just discernable mind principle of Kama Manas. In conjunction with the original orange, these brought about what the Ancient Wisdom denominates the first fall, that which in after times was duplicated by Adam, the generic name of the first root race of this fourth round. Descending into a lower than their native orange division of matter, the first race thus were eaters of the tree of good and evil; therefore they experienced death as the second race.

During ages many and long, the orange in man became increasingly mixed with gross material elements. At the middle of the fourth round, that lowest arc of human progress, man's spiritual forces began their upward pull on the lower quaternary. Therefore his slow rise toward the purity of the original orange plus that experience which is the fulness of human wisdom. The history of the race proves that the lower quaternary lacks buoyancy necessary to its rise into the pure regions of the spirit; hence the necessity of emphasizing the office of the higher triad.

The revealers of the Ancient Wisdom deemed it unsafe to depart from this emphasis during that era of materialism and material philosophy, the last quarter of the nineteenth century. However, that Truth might have its witness, in place of the orange physical they inserted in the septenary series of human and planetary principles the great Kosmic principle of Jiva, giving thereto the name Prana, one proper to a substance but little removed from terrestrial matter.

Perhaps the inaugurators of the Theosophical Movement overrated the perception of their students, or, what is more likely, the hiding of the orange beneath the guise of Prana was a touch of skill worthy of those who in their teaching habitually employ such methods.

H. P. B.