Man: Whence, How and Whither
About This Book
Man: Whence, How and Whither is the most ambitious collaborative work of Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater — a panoramic account of humanity's evolutionary history across vast spans of time, from the first appearance of the proto-human consciousness in the early stages of the Earth chain through the present age and into the projected far future. The book draws on what both authors claim was systematic clairvoyant investigation — the direct observation of the akashic record, understood as the permanent impression of all past events in the fabric of the astral plane — to present a history of Earth and humanity that goes far beyond what conventional archaeology or evolutionary science can access.
The scale of the book is extraordinary: covering periods of millions of years, tracking the development of consciousness through the root races and sub-races that the Theosophical tradition identifies as the successive waves of human evolution, identifying historical figures across their multiple incarnations (including, controversially, many prominent figures in the Theosophical Society itself), and projecting the future evolution of humanity through the remaining stages of the Earth chain and into the cosmic periods that follow. The book is simultaneously a work of Theosophical cosmology, a history of consciousness development, and a remarkable document of the Victorian-Edwardian esoteric imagination operating at its most ambitious scale.
What You'll Learn
• Understand the Theosophical model of human evolution: the root race framework (the seven successive waves of human development, of which the fifth — our current Aryan root race — is the one most familiar to contemporary history) and how each root race represents a different configuration of the human vehicles of consciousness and a different focus in the overall evolutionary programme
• Grasp the akashic record methodology: what Besant and Leadbeater claim about how clairvoyant investigation of the akashic record works, what limitations they acknowledge in this method, and how the historical content of Man: Whence, How and Whither is understood to have been obtained through this form of investigation
• Recognise the Atlantean and Lemurian accounts: how the book describes the two previous root races — Lemurian and Atlantean — in terms of their geography, their civilisation, their level of consciousness development, and the circumstances of their endings — and how this material compares with other esoteric traditions' accounts of lost civilisations
• Learn the future evolution dimension: what the book projects about the remaining development of humanity — the coming sixth and seventh root races, the ultimate spiritualisation of the physical plane that the Theosophical tradition envisions, and the cosmic periods that follow the completion of the Earth chain
• Appreciate the historical controversies: how the specific claims made in Man: Whence, How and Whither — particularly the identification of historical figures and the description of specific past events — have been received within and outside the Theosophical community, and what they reveal about both the possibilities and the limitations of the clairvoyant methodology
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