What can the Stars teach us about a Living Universe?
Andrew Rooke -- Australia
2,000 years ago, the Bible’s New Testament tells us, three wise men followed the light of a special star to find the birthplace of Jesus Christ. What can the stars teach us today in this technological age? Recent mapping of galaxies on the largest scale reveals that the cosmos resembles a huge spider’s web. Superclusters of galaxies lie bunched in walls or form long filaments that look for all the world like groups of brain cells. Each of these structures is separated by vast voids. Gravity continues to pull thousands of galaxies into enormous structures and Dark Energy drives them outward towards the unknown regions beyond the edge of the observable universe. What can all this mean for students of the Ancient Wisdom?
We Are Part of a Larger Being
We are starting to appreciate the reality of the ancient teachings that that our universe is one of an infinite number of vast living organisms extending from the infinitely divisible atom to the super-galactic structures we are now seeing with our new technology and beyond to macrocosmic entities. Theosophical teachings compare our Earth to an electron and our solar system to an atom in the body of a being so vast that we cannot see it. We only see other atoms, galactic ‘molecules’, and now with our new technology, larger galactic super-cluster ‘molecular swarms’ surrounding us. Theosophical teacher, G de Purucker, comments on this subject:
The Milky Way [our home galaxy], a complete and self-contained universe, is aggregately, but one cosmic cell in the body of some super-cosmic entity, which in turn, is one but an infinitude of others like itself. The great contains the small; the greater contains the great. Everything lives for and unto everything else. This is the reason why separateness has been called the ‘great heresy’. It is the great illusion, for separateness is non-existent. Nothing can live unto itself alone. Every entity lives for all, and the all is incomplete without the one entity, and therefore lives for it.
G de Purucker: The Fountain-Source of Occultism. Page, 113.
The Ancient Wisdom further postulates that consciousness is not bounded by physical size. Intelligent beings may possibly inhabit the electrons of our bodies, or equally, the macrocosmic structures we see in recent star surveys. Is it not possible that such beings, like us, might be pondering these wonderful truths of the ancient wisdom right now? As the same theosophical teacher comments about beings living on the electrons of our bodies:
Their universe is a single organ of our body, and their galaxy is a single molecule of a cell of that organ. This is consciousness, ‘Atman’, not “name and form”…Consciousness has no magnitude. It will fill space, it will fill an atom, and things incomparably smaller than one of our chemical atoms. It is dimensionless, because it has no shape, no form, no ‘rupa’…
G de Purucker: The Dialogues of G de Purucker. Vol.3 pages 165-167.
One might fantasize that the larger being of which we form a part could be no further progressed in spiritual evolution than ourselves; conversely, that hierarchies of divinely conscious beings could inhabit the atoms of our bodies whose worlds and galaxies live out their life cycles and reembody in nano-seconds of our time! Conversely, a split second of time for the huge being of which we are a part would be an aeons long age for us tiny beings compared to it. Because of this difference in the time-space continuum between large and small beings, then we infinitely small beings might know nothing or little about a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions happening to the body of the galactic being of which we form a minute part. Just as the atoms and molecules, our worlds, might peregrinate in and out of other large beings over vast time periods as do the life-atoms which enter and leave us humans at every instant because of the differing time scales for us infinitesimals and the huge being of which we are a part.
The Christian Saint Paul in the New Testament refers to this truth when he says:
…27 God intended that they would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us. 28 ‘For in Him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are His offspring.’ 29 Therefore, being offspring of God, we should not think that the Divine Being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by man’s skill and imagination.…
St Paul in Acts: 17, 27-29 New Testament, Christian Bible.
Ethical Implications
The fact that modern science is beginning to have some understanding of the ancient truth that we are part of a larger organism has ethical implications for us all. We are encouraged to lift our heads from our transitory worries and seek the broader horizons of the night sky, alive with evidence of our brotherhood with the stars. From infinitesimal sub-atomic beings to galactic super-clusters, we see intimate connections and realise that we have our own role to play in the universal drama of life. We start to respect our bodies and realise our behaviour in our world has eventually dramatic results for the tiny beings who form our body. We begin to understand the esoteric reasons for respecting our bodies, the earthly environment and the greater universe as ‘temples of life’. We are encouraged to treat ourselves and other beings with reverence as parts of one living organism with whom we should try and live in harmony for the benefit of all. We realise that our decisions and actions will affect the destiny of the planets and suns of the distant future, when we, as evolving reincarnating beings, shall inhabit celestial forms – the stars and galaxies – to provide the environment for the humanities of the remote future which will be the evolved life-atoms of our own constitution today.
See also the complete issue of The Ancient Wisdom Downunder for June 2025 which is on the theme of ‘Invisible Worlds’, especially the article on pages 28-30 on ‘Black Holes’ giving details of theosophical teachings on ‘Raja Stars’.
[If you wish to receive the June 2025 issue of The Ancient Wisdom Downunder the author is referring to, write to Andrew Rooke at
The Esoteric Philosophy teaches that our Solar System is alive throughout – as indeed all Solar Systems are. It is a living Organism, an organic Entity, its heart and brain combined in the Sun; and this system is composed of minor organs, just as, in the small, man’s body is an organism composed of organs, and intermediary tissues such as flesh, bones, sinews, nerves, etc…
G de Purucker.
