The End of a World of Being

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Planetary Rounds and Globes Series · 8 pages

Eight pages, the shortest text in this section, from "The Pralaya of Modern Science," first published in The Theosophist in October 1880 and republished in Blavatsky Collected Writings volume II. It has its own contents page and abstract, and a frontispiece by Lorlegin.

The piece answers a specific scientific conclusion rather than science in general. Thomson and Clausius are named as having simultaneously reached the opinion that the universe is dying — running down towards a uniform temperature at which nothing further can happen — and the file's first observation is that if they are right, the future of our solar system offers little hope or consolation for our descendants. What is offered against it is not a denial that dissolution occurs but a different account of what dissolution is. A universal dissolution, the Maha-Pralaya, is said to occur every 4,320,000,000 mortal years — a Day of Brahmā — and to be followed by a universal rebirth of exactly equal duration, which vulgar minds mistake for the creation of the world. On that reading the end of a world of being is not an ending at all but the consummation of a grand cycle of life towards higher worlds, one of an infinite series of rhythmical motions of the great divine breath in the eternity of time. The phrase used for the effect of this on the reader is the file's own: that the secret doctrine dispels the gloom and doom of modern science. Its brevity is deliberate — the argument is a single substitution, of a rhythm for a terminus, and the file makes it and stops.

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