1. What is consciousness?
2. Matter, fields, force
3. Brahman and parabrahman
4. The ether and the void
5. Mind and thought
6. Astral light and memory
7. Materialism and idealism
8. Three fundamental propositions
9. The knowable and the unknowable
10. Summary
11. Bibliography
‘Nature is organically one: one life, one essence, one consciousness ...’ (G. de Purucker)
A general definition of consciousness is: ‘awareness of one’s own existence, sensations, thoughts, surroundings, etc.’ But this does not tell us what consciousness is in itself. The materialist view is that consciousness is nothing more than an attribute that somehow arises from neural processes in highly complex physical organisms, whereas the theosophical view is that consciousness is not merely a state of awareness, but the ultimate substance of nature.
G. de Purucker (GdeP) defines consciousness as ‘the finest and loftiest form of energy’, ‘the root of all things’. ‘In all its forms and protean manifestations,’ he says, ‘consciousness is spirit-matter – force and matter, or spirit and substance, are one.’ The universe can be regarded as embodied consciousness, or rather ‘a quasi-infinite aggregate of imbodied consciousnesses’.[1] He sometimes uses the term ‘consciousness-life-substance’ to refer to the unitary essence of which all entities and things consist.[2]
H.P. Blavatsky (HPB) describes spirit/consciousness and matter as follows:
Spirit (or Consciousness) and Matter are ... to be regarded, not as independent realities, but as two facets or aspects of the ABSOLUTE (Parabrahm), which constitute the basis of conditioned Being whether subjective or objective.[3]
There can be no manifestation of Consciousness, semi-consciousness, or even ‘unconscious purposiveness,’ except through the vehicle of matter ... [B]oth of these aspects of the ABSOLUTE ... are mutually inter-dependent.[4]
... the opposite poles of subject and object, spirit and matter, are but aspects of the One Unity in which they are synthesized ...[5]
‘Spirit and Matter are the two States of the ONE, which is neither Spirit nor Matter, both being the absolute life, latent.’ (Book of Dzyan, Comm. III., par. 18)[6]
Spirit is matter on the seventh plane; matter is Spirit – on the lowest point of its cyclic activity; and both – are MAYA.[7]
... there is neither Spirit nor matter, in reality, but only numberless aspects of the One ever-hidden IS (or Sat).[8]
... the Eastern Occultists hold that there is but one element in the universe – infinite, uncreated and indestructible – MATTER; which element manifests itself in seven states – four of which are known to modern science ... Spirit is the highest state of that matter, they say, since that which is neither matter nor any of its attributes is – NOTHING.[9]
Stanza 3, verse 10 of the Stanzas of Dzyan reads:
Father-Mother spin a web whose upper end is fastened to Spirit (Purusha), the light of the one Darkness, and the lower one to Matter (Prakriti), its (the Spirit’s) shadowy end; and this web is the Universe spun out of the two substances made in one, which is Svabhavat.[10]
GdeP describes Father-Mother, or svabhavat, as ‘the spirit and essence of cosmic substance’, ‘the plastic essence of matter, both manifest and unmanifest’.[11]
Spirit and matter are therefore relative. Matter is crystallized consciousness, and consciousness is etherealized matter. Every concrete thing or entity that exists is a form of energy-substance and whether it functions (for us) as mind/consciousness, energy/force or substance/matter depends on the plane or subplane on which we are situated in relation to it. We currently inhabit the lowest material plane of our hierarchy. The highest form of consciousness on our own plane is to be found on the seventh subplane, and is a lesser manifestation of the consciousness on the highest, seventh plane of our hierarchy.
GdeP states:
consciousness or mind-stuff or thought is so fine and subtle, so tenuous and ethereal, that philosophy and religion from time immemorial have looked upon it or them as being, cosmically speaking, the essence of everything, permeating all. But if cosmic mind or consciousness is thus all-permeant, and the essence of everything, it must be more minute than the most dense, concreted entity possible to imagine, and therefore although it is so essentially and cosmically tenuous, logic compels us to add that it is infinitely more dense, because underlying it, than even the ether of modern science which is two billion times denser than lead.[12]
This illustrates the occult doctrine that the entire manifested universe is maya, or illusion. This ‘does not mean that the universe is non-existent per se, which would be an absurd supposition, but that we percipient and intelligent beings do not understand it as it is in itself’.[13] Whatever plane we are on, all the things we see, including our own bodies, are only relatively real, in the sense that they are impermanent and ever-changing, and dependent on the workings of more ethereal layers of energy-substance that lie within, beyond the range of our physical senses. Separation is also relative, since all substantial forms and even the ‘empty’ space between them are ultimately spun from the same universal essence.
What for us is consciousness would be matter when viewed from a hierarchy superior to our own. As we pursue our evolutionary journey through hierarchy after hierarchy, consciousness becomes purer and purer, but we shall never reach absolutely ‘pure’ consciousness. An absolutely indivisible atom of pure consciousness would be a dimensionless, mathematical point, i.e. a purely theoretical entity. In theosophy each such infinitesimal point of consciousness is called a monad. However, ‘monad’ is a generalizing term. An ‘ultimate’ monad, as just said, is an abstraction. But the monads to be found in any particular hierarchy, while relatively unitary and homogeneous, are in fact composite and heterogeneous.
A human can be regarded as a stream of consciousness passing through all the subplanes of our own plane. On each subplane there are knots or foci in this stream of consciousness, each of them being a monadic centre acting through a suitable vehicle. Humans consist for example of a divine monad, a spiritual monad, a human monad, an animal monad and an astral-vital-physical monad – all of them children of the monadic essence. Even our highest, divine monad is a composite entity. In the words of GdeP:
It is the cosmic seed out of which the tree of cosmic life grows, its roots upwards; its branches, branchlets, twigs, leaves, fruits, below. Eventually out of such a seed come all the issues of cosmic life, and if there were but one infinitely homogeneous essence in the monad, there could not be this dispersing into the manifold, incredibly numerous, innumerable planes, beings, hierarchies of the manifested universe. The very fact that heterogeneity issues from what we call homogeneity shows that heterogeneity with all its innumerable branches was locked up in the homogeneous monadic essence, streaming through that homogeneous monadic essence as the life stream of a tree issues forth from the apparently, and to us actually, homogeneous seed ...
Thus then, the monad to us is homogeneous. All issues forth from it, all again will be reabsorbed or withdrawn back into it when pralaya opens. But all these different individualities must have been lying latent there in order that they might issue forth therefrom. Therefore it shows us that the monad is not merely a channel, a laya-center, through which streams ... whatever there is of manifested life, but that the monad itself is an entity.[14]
[E]very monad is a creative center, not in the sense of creating something out of nothing, but as producing forth the atoms of itself which in turn grow to be evolving entities progressing through eternity. These ‘monadic atoms’ are not created by the parent monad, but pre-exist in the substance of the parent-monad until their time for manifestation comes. Then they begin their existence as child-monads or elemental monadic centers.[15]
Monads are ‘spiritual-substantial entities’, ‘the ultimate elements of the universe’, and ‘engender other monads as one seed will produce multitudes of other seeds’. Each monad generates the various vehicles through which its powers are unfolded and expressed on lower planes.[16]
Spirit or consciousness is thus a form of energy-substance. As GdeP says: ‘If we are really to understand nature herself, and not merely man’s imaginings about her, we should therefore once and for all stop thinking in the mental terms and framework of extra-material “ghosts” and “souls” which are essentially and absolutely different from the essence of matter.’[17]
He also states:
When theosophists speak of spirit and substance, of which latter, matter and energy or force are the physicalized expressions, we must remember that all these terms are abstractions – generalized expressions for hosts of entities manifesting aggregatively.[18]
In other words, spirit-substance manifests as multitudes of evolving entities, of infinitely varied shapes and sizes, each containing at its heart a spiritual monad, and displaying some degree of life and consciousness. And each entity evolves by gradually awakening and developing the powers and faculties slumbering within.
Notes
2. GdeP: according to archaic pantheism ‘there is a Divine Essence which lives and moves and operates ... in innumerable multitudes of life-consciousness rays, through all Being: the eternal consciousness-life-substance, super-spiritual, from which the entire universe flows forth, and back into which it will in due course of the revolving ages return’ (The Esoteric Tradition, 2nd ed., 204).
‘SPACE in the teaching of the esoteric tradition is the eternal and boundless ALL considered as infinitely alive in itself, and therefore containing a limitless plenitude of consciousness-life-substance expressing itself in the fields of space in interlocking, interblending, interworking, hierarchies of the hosts of consciousnesses’ (The Esoteric Tradition, 2nd ed., 206fn).
‘Life-consciousness-substance, the cosmic Triad, are one, one thing, with three faces as it were, and this Triad is the essence of things’ (Esoteric Teachings, 7:66-7).
3. The Secret Doctrine, 1:15. HPB: ‘Strictly speaking, Parabrahm is not even the Absolute but Absoluteness’ (Secret Doctrine Commentary, 1:35). When parabrahman is used to mean the infinite All, calling it absoluteness ‘is more correct and logical than to apply the adjective “absolute” to that which has neither attributes nor limitations’ (The Theosophical Glossary, 4, 343). See section 3.
4. The Secret Doctrine, 1:328-9.
5. The Secret Doctrine, 1:16.
6. The Secret Doctrine, 1:258.
7. The Secret Doctrine, 1:633.
8. The Secret Doctrine, 1:542.
9. Blavatsky Collected Writings, 4:602.
10. The Secret Doctrine, 1:83.
12. The Esoteric Tradition, 3rd ed., 213.
13. The Esoteric Tradition, 2nd ed., 426fn.
14. The Dialogues of G. de Purucker, 1:42-3. See The monad: one and many.
15. The Dialogues of G. de Purucker, 2:29.
17. The Esoteric Tradition, 2nd ed., 726.
18. Occult Glossary, 102
GdeP: ‘We talk of the cosmic life, or of the cosmic consciousness; but these words life and consciousness, when so used, are admittedly abstractions, and we use them as such; but we do not make the mistake of thinking that there is such a thing as cosmic life or cosmic consciousness apart from beings which live and which are conscious. Life as such is an abstraction; the actual thing is that there are living entities. Consciousness as such is an abstraction; the actual truth is that there are conscious beings. Man as such is an abstraction; the actual fact is that there are men. ... God as such is merely an abstraction, a word signifying, as an easy way of speech, that the universe is filled full with gods, cosmic spirits, living beings of high spiritual stature or evolutionary grade’ (Questions We All Ask, 1:39).
Our bodies and all the physical objects surrounding us are built up of atoms and molecules. In the 19th century it was thought that atoms were indivisible and formed the ultimate building blocks of matter. Subsequently it was discovered that atoms are not indivisible; they are 99.999% empty space, and consist of a tiny nucleus of protons and neutrons, with a cloud of minuscule electrons whirling around it. Subatomic particles are not hard, solid particles either; they are considered to be knots or concentrated points of energy, which act sometimes like particles and sometimes like waves.
Energy is a measure of activity and motion. Quoting a commentary, HPB writes: ‘Motion is the One Eternal is, and contains the potentialities of every quality in the manvantaric worlds.’1 Modern science has dissolved the once-so-solid material world into patterns of vibration or wave motion. In 1930 physicist James Jeans described matter as follows:
[T]he tendency of modern physics is to resolve the whole material universe into waves, and nothing but waves. These waves are of two kinds: bottled-up waves, which we call matter, and unbottled waves, which we call radiation or light. The process of annihilation of matter is merely that of unbottling imprisoned wave-energy and setting it free to travel through space. These concepts reduce the whole universe to a world of radiation, potential or existent ...2
The idea of matter being crystallized light echoes what HPB wrote half a century earlier. She speaks of ‘that infinite Ocean of Light, whose one pole is pure Spirit lost in the absoluteness of Non-Being, and the other, the matter in which it condenses, crystallizing into a more and more gross type as it descends into manifestation’.3
At the time The Secret Doctrine was written (1888), scientists still tended to consider atoms to be indivisible, a belief which persisted until the discovery of radioactivity in 1896 and the electron in 1897. However, HPB supported the view held by a minority of scientists that since atoms must be ‘elastic’ (otherwise they would be unable to absorb and transmit forces), they must be divisible. Since this must apply to ‘sub-atoms’ too, the latter must also be divisible, and so on, ad infinitum.
But infinite divisibility of atoms resolves matter into simple centres of force, i.e., precludes the possibility of conceiving matter as an objective substance. ...
It is on the doctrine of the illusive nature of matter, and the infinite divisibility of the atom, that the whole science of Occultism is built. It opens limitless horizons to substance informed by the divine breath of its soul in every possible state of tenuity, states still undreamt of by the most spiritually disposed chemists and physicists.4
She also writes:
Atoms are called ‘Vibrations’ in Occultism ... The waves and undulations of Science are all produced by atoms propelling their molecules into activity from within. Atoms fill the immensity of Space, and by their continuous vibration are that MOTION which keeps the wheels of Life perpetually going. It is that inner work that produces the natural phenomena called the correlation of Forces.5
HPB describes force as follows: ‘Force or energy is a quality; but every quality must belong to a something, or a somebody.’6 In other words, forces have a ‘substantial nature, however supersensuous’.7 Forces, she says, ‘are only the effects of causes generated by Powers, substantial, yet supersenuous, and beyond any kind of matter with which they (the Scientists) have hitherto become acquainted’.8 Occultism rejects the idea of an extra-cosmic God, but firmly upholds the idea of intra-cosmic intelligent powers or forces.9
If matter is produced by motion, and since there can be no motion without something that moves, there must be a medium, composed of a finer grade of substance, in which this motion takes place. In the 19th century, official science postulated the existence of a universal ether. Having found no unequivocal physical evidence for such an ether, it abandoned the hypothesis. It was left with the absurd idea that waves can be transmitted through empty space, and that particles are produced by wave motion in a void of nothingness.
To make this sound more ‘scientific’ it introduced the nebulous concept of a field. According to Einstein, matter is ‘constituted by the regions of space in which the field is extremely intense’.10 Fritjof Capra says that the field is ‘not a state of mere nothingness, but contains the potentiality for all forms of the particle world. These forms, in turn, are not independent physical entities but merely transient manifestations of the underlying Void.’11
Capra refers to the underlying quantum field as ‘the fundamental physical entity: a continuous medium which is present everywhere in space’.12 He also states that although physicists understand all energy to be a measure of activity, they ‘do not have an answer to the question: What is it that is active?’13
The only logical answer is ‘something’ rather than ‘nothing’, and this can only mean a more ethereal grade of energy-substance that is not physically detectable. Materialistically minded physicists cannot accept this, and instead have invented a host of mathematical abstractions that have no real explanatory value.14 The philosophers of antiquity who taught that ‘nothing comes from nothing’ and ‘nature abhors a vacuum’ were far wiser.
Notes
1. The Secret Doctrine, 1:599fn. Mahatma KH: ‘Spirit, life and matter are not natural principles existing independently of each other, but the effects of combinations produced by eternal motion in Space’ (The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, #23b,159).
2. The Mysterious Universe, quoted in The Esoteric Tradition, 3rd ed., 232.
3. The Secret Doctrine, 1:481. Isaac Newton had the same insight: ‘The changing of Bodies into Light, and Light into Bodies, is very conformable to the Course of Nature, which seems delighted with Transmutations’ (Opticks, quoted in The Esoteric Tradition, 3rd ed., 231).
4. The Secret Doctrine, 1:519-20; see The infinite divisibility of matter. ‘Divine breath’ refers to inner motion or force – ‘Occultism, seeing no difference between the two [i.e. motion and force], never attempts to separate them’ (The Secret Doctrine, 1:512).
5. The Secret Doctrine, 1:633.
HPB: ‘As described by Seers – those who can see the motion of the interstellar shoals [of atoms], and follow them in their evolution clairvoyantly – they are dazzling, like specks of virgin snow in radiant sunlight. Their velocity is swifter than thought, quicker than any mortal physical eye could follow, and, as well as can be judged from the tremendous rapidity of their course, the motion is circular. Standing on an open plain, on a mountain summit especially, and gazing into the vast vault above and the spacial infinitudes around, the whole atmosphere seems ablaze with them, the air soaked through with these dazzling coruscations. At times, the intensity of their motion produces flashes like the Northern lights during the Aurora Borealis. The sight is so marvellous, that, as the Seer gazes into this inner world, and feels the scintillating points shoot past him, he is filled with awe at the thought of other, still greater mysteries, that lie beyond, and within, this radiant ocean’ (The Secret Doctrine, 1:633-4).
6. The Secret Doctrine, 1:509.
7. The Secret Doctrine, 1:514.
8. The Secret Doctrine, 1:520.
9. The Secret Doctrine, 1:529. HPB: ‘Christian theology, having rejected the doctrine of emanations and replaced them with direct, conscious creations of angels and the rest out of nothing, now finds itself hopelessly stranded between Supernaturalism, or miracle, and materialism. An extra-cosmic god is fatal to philosophy, an intra-cosmic Deity – i.e. Spirit and matter inseparable from each other – is a philosophical necessity’ (The Secret Doctrine, 2:41).
10. Quoted in Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics, Bantam Books, 1984, p. 197.
11. The Tao of Physics, p. 209.
12. The Tao of Physics, p. 196.
13. Fritjof Capra, Uncommon Wisdom, Flamingo, 1988, pp. 131, 147-8.
Capra rightly argues that the ultimate reality postulated by Eastern mysticism cannot be identified with the quantum field of physics, since the former is the essence of all phenomena in this world, while the quantum field accounts only for certain physical phenomena.[1] He points out that although the ultimate reality is often said to be a formless void, it is not mere nothingness. It is, he says, ‘the essence of all forms and the source of all life’.[2] According to Capra:
The Brahman of the Hindus, the Dharmakaya of the Buddhists, and the Tao of the Taoists, can be seen, perhaps, as the ultimate unified field from which spring not only the phenomena studied in physics, but all other phenomena as well.[3]
What Capra fails to articulate is that brahman is itself substantial, however insubstantial it may be in comparison with our own gross state of matter. Moreover, there is a series of intermediary planes between brahman and the physical world.
Strictly speaking, it is not brahman but parabrahman that is the ultimate reality, i.e. infinitude. Brahman is the divine source of our own manifest universe (whether solar or galactic), but it is certainly not a void in the literal sense of the word. It is the hierarch, spiritual summit, or absolute of any particular cosmic hierarchy.[4]
‘Beyond’ our own hierarchy stretch an infinite number of superior hierarchies, in comparison with which the brahman of our own hierarchy would be gross matter, and an infinite number of inferior hierarchies, in comparison with which even the lower planes of our own hierarchy would seem like pure spirit. Just as our own bodies are composed of trillions upon trillions of physical atoms (and astral life-atoms), so brahman is just one of countless life-atoms in an entity on an even grander scale.
When parabrahman[5] denotes the boundless All, it is an abstraction, not an entity, and strictly speaking it therefore has no attributes. Nevertheless, it is sometimes described in paradoxical terms such as absolute consciousness and unconsciousness, or as boundless space, ceaseless motion and endless duration (all these terms being abstractions).
It is sometimes referred to as parabrahman-mulaprakriti: parabrahman refers to the consciousness or energy side of reality, and mulaprakriti to the matter or vehicle side. Parabrahman is root-consciousness, while mulaprakriti – the ‘veil’ of parabrahman – is root-nature or root-matter, and the two are essentially one. Parabrahman-mulaprakriti can also be used to mean the root-consciousness and root-matter of an individual hierarchy, rather than of the Boundless.[6]
As GdeP says, ‘Absolute is a relative term’. It is the philosophic One, the cosmic Originant, but not the mystic Zero, representing infinitude. The Zero contains an infinite number of cosmic Ones, or cosmic monads, as well as multitudes of minor monads derived from each cosmic One.
Each such Absolute is a cosmic jīvanmukta, signifying an entity that has reached a condition of relatively perfect liberation – the moksha or mukti of Brahmanism and the Latin word absolutum, both meaning set free, free from servitude to all the lower planes because master or originant thereof.[7]
Terms like unmanifested and manifested, abstract and concrete, subjective and objective, noumenal and phenomenal, real and illusory, undifferentiated and differentiated, unconditioned and conditioned, homogeneous and heterogeneous, non-being and being, can be used to describe the highest planes and lower planes of any hierarchy respectively, but all such terms are relative. As HPB says:
In using the term ‘planes of non-being’ it is necessary to remember that these planes are only to us spheres of non-being, but those of being and matter to higher intelligences than ourselves. ... That which in the Secret Doctrine is referred to as the unmanifested planes, are unmanifested or planes of non-being only from the point of view of the finite intellect; to higher intelligences they would be manifested planes and so on to infinity, analogy always holding good.[8]
Notes
1. The Tao of Physics, p. 197.
2. The Tao of Physics, p. 198.
3. The Tao of Physics, p. 197. According to Capra, dharmakaya means ‘body of being’. GdeP says that it means ‘continuance-body’ or ‘body of the law’. He describes it as a state of pure consciousness, freed from all personalizing thought, very close to the nirvanic state (Occult Glossary, 3).
4. Occult Glossary, 1-2; Fountain-Source of Occultism, 85-8, 89-93. See Hierarchies: worlds visible and invisible.
Brahman (from the root bṛih, ‘expansion’), the universal spirit, is sometimes called paramatman, meaning the highest or most universal atman or self, but is sometimes used to mean ‘boundless life, boundless consciousness, boundless substance’ (Occult Glossary, 124-6). As HPB says, ‘The language of occultism is varied’ (The Secret Doctrine, 2:616). GdeP: ‘one of the commonest “blinds” ... is using the same word in varying senses. ... Free your minds, keep them plastic!’ (Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy, 281-2).
Parabrahman is also called That (tat) in Sanskrit Vedic literature, while the manifested universe is called This (idam) (Occult Glossary, 124). Related Sanskrit terms are sat, the ‘real’, and asat, the ‘unreal’ or the manifested universe; in another and even more mystical sense asat means ‘not sat’, i.e. even beyond or higher than sat (Occult Glossary, 7).
5. In theosophical literature, parabrahman is often said to mean ‘beyond brahman’ (Secret Doctrine Commentary, 1:4; Occult Glossary, 124). But David Reigle explains that when param means ‘beyond’ or ‘higher than’, the noun to which it relates must precede it and be in the ablative case (prajnaquest.fr). Parabrahman literally means ‘higher brahman’, in contrast to aparabrahman, ‘lower brahman’, which in Vedantic literature is sometimes equated with brahmā, the masculine creative power. When brahman is declined in the neuter gender, the nominative singular is written brahma (without an accent), but ‘brahman’ (or even ‘brahm’) is sometimes used instead, to avoid confusion with brahmā.
Whatever terms we adopt, the distinction between the absolute and infinitude is of critical importance. As HPB puts it, ‘in pure philosophy there is an abyss between the infinite and the absolute’ (Blavatsky Collected Writings, 12:342).
6. Occult Glossary, 111; Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy, 181. GdeP: ‘every atom has its own logos; every atom has its own paramātman and mulāprakṛiti, for every entity everywhere has its own highest. These things and the words which express them are relative’ (Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy, 243).
7. Fountain-Source of Occultism, 89.
8. Secret Doctrine Commentary, 2:18, 21. HPB also speaks of ‘the relatively noumenal – as opposed to the phenomenal – universe’ (The Secret Doctrine, 1:146).
KH: ‘It is the peculiar faculty of the involuntary power of the infinite mind – which no one could ever think of calling God – to be eternally evolving subjective matter into objective atoms (you will please remember that these two adjectives are used but in a relative sense) or cosmic matter to be later on developed in to form’ (The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, #22, 138).
A wave is defined in physics as ‘an energy-carrying disturbance propagated through a medium or space by a progressive local displacement of the medium or a change in its physical properties, but without any overall movement of matter’. A medium is defined as ‘an intervening substance or agency for transmitting or producing an effect’. Logically, a medium must be substantial, however subtle and undetectable it may be to our own senses. And a wave cannot propagate through space unless some kind of medium is present.
The ageless wisdom postulates an infinite continuum of energy-substance, with infinitely varying degrees of materiality and ethereality, or rates of vibration. All planes or worlds appear ‘as objective and material to their respective inhabitants as ours is to us’.[1] Each hierarchy consists of seven (or 10 or 12) planes,[2] each divided into subplanes, sub-subplanes, etc. Thus even on our own physical plane, there are grades of substance with vibratory rates that make them undetectable by either our senses or scientific instruments. These higher grades of substance provide the substratum or ether in which vortical motion produces particles of what to us is physical matter.
In 1900 physicist Max Planck discovered that what we call energy is not a continuous flow but is composed of discrete units or quanta. This suggests that if we had more refined sense organs we would perceive these energy quanta as particulate and material. These particles consist of concentrated energy of an even finer grade, produced by motion in an even finer etheric substratum, and so on, indefinitely.
Modern materialistic science claims that physical matter is the only form of matter and arises from an underlying quantum field – beyond which there is nothing at all. The ether that scientists formerly postulated to be the substratum of physical matter, was only one or two degrees less material than our own tangible matter, which can be therefore called ‘crystallized ether’.[3] Such an ether is ‘immaterial’ in the sense that it is ‘not matter in the physical sense, but nevertheless distinctly substance in our theosophical and philosophical sense’.[4]
The existence of more ethereal states of matter may have been rejected by modern science, but it is at least reasonable and logical, and amenable to proof by those with the ability to see on higher planes. As HPB says, ‘[T]here are other forms of energy [i.e. unknown to science] wedded to other forms of matter, which are supersensuous, yet known to the adepts.’[5]
Writing in the 1930s, GdeP criticized the tendency of science to discard the notion of an intra- and inter-atomic ether or ethers simply because no definitive chemical or physical evidence could be found. He stated: ‘The chemical and physical proof is lacking only because of the imperfection of both chemical physics and molecular physics.’ He goes on:
Whatever the tenuous ‘stuff’ may be which fills the spaces of the atoms and between the atoms, it most emphatically does exist and is the reason why forces or energies can be transferred or transmitted across what so many scientists so foolishly call ‘empty space.’ ...
We either have to admit the existence of such ether or ethers, i.e., of this extremely tenuous and ethereal substance which fills all space, whether interstellar or interplanetary or inter-atomic and intra-atomic, or accept actio in distans – action at a distance, without intervening intermediary or medium of transmission; and such actio in distans is obviously by all known scientific standards an impossibility.[6]
GdeP adds that the esoteric philosophy affirms the existence of such an ether, which is sevenfold (or tenfold) in nature. The ether whose existence was earlier suspected by science is only ‘the lowest dregs or lees of that spiritual-substantial cosmic essence which in its hierarchically highest parts the esoteric wisdom calls ākāśa, or sometimes, from another angle of vision and with an even more abstract significance, mulāprakṛiti – root-nature’. This cosmic essence is ‘not only a medium of transmission or connecting cosmic fluid between body and body, but actually is the prima materia itself, out of the lowest or most concreted parts of which the entire physical material universe is constructed’.[7]
HPB wrote: ‘apart from a hypothetical ether of Space and gross physical bodies, the whole sidereal and unseen Space is, in the sight of the materialists, one boundless void in nature – blind, unintelligent, useless’.[8] From a theosophical viewpoint:
Space is neither a ‘limitless void,’ nor a ‘conditioned fullness’, but both: being, on the plane of absolute abstraction, the ever-incognisable Deity, which is void only to finite minds, and on that of mayavic perception, the Plenum, the absolute Container of all that is, whether manifested or unmanifested: it is, therefore, that ABSOLUTE ALL.[9]
[S]pace is the illimitable series of hierarchies which do not merely fill, but which are the boundless All.[10]
[W]hat seems to us to be empty space must actually be fields of cosmic ether which, because of its ethereality, neither our organ of vision, nor our sense of touch, nor our most delicate instruments, can subject to experimentation.[11]
As GdeP explains, the word ‘void’ refers to ‘the divine-spiritual side of being’, while the pleroma or plenum (fullness) refers to ‘the prakriti or matter side of being, the side of manifestation, which vanishes away like a dream when the great manvantara or period of world activity is finished’.[12] The corresponding Buddhist term is shunyata (śūnyatā), ‘emptiness’, which has two related meanings:
When considered as a positive term, it stands for the boundless All, space in its highest and most abstract sense, implying endless and limitless infinitude ..., as well as the all-encompassing, endless Fullness of the All. It is the universe with everything that is in it seen from the standpoint of the spiritual-divine realms, which to intelligences living in lower spheres seems to be the Great Void – Mahāśūnya.
When Śūnyatā is considered negatively, it stands for the idea of kosmic illusion, the mahāmāyā. From the viewpoint of the divine-spiritual consciousness, the entire objective universe, visible or invisible, is unreal and illusive because it is so impermanent. It is empty in the sense of being evanescent. Not that the manifested universe does not exist; it does, or it could not provide an illusion, but it is not what it seems to be. Thus both the positive and negative meanings of Śūnyatā are founded upon the same basic idea, namely, the reality of the divine-spiritual, and the relative unreality of all that is objective.[13]
Notes
1. The Secret Doctrine, 1:605.
GdeP: ‘When we recollect that our own physical sphere is nothing but a vast agglomerate of electric charges in the bodies of the different atoms of which physical matter is composed – which electronic “sub-atoms” are as widely separated from each other [relatively speaking] as are the celestial bodies in our own physical sphere – there is small difficulty in recognizing the fact that beings with a sense apparatus different from our own could easily look through our physical bodies and through the body of our earth as if these were “empty space” ’ (The Esoteric Tradition, 3rd ed., 236).
2. 4 lower planes + 3 spiritual planes (= 7) + 3 divine planes (= 10) + 2 polar links with the hierarchies ‘above’ and ‘below’ = 12 (Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy, 574-7). The 12 globes of a planetary or solar chain are said to be located on seven different planes, but from another perspective, each globe can be considered a separate plane or ‘sphere’ (see Fountain-Source of Occultism, 246; Studies in Occult Philosophy, 93).
3. Secret Doctrine Commentary, 2:19.
4. Studies in Occult Philosophy, 441.
5. The Secret Doctrine, 1:582fn.
6. The Esoteric Tradition, 2nd ed., 901-2fn.
In his private letters, Isaac Newton dismissed as absurd the idea that gravity could act at a distance without an intervening material medium. He believed that the fundamental cause of gravity had not yet been discovered and was essentially a spiritual agency, which he understood to mean ‘God’ (The Esoteric Tradition, 2nd ed., 443-5; 3rd ed., 221-2; The Secret Doctrine, 1:490-1).
7. The Esoteric Tradition, 2nd ed., 902fn.
8. The Secret Doctrine, 1:587.
9. The Secret Doctrine, 1:8.
10. Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy, 432.
11. Fountain-Source of Occultism, 66.
12. Fountain-Source of Occultism, 66-7.
13. Fountain-Source of Occultism, 67-8.
Mind is the faculty of perception, thought, feeling, will, intuition, imagination, and memory. GdeP describes it as follows:
Mind is a faculty of consciousness, from one standpoint. It is an aspect or function of consciousness, from another standpoint. It is the dregs of pure consciousness. Mind belongs to the intermediate or psychic nature of the human being. … Mind in this sense is a limitation; it is the mental instrument through which consciousness expresses itself in human beings … at our present evolutionary stage.
[T]he whole purpose of human evolution is to raise our consciousness from the animal or brain-mind into the more typical and higher human mind, and from it into the spiritual mind, and when this shall have been attained then we shall be like gods.[1]
Animals possess only a lower, instinctual mind, while humans also possess a higher, self-conscious mind, and therefore a degree of free will, due to the greater unfolding of buddhi-manas achieved in the human kingdom (manas means mind, in the sense of ego-consciousness, while buddhi is the spiritual soul, the source of intuitive wisdom).[2]
The belief that mind is an immaterial epiphenomenon of matter is a modern materialistic superstition. HPB points out that mind must be material (though nonphysical) since ‘nothing which is capable of producing an effect on any portion of the physical – objective or subjective – Kosmos can be otherwise than material’.[3] Our brain, she says, is the physical vehicle of ‘super-physical thought’.[4] Or as GdeP puts it, mind is material, but ‘matter of its own ethereal type’.[5]
Our entire inner and outer constitution – the spiritual-divine self (atman-buddhi, the monad), the reincarnating soul (higher manas), the lower mind (kama-manas), and the astral and physical bodies – reflects our karma, i.e. the sum total of all our past actions, and there is constant communication and interaction between all our different selves, souls, vehicles or bodies. The state of development of our physical brain and body determines the extent to which the higher levels of our constitution can manifest in the physical world.
The physical heart is the seat of buddhi and the centre of spiritual consciousness; the brain is the seat of manas and the centre of intellectual consciousness; the liver is the seat of kama (desire); and the spleen is the seat of the astral body. The pineal gland is the seat of our ‘highest and divinest consciousness’ and the organ of spiritual vision.[6]
Within the brain, the cerebrum is associated with conscious, voluntary thoughts and actions, while the much smaller cerebellum is associated with involuntary, instinctive functions. An injured brain can obviously result in mental impairment on the physical level, but this does not prove that mind and consciousness are generated in the brain. A wide range of paranormal and psychic phenomena show that mind and consciousness exist independently of physical bodies.[7] Moreover, giving a detailed description of what is happening in the brain during different mental processes is not the same as ‘explaining’ mind and consciousness.
The subconscious, instinctual mind is the lower, vegetative, passive part of our mind or soul, the storehouse of ancient memories and experiences, and operates automatically, while intuition is spiritual wisdom and knowledge gained in past lives and stored in the spirit-soul.[8] Inspiration comes from our inner god, our inner spiritual sun.[9]
The will is rooted in higher manas, or buddhi-manas,[10] and its physical organ is the pituitary gland in the brain.[11] Our active will is set in motion by our intelligence and innate life, while our passive, vegetative, instinctive will governs the automatisms of the body and mind.[12] Our will is free precisely in proportion with the degree to which we have attained self-conscious union with our inner divinity.[13] GdeP writes:
when the spiritual will is evoked and active in a man, he becomes supreme over himself so that he has absolute self-command, and not even the denizens of the astral world can in any wise control him. Will in action is a current of energy, which means a current of substance, precisely as electricity is both force and matter. Back of will lies desire. If the desire be pure, the will is pure. If the desire be evil, the will is evil.[14]
According to theosophy, thoughts and emotions are ethereal elemental entities. An elemental is an un-self-conscious entity at the beginning of its evolutionary growth. All the seven (or 10 or 12) planes or element-principles of which the cosmos is composed are aggregates of elementals.
Thoughts are manasic elementals, while personal emotions are rooted in the kama side of us.[15] Some of our thoughts originate in our own thought-organ, which is one of the apparatuses of the monadic essence, while others are produced by other thinking entities and are drawn into our minds from the thought reservoir of the planet.[16]
GdeP states that ‘a thought is an elemental: its heart, its core, is a monad; and its body is a thought-form’.[17] Thoughts, says mahatma KH, are ‘things’, ‘real entities’, and have ‘tenacity, coherence, and life’.[18] The intensity of a thought determines how long the thought-form holds together.[19]
According to biologist Lyall Watson, ‘words, phrases, fashions, theories and ideas are in effect non-physical genes, a kind of abstract DNA. They are very much alive, passing from brain to brain, propagating themselves by imitation.’[20] Each time they take on a physical form in the human nervous system they ‘gain strength and momentum, building up their morphogenetic fields, becoming an evolutionary force in their own right’.[21] Clearly, anything that is alive and can be transmitted from brain to brain and take on physical form cannot be entirely nonsubstantial – otherwise it would not exist.
In the words of an anthropologist, the vision of a shaman (tribal magician) ‘is no mere hallucination. It is a mental formulation visualised and externalised, which may even exist for a time independent of its creator’.[22] The Aborigines call these entities ‘power animals’, which ‘can sometimes be seen by others, and are capable of themselves working or “seeing” at a distance’.[23]
Watson gives the following description of the famous Indian rope trick:
there is at least one account by two psychologists who, with several hundred other people, saw a fakir throw a coil of rope into the air, watched a small boy climb the rope and disappear. They describe how dismembered parts of the boy came tumbling horribly down to the ground, how the fakir gathered them up in a basket, climbed the rope himself and came back down smiling, with the intact child. Others in the crowd are said to have agreed with most of the details of what happened, but a film record which begins with the rope being thrown into the air, shows nothing but the fakir and his assistant standing motionless beside it throughout the rest of the performance. The rope did not stay in the air and the boy never climbed it. The crowd, it seems, was party to a collective delusion.[24]
It appears that the fakir was able to project his own mental images into the mental spheres of the audience.
GdeP says that only the lower mental processes are verbal; our brain-mind seeks the best words to express whatever thoughts arise. Thought per se, however, is wordless, and resides in the higher mind, which is ‘far above merely verbal forms’ and ‘deals alone with ideas, images, pictures’. The brain-mind may receive these images and ideas as mental impulses.[25]
The thought-elementals we generate and those we attract into our stream of consciousness reflect our evolutionary development and current state of mind. Each of us ‘colors the thoughts as they pass through our minds, thus giving a new direction, a new karmic impulse to them’.[26] When their energy is spent, we ‘forget’ them, which means that they return to the reservoir of consciousness, to reappear at some future time.[27]
Our imagination can elevate or debase us. Picturing evil things pulls us down, while picturing beautiful and sublime events and ideas lifts us up. If we allow ourselves to constantly think low and degenerate thoughts, they become habitual. But by exercising our will, we can learn to control our minds and focus on more inspiring and uplifting ideas.
As GdeP says: ‘It is the direction in which a man’s thoughts and desires are set which in all cases determines not only his destiny, but the path which he will follow, the pitfalls which he will encounter, or the happiness which he will make for himself as he travels through the ages.’[28] This idea is neatly summed up in the Biblical proverb: ‘As he thinks in his heart, so is he.’[29] Our urge to rise higher reflects ‘a yearning in the higher part of us to return to its own native higher spiritual realms’.[30]
Theosophy distinguishes four general states of human consciousness: jagrat, svapna, sushupti, and turiya-samadhi.
The waking state, or jāgrat, is the state or condition of consciousness normal to the imbodied human being when not asleep. Svapna is the state of consciousness more or less freed from the sheath of the body and partially awake in the astral realms, higher or lower as the case may be. Sushupti is the state of self-oblivion into which the human being is plunged when the percipient consciousness enters into the purely mānasic condition, which is self-oblivion for the relatively impotent brain-mind; whereas the turīya state, which is a practical annihilation of the ordinary human consciousness, is an attainment of union with ātma-buddhi overshadowing or working through the higher manas.[31]
When we dream, we are in svapna. In dreamless sleep, we are in sushupti. When we die, we pass from jagrat into svapna as far as our astral body is concerned. Our human soul is unconscious in sushupti, but our spirit, which has gone to its parent source until recalled to earth, is in turiya-samadhi. GdeP writes: ‘In future ages when we shall be demigods on earth, adumbrations of this divine consciousness will be familiar to all of us.’[32]
Notes
1. Questions We All Ask, 1:20.
2. See Origin of mind.
3. Blavatsky Collected Writings, 4:307fn.
4. Blavatsky Collected Writings, 12:417.
5. Questions We All Ask, 1:21.
6. Blavatsky Collected Writings, 12:663, 694-5; The Key to Theosophy, 121; The Dialogues of G. de Purucker, 2:98.
7. See Life beyond death: evidence for survival.
8. Questions We All Ask, 1:22; Esoteric Teachings, 2:53.
9. Questions We All Ask, 1:17.
10. The Dialogues of G. de Purucker, 3:417; Esoteric Teachings, 1:54.
11. Questions We All Ask, 1:9.
12. Esoteric Teachings, 1:53.
13. The Esoteric Tradition, 2nd ed., 472.
14. Fountain-Source of Occultism, 11.
15. The Dialogues of G. de Purucker, 1:300.
16. The Dialogues of G. de Purucker, 1:383-6.
17. The Dialogues of G. de Purucker, 2:31.
18. The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, #9, 49. KH: ‘is there ... either a sensation, an abstract idea, a tendency of mind, or a mental power, that one could call an absolutely non-molecular phenomenon? Can even a sensation or the most abstract of thoughts which is something, come out of nothing, or be nothing?’ (The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, #16, 112).
19. Echoes of the Orient, 3:264.
20. Supernature II, Sceptre, 1987, p. 82.
21. Supernature II, p. 82.
22. Quoted in Supernature II, p. 256.
23. Supernature II, p. 256.
24. Supernature II, pp. 158-9.
25. Questions We All Ask, 1:14.
26. The Esoteric Tradition, 2nd ed., 653.
27. The Dialogues of G. de Purucker, 1:212.
28. The Esoteric Tradition, 3rd ed., 376.
30. The Dialogues of G. de Purucker, 3:417.
31. Occult Glossary, 74; see also Fountain-Source of Occultism, 568-73.
32. Fountain-Source of Occultism, 598.
The astral plane – the plane immediately ‘above’ the physical plane – is closely connected with events in the physical world. It is sometimes called the ‘astral light’, because this more ethereal grade of matter appears self-luminous to sensitives or seers.[1] There is no definite ‘partition’ between the astral and physical planes; they merge into each other by indistinguishable gradations of matter. GdeP writes:
There are times in human history, which recur with periodic regularity, when these few intervening grades between the physical and the astral seem to wear thin; and at such times there occurs an inevitable outbreak of psychoastral happenings.[2]
The heyday of spiritualism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was an instance of this.[3]
Every globe of every planetary chain in the solar system is surrounded by its own astral light, which is a thickened or more compacted portion of the astral light of the entire solar system, on the plane in question. Every physical planet is a concreted form of astral substance. The planetary astral light corresponds to what the astral model-body (linga-sharira) is in the case of an individual human being. The term astral light can also be used in a more general sense to refer to all the different grades of substance between the physical plane and the akasha, i.e. the highest three of the seven planes of the solar system.[4]
The astral light acts as a channel of communication between the physical world and the higher, spiritual world. It is the storehouse of all the energies that are descending to manifest in the physical sphere, and the receptacle of whatever passes out of the physical sphere on its way upward. It is also called a picture gallery or nature’s memory, because it bears imprints or records of whatever happens on the physical and astral planes.
As already mentioned, thoughts and emotions are elemental entities carried on currents of the astral light; we suck them in and send them out again in modified form. The lower reaches of the astral light are the depository of base pictures, passions and impulses, while the higher reaches (and akasha) record the more noble thoughts, emotions and deeds of the human race. Our minds constantly wander, as it were, through the astral light until sympathetic contact with some astral record is made. The pictures and impressions picked up by the mind are stamped in accordance with its own characteristics and released again, until they strike some other receptive mind.
As GdeP writes:
The human brain could never think a thought, could never imagine anything, nor could the emotional apparatus be enslaved by its emotional movements, whether passional or otherwise, were not all these things already existent in and drawn from the astral light – only to be returned to it.[5]
It is the bewildering confusion of records stored in the astral light and the possibility of their being modified and embroidered before they are registered and interpreted by our minds that account for the innumerable conflicting visions seen by some ‘sensitives’ and psychics. It takes the trained spiritual eye of an adept to distinguish truth from deception.
Given the astral light’s characteristics as a storehouse of impressions, thoughts and emotions, and as a medium for transmission, it is closely associated with a great many phenomena on earth. It explains thought transference, and the unconscious influence humans can exercise on one another. It helps explain psychic epidemics, such as sudden crazes, mass hysteria and crowd psychology. As theosophist Franz Hartmann says:
A biogenesis of thought-infections and mental epidemics might be written. To such an investigation would belong the histories of all great reformations originating from some central idea; also the history of the crusades, the flagellants, the inquisition, mediaeval witchcraft, and modern materialism, and the absurdities of fashion.[6]
The Covid-19 pandemic was an extreme example of a global mass psychosis, characterized by widespread fear, hysteria, paranoia, delusion and irrationality, largely fuelled by government and media misinformation.[7]
The lower astral regions are the kama-loka,[8] the realm of the decomposing astral corpses or kama-rupas left behind by excarnate humans at the ‘second death’, before the human monad enters the higher spiritual state known as the devachan. If left alone and not revitalized by mediums seeking contact with the ‘spirits of the dead’, the astral shells sooner or later dissolve into their component astral life-atoms, just as the physical corpse, after the ‘first death’, disintegrates into its component physical atoms, whether through burial and decomposition, or cremation. Since astral shells are instinctual entities, devoid of higher intelligence, the communications received via mediums from the dead are usually extremely trivial and banal.[9]
Astral shells can be attracted to a person by affinity and sucked into his or her own astral model-body, in which case they may strengthen any vice that person is addicted to. Dabbling in psychic practices increases the risk of this. The greatest threat is posed by elementaries, the kama-rupas of humans who have lived very evil and depraved lives, which take far longer to decompose.
The astral light helps to explain hauntings and apparitions. It provides a link between the mental and moral condition of the earth’s inhabitants and terrestrial phenomena such as storms and earthquakes; tensions created by our thoughts and emotions build up until they find sudden relief. The preservation of images in the astral emanations of an object explains the phenomenon of psychometry. Visions of the future, at least in its probable outline, are possible because coming events cast their shadows before them, and because the general grooves of evolution on earth have already been laid down during the preceding embodiments of the earth and its inhabitants.
According to psychologist C.G. Jung, we not only have a personal consciousness (and an unconscious), but also inherit a shared ‘collective unconscious’ from past generations, which contains ‘primordial images’ or ‘archetypes’. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake writes:
Jung tried to explain the inheritance of the collective unconscious physically by suggesting that the archetypal forms were ‘present in the germplasm’. But it is very doubtful that anything with the properties of the archetypal forms could be inherited chemically in the structure of DNA, or in any other physical or chemical structure in sperm or egg cells. Indeed the idea of the collective unconscious makes little sense in terms of current mechanistic biology ...[10]
The astral light accounts for many of the phenomena associated with the collective unconscious.
According to Sheldrake, ‘not only is there no evidence that memory traces are stored within the brain, there are also reasons for thinking that no coherent mechanistic explanation of memory in terms of physical traces is possible even in principle’.[11] His own solution is to postulate the existence of a variety of ‘morphic fields’ possessing an inherent memory. But he claims that these ‘information fields’ are entirely nonsubstantial and nonenergetic – which basically means nonexistent.[12] It is certainly untenable to reduce all mental phenomena to the ‘mechanics’ of the physical brain, but it is more conceivable that memories are stored in some form of substantial-energetic matrix than to believe that they are stored in fields of nothingness.
According to theosophy, all our personal memories are stamped on the various layers of our auric egg, especially our higher and lower mental vehicles – i.e. higher manas and kama-manas, or our individuality and personality respectively.[13] Every organ and every cell in our body has a consciousness of its own kind, and its own memory.[14] Although some of our brain cells receive and convey sensations and impressions, they are not the retainers of them.[15] Physical memory is a reflection of the ‘psycho-astral memory’, which ‘resides in the essence of the astral or ethereal life-atoms’.[16]
GdeP writes:
Every incident, fact, event, thought, and emotion of a man’s life is recorded in the different parts of his being: the emotional events in the kāma-mānasic part; the mental in the mānasic aspect of his constitution, and the spiritual in the buddhi-mānasic, etc.; while the Iinga-śarīra and the physical body are themselves permanently marked and often noticeably changed by the experiences undergone throughout the incarnation. ...
What we call memory is merely the ability to read more or less accurately the mental and physiological impressions stamped on our auric egg, which impressions are carried by the auric flow to the body where they enter the texture of the physical brain and nervous system, and by reaction often make themselves felt as memories of the past.[17]
Notes
1. The Dialogues of G. de Purucker, 3:425. The physical, astral and akashic planes are really subplanes of the lowest cosmic plane of our hierarchy.
2. The Esoteric Tradition, 3rd ed., 414.
3. See Life beyond death: evidence for survival, part 2.
4. The Buddhists call akasha ‘svabhavat’, ‘adi-buddhi’ or ‘alaya’, and the Hindus and Brahmans also call it ‘paramatman’. The ancient Greeks called it ‘aether’. The planes between akasha and the lower astral light are sometimes called the ‘anima mundi’ (world soul). The threefold division of akasha, anima mundi and astral light parallels the threefold division of the human constitution into spirit, soul and body (physical matter being a further concretion of the coarsest parts of the astral light). (See The Dialogues of G. de Purucker, 3:394-402, 421, 423-6; Occult Glossary, 4-5, 5, 8-10.) Sometimes anima mundi is used to refer to the higher portions of akasha (Fountain-Source of Occultism, 77). In Greece, Rome, Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt and elsewhere the lower astral regions were called the underworld.
5. The Esoteric Tradition, 3rd ed., 543.
6. Magic White and Black, Tat Foundation, 1980, ch. 9, p. 218.
7. See Mass psychosis and the power of thought, Covid-19: freedom, fear and mass delusion, Ozone, influenza and the causes of disease.
8. The kama-loka corresponds to the purgatory of the Catholics, the Hades of the ancient Greeks, the Orcus of the Romans, and the Amenti of the Egyptians.
9. See Life beyond death: evidence for survival, part 2.
10. A New Science of Life, Paladin, 1987, p. 31.
11. A New Science of Life, pp. 35-6.
12. See Rupert Sheldrake: a theosophical appraisal.
13. The Dialogues of G. de Purucker, 3:74; Blavatsky Collected Writings, 12:366.
14. Blavatsky Collected Writings, 12:368, 370-1.
15. Blavatsky Collected Writings, 12:415-6.
16. The Dialogues of G. de Purucker, 3:78-9.
17. Fountain-Source of Occultism, 550.
Materialism affirms the ontological primacy of inert matter over mind and consciousness. Biology and psychology are ultimately reduced to physics and chemistry, while parapsychology tends to be discounted altogether. GdeP writes:
If theosophy has one natural enemy against which it has fought and will always fight it is the materialistic view of life, the view that nothing exists except dead unconscious matter, and that the phenomena of life and thought and consciousness spring from it. This is not merely unnatural and therefore impossible; it is absurd as a hypothesis.[1]
Idealism asserts that reality exists essentially as spirit or consciousness, which gives rise to matter. Subjective idealism goes as far as to say that the material universe exists only in our minds. GdeP says that theosophy is not the idealism of Spinoza (1632-77), Berkely (1685-1753), Kant (1724-1804), or Schopenhauer (1788-1860), but is closer to the philosophy of Leibniz (1646-1716) and Schelling (1775-1856), who taught a form of objective idealism.[2]
HPB writes:
We know of no eastern philosophy that teaches that ‘matter originated out of Spirit.’ Matter is as eternal and indestructible as Spirit and one cannot be made cognizant to our senses without the other – even to our, the highest, spiritual sense. Spirit per se is a non-entity and non-existence.[3]
Esoteric philosophy, teaching an objective Idealism – though it regards the objective Universe and all in it as Maya, temporary illusion – draws a practical distinction between collective illusion, Mahamaya, from the purely metaphysical stand-point, and the objective relations in it between various conscious Egos so long as this illusion lasts.[4]
GdeP states:
Theosophy is not an absolute idealism; it does not teach that the external universe is absolutely nonexistent and that all external phenomena merely exist in the mind. ... [It is] objective idealism because it recognizes the external object as having existence ...[5]
[W]e do not deny the transitory objective reality of entities and things, [which are] the transitory and passing self-expressions of the monadic essence existing in such or other phases of the monad’s eternal pilgrimage.[6]
[T]he universe and all its manifestations and works are ‘real’ for those involved in it; but are māyā when contrasted with the utter and unlimited Reality from which the universe originally sprang forth as a cosmic monad, and into which, aeons hence, it will again return.[7]
Theosophy may sound more materialistic than materialism itself in some respects, since it teaches that thoughts, souls and spirit are all substantial. And KH says, ‘we believe in matter alone’, but then adds: ‘in MATTER as visible nature and matter in its invisibility as the invisible omnipresent omnipotent Proteus with its unceasing motion which is its life’.[8] The theosophical concept of matter differs from the standard materialist conception in the following fundamental ways.
Firstly, there is an infinite spectrum of grades of matter, both finer and grosser than our own tangible, physical matter, of whose properties physical science is completely ignorant. Spirit is etherealized matter, or rather matter is concreted spirit.
Secondly, all matter is both alive and conscious to some degree:
... Occultism does not accept anything inorganic in the Kosmos. The expression employed by Science, ‘inorganic substance,’ means simply that the latent life slumbering in the molecules of so-called ‘inert matter’ is incognizable. ALL IS LIFE, and every atom of even mineral dust is a LIFE, though beyond our comprehension and perception, because it is outside the range of the laws known to those who reject Occultism.[9]
[Theosophists] recognise a distinct vital principle [prana, chi/qi] independent of the organism – material, of course, as physical force cannot be divorced from matter, but of a substance existing in a state unknown to Science. Life for them is something more than mere interactions of molecules and atoms.[10]
Everything in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is CONSCIOUS: i.e., endowed with a consciousness of its own kind and on its own plane of perception. We men must remember that because we do not perceive any signs – which we can recognise – of consciousness, say, in stones, we have no right to say that no consciousness exists there. There is no such thing as either ‘dead’ or ‘blind’ matter, as there is no ‘Blind’ or ‘Unconscious’ Law.[11]
Thirdly, all matter is illusion, in the sense that we do not see it as it really is, and all material things are subject to change and eventual dissolution. Subatomic particles, are condensed vortices of more ethereal energy-substance, and the material objects we see around us are composed almost entirely of ‘empty space’, with the illusion of solidity being produced by the dizzying speed of the electrons orbiting each atomic nucleus. If all the empty space were removed from every living human on earth and their atoms compacted into one lump, the entire human race would fit in the volume of a sugar cube.
Paradoxically, parabrahman – the abstract totality of all that exists – is described in theosophy as ‘the only Reality’, while all the endless multitudes of finite, transitory, evolving entities that compose it at any given moment are labelled ‘maya’[12] – though the degree of illusion varies according to their relative degree of ethereality and spirituality. GdeP states:
In the consciousness of beings of dhyāni-chohanic grade human evolution here on earth is a pure māyā, and in the consciousness of still more sublime entities, as far beyond the dhyāni-chohans as they are beyond us, even the dhyāni-chohanic evolution is a pure māyā.[13]
In other words, illusion (maya) and reality are relative terms:
Illusion is everything which pertains to the phenomenal world of material existence. Reality – and reality itself is a relative thing – is everything which pertains to the spiritual world. It is the root of this material world. But as that spiritual world – the reality of any illusory world – is itself one of a host of worlds, some still more sublime, even that spiritual world is illusory to the reality of that still higher world.[14]
Dualists argue that consciousness and matter are independent but complementary aspects of reality. They regard mind/consciousness either as a property of matter, but one that cannot be reduced to the activity of matter, or as a type of substance distinct from physical matter.
Theosophy agrees that mind and physical matter are different types of substance, but this is only a relative duality because both are manifestations of the underlying consciousness-substance. If mind were absolutely different from matter, it would not be able to interact with and influence matter. In other words, every material form is not merely conscious, alive and substantial, but is composed of consciousness-life-substance. This metaphysical expression is designed to highlight the ultimate monistic unity of all existence.
If we adopt the occult concept of matter, and expand the meaning of ‘materialism’ accordingly, the dichotomy between materialism and idealism essentially disappears. Hence occult philosophy can be called not only objective idealism, but also transcendental materialism,[15] but this is not materialism in the normally accepted sense of the word.
HPB draws a distinction between ‘physico-materialism’ and ‘spirito-’ or ‘metaphysico-materialism’. She states:
In one sense every Buddhist as well as every Occultist and even most of the educated Spiritualists, are, strictly speaking, materialists. ... If [spirit] is something – it must be material, otherwise it is but a pure abstraction, a no-thing.[16]
Consciousness-substance is the fundamental, primordial ‘stuff’ of the universe, the ultimate, inexplicable mystery. Several prominent scientists in the early 20th century recognized that consciousness is not a by-product of matter.
James Jeans, for instance, said: ‘I incline to the idealistic theory that consciousness is fundamental, and that the material universe is derived from consciousness, not consciousness from the material universe.’ Max Planck, too, stated that he regarded consciousness as fundamental, and matter as derived from consciousness: ‘We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.’[17]
Astronomer Arthur Eddington referred to the basic stuff of the world as ‘mind-stuff’. This echoes the view of the ancients, who called essential matter by the name of mind. But as GdeP points out, the ancient philosophers were referring to the cosmic soul, while the cutting-edge scientists of his day were referring to nothing higher than ethereal substance – one or two removes beyond the physical sphere.[18]
In the late 20th century, physicist David Bohm postulated that behind the visible, tangible world, or ‘explicate order’, there lay an ‘implicate order’ of undivided wholeness, which could also be called spirit or consciousness. He added: ‘The separation of the two – matter and spirit – is an abstraction. The ground is always one.’[19]
Reference has already been made to the paradox that consciousness is both more dense and compact than the densest form of matter with which we are acquainted, and yet at the same time far more tenuous and ethereal. An infinitesimal particle of ‘pure’ consciousness is an abstraction. The atoms of consciousness (or monads) to be found in any particular hierarchy are indivisible only from the standpoint of that hierarchy. If they were absolutely indivisible and homogeneous, it would be impossible for anything to be unfolded from them, and there would be no evolution.
Consciousness is therefore both universal and particular. From primordial, homogeneous consciousness-substance, the fundamental essence, issues forth all the diversity and multiplicity of manifest reality through a process of progressive differentiation. The unity in question is brahman in a relative sense, or parabrahman in an absolute, abstract sense. When a period of evolutionary activity draws to a close, multiplicity is absorbed and reintegrated into the original, (relatively) homogeneous unity.
If a ray of white light is passed through a transparent glass prism, it disperses into the seven colours of the visible spectrum. If it is passed through another, suitably positioned prism, the colours recombine to form white light. Science cannot explain this mystery. All it can do is measure the exact frequencies associated with each colour. This phenomenon shows how an integrated state (white light) can contain within it potentially differentiated states, which after manifesting can revert to the original integrated state.
This is an excellent illustration of how the One (the absolute) becomes the Many (the manifested universe) while, in essence, remaining eternally the same. As Krishna says in the sacred Hindu text, the Bhagavad-Gita: ‘I establish all this universe with a portion of myself, and yet remain separate.’[20] At the end of each cycle of manifestation the many rebecome, or are reabsorbed into, the One. As GdeP points out, a monad does not literally descend into matter, and the One does not literally become the many, but remains eternally itself – the supreme self or paramatman of the many that flow forth from it.[21]
Notes
1. Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy, 65-6.
2. Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy, 34, 135-6.
3. Blavatsky Collected Writings, 4:297.
4. The Secret Doctrine, 1:631.
5. Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy, 34.
6. Hierarchical constitution of nature, part 2.
7. Fountain-Source of Occultism, 104.
8. The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, #10, 56.
9. The Secret Doctrine, 1:248-9. See Life on other worlds.
10. The Secret Doctrine, 1:603.
11. The Secret Doctrine, 1:274.
12. Fountain-Source of Occultism, 86. GdeP: ‘it is clear that all the multifarious varieties which surround us are not absolutely nonexistent, nor are they in an absolute sense different and separate from the Reality behind. If this were so, we should be at once inventing an inexplicable duality between the fundamental Reality and the manifested illusion ...’ (Fountain-Source of Occultism, 96).
13. Fountain-Source of Occultism, 103.
14. The Dialogues of G. de Purucker, 2:46.
15. Sven Eek (comp.), Damodar and the Pioneers of the Theosophical Movement, TPH, 1978, p. 437; A.P. Sinnett, Esoteric Buddhism, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1889, p. 225; Blavatsky Collected Writings, 10:185.
HPB also uses ‘transcendental materialism’ in a negative sense: ‘Theosophy ... is the true and unalloyed Spiritualism, while the modern scheme of that name is, as now practised by the masses, simply transcendental materialism’ (The Key to Theosophy, 33). She is referring here to spiritualists’ mistaken belief that the astral entities communicated with by mediums, and sometimes even materialized by them in the séance room, are the genuine spirits of the dead.
16. Blavatsky Collected Writings, 4:307fn.
17. Quoted in The Esoteric Tradition, 3rd ed., 206.
18. The Esoteric Tradition, 2nd ed., 410.
19. R. Weber, Dialogues with Scientists and Sages: The search for unity, Arkana, 1990, p. 101. See David Bohm and the implicate order.
20. The Dialogues of G. de Purucker, 3:324.
21. Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy, 195.
To highlight the difference between materialistic science and occult science, the three foundation stones of the ancient wisdom, as set out in The Secret Doctrine, are presented below.
The first of the three fundamental propositions speaks of:
An Omnipresent, Eternal, Boundless, and Immutable PRINCIPLE on which all speculation is impossible, since it transcends the power of human conception and could only be dwarfed by any human expression or similitude. ... It is of course devoid of all attributes and is essentially without any relation to manifested, finite Being. It is ‘Be-ness’ rather than Being (in Sanskrit, Sat), and is beyond all thought or speculation.[1]
It is the ONE LIFE, eternal, invisible, yet Omnipresent, without beginning or end, yet periodical in its regular manifestations, between which periods reigns the dark mystery of non-Being; unconscious, yet absolute Consciousness; unrealisable, yet the one self-existing reality; truly, ‘a chaos to the sense, a Kosmos to the reason.’ Its one absolute attribute, which is ITSELF, eternal, ceaseless Motion, is called in esoteric parlance the ‘Great Breath,’ which is the perpetual motion of the universe, in the sense of limitless, ever-present SPACE.[2]
This ‘One homogenous divine SUBSTANCE-PRINCIPLE’[3] is therefore boundless infinitude, the ineffable source of all that is, was, and ever will be. It is infinite life, inscrutable to our finite intelligence. GdeP writes:
Try and form some simple concept of the meaning of the endless and beginningless eternity and of the Boundless, and drop it there: unceasing life, endless activity, never-ending life and consciousness in unceasing motion everywhere. ... The wise ancients never bothered their heads much about any foolish attempt to fathom the Boundless or the limitless Eternal. They recognized the reality of being, and let it go at that, knowing well that an ever-growing knowledge of the universal life was and is all that human intelligence could ever attain to by an ever-expanding consciousness.[4]
The second of the three fundamental propositions affirms:
The Eternity of the Universe in toto as a boundless plane; periodically ‘the playground of numberless Universes incessantly manifesting or disappearing,’ called ‘the manifesting stars,’ and the ‘sparks of Eternity.’ ‘The Eternity of the Pilgrim’ [monad] is like a wink of the Eye of Self-Existence (Book of Dzyan). ‘The appearance and disappearance of Worlds is like a regular tidal ebb of flux and reflux.’ ...
This second assertion of the Secret Doctrine is the absolute universality of that law of periodicity, of flux and reflux, ebb and flow, which physical science has observed and recorded in all departments of nature. An alternation such as that of Day and Night, Life and Death, Sleeping and Waking, is a fact so common, so perfectly universal and without exception, that it is easy to comprehend that in it we see one of the absolutely fundamental laws of the universe.[5]
The third fundamental proposition teaches:
The fundamental identity of all Souls with the Universal Over-Soul, the latter being itself an aspect of the Unknown Root; and the obligatory pilgrimage for every Soul – a spark of the former – through the Cycle of Incarnation (or ‘Necessity’) in accordance with Cyclic and Karmic law, during the whole term.[6]
In other words, we are sparks of the universal spirit, atoms of cosmic consciousness; the universe and all in it constitute one immense, living organism. HPB goes on to say that there is a continuous ladder of life reaching from the elemental kingdoms, through the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms, to the human kingdom, and beyond to the spiritual-divine kingdoms, and that no rung of the ladder can be missed by the evolving monads. As far as the human kingdom is concerned:
The pivotal doctrine of the Esoteric philosophy admits no privileges or special gifts in man, save those won by his own Ego through personal effort and merit throughout a long series of metempsychoses and reincarnations.[7]
Notes
1. The Secret Doctrine, 1:14.
2. The Secret Doctrine, 1:2.
3. The Secret Doctrine, 1:273.
4. Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy, 216.
5. The Secret Doctrine, 1:16-7.
6. The Secret Doctrine, 1:17.
7. The Secret Doctrine, 1:17.
It is absurd to suppose that we shall ever find ‘the answer’ to life, the universe and everything, i.e. an explanation for infinite existence. And this futile quest is in no way facilitated by imposing artificial limitations on reality, or by trying to reduce everything to ‘elementary’ and ‘fundamental’ component parts. There are actually scientists who are seeking to reduce the whole universe to a single formula, or Lagrangian, which will explain everything. Paul Davies writes:
This belief that all things ultimately flow from the fundamental Lagrangian goes almost unquestioned in the physics community. It has been succinctly expressed by Leon Lederman, director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago: ‘We hope to explain the entire universe in a single, simple formula that you can wear on your T-shirt.’[1]
One thing such a formula would certainly not explain is consciousness – yet ironically everything we know of the universe and even the very idea of a Lagrangian comes to us via consciousness. And even if scientists came up with such a formula, it would not answer the question: Why this particular Lagrangian rather than a different Lagrangian (and corresponding universe)?
Theosophy does not pretend to explain everything. What it offers is an overarching scientific, philosophical and ethical system of thought that reflects the true nature of reality far better than do the narrow dogmas of scientific materialism. Occult science is based on the psychic explorations, observations and experiences of countless generations of adepts:
The Secret Doctrine is the accumulated wisdom of the ages, ... the uninterrupted record covering thousands of generations of seers ... [F]or long ages, the ‘wise men’ of the fifth race ... passed their lives in learning, not teaching ... by checking, testing, and verifying in every department of nature the traditions of old by the independent visions of great adepts; i.e., men who have developed and perfected their physical, mental, psychic, and spiritual organisations to the utmost possible degree.[2]
For thousands of years, one initiate after another, one great hierophant succeeded by other hierophants, has explored and re-explored the invisible universe, the worlds of the interplanetary regions, during long periods when his conscious soul, united to the spiritual soul and to the ALL, free and almost omnipotent, left his body. ...
The mysteries of life as well as of death, of the visible and invisible worlds, have been fathomed and observed by initiated adepts in all epochs and in all nations. They have studied these during the solemn moments of union of their divine monad with the universal Spirit, and they have recorded their experiences. ... A definite science, based on personal observation and experience, corroborated by continuous demonstrations, containing irrefutable proofs, for those who study it, has thus been established.[3]
Every seeker pursuing the spiritual path will eventually become able to verify the teachings of the ageless wisdom tradition for themselves.
Theosophy takes the view that since nothing can come from nothing,[4] the universe must always have existed. The universe must also be infinite, since it is illogical to suppose that space has a boundary somewhere, beyond which is nothingness. Saying that space-consciousness-substance is infinite, eternal and fundamental does not solve the mystery of how or why it exists; it is merely a statement of the obvious.
Consciousness-life-substance is the ultimate unknown, the primeval essence behind the infinite diversity of ever-changing forms that make up the manifest universe. There is an endless spectrum of worlds within worlds, living entities within living entities. HPB writes:
The refusal to admit in the whole Solar system of any other reasonable and intelligent beings on the human plane, than ourselves, is the greatest conceit of our age. All that science has a right to affirm, is that there are no invisible Intelligences living under the same conditions as we do. It cannot deny point-blank the possibility of there being worlds within worlds, under totally different conditions to those that constitute the nature of our world; nor can it deny that there may be a certain limited communication between some of those worlds and our own.[5]
While dismissing the idea of interpenetrating, interacting planes within planes, composed of different grades of energy-substance, modern scientists are happy to indulge in the most ridiculous flights of fancy. For example:
• Space and time can supposedly be combined into an abstract four-dimensional ‘spacetime continuum’, by treating time as a negative dimension of space. Spacetime can allegedly be ‘curved’ by large masses, and magically produce a real force – gravity. It can also expand and contract.[6]
• The universe supposedly exploded into existence out of nothing in a ‘big bang’ 13.8 billion years ago as a result of a random ‘fluctuation’. It began as a ‘singularity’, a point of infinite density, either infinitely small or measuring a billion-trillion-trillionth of a centimetre (10-33 cm), where notions of time and space break down (10-33 cm is known as the Planck length and is supposedly the shortest length possible in nature). Spacetime has supposedly been expanding ever since. We’re told that, if there is enough matter in the universe, spacetime is finite, but has no edges because it curves round upon itself. Otherwise the universe is infinite – even though it originated a finite time ago and expands at a finite speed.[7]
• Most quantum physicists believe that when subatomic particles are not being observed, they dissolve into ‘probability waves’, which somehow ‘collapse’ into a real particle again when the next measurement is made. They also claim that since they cannot identify the causes of subatomic events, the quantum world must be characterized by absolute indeterminism and lawlessness. A further claim is that ‘In the quantum realm, something really can emerge from nothing’.[8]
• According to the standard model of particle physics, fundamental particles are infinitely small. String theorists claim that fundamental particles are really one-dimensional strings, with length but no thickness, and that there are six additional spatial dimensions, which have somehow ‘curled up’ invisibly small, and measure only 10-33 cm. Brane theory (or M-theory) postulates a universe of 11 dimensions, containing zero-dimensional point particles, one-dimensional strings, two-dimensional membranes, three-dimensional ‘blobs’, and higher-dimensional objects, up to and including nine dimensions.[9]
As GdeP observes, ‘The Occidental mind loves abstractions, loves to entify abstractions, to look upon them as concrete realities’. As a result, ‘the mind feels temporarily satisfied with phantasms’ and becomes ‘lost in mazes of unrealities’.[10] That is an accurate description of much of what passes for ‘science’ nowadays.
Theosophy rejects indeterminism and insists that every event has a cause:
It is impossible to conceive anything without a cause; the attempt to do so makes the mind a blank.[11]
[N]othing – whether in the spiritual, psychic, or physical realm of being – [can] come into existence out of nothing. There is no cause in the manifested universe without its adequate effects, whether in space or time; nor can there be an effect without its primal cause, which itself owes its existence to a still higher one …[12]
[T]he operations of nature do not just happen, helter-skelter, but take place only in accordance with law and order. Effect inevitably follows cause, and this chain of causation lasts from eternity to eternity as a concatenation of interlinked events succeeding each other in regular and unbroken serial order.[13]
According to theosophy, every plane of existence is three-dimensional; or to put it more precisely, bodies and entities on any plane have extension in three dimensions only. As HPB says, ‘popular common sense justly rebels against the idea that under any condition of things there can be more than three of such dimensions as length, breadth, and thickness’.[14] Similarly, GdeP writes:
the tendency so noticeable among certain philosophical and scientific writers of the West to speak of more than three ‘dimensions’ of Space is simply a misuse of terms, for ‘dimension’ means mensuration, or measuring, and it is only concrete things which can be measured. ... As long as manifested Space exists, there will be the three well-known dimensions and no others, using here the word ‘dimension’ in its proper sense of the mensuration of manifested entities or bodies.[15]
Space can have no dimensions. Matter can have three dimensions only, because ... when you express the metes and bounds of manifested substance by length, and breadth, and depth, you have covered the entire field it presents.[16]
Because the universe is one vast organism, ensouled by one universal life, the principle of analogy – as above, so below – provides a powerful key to unlocking the mysteries of nature:
Believing in a spiritual and invisible universe, we cannot conceive of it in any other way than as completely dovetailing and corresponding with the material, objective universe, for logic and observation alike teach us that the latter is the outcome and visible manifestation of the former, and that the laws governing both are immutable.[17]
[N]ature is built upon a common plan in all its stages from the highest to the lowest, and ... therefore follows similar lines of action everywhere, in the great as in the small.[18]
In response to ultimate questions about the origin, nature and destiny of man and the universe, materialists will invoke matter-energy, fields, laws of nature, and chance. Occultists will refer to infinite and eternal consciousness-life-substance, hierarchies within hierarchies, cyclic evolution, reembodiment, karma, and universal mind. But if we take the final step and ask why even these things exist, both materialists and occultists can only say: that’s just the way things are. That is the ultimate answer – not a mathematical formula. Somewhere we have to stop and say that ultimate origins are forever beyond our comprehension and therefore unknowable.
Contrasting physical science and occult science, HPB says:
The duty of the Occultist lies with the Soul and Spirit of Cosmic Space, not merely with its illusive appearance and behaviour. That of official physical science is to analyze and study its shell – the Ultima Thule of the Universe and man, in the opinion of Materialism.[19]
Materialists stop at the frontiers of the physical world, where they lose themselves in mathematical abstractions. Christian theology goes a step further: ‘below’ earth is hell, ruled by the Devil, and ‘above’ it is heaven, ruled by God. But as GdeP puts it: ‘To stop at any point and call it God would simply be creating a deity – a God man-made, truly!’[20] The Christian scheme is a very faint and distorted echo of the ancient wisdom, which teaches that there are planes within planes, and that ‘The Universe is worked and guided from within outwards’.[21]
There are hierarchies of planes and hierarchies of beings, of many degrees of consciousness and power. Everything in the universe is alive, driven by will, governed by intelligence, and spiritually purposive. And just as space-life-consciousness is boundless, so is evolution: ‘The Secret Doctrine teaches the progressive development of everything, worlds as well as atoms; and this stupendous development has neither conceivable beginning nor imaginable end.’[22] Thus there are no absolute beginnings and ends, only relative ones. Evolution stretches from eternity to eternity.
Our finite minds cannot fathom infinitude. We can only try to understand our place and purpose within it, and strive to fulfil our evolutionary destiny. As we evolve through the aeons, our understanding grows, but absolute knowledge will always be beyond our grasp. When we attain the summit of our present hierarchy, new expanses of experience will open up before us, and we will repeat the evolutionary journey from un-self-conscious god-spark to self-conscious god, again and again.
In HPB’s words:
Whatever plane our consciousness may be acting in, both we and the things belonging to that plane are, for the time being, our only realities. As we rise in the scale of development we perceive that during the stages through which we have passed we mistook shadows for realities, and the upward progress of the Ego is a series of progressive awakenings, each advance bringing with it the idea that now, at last, we have reached ‘reality’; but only when we shall have reached absolute Consciousness, and blended our own with it, shall we be free from the delusions produced by Maya.[23]
GdeP puts it this way:
In the far distant ages of the future, at the end of the seventh round of our present planetary chain, all those who will then have successfully made the goal will have become dhyāni-chohans. Of course, this culmination of human greatness at the end of the seventh round is not the end of all possible evolution for human monads, for future ages will carry the evolving monads to still greater heights of spiritual and intellectual achievement. Even then, there will be māyā, but māyā on a far more spiritual plane, which in turn will be transcended as the monads advance ever higher and higher on their everlasting pilgrimage. Thus it is that the different oceans of māyā, each being a series of cosmic planes, will be transcended one after the other, in the endless journey towards that ever unattainable Reality which we call Parabrahman.[24]
Notes
1. The Cosmic Blueprint, Unwin Paperbacks, 1989, p. 13.
2. The Secret Doctrine, 1:272.
3. Blavatsky Collected Writings, 5:50-1. KH: ‘By most of your gold worshipping countrymen our facts and theorems would be denominated fancy-flights, the dreams of madmen’ (The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, #54, 305).
4. GdeP: ‘Nothing is nothing, and from nothing nothing can come, because it is nothing. It is a word, a fantasy …’ (The Esoteric Tradition, 3rd ed., 50). HPB: ‘the Occult teaching says, “Nothing is created, but is only transformed. Nothing can manifest itself in the universe – from a globe down to a vague, rapid thought – that was not in the universe already; everything on the subjective plane is an eternal IS; as everything on the objective plane is an ever becoming – because transitory” ’ (The Secret Doctrine, 1:570).
5. The Secret Doctrine, 1:133.
6. See Space, time and relativity, Gravity and antigravity. GdeP: ‘[Einstein's] ideas with regard to the nature of gravitation as being a warping or distortion of space in the proximity of material bodies seem to be a mathematical pipe-dream' (The Esoteric Tradition, 3rd ed., 465; 2nd ed., 861fn).
7. See Trends in cosmology: beyond the big bang. GdeP called the theory of an expanding universe or expanding space ‘purely imaginary’, ‘a scientific fairly-tale’, and ‘all wrong’ (Esoteric Teachings, 3:28-30; Fountain-Source of Occultism, 80-1; The Esoteric Tradition, 2nd ed., 435-8fn; 3rd ed., 218-9).
8. bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/something-from-nothing.
9. See The farce of modern physics.
10. The Dialogues of G. de Purucker, 3:324; Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy, 476.
11. The Secret Doctrine, 1:44.
12. The Secret Doctrine, 1:569.
13. The Esoteric Tradition, 3rd ed., 352.
14. The Secret Doctrine, 1:252.
15. Esoteric Teachings, 3:30-1.
16. Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy, 478.
17. Blavatsky Collected Writings, 1:296-7.
19. The Secret Doctrine, 1:589. See Physical vs. occult science.
20. Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy, 136.
21. The Secret Doctrine, 1:274.
22. The Secret Doctrine, 1:43. See Cyclic evolution.
23. The Secret Doctrine, 1:40.
24. Fountain-Source of Occultism, 107.
1. Energy and matter, spirit and substance, consciousness and its vehicles, are essentially one. Matter is crystallized consciousness.
2. The universe is embodied consciousness (or rather consciousnesses), existing in infinitely varying degrees of substantiality and ethereality.
3. The infinite continuum of spirit and matter is broken up into hierarchies of 7, 10 or 12 interpenetrating spheres or planes.
4. Everything is a living, conscious, substantial entity, at a particular stage of its cyclical awakening.
5. Everything is composite – it lives its life within a greater entity and is composed of innumerable lesser entities.
6. Everything evolves by unfolding the latent powers and faculties locked up within.
7. Everything is relative – even the absolute.
H.P. Blavatsky
H.P. Blavatsky Collected Writings, Theosophical Publishing House (TPH), 1950-91
The Key to Theosophy, Theosophical University Press (TUP), 1972 (1889)
The Secret Doctrine, TUP, 1977 (1888)
Secret Doctrine Commentary: Stanzas I-IV, TUP, 1994 (1890-91)
The Theosophical Glossary, Theosophical Publishing Society, 1892
W.Q. Judge
Echoes of the Orient, TUP, 2nd ed., 2009-11
Mahatmas
T.A. Barker (comp.), The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, TUP, 2nd rev. ed., 2021
G. de Purucker
A.L. Conger (ed.), The Dialogues of G. de Purucker, TUP, 2nd ed., 1997
Esoteric Teachings, Point Loma Publications, 1987
The Esoteric Tradition, TUP, 2nd ed., 1973
The Esoteric Tradition, TUP, 3rd ed., 2011
Fountain-Source of Occultism, TUP, 1974
Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy, TUP, 2nd ed., 1979
Hierarchical constitution of nature, 1930
Man in Evolution, TUP, 2nd ed., 1977
Occult Glossary, TUP, 2nd ed., 1996
Questions We All Ask, TUP, 1929-30
Studies in Occult Philosophy, TUP, 1973
October 1989. June 2023.
The mahatmas on spirit, matter, God
Sevenfold constitution of nature and man
The infinite divisibility of matter
Trends in cosmology: beyond the big bang
Mass psychosis and the power of thought