It is difficult for us in these days to appreciate or to comprehend the Atlantean state of consciousness. There was no mental process whatsoever except among the leaders of the race; there was only rampant, ruthless, insatiable desire. This action of the Great White Lodge forced two issues and confronted the race with two hitherto unrealized [233] problems. The first was that psychological attitudes and states of consciousness can and do bring about physiological conditions, these being both good and bad. Secondly, for the first time the people faced with recognition the phenomenon of death - death which they themselves brought about in a new way and not just by physical means. This had to be dramatized for them in some definitely objective manner, for as yet the masses did not respond to verbal teaching but only to visual events. When, therefore, they saw a particularly predatory and rapacious person begin to suffer from a dire disease which seemed to arise from within himself and - whilst suffering - hold on to his love of life (as tubercular people do today), they were faced with another aspect or form of the original law (imposed in Lemurian times) which said: "The soul that sinneth, it shall die." Death had hitherto been accepted without questioning as the fate of all living things, but now, for the first time, mental relationship between individual action and death was recognized - as yet in a dim and feeble way - and a great step forward was made in the human consciousness. Instinct failed to handle this situation.

Death, brother of mine, is a great and universal heritage; all forms die, for such is the law of life, to speak in paradoxes. The time had arrived when the race could be taught the lesson that death can either be the ending of a cycle and an automatic response to the great Law of Cycles which continually institutes the new and ends the old, or it can be brought about by the misuse of the physical body, by misapplied energy and by the deliberate action of the man himself. The man who deliberately sins, and who is psychologically wrong in his attitudes and consequent actions, commits suicide just as truly as the man who deliberately blows out his brains. This is seldom realized, but the truth will become increasingly apparent. [234]

It is around these basic ideas that the world war (1914-1945) was fought. We call the unlawful possession of other people's land, territories, goods and chattels, aggression; but this is the same thing in principle as stealing, theft and rape. Today these evils are not only individual sins and faults, but can be national characteristics; the world war has brought the whole problem to the surface of the human consciousness and the ancient Atlantean struggle is being bitterly waged, with the probability that this time the Great White Lodge will triumph. That was not the case in the earlier conflict. Then the war was ended by the intervention of the planetary Logos Himself, and that [235] ancient civilization went down into the deeps and was engulfed in water - the symbol of purity, sanitation and universality, and therefore appropriate as an ending for what one of the Masters has called "a tubercularly oriented race." Death by drowning and death by obscure physical means which I am not at liberty to describe have both been tried in the effort to salvage humanity. Today, death by fire is the applied technique, and it promises to be successful. In contradistinction to the great Lemurian and Atlantean crises, humanity is now far more mentally alert, the causes of the trouble are recognized, motives are seen more clearly, and the will-to-good and to change past evil conditions is stronger than ever before. What is beginning to manifest now in the public consciousness is something utterly good and new.