A Wisdom Archive on Evolution

Comparative genomics is the study of relationships between the genomes of different species. Comparative genomics is an attempt to take advantage of the information provided by the signatures of selection to understand the function and evolutionary processes that act on genomes. While it is still a young field, it holds great promise to yield insights into many aspects of the evolution of modern species. The sheer amount of information contained in modern genomes (several gigabytes in the case of humans) necessitates that the methods of comparative genomics are mostly computational in nature. Gene finding is ...

Read more here: » Comparative genomics: Encyclopedia II - Comparative genomics - Overview

Whirlwind A gyrating wind; in theosophy, when applied to the movements of a universe, a name for the moving of the Great Breath and for the various functions and activities of fohat.
 
Motion, the divine breath, becomes the cosmic whirling or whirlwind and sets in motion the particles in space, bringing about now their coagulation and concretion, now their dissipation and dispersion.
 
Deity thus mystically becomes a whirlwind; pulsatory life assumes a whirling movement. Stages in world formation are described as diffused cosmic matter, then the fiery whirlwind, the first stage in the formation of a nebula, leading eventually to the formation of solar system and more particularly of a globe or group of solar or planetary globes.
 
The primordial seven forces, the first seven breaths of the cosmic dragon of wisdom or cosmic manifest intelligence, produce from their circumgyrating motions the fiery whirlwind. The first chapter of Ezekiel mentions a whirlwind and other descriptions of cosmic evolution, especially wheels.

 
(See also: Whirlwind, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body mind and Soul )

For more dictionary entries, see » Evolution Dictionary

Yatus or Yatudhanas (Sanskrit) A kind of spirit corresponding to the Greek daimon, one of the hierarchies of spiritual, semi-spiritual, and ethereal entities -- among many other similar classes, such as the nagas, gandharvas, devas, rishis, apsarasas, and yakshas. In the human constitution, those elemental or semi-elemental beings which are instrumental in carrying out the mandates of the higher parts of man; in the solar system they perform a similar function of cosmic character. Along with the other classes, they are the "Sun''s attendants throughout the twelve solar months; in theogony, and also in anthropological evolution, they are gods and men -- when incarnated in the nether world" (SD 2:211).

 
(See also: Yatus, Yatudhanas, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body mind and Soul )

For more dictionary entries, see » Evolution Dictionary

Yellow-faced Used in an archaic commentary on the Book of Dzyan (q SD 2:427-8), referring to people on Atlantis, the continent of the fourth root-race, who remained true to their teachers, in contradistinction to the Black-faced -- those who followed their sorcerer-leaders in practices of black magic -- who were engulfed in the cataclysm which submerged Atlantis. The Yellow-faced, the ancestors of the succeeding fifth root-race, were led to safety by their teachers, the Sons of Wisdom. Thus the fifth root-race -- sometimes referred to as Aryans because the Aryan Hindus are the descendants of the first subrace of the fifth root-race -- are said to be the descendants of "the yellow Adams, the gigantic and highly civilized Atlanto-Aryan race"; "they ''of the yellow hue'' are the forefathers of those whom Ethnology now classes as the Turanians, the Mongols, Chinese and other ancient nations; and the land they fled to was no other than Central Asia. There entire new races were born; there they lived and died until the separation of the nations. . . . Nearly two-thirds of one million years have elapsed since that period" (SD 2:426, 425).
 
The foregoing does not mean that the modern Chinese, for instance, are the first subrace of the fifth root-race; for actually the true Chinese are the remains existing today of the last or seventh subrace of the fourth root-race, although indeed, due to many millennia of intermarriage with more truly Aryan stocks, the Chinese today are to be classed as part of the fifth root-race.
 
There is an old legend prevalent among many peoples that the color of human skin changes from light to dark as the ages slowly pass by: the legend stating that the first in any new great racial group or stock is light-colored or moon-colored, slowly changing to a more ruddy shade verging into cream or yellow, becoming gradually brown and darker brown, and ending with chocolate or what is called black. Yet the meaning is not that every race runs through these changing tints from light to dark during the course of its evolution, but that the different minor racial groupings, appearing each in its day during the course of the slow evolution of a root-race, gradually range from the root-race''s beginning from the light, and passing gradually through the different stages to the chocolate. Nor is it again to be understood that theosophy teaches that all mankind sprang either from an original pair, as metaphorically taught in the Bible, but that in the beginnings of time seven primary seed-groupings appeared on earth from inner realms, each with its own tint or color as we would now say, and each of the seven having its own karmically defined position on the ladder of evolution.
 
The Negroes or people of chocolate-tinted skin are nevertheless not to be understood as being the seventh or last subrace of the fourth root-race, for the Chinese were these last. The chocolate-skinned men arose as a racial group at the very close of the Atlantean cycle, and are thus racially not degenerated from a previous higher evolutionary state, but are a human seed-stock born at the end of Atlantean development, destined in time through racial miscegenation to be one of the racial contributories to the humanity of the future.
 
See also YELLOW RACE

 
(See also: Yellow-faced, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body mind and Soul )

For more dictionary entries, see » Evolution Dictionary

Winter Solstice.
 
See SEASONS

 
(See also: Winter Solstice, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body mind and Soul )

For more dictionary entries, see » Evolution Dictionary

Wisdom.
 
See ATMA-VIDYA; BODHI; HOCHMAH; SOPHIA, ETC.

 
(See also: Wisdom, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body mind and Soul )

For more dictionary entries, see » Evolution Dictionary

Winged Globe.
 
See GLOBE, WINGED

 
(See also: Winged Globe, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body mind and Soul )

For more dictionary entries, see » Evolution Dictionary

Will Power.
 
See WILL

 
(See also: Will Power, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body mind and Soul )

For more dictionary entries, see » Evolution Dictionary

Waters of Space Chaos, the great deep, the great cosmic Mother, the universal cosmic matrix. According to Thales and other ancient philosophers, the water of cosmic space was the first principle emanating from the spatial deeps of spirit and producing the universe through emanational evolution. Various Greek philosophers have represented aether, fire, air, or water as the primordial cosmic principle; and each of these was true, though giving only a part of the truth. These philosophies as aspects of a whole in much the same way as the several great schools of Hindu philosophy are.
 
Thus the waters of space are equivalent to the veil of cosmic spirit. Water in ancient cosmogonies corresponded to the Hindu prakriti or pradhana, and like the Greek Second Logos was endowed with feminine or productive characteristics. Thus the archaic Greeks in one form of their cosmogonical philosophy taught that all things, including the gods, came forth from Ocean and his wife Tethys:
 
"Ocean is the immeasurable space (Spirit in Chaos), which is the Deity . . .; and Tethys is not the Earth, but primordial matter in the process of formation" (SD 2:65).
 
"But there are two distinct aspects in universal Esotericism, Eastern and Western, in all those personations of the Female Power in nature, or nature -- the noumenal and the phenomenal. One is its purely metaphysical aspect, . . . the other terrestrial and physical, and at the same time divine from the stand-point of practical human conception and Occultism. They are all the symbols and personifications of Chaos, the ''Great Deep'' or the Primordial Waters of Space, the impenetrable veil between the Incognisable and the Logos of Creation" (SD 1:431).

 
(See also: Waters of Space, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body mind and Soul )

For more dictionary entries, see » Evolution Dictionary

Wing, Wings Often signifying flight, but more accurately the soaring power of the spirit, literally or metaphorically, as in the wings of Mercury, of Christian, Hebrew, and other angelic figures of the Mesopotamian nations, of the horse Pegasus, of the sphinxes representative of the several human powers, of the winged dragons, of the winged wheels mentioned in Ezekiel''s vision of initiation, and also as descriptive of the workings of fohat. The eternal bird, the flutter of whose wings produces life, represents the dual forces proceeding from boundless space, and the emblem is equivalent to Hansa, the Hindu bird of wisdom. Similar to this is the winged globe of Egypt.
 
As the emblem in ancient symbolic art, representative of the soaring power of the human spirit-soul within, and from this fundamental idea the emblem has been applied to derivative symbolic ideas, such as the flight of the inner self into interior worlds during the trials of initiation, or the soaring intelligence of the initiate penetrating into the mysteries and secrets of interior worlds.

 
(See also: Wing, Wings, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body mind and Soul )

For more dictionary entries, see » Evolution Dictionary

Willi.
 
See VILI

 
(See also: Willi, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body mind and Soul )

For more dictionary entries, see » Evolution Dictionary

Will-less A condition of beings who have not yet evolved forth free will, hence without initiative or self-determination. A specific instance is the case where will-less may be applied to the gods in heaven against whom Satan rebelled (as narrated in Milton''s Paradise Lost). In theosophical literature, used in reference to mankind in its early stages before manas (mind) became awakened, hence to the first and second root-races and early third root-race. Even among these early races the will was not absent, but it had not yet come into functional activity.

 
(See also: Will-less, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body mind and Soul )

For more dictionary entries, see » Evolution Dictionary

White Lotus Day May 8; commemorating H. P. Blavatsky''s death in 1891.

 
(See also: White Lotus Day, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body mind and Soul )

For more dictionary entries, see » Evolution Dictionary