Page:The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927).djvu/93

Rh foreign to its evolved characteristics, either in this world, in Bardo, or in any realm or world of sangsāric existence. This is held to be a natural law governing the manifestation of life, as inviolable as the law of karma, which sets it into operation.

For a human life-flux to flow into the physical form of a dog, or fowl, or insect, or worm, is, therefore, held to be as impossible as would be—let us say—the transferring of the waters of Lake Michigan into the depression occupied by the waters of Lake Killarney, or—as the Hindu would say—as putting into the bed of the Ganges River the waters of the Indian Ocean.

Degeneration, in a highly developed flowering plant, or apple, or vegetable, or wheat, or animal, is, of course, concomitant with cultural neglect; but within this creation period—at least so far as the physical vision of science has penetrated therein—the flowering plant does not degenerate into the apple, nor into the corn, nor one species of animals into another, nor does man degenerate into anything but the savage man—never into a sub-human creature. As to the processes affecting the life-flux which the human eye cannot see, the esoteric teaching coincides with that of the ancient Greek and Egyptian mystics: ‘As below, so above’; which implies that there is one harmonious karmic law governing with unwavering and impartial justice the visible as well as the invisible operations of nature.

From this follows the corollary, which the Oriental advocates of the esoteric interpretation give out: Progression or retrogression—never an unchanging neutral state of inactivity—are the alternatives within the Sangsāra; and the one or the other, within any of the mansions of existence, cannot lead the life-flux to the threshold of that mansion—neither the sub-human to the human, nor the human to the sub-human—save step by step. And retrogression and progression alike are time-processes: ages pass ere the fire-mist becomes the solidified planet; an Enlightened One is the rare fruit of unknown myriads of embodiments; and man, the highest of the animal-beings, cannot become the lowest