THEO. Take as a first comparison and a help towards a more correct conception, the solar year, and as a second, the two halves of that year, producing each a day and a night of six months’ duration at the North Pole. Now imagine, if you can, instead of a Solar year of 365 days, ETERNITY. Let the sun represent the universe, and the polar days and nights of 6 months each—_days and nights lasting each 182 trillions and quadrillions of years_, instead of 182 days each. As the sun arises every morning on our _objective_ horizon out of its (to us) _subjective_ and antipodal space, so does the Universe emerge periodically on the plane of objectivity, issuing from that of subjectivity—the antipodes of the former. This is the “Cycle of Life.” And as the sun disappears from our horizon, so does the Universe disappear at regular periods, when the “Universal night” sets in. The Hindoos call such alternations the “Days and Nights of Brahma,” or the time of _Manvantara_ and that of _Pralaya_ (dissolution). The Westerns may call them Universal Days and Nights if they prefer. During the latter (the nights) _All is in All_; every atom is resolved into one Homogeneity. EVOLUTION AND ILLUSION. ENQ. But who is it that creates each time the Universe? THEO. No one creates it. Science would call the process evolution; the pre-Christian philosophers and the Orientalists called it emanation: we, Occultists and Theosophists, see in it the only universal and eternal _reality_ casting a periodical reflection of _itself_ on the infinite Spatial depths. This reflection, which you regard as the objective _material_ universe, we consider as a temporary _illusion_ and nothing else. That alone which is eternal is _real_. ENQ. At that rate, you and I are also illusions. THEO. As flitting personalities, to-day one person, to-morrow another—we are. Would you call the sudden flashes of the _Aurora borealis_, the Northern lights, a “reality,” though it is as real as can be while you look at it? Certainly not; it is the cause that produces it, if permanent and eternal, which is the only reality, while the other is but a passing illusion. ENQ. All this does not explain to me how this illusion called the universe originates; how the conscious _to be_, proceeds to manifest itself from the unconsciousness that _is_.