74: "When the last cycle of man-bearing has been completed by that last fecund earth; and humanity has reached in a mass the stage of Buddhahood and passed out of the objective existence into the mystery of Nirvana—then "strikes the hour"; the seen becomes the unseen, the concrete resumes its pre-cyclic state of atomic distribution.
But the dead worlds left behind the onsweeping impulse do not continue dead.  Motion is the eternal order of things and affinity or attraction its handmaid of all works.  The thrill of life will again re-unite the atom, and it will stir again in the inert planet when the time comes.  Though all its forces have remained statu quo and are now asleep, yet little by little it will—when the hour re-strikes—gather for a new cycle of man-bearing maternity, and give birth to something still higher as moral and physical types than during the preceding manvantara.  And its "cosmic atoms already in a differentiated state" (differing—in the producing force in the mechanical sense of motions and effects) remain statu quo as well as globes and everything else in the process of formation."  Such is the "hypothesis fully in accordance with (your) (my) note."  For, as planetary development is as progressive as human or race evolution, the hour of the Pralaya's coming catches the series of worlds at successive stages of evolution; (i.e.) each has attained to some one of the periods of evolutionary progress—each stops there, until the outward impulse of the next manvantara sets it going from that very point—like a stopped time-piece re-wound.  Therefore, I have used the word "differentiated."
At the coming of the Pralaya no human, animal, or even vegetable entity will be alive to see it, but there will be the earths or globes with their mineral kingdoms; and all these planets will be physically disintegrated in the pralaya, yet not destroyed; for they have their places in the sequence of evolution and their "privations" coming again out of the subjective, they will find the exact point from which they have to move on around the chain of "manifested forms."  This, as you know, is repeated endlessly throughout Eternity.  Each man of us has gone this ceaseless round, and will repeat it forever and ever.  The deviation of each one's course, and his rate of progress from Nirvana to Nirvana is governed by causes which he himself creates out of the exigencies in which he finds himself entangled."—From The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett, p. 67.