From the Akasha Chronicle
PREFACE
BY MEANS OF ordinary history man can learn only a
small part of what humanity experienced in prehistory. Historical
documents shed light on but a few millennia. What archaeology,
paleontology, and geology can teach us is very limited. Furthermore,
everything built on external evidence is unreliable. One need only
consider how the picture of an event or people, not so very remote
from us, has changed when new historical evidence has been
discovered. One need but compare the descriptions of one and the same
thing as given by different historians, and he will soon realize on
what uncertain ground he stands in these matters. Everything
belonging to the external world of the senses is subject to time. In
addition, time destroys what has originated in time. On the other
hand, external history is dependent on what has been preserved in
time. Nobody can say that the essential has been preserved, if he
remains content with external evidence.
Everything which comes into being in time has its
origin in the eternal. But the eternal is not accessible to sensory
perception. Nevertheless, the ways to the perception of the eternal
are open for man. He can develop forces dormant in him so that he can
recognize the eternal. In the essays, Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse
der hoheren Welten? (How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher
Worlds?), which appear in this periodical*, this
development is referred to. These present essays will also show that
at a certain high level of his cognitive power, man can penetrate to
the eternal origins of the things which vanish with time. A man
broadens his power of cognition in this way if he is no longer
limited to external evidence where knowledge of the past is
concerned. Then he can see in events what is not perceptible
to the senses, that part which time cannot destroy. He penetrates
from transitory to non-transitory history. It is a fact that this
history is written in other characters than is ordinary history. In
gnosis and in theosophy it is called the “Akasha
Chronicle.” Only a faint conception of this chronicle can be
given in our language. For our language corresponds to the world of
the senses. That which is described by our language at once receives
the character of this sense world. To the uninitiated, who cannot yet
convince himself of the reality of a separate spiritual world through
his own experience, the initiate easily appears to be a visionary, if
not something worse.
The one who has acquired the ability to perceive
in the spiritual world comes to know past events in their eternal
character. They do not stand before him like the dead testimony of
history, but appear in full life. In a certain sense, what has
happened takes place before him.
Those initiated into the reading of such a living
script can look back into a much more remote past than is represented
by external history; and — on the basis of direct spiritual
perception — they can also describe much more dependably the
things of which history tells. In order to avoid possible
misunderstanding, it should be said that spiritual perception is not
infallible. This perception also can err, can see in an inexact,
oblique, wrong manner. No man is free from error in this field, no
matter how high he stands. Therefore one should not object when
communications emanating from such spiritual sources do not always
entirely correspond. But the dependability of observation is much
greater here than in the external world of the senses. What various
initiates can relate about history and prehistory will be in
essential agreement. Such a history and prehistory does in
fact exist in all mystery schools. Here for millennia the agreement
has been so complete that the conformity existing among external
historians of even a single century cannot be compared with it. The
initiates describe essentially the same things at all times
and in all places.
Following this introduction, several chapters from
the Akasha Chronicle will be given. First, those events will be
described which took place when the so-called Atlantean
Continent still existed between America and Europe. This part of our
earth's surface was once land. Today this forms the floor of the
Atlantic Ocean. Plato tells of the last remnant of this land, the
island Poseidon, which lay westward of Europe and Africa. In The
Story of Atlantis and Lost Lemuria, by W. Scott-Elliot, the
reader can find that the floor of the Atlantic Ocean was once a
continent, that for about a million years it was the scene of a
civilization which, to be sure, was quite different from our modern
ones, and the fact that the last remnants of this continent sank in
the tenth millennium B.C. In this present book the intention is to
give information which will supplement what is said by Scott-Elliott.
While he describes more the outer, the external events among our
Atlantean ancestors, the aim here is to record some details
concerning their spiritual character and the inner nature of the
conditions under which they lived. Therefore the reader must go back
in imagination to a period which lies almost ten thousand years
behind us, and which lasted for many millennia. What is described
here however, did not take place only on the continent now covered by
the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, but also in the neighboring regions
of what today is Asia, Africa, Europe, and America. What took place
in these regions later, developed from this earlier
civilizations.
Today I am still obliged to remain silent
about the sources of the information given here. One who knows
anything at all about such sources will understand why this has to be
so. But events can occur which will make a breaking of this silence
possible very soon. How much of the knowledge hidden within the
theosophical movement may gradually be communicated, depends entirely
on the attitude of our contemporaries.
Now follows the first of the writings which can be
given here.
* These essays were published in book form, Berlin,
1909.
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