In connection with such a beginningless integration and disintegration, to speak of a condition of greater or lesser development is the notion of a child. As little as the clenched fist is more developed than the five fingers outspread, just as little is a world in space peopled with thinking, living beings more developed than one spread out in masses of nebula; all things are only phases in a beginningless proceeding here presenting itself to me symptomatically, but of which I obtain a direct comprehension in consciousness. To ask whether suns and Milky Ways are without beginning is meaningless; for they are positively nothing else but the expression of the hither and thither movement of energies; but that which I now experience in consciousness, that is--rightly considered--beginninglessness itself; and the self-integration and self-disintegration of worlds is nothing but the functional concomitant phenomenon of the beginninglessness of the _I_. If now such a Lokadhātu (world-system) goes to decay, this, conformable to its nature, is nothing but a summation of single dyings. The Kamma of the single things takes fresh hold in the universe there where it can take hold--and therefore _must_ take hold. Actual energies take hold immediately, independent of space and time. There is no need to trace their course from meteorites and cosmic nebulæ, from one heavenly body to another, somewhat as one might trace a letter from its place of postage to its destination; but even as our thoughts are immediate, independent of time and space, as our loves are able to “lay hold” in the remotest ends of the earth, so do the Kammas lay hold immediately, independent of time and space, in the most distant abysses of infinitude, even to where no light-year any more can measure--lay hold there, whither, in virtue of their propensities, their tendencies, they reach out. From the commanding position of such a conception it follows that Buddhist cosmogony does not fit in with our crude astronomical ideas. As it is not always the case that “birds of a feather flock together”--there are solitary denizens of air, noble creatures that wing their way through the ether alone--so Buddhist cosmogony makes mention of solitary beings who segregate themselves at the initial beginnings of a new world. When, after the break-up of a system of worlds, here and there worlds again begin to form, to sprout; when again here and there energies take hold even because they can take hold, then these beings appear as pure creatures of light, self-luminous, wheeling through boundless space, through boundless epochs of time, compact all of light, compact all of bliss, yet even as we, belonging to the world, differing only in the circumstances and antecedent conditions of their “taking hold.”