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And, please, backwards: playing as it were the crab in time; and not content till the whole pralaya is skipped, and you stand on the far shore, in the sunset of an elder day: looking now forward, into futurity, from 390, perhaps 394 B.C.; over first a half-cycle of Persian decline, long melancholy sands and shingle, to there on the edge of the great wan water, that July in 330 when mean Satrap Bessus killed his king, Codomannus, last of the Achaemenidae, then in flight from Alexander; and the House of Cyrus and Darius came to an end.
For the clause 'Non-being indeed was this in the beginning' declares that the pranas existed even at the time when the entire world was in the pralaya state. Those texts, then, which speak of an origination of the pranas must be explained somehow, just as we did with the texts referring to the origination of the individual soul.
The Yogi Teachings contain much regarding the "Days and Nights of Brahm;" the "In-breathing and Out-breathing of the Creative Principle;" the periods of "Manvantara," and the periods of "Pralaya." This thought runs through all the Oriental thought, although in different forms, and with various interpretations.
He had moved out of Rome itself, where the psychic atmosphere was too thickly encumbered; had gone eastward, where the air, after long pralaya, was clearer; had propped up imperial authority, now for the first time, with the definite insignia of imperial state: wore a tiara, was to be kneeled to, addressed as Dominus, and so forth: all outward expedients, and Brummagem substitutes for that inner adjustment which Laotse called Tao: the Way that you are to seek by retreating within, and by advancing boldly without; and not by any one road, because it is not found by devotion alone, nor by religous contemplation alone, or by ardent progress, self-sacrificing labor, or studious observation of life, alone; but the whole nature of man must be used wisely by the one who desire to enter it.
There, in the heart of that old civilization, the air is thick with detritus; here if only because a long pralaya and fallow time have made the land new, the detritus is negligible; perhaps it is not even forming, but consumed as we go; because at least we have glimpses of the Way.
You see, railways, quick communications, and all the appliances of modern science and invention cannot do as much for India in pralaya, as her own native civilization could do for her in manvantara. Then he goes on to show how that civilization guarded against famine and many other things; and incidentally to prove it not only much higher than the Greek, but much higher than our own.
There have been, with us, too great ups and downs of civilization; too little continuity. We might have grown to it by now, had that medieval pralaya been a quiet and natural thing, instead of what it was: a smash-up total and orgy of brutalities come as punishment for our sins done in the prime of manvantara. A word or two as to the Ramayana.
Such things are proper to peoples new-born after their long pralaya; and can hardly happen, one would say, after the morning of the manvantara has passed. Thus in our own European cycle, Italy the first-born was in full creative energy from about 1240 to 1500: twenty-six decades; whereas the nations that have held hegemony since have had to be content each with its thirteen.
When the pralaya came on her, and the forces of life all went elsewhere as they do and must from every civilization in their season, China lost two of her treasures: Plenydd's vision, and Alawn's gift of song, were taken from her.
From 850 to 240 all these figures are of course approximations: there was pralaya in China; on the other side of the world, it was the period of Celtic eruptions and probably, disruption. While Tsin Shi Hwangti, from 246 to 213, was establishing the modern Chinese Empire, the Gauls made their last incursion into Italy.
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