Life-Wave

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Life-Wave is a term generally used to designate the life that animates each of the seven kingdoms that are evolving in a particular Globe. Thus, we have the human life-wave, the animal life-wave, etc. An additional meaning introduced by C. W. Leadbeater and Annie Besant, refer to what has been called the Three Great Outpourings.

According to A. P. Sinnett

A. P. Sinnett used this term to illustrate the way in which the Monads that animate each of the Kingdoms pass from one Globe of the Planetary Chain to the next one. This takes place as if by "waves", as opposed to a continuous flow:

The tide of life--the wave of existence, the spiritual impulse, call it by what name we please--passes on from planet to planet by rushes, or gushes, not by an even continuous flow.[1]

This happens once a particular Kingdom finishes its seven World-Periods or Rings, (called Root-Races in the case of human beings) and is ready to move one to the next Globe.

According to C. W. Leadbeater

C. W. Leadbeater wrote:

The term "life-wave" has been employed in our literature in three distinct senses. First, it has been used to denote the three great outpourings of Divine Life by means of which our solar system came into existence--by which its evolution is carried on. Secondly, it has been applied to the successive impulsions of which the second outpouring is formed. . . . Thirdly, the expression has been accepted as signifying the transference of life from one planet of our chain to another in the course of evolution.[2]

Regarding the second meaning, the idea is that the current life-wave that is ensouling humans in this Planetary Chain, ensouled animals in the previous Chain, and vegetables in the one preceding it. Thus, the animal life-wave in the Chain will become the human life-wave in the next one.[3]

According to G. de Purucker

G. de Purucker defined it as follows:

This is a term which means the collective hosts of monads, of which hosts there are seven or ten, according to the classification adopted. . .


When the hosts of beings forming the life-wave — the life-wave being composed of the entities derived from a former but now dead planet, in our case the moon — find that the time has arrived for them to enter upon their own particular evolutionary course, they cycle downwards as a life-wave along the planetary chain. . . . This life-wave passes seven times in all around the seven spheres of our planetary chain, at first cycling down the shadowy arc through all the seven elements of the kosmos, gathering experience in each one of them; each particular entity of the life-wave, no matter what its grade or kind — spiritual, psychic, astral, mental, divine — advancing, until at the bottom of the arc, when the middle of the fourth round is attained, they feel the end of the downward impulse. Then begins the upward impulse, the reascent along the luminous arc upwards, towards the source from which the life-wave originally came.[4]

Additional resources

Notes

  1. Alfred Percy Sinnett, Esoteric Buddhism (London: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1972), 34.
  2. Charles Webster Leadbeater, The Inner Life vol. II, (Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Press, 1942), 190-191.
  3. Charles Webster Leadbeater, The Inner Life vol. II, (Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Press, 1942), 193.
  4. Life-Wave by G. de Purucker in his Occult Glossary.