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A Treatise on Cosmic Fire - Section One - Introductory Remarks - Fire in Manifestation
III. Fire in Manifestation

To continue our consideration of the fires which sustain the economy of the visible solar system, and of the visible objective human being, which produce evolutionary development, and which are the bases of all objective efflorescence, it must be noted that they demonstrate as the sumtotal of the vital life of a solar system, of a planet, of the entire constitution of active functioning man upon the physical plane, and of the atom of substance.

Speaking broadly we would say that the first fire deals entirely with:

  1. Activity of matter.
  2. The rotary motion of matter.
  3. The development of matter by the means of friction, under the law of Economy. H.P.B. touches on this in the Secret Doctrine. 14

The second fire, that from the cosmic mental plane, deals with:

  1. The expression of the evolution of mind or manas.
  2. The vitality of the soul.
  3. The evolutionary expression of the soul as it shows forth in the form of that elusive something which brings about the synthesis of matter. As the two merge by means of this active energizing factor, that which is termed consciousness appears. 15 As [49] the merging proceeds and the fires become more and more synthesized, that totality of manifestation which we regard as a conscious existence becomes ever more perfected.
  4. The operation of this fire under the Law of Attraction.
  5. The subsequent result in the spiral-cyclic movement which we call, within the system, solar evolution, but which (from the standpoint of a cosmos) is the approximation of our system to its central point. This must be considered from the standpoint of time. 16

14 See S. D., I, 169, 562, 567, 569; II, 258, 390, 547, 551, 552.

15 In the Study of Consciousness Mrs. Besant says (page 37): "Consciousness is the one reality, in the fullest sense of that much-used phrase; it follows from this that any reality found anywhere is drawn from consciousness. Hence, everything which is thought, is. That consciousness in which everything is, everything literally, "possible" as well as "actual" - actual being that which is thought of as existent by a separated consciousness in time and space, and possible all that which is not so being thought of at any period in time and any point in space - we call Absolute Consciousness. It is the All, the Eternal, the Infinite, the Changeless. Consciousness, thinking time and space, and of all forms as existing in them in succession and in places, is the Universal Consciousness, the One, called by the Hindu the Saguna Brahman - the Eternal with attributes - the Pratyag-Atma - the Inner Self; by the Parsi, Hormuzd; by the Mussulman, Allah. Consciousness dealing with a definite time, however long or short, with a definite space, however vast or restricted, is individual, that of a concrete Being, a Lord of many universes, or a universe or of any so-called portion of a universe, his portion and to him therefore a universe - these terms varying as to extent with the power of the consciousness; so much of the universal thought as a separate consciousness can completely think, i.e., on which he can impose his own reality, can think of as existing like himself, is his universe."

16 Universal consciousness, manifesting as consciousness in time and space, as Mrs. Besant so ably expresses it, includes all forms of activity and spiral cyclic evolution from the standpoint of cosmic evolution, and in terms of absolute consciousness, may again be rotary.
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