Mrs. Besant follows her
Eastern masters faithfully in reporting their conclusions, but she has
plainly availed herself of many of the terms and suggestions of modern
science in interpreting them to us. If one could use a figure borrowed
from electricity, the One is "stepped-down" through a series of planes
and manifestations. Theosophy makes much of sevens--no use to ask
why--and bridges the gulf between ultimate and present realities by a
series of seven planes in which what is coarsest in the plane above
becomes the germ of what is finest in the plane beneath. Even so, the
One does not directly touch even the highest of these seven planes.
(Theosophy is, first of all, a study in descents and not in ascents;
ascent comes later.) There are between the One and the topmost plane
three emanations (but perhaps we would better let Mrs. Besant speak to
us herself): "The self-unfolding of the Logos in a threefold form: the
first Logos the root of all being, from Him the second manifesting the
two aspects of life and form, then the third Logos, the universal mind,
that in which all archetypically exists, the source of beings, the fount
of fashioning energies."[66]

[Footnote 66: "The Ancient Wisdom," p. 41.]

_Evolution and Involution_

It would seem to the uninitiated that all this is a kind of smoke-screen
of words to conceal our real ignorance of what we can never know and
really have no need to know. It is evidently just an attempt to bridge
the abyss between the immaterial and the material. If Theosophy wishes
to bridge this abyss with conjecture, well and good, but its conjectures
really leave us more deeply perplexed than we should be if we frankly
recognized and accepted the limitations of our ignorance. Once within
sight of the topmost of her seven planes, Mrs. Besant goes on a little
more definitely though she confesses "of what occurs on the two higher
planes of the universe, the seventh and the sixth, we can form but the
haziest conception." Each plane has what she calls its own "spirit
matter"; this spirit matter becomes coarser as we descend; each plane is
an emanation from the plane above it and the spirit matter of each plane
winds one more veil around those emanations of the immaterial One in
whom or which the whole process took its beginning.

Theosophy does not speak of evolution as it attempts to account for our
material world, it speaks of involution. Here it reverses what is most
distinctive in mode