niverse begins and
ends with two opposite movements: an emanation from Brahma, it is born
when the breast of God sends forth the heavenly outbreathing, it dies,
reabsorbed, when the universal inbreathing takes place. These
movements produce attraction and repulsion, the aggregation and
dissolution to be found everywhere. It is the attraction of a
force-centre, the "laya centre" of Theosophy, which permits of the
atomic condensation that gives it the envelope whose soul it is; when
its cycle of activity ends, attraction gives place to repulsion, the
envelope is destroyed by the return of its constituent elements to the
source from which they were drawn, and the soul is liberated until a
future cycle of activity begins.

Even the rhythm of pulmonary respiration, the contraction and dilation
(systole and diastole) of the heart, the ebb and flow of the tides, as
also day and night, sleeping and waking, summer and winter, life and
death, are all products of that law of contraries which rules
creation.

These "opposites" are the very essence of cosmic life, the twin
pillars of universal equilibrium; they have been represented in
Solomon's symbolical temple--here, the Universe--by Jakin and Boaz,
the white and the black columns; they are also the interlaced
triangles of "Solomon's Seal," the six-pointed star, the two Old Men
of the Kabbalah, the white Jehovah and the black Jehovah; Eros and
Anteros, the serpents of Mercury's caduceus, the two Sphinxes of the
car of Osiris, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, the
Chinese "Yang" and "Yin," the goblet and staff of Tarot, man and
woman. All these images represent the same law.

Multiplicity, the fruit of the contraries, makes its appearance in the
forms born in infinite, homogeneous Being; its goal is the goal of
creation; the production, in infinite Being, of centres which are
developed by evolution and finally become gods in God. These centres,
or "souls," these points in the supreme Point, are divine in essence,
though, so far, they have no share at all in the perfection
"manifested" by God; they are all "centres," for God is a sphere,
whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere, but they have
not developed consciousness which is as yet only potential in them.
Like cuttings of willow which reproduce the mother-tree, these points,
veritable portions of God, are capable of germinating, growing up, and
becoming "I's," self-conscious beings, intelligent and en