Today we will start to look at a topic that warms the hearts, if not the bodies of many a tortured soul. There are many legends of a ”last judgement,” at which the future destiny of Humanity will be decided. Behind these legends there lies an important occult truth, though unfortunately, the diseased imagination of the medieval monks distorted the perfectly simple and rational idea of the suspension of a life wave, into that of ”everlasting damnation.”
Let us revert to our teaching analogy. Let us postulate that a teacher of a class has years of work ahead of them to prepare their students to take an examination. The teacher makes a plan and allots coursework to each term and month of the teaching calendar. There is a confounding issue with this school and that is that the pupils are of varying ages and capacities. Some learn rapidly and others fall behind and some just barely reach a minimum standard.
About halfway through the year the teacher, reviewing the attainment of their students and decides to admit no more pupils to the class. This the teacher does because they know what is required for the students to take the examination. The teacher realises the impossibility of any pupil below a certain initial standard, being able to make sufficient progress to enable them to pass the examination at the end of the year. A little later in the year, the teacher again reviews the position of their pupils and foresees that, whilst some of the students will certainly pass the examination, the prospect of others is doubtful, whilst there are yet others who are certain to fail. The teacher would then, with good justification, say to these last, the least advanced of the pupils:
”We have now reached a stage when the further work of this class is useless to you. You cannot possibly, by any effort, attain the necessary standard in time for the examination. The more advanced teaching, which must now be given to the others, would be entirely unsuitable for you, and, as you cannot understand it, you would not only be wasting your own time but would also be a hindrance to the rest of the class. It is, therefore, better for you, at once, to transfer yourselves to the class below this, there to perfect yourselves in the preliminary lessons, which you have not yet thoroughly learned and come back to this level with next year’s class, when you will be sure to pass with credit.”
This is an exact analogy of what happens in every chain and is very relevant to our chain. In the middle of the fourth round, save for a few exceptional cases, the ”door was shut” for animals to enter the Human Kingdom, the reason being that, if they were allowed to enter, at this late stage of the chain, it would be impossible for them to continue evolving alongside humanity, which would be so much more advanced than them. In the middle of our next round, the fifth, will take place the great ”separation,” when human monads who are not sufficiently advanced to progress with the rest of their cohort, will drop out and pass into a condition of suspension, until a future chain. This new chain will provide them with opportunities suitable for their continuing evolution. This section of the human kingdom may be described as ”lost” to us because its members drop out of this particular sub-wave of evolution. In our college analogy, they will cease to be ”students of our year.” They will, however, become ”students of the next year”-in fact, they will become leading students in it, because of the work they have already done” and the experience they have already had.
Most of these monads fail because they are too young, although they are too old to remain in the class below, the animal kingdom. They have had the experience of going through the first portion of the chain, and will therefore be able, in the next chain, to take up their evolution readily and easily, and they will be able to help their more backward fellow humans who have not had their advantages. It should be noted that those that ”fail,” because they are too young, are not to be blamed for this situation.
There is, however, another large class, who might have succeeded by determined effort, but who fail for lack of “pulling their finger out” and doing the course work. These correspond to pupils who fail, not because they are too young, but because they are too lazy to do their work. Their fate is the same as that of the others, but, while those were blameless because they did their best, these others are blameworthy precisely because they did not do their best. Hence they will carry with them a legacy of unpleasant karma, from which the former class of monads will be free.
It is to the Humanity of this class, who are not making a sufficient effort that Christ-Maitreya addressed many of his teachings. They had the opportunity and ability to succeed but were not making the necessary efforts. Blavatsky spoke scathingly of such monads as ”useless drones who refuse to become co-workers with Nature, and who perish in their millions during the manvantaric life-cycle”. We should, however note, that this ”perishing” is merely from this ”manvantaric lifecycle,” i.e., from this chain, and that it means for them, not total extinction, but only a delay. Delay is the worst that can happen to monads in the ordinary course of evolution. Such delay is undoubtedly serious, but, bad though it may be, it is the best that can be done under the circumstances. Such people are clearly in need of more training, and that training they must have, even though it may mean many lives. These lives may be dreary and may even contain much suffering. But that is the only way in which they can attain to the level destined for them, and to which they certainly will attain in due course. Remember the Law of Development. We have no choice but to move forward. The Absolute has not given us a “plan B”.
It was with the object of ”saving” as many people as possible from that additional suffering that the Christ-Maitreya is purported to have said to His disciples: ”Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature; he that believeth and is baptised shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be damned.” For baptism, and its corresponding rites in other religions, is the sign of the dedication of the life to the service of the Hierarchy. The monad who grasps the truth and consequently sets their face in the right direction will certainly be among the ”saved” or ”safe,” and who escape the ”condemnation” in the fifth round. The ”damnation,” as we have seen, means merely rejection from this ”aeon” or chain of worlds. A throwing back into following life-streams.
The ”belief,” referred to, does not, of course, refer solely to that portion of Humanity who accept Christianity or any other belief system. It does not matter in the least what their religion is, so long as they are aiming at living a spiritual life, so long as they have definitely ranged themselves on the side of good and against evil, and are working unselfishly onward and upward.
It seems that it is just possible for even the “youngest” human monad, now living, to reach, before the middle of the fifth round, the level necessary for continued evolution in this chain; but, in order to do so, they must never once fail to take advantage of each opportunity as it is offered to them. The number who will be capable of doing this will be vanishingly small. It has been calculated, by who I do not know but I suspect Leadbeater had a hand in it, that the proportion who will be prepared to continue in this chain, will be about three-fifths of the total population of the present human kingdom. The remaining two-fifths will be suspended. The total number constituting the present cohort of Humanity is estimated to be approximately 60 billion monads. That number may seem large to you but remember this does not just include those who are incarnate today. Many monads are floating around the Emotional and Mental worlds, not to mention those that are asleep in their causal bodies. The reason that many mounds are not incarnating in the current 5th Root Race, is that they have nothing to gain by doing so. They are more advanced than the current crop of Humanity and are waiting for the current cohort of pupils to move off the scene before they make their grand entrance and continue their evolution. To put numbers to this separation; approximately 36, billion monads will cycle around the chain, whilst 24, billion will be suspended.
Clearly, the “Day of Judgment” is not what the posters have been telling us but there is much more to say on this subject and we will make a start in the next presentation.