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Updated: June 3, 2025
The line from Greece to China lies through Persia and India. But Persia was dead, in pralaya; you could expect no splendor, no mark of the Crest-Wave's passing, there.
All these historic eruptions were the mere sporadic outburst of a race long past its prime and querulous with old age, I think Two thousand years of severe pralaya, almost complete extinction, utter insignificance and terrible karma awaited them; and we only see them, pardon the expression, kicking up their heels in a final plunge as a preparation for that long silence.
We see the same thing in any decadent people; by which I mean, any people at the end of one of its manvantaras, and on the verge of a pralaya. And remember that a pralaya, like a night's rest or the Devachanic sleep between two lives, is simply a means for restoring strength and youth.
Even if the going of the souls to Brahman were not seen in other texts, the fact that the text under discussion declares the individual souls to abide in Brahman in the state of deep sleep, enjoying freedom from all pain and trouble just as if they were merged in the pralaya state, is a sufficient 'inferential sign' to prove that the 'small ether' is the highest Brahman.
There was far less ferment of the Spirit, true; less possibility of progress; but that is merely to say that China was in pralaya, Europe in high manvantara.
Persia was under pralaya, in retreat among its original mountains; and submergence under Hellenisticism might have meant for its oblivion of its own native Persianism. Consder: of the two great centers of West-Asian culture, Egypt fell under Greek, and then under Roman, dominion; and the old Egyptian civilization became, so far as we can tell, utterly a thing of the past.
Nor can the Sankhya retort that our view gives rise to similar difficulties in so far, namely, as the Lord, all whose wishes are eternally accomplished, who is free from all imperfection, &c. &c., cannot be the originator of either creation or pralaya, and as the creation of an unequal world would lay him open to the charge of mercilessness.
Then, too, this is a region that, in a time of West Asian manvantara and European pralaya, might easily tempt adventurers from the Near East. But the main road for true refugees is the high Apennines; and this is the road most of them traveled.
Now if we took the strictness of the cycles au very pied de lettre, we should be a little uneasy about the last five years of that manvantara; we should expect them at least to be filled with omens of coming evil; we should expect to find in them a dark compensation for the five bright years at the tail of the old pralaya. Well, cycles have sometimes a pretty way of fulfilling expectations.
He lived greatly and nobly for a world he could not save... that could not be saved, so far as he knew. He died in 180; and another Nero, without Nero's artistic instincts, came to the throne in his son Commodus; pralaya, military rule, disruption, had definitely set in.
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