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Pralaya comes, with conquest, the overturning of civilization, mixture of blood; all the precious results obtained hurled back into the vortex; and then to be cast up anew with the new manvantara, a new uncouth formless form, to be played on, shaped and infused by the life-currents again.
During a pralaya this causal substance abides self-luminous, with all the distinctions of consciousness of pleasure and pain gone to rest, comparable to the soul of a man held by dreamless sleep, different however in nature from mere non-sentient matter.
The Parthians had no superior culture to impose on the Persians; whereas the Greeks had, because theirs was active and in manvantara, while that of the Persians themselves was negative, because in pralaya.
A turn for democracy; plebeian qualities; these are the things one would expect after pralaya, if that pralaya had been at all disastrous. With the ancient Greeks, the plebeian qualities were not all virtues by any means; they retained through their great age many of the vices of plebeianism.
You get on the one hand a franker play of the passions, and no curbs imposed either by a sound police system or a national conscience; in pralaya time there is no national conscience, or, I think, national consciousness, no feeling of collective entity, of being a nation, at all; perhaps no public opinion.
In Greece an old manvantara had evolved patricianism and culture; which the pralaya following swept all away, except some relics perhaps in Thebes the isolated and conservative, certainly in Sparta. Lycurgus was wise in his generation when he sought by a rigid system to impose the plebeian virtues on Spartan patricianism. Wise in his generation, yes; but he could work no miracle.
For Brahman having non-sentient matter for its body, that state which consists of the three gunas and is denoted by the term 'Unevolved' is something effected. And the text, 'When there was darkness, neither day nor night, states that also in a total pralaya non-sentient matter having Brahman for its Self continues to exist in a highly subtle condition. Upanishad refers to.
Not that culture ever became extinct; indeed, through this whole period the super-refinement that had grown up under the Hans persisted side by side with the barbarian excursions and alarms. It was not, as in Rome, a case of major pralaya: men did not resort to savagery; literary production seems never to have run quite so sterile.
The texts which speak of Brahman as being one only without a second are explained as referring to the state of pralaya or absorption which occurs at the end of each Kalpa. At the conclusion of the period of pralaya he re-emits the world and individual souls by an act of volition and the souls begin the round of transmigration.
This by way of hurling one more spear at the old cruel doctrine of race inferiorities and superiorities: at Unbrotherliness and all its wicked works and ways. I was the European pralaya; when your duty to your neighbor was everywhere and always to fight him, to get in the first blow; to kill him before he killed you, and thank God for his mericies. So Ireland was not exceptional in that way.
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