© 1996 by Eldon B. Tucker. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that new copies bear this notice and the full citation.

All rights reserved. Published 1996.

Published in the United States of America

99 98 97 96 5 4 3 2 1

-oOo-

(This book is based upon the original edition, first published in 1932 by Rider & Co., London, and reprinted in 1947 by Theosophical University Press, Covina, California. Terminology has been standardized, footnotes merged into the text, and illustrations redone for the electronic edition. To aid in citations, the end of pages in the print edition are denoted by page numbers in braces. [57], for instance, denotes the end of page 57 in the original edition.)

A print copy of the first edition, with supplemental chapters, may be ordered from Point Loma Publications, P.O. Box 6507, San Diego CA 92166, USA, (619)222-9609 (voice/fax) for $20 (US funds) prepaid. (590 pages, ISBN 0-913004-70-7 [cloth])

The second edition of the book may be ordered from Theosophical University Press, Post Office Box C, Pasadena CA 91109 (818)798-3378 (voice), (818)798-4749 (fax), tupress@aol.com, for $20 (US funds) plus $2 shipping & handling. (669 pages, ISBN 0-911500-63-4 [cloth], 0-911500-64-2 [paper]).

Note that prices are as of December, 1996, and are subject to change without notice.

Preface

Dr. de Purucker, the present Leader of The Theosophical Society, which has its International Headquarters at Point Loma, California, delivered the lectures contained in this volume to members of the Esoteric Section during the years 1924-27. They were given under the direction of Katherine Tingley, then Leader of The Theosophical Society, in fulfillment of a long cherished plan to give to the world a work which would serve not only as a commentary upon The Secret Doctrine of H.P. Blavatsky, but at the same time would be the means of giving out certain esoteric keys, which would enable students to unlock for themselves the treasure of knowledge therein contained. Many are the educated men and women who have been forced to lay aside The Secret Doctrine as too abstruse and difficult, because they had no instruction and therefore no understanding of the fundamental conceptions upon which the Esoteric Philosophy is based.

To those who hunger for truth and spiritual knowledge, and who bring an open mind to the study of this book, it is not too much to say that in asking they will receive, and in seeking they will find.

The original stenographic report of these lectures was corrected by the Author, but he has not had the time to read the proofs, the responsibility for which he left to the Editor. The book owes much to the collaboration of Dr. J.H. Fussell who, in addition to doing some of the preliminary work of preparing the manuscript for publication, undertook the selection of the quotations which appear at the head of each chapter. It should be mentioned that all references to The Secret Doctrine are to the original Edition (1888) of that work.

A certain amount of criticism was aroused among students of Theosophy by the announcement that Dr. de Purucker had given in these pages teaching which is not contained in the works of H.P. Blavatsky. Moreover, these critics appear to base their objections upon isolated quotations from Madame Blavatsky, in an endeavor to show that it is impossible at this time that further genuine teaching can be given, and ipso facto anything that is given must be false. But students will recognize that anything in the nature of dogmatism is contrary to the spirit of the Esoteric Philosophy, and for that reason should be avoided. Inevitable [v] child of crystallized thought, it begins its lethal work by laying a shadow on the mind, and ends by producing a sect.

The tendency of the dogmatist is to read only those parts of the teaching which suit his own peculiar purpose, and the rest of the Teacher's writings are pushed into the background and thus prevented from doing their beneficent work. Shall we not see for ourselves how H.P. Blavatsky regarded the problem? In her Five Messages to the American Theosophists, she wrote:

Orthodoxy in Theosophy is a thing neither possible nor desirable. It is diversity of opinion, within certain limits, that keeps the Theosophical Society a living and a healthy body, its many other ugly features notwithstanding. Were it not, also, for the existence of a large amount of uncertainty in the minds of students of Theosophy, such healthy divergence would be impossible, and the Society would degenerate into a sect, in which a narrow and stereotyped creed would take the place of the living and breathing spirit of Truth and an ever-growing Knowledge.

According as people are prepared to receive it, so will new Theosophical teaching be given. But no more will be given than the world, on its present level of spirituality, can profit by. It depends on the spread of Theosophy - the assimilation of what has been already given - how much more will be revealed and how soon.

Again in the Introductory to The Secret Doctrine she wrote:

In Century the Twentieth some disciple more informed, and far better fitted, may be sent by the Masters of Wisdom to give final and irrefutable proofs that there exists a Science called Gupta-Vidya; and that, like the once-mysterious sources of the Nile, the source of all religions and philosophies now known to the world has been for many ages forgotten and lost to men, but is at last found.

These statements are quite enough to show that Madame Blavatsky never meant it to be understood that under no circumstances would additional teaching be given. On the contrary she clearly indicated that although the two volumes of The Secret Doctrine contained all that could be given to the world in the nineteenth century, the giving of further teaching would depend necessarily upon the readiness of people to receive it.

So far from claiming that her writings contain the whole of Theosophy she pointed out in her Introductory to The Secret Doctrine that she had raised "but a small corner of the dark veil" and "after long millenniums of silence and secrecy" had given but an "outline of a few fundamental truths ¼ because that which must remain unsaid could not be contained in a hundred such volumes". The Esoteric Doctrine in its totality has always existed in the keeping of The Adepts in The Sacred [vi] Science, and it is therefore a complete system of thought which does not evolve or change. But the whole of it never has and never will be given out publicly, and therefore since from time to time additional teaching is given, this does constitute for the public a further unfolding or evolution of the age-old Doctrine. In other words Theosophy - the Wisdom of the Gods - is eternal in Nature, but our understanding of it grows, and as "those who have ears to hear" become fit and ready to receive more teaching, more will be given. This fact is dearly brought out also by William Q. Judge:

If any persons regard H.P.B.'s writings as the infallible oracles of Theosophy, they go directly against her own words and the works themselves; they must be people who do not indulge in original thinking and cannot make much impression on the times.

As for the Theosophical Society, the moment it makes a hard and fast definition of Theosophy it will mark the first hour of its decay.

Inasmuch as Theosophy is the whole body of truth about man and nature, either known now or hereafter to be discovered, it has the "power of growth, progress and advancement," since every new truth makes it clearer. But among the truths will not be reckoned at any time the definitions, dogmas, creeds or beliefs laid down by man.

None the less it is a fact, paradoxical though it may seem to some, that no teaching calling itself Theosophical will bear the test of a thoroughly impartial investigation, unless it is consistent with the teaching of H.P. Blavatsky; and this precisely because her writings bear the stamp of consistency with the recorded teachings of all the great Sages and Seers of Antiquity.

Herein lies the strength of Dr. de Purucker, not only in this work but in his other writings. True to the lines laid down by Madame Blavatsky, he makes no appeal to dogmatic authority, but claims his right to an impartial hearing on the ground that his teaching "closely adheres to Nature, and follows the laws of uniformity and analogy". "Proof," he defines, "as the preponderance of evidence bringing conviction to the mind," and goes on to show that if Knowledge is to grow in us then it is necessary to check any tendency to crystallization of thought, i.e., to limit the understanding by closing the doors of the mind to further light upon any particular subject of study. The truth is that in the search for the Great Knowledge, progress is seen to be as endless as boundless Infinitude - inwards and upwards forever - towards the Unutterable. Herein perhaps also is the secret of humility.

The meaning of any part of this book is not to be understood by merely dipping into it here and there. A particular doctrine is touched upon in one chapter, outlined in another, then dealt [vii] with in fuller detail until in some later chapter the key thought to the whole subject is revealed if the preceding ideas have been grasped. Thus the mind of the reader is opened gradually to receive teaching which becomes ever deeper with each succeeding chapter, unfolding before the inner eye a vision of the age-old Path that leads at last from darkness into Light.

- A. Trevor Barker

70 Queen's Gate,

London, S.W. 7,

December 28, 1931 [viii]

Introduction

We sometimes lock ourselves in little boxes of opinion, and will not be free for fear. But still Sun shines, winds blow, waves "boom and blanche on the precipices"; and the winds and Sun of the spirit, the waves of time. While some are busy proving that no Teacher can come, one has appeared among us who Teaches.

The spirit will not be confined by rules that the petty mind dictates to it, and we can impose no Thou shalt nots upon inspiration. There are certain marks by which we may know what comes from the heights: a light to illumine life and the hidden things; a sublimity to enlarge the Soul. Do you not see that what is ever-living cannot be cribbed and cabined within what was spoken in this year or that, even by Speakers with Authority; because words are finite things: of value as carriers of the messages of the Spirit; harmful and tyrannous when we bow our souls to them, and would make their finiteness an absolute?

H.P. Blavatsky came not to shackle us with new creeds, but to bring greatness and freedom to our minds. She pointed the way to sublimity of life and thought: her keynote is sublimity. She never said, there is a place where evolution stops, or where knowledge stops. Because some have given out ridiculousness in place of her sublime, it does not mean that the great Lodge and its powers and wisdom are exhausted, or that there must be no advance in knowledge.

As I understand the book, it makes this appeal: Turn your eyes to the mountaintops of being; feed your souls on the grandeur of Truth. Who has H.P. Blavatsky as a living power in his thought is not coffined in a creed, but judges each new idea that comes to him by its power to illumine life.

- Kenneth Morris

Llwynypia, November 22, 1931 [ix]

Chapter I

THE SELF: MAN'S INMOST LINK WITH THE UNUTTERABLE: THE ESOTERIC PHILOSOPHY: TAUGHT IN ALL THE ANCIENT RELIGIONS.

¼ neither the collective Host (Demiurges), nor any of the working powers individually, are proper subjects for divine honors or worship. All are entitled to the grateful reverence of Humanity, however, and man ought to be ever striving to help the divine evolution of Ideas, by becoming to the best of his ability a coworker with nature in the cyclic task. The ever unknowable and incognizable Karana alone, the Causeless Cause of all causes, should have its shrine and altar on the holy and ever untrodden ground of our heart - invisible, intangible, unmentioned, save through "the still small voice" of our spiritual consciousness. Those who worship before it ought to do so in the silence and the sanctified solitude of their Souls, making their spirit the sole mediator between them and the Universal Spirit, their good actions the only priests, and their sinful intentions the only visible and objective sacrificial victims to the Presence.

- Secret Doctrine, I, 280

Fellow-Students of the Ancient Wisdom:

We stand on holy ground. The Leader's call seems like the clarion voice of the Law, of the Ancient Wisdom, which, echoing down the ages, rings in our hearts at a moment like this, and seems to tell us in accents that we may interpret if we have the heart and the soul so to do: "Fideles, sursum corda: Up hearts, ye faithful ones!" And may we not answer in the same spirit which the Leader has shown, has manifested to us this evening: "Yea, verily, in the name of Truth, we lift our hearts to the shining god within each one of us"?

We are here this evening in the presence of the agent and the representative of the Exalted Men who form the Guardian Body of the Esoteric Philosophy. We must feel called. The hour is a solemn one. It is time for us to rise above personality and, face to face with ourselves, search our hearts, and endeavor so to speak the words which we have learned that, as the Teacher has told us, others who have had less chance than ourselves may in their turn pass on these truths of the inner life.

In our last two meetings we studied the Three Fundamental [1] Postulates or Principles in H.P. Blavatsky's wonderful work, The Secret Doctrine! remember in particular the Teacher's words in comment after the meeting had ended. They struck me as very beautiful, profoundly suggestive. She said:

Thinking towards the unthinkable is a wonderful, spiritualizing force; one cannot think toward it without a disposition either to think more or feel more - without opening up the inner consciousness of man. And when that inner consciousness is awakened, the soul finds itself closer to the infinite laws, closer to THAT, or that Great Center that no words can express.

We have endeavored to reach two planes, which we have to compare, to reach, by the appeal to the Inmost within ourselves. We are taught that there exists in man a link with the Unutterable, a cord, a communication, that extends from It to the inner consciousness; and that link - such is the teaching as it has come down to us - is the very Heart of Being. It arises in that super-sensory Principle, that Unutterable Mystery which H.P. Blavatsky defines in the first of the Three Fundamental Propositions as above human mind. Becoming one with that link, we can transcend the powers of ordinary human intellect, and reach (even if it be by striving out, upward, towards) that Unutterable, which is - though it is beyond human power to express it in words, or beyond human thought - which is, we know, the Concealed of the Concealed, the Life of Life, Truth of Truth, the ALL.

Here is the thought, it seems to me, which illustrates so well the Teacher's words; striving toward this inwards, towards the Inmost, we can attain to some conception, if not understanding, of the Infinite Principle of all that is. From It, in the course of endless duration, there spring into manifestation - so the teaching runs - at the end of the great Universal or Cosmic Pralaya, the beginnings of things. These beginnings eventuate in the forms of life and being that H.P. Blavatsky describes in the Second and Third Fundamental Propositions.

This inmost link with the Unutterable was called in ancient India by the term SELF, which has been often mistranslated 'Soul'. The Sanskrit word is Atman, and applies, in psychology, to the human entity. The upper end of the link, so to speak, to use human terms, was called Paramatman, or the 'Self Beyond', the permanent SELF - words which describe neatly and clearly to those who have studied this wonderful philosophy, somewhat of the nature and essence of the thing which man is, and the source from which, in that beginningless and endless duration, he sprang. Child of earth and child of heaven, he contains both in himself.

We pass now from considering the First Proposition to the [2] Second and the Third. And in order that we may understand what we mean when we use certain words, it will be useful to illustrate our usages of such words. Let us take up the very interesting and remarkably well translated book entitled The Song Celestial, the work of Sir Edwin Arnold. It is a translation into English verse of the Bhagavad-Gita. That work is an episode or an interlude in the Mahabharata, the greater of the two great Hindu epics. It is found in the sixth book of the Mahabharata, i.e., the 'Great Bharata'; and in the style of the Hindu writings it comprises a dissertation on religious, philosophical, and mystical subjects. It has been several times translated, more or less successfully. Possibly the best has been that of our second Teacher, William Quan Judge. His work is a recension, rather, of a translation by Wilkins, modified by Cockburn, and in turn corrected, according to the Esoteric Philosophy, by Mr. Judge. Sir Edwin's Song Celestial, in book the second, has the following:

¼ The soul which is not moved,

The soul that with a strong and constant calm

Takes sorrow and takes joy indifferently,

Lives in the life undying! That which is

Can never cease to be; that which is not

Will not exist. To see this truth of both

Is theirs who part essence from accident,

Substance from shadow. Indestructible,

Learn thou! the Life is, spreading life through all;

It cannot anywhere, by any means,

Be any wise diminished, stayed, or changed.

But for these fleeting frames which it informs

With spirit deathless, endless, infinite,

They perish ¼

Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall cease to be never;

Never was time it was not, End and Beginning are dreams!

Birthless and deathless and changeless remaineth the spirit forever;

Death hath not touched it at all, dead though the house of it seems!

Now these words are exquisitely beautiful. They nevertheless contain a mistranslation, a misrendering of the text of this wonderful little work. In the first place, Sir Edwin translates the Sanskrit word TAT, which we explained in our last study, first by the word soul and next by the word spirit. Of course, analogically, it has a reference to the Soul and the Spirit of Man; but the Sanskrit of it does not point particularly to the Soul of Man. I will read a translation in prose, of these same verses, made with no attempt at poetic thought, no attempt to use beautiful language, but simply to express the thought:

The man whom these do not lead astray, O Bull among men! who is the same in pain and pleasure, and of steady soul, he partakes of immortality. [3]

There is no existence for the unreal; there is no non-existence for the Real. Moreover, the ultimate characteristic of both these is seen by those who perceive true principles.

Know THAT to be indestructible by which this whole Universe was woven.

The Sanskrit word for That is TAT; and by that word the Vedic Sages described this Unutterable Principle, from which all sprang. The figure is that of the weaving of a web.

The destruction of this Imperishable, none is able to bring about.

These mortal bodies are said to be of the embodied Eternal, Indestructible, Immeasurable One ¼

He who knows It as the slayer, and he who thinks It to be the slain: both of them understand not. It slays not, nor is it slain.

It is not born, nor does it ever die; It was not produced, nor shall it ever be produced.

It is unborn, constant, everlasting, primeval. It is unhurt when the body is slain.

The application that the writer in the Bhagavad-Gita makes, is to the link which we have spoken of, the deathless, undying principle within us; and he describes it by the word THAT, and contrasts it with the manifested Universe, which, following the Ancient Teachings of India, was invariably spoken of as THIS: the Sanskrit word is IDAM.

The Sages of Olden Times left on record the inner teaching of the religions of the peoples among whom they lived. This inner teaching was the Esoteric Philosophy, the Theosophy of the period. In Hindustan this Theosophy is found in the Upanishads, a part of the Vedic literary cycle. The word itself implies 'Secret Doctrine' or 'Secret Teachings'. From the Upanishads and from other parts of the wonderful Vedic literature, the ancient sages of India produced what is called today the Vedanta - a compound Sanskrit word meaning 'the End (or Completion) of the Veda' - that is to say, instruction in the final and most perfect exposition of the meaning of the Vedic tenets.

In Ancient Greece there were various Schools and various Mysteries; and the Theosophy of Ancient Greece was held very secret; it was taught in the Mysteries and it was taught by different teachers to select bodies of their disciples. One of such great teachers was Pythagoras; another was Plato; and this Theosophy was more or less clearly outlined and embodied, after the fall of the so-called Pagan religions, in what is today called the Neo-Platonic philosophy. It represents actually the inner teachings of Pythagoras, Plato, and the inner sense of those mystical doctrines which passed current in Greece under the name of the Orphic poems.

Of the Theosophy of Egypt we have but scanty remains [4] such as exist in what is called 'The Book of the Dead'. Of the Theosophy of ancient America, of the Inca, the Mayan, empires we have next to nothing. The Theosophy of ancient Europe has passed away. All that remains to us is a certain number of mystical writings such as the Scandinavian Edda, and the Germanic books, which are represented, for instance, in the Sagas found written in the old High German and in the Anglo-Saxon tongues.

A study which anyone can make of the doctrines contained in the Upanishads, in 'The Book of the Dead', in the Neo-Platonic philosophy, in the Scandinavian Edda, and elsewhere, shows that they had one common basis, one foundation, one common truth. Various men in various ages at various times taught the same truth, using different words and different tropes, different figures, different metaphors; but underneath always was the Ancient Doctrine, the Secret Wisdom.

The Theosophy of the Jews was embodied in what was later called the Qabbalah, from a Hebrew word meaning 'to receive'; that is to say, it was the traditional doctrine handed down, or received (according to the statements of the Qabbalah itself) through the prophets and the sages of Jewry; and was said to have been first taught by "God Almighty to a select company of angels in Heaven".

We must understand, when we approach the teachings of the Ancient Wisdom, that the ancient teachers spoke and thought and taught anthropocentrically; that is, that they all insisted on following the psychological laws of the human mind, and therefore taught in human figures of speech, oft using quaint metaphors, very odd, and yet so instinctive as figures of speech. How wise that was! because they were able to carry on the Ancient Teachings, and did so in such fashion that least of all did this anthropocentric system encourage the dogmatic rulings that have most truly blasted all that was best in the teachings of the Christian Church. These tropes, these metaphors, were so quaint that the mind understood almost instantly that they were but the vehicle embodying the Truth. Let us remember this, and our work becomes immensely more easy.

Now let us take the Qabbalah as a sample of the manner in which one Theosophy - the Jewish - approaches the mystery of how the Unmanifest produces the Manifest, how from that which is endless and beginningless duration, sprang forth matter, space in the sense of material extension, and time. But first let me quote from another Sanskrit work, one of the Upanishads, the Kena-Upanishad. Speaking of this Unutterable Mystery, it says:

The eye reacheth it not, language reacheth it not, nor does thought [5] reach to it at all; verily, we know not nor can we say how one should teach it; it is different from the known, it is beyond the unknown. Thus have we heard from the men of olden times, for they taught it to us.

The great Sankaracharya, perhaps the most famous of Indian commentators on the Upanishads and the marvelously beautiful system of philosophy drawn from them called the Vedanta, says, commenting on the Aitareya-Upanishad:

There is the One, sole, alone, apart from all duality, in which there appear not the multitudinous illusory presentments of unreal bodies and conditions of this universe of merely apparent reality; passionless, unmoving, pure, in utter peace; knowable only by the lack of every adjective epithet; unreachable by word or by thought.

The Qabbalah is the traditionary teaching of the sages among the Jews. It is a wonderful teaching; it contains in outline or in epitome every fundamental tenet or teaching that our own Secret Doctrine contains. The teachings of the Qabbalah are often couched in very quaint and sometimes amusing language; sometimes its language rises to the height of sublimity. What does the Zohar, the second of the great books that remain of the Jewish Qabbalah (the word 'Zohar' itself meaning 'Splendor'), have to say of the manner in which the Jewish religious books should be studied? It says this (iii, 152 a):

Woe be to the son of man who says that the Torah [the Hebrew Bible, especially the Pentateuch, or rather the first four books of the Bible excluding Deuteronomy, the fifth] contains common sayings and ordinary narratives. If this were the case we might in the present day compose a code of doctrines from profane writings which would excite greater respect. If the Law contains ordinary matter, then there are nobler sentiments in profane codes. Let us go and make a selection from them and we shall be able to compile a far superior code. No! Every word of the Law has a sublime sense and a heavenly mystery ¼ As the spiritual angels had to put on earthly garments when they descended to this earth, and as they could neither have remained nor be understood on the earth without putting on such a garment, so it is with the Law. When it descended on earth, the Law had to put on an earthly garment, in order to be understood by us, and the narratives are its garment ¼ Those who have understanding do not look at the garment but at the body [the esoteric meaning] beneath; whilst the wisest, the servants of the heavenly King, those who dwell on Mount Sinai, look at nothing but the soul -

i.e., at the ultimate Secret Doctrine or sacred wisdom hid under the 'body', under the exoteric narratives or stories of the Bible.

In these days, when Modernists and Fundamentalists quarrel - quarrel unnecessarily, quarrel about exoteric superficialities, quarrel about things which arise out of the egoism of men, quarrel [6] about the dogmatic teachings of the Christian Church, every one of them probably based on ancient Pagan Esoteric Philosophy - it is an immense pity that they do not know and understand that this teaching of the Qabbalah as expressed in the Zohar is a true one; it is the teaching of our three Leaders and Teachers; for under every garment is the life. As Jesus taught in parables, so the Bible was written in tropes, in figures of speech, in metaphors. [7]

Chapter II

WHERE IS REALITY? TRUTH CAN BE KNOWN. MAN'S COMPOSITE NATURE ACCORDING TO DIFFERENT SYSTEMS: THREEFOLD, FOURFOLD, FIVEFOLD, OR SEVENFOLD.

The fundamental Law in that system [i.e., the Esoteric Philosophy], the central point from which all emerged, around and toward which all gravitates, and upon which is hung the philosophy of the rest, is the One homogeneous divine SUBSTANCE-PRINCIPLE, the one radical cause.

It is called "Substance-Principle," for it becomes "substance" on the plane of the manifested Universe, an illusion, while it remains a "principle" in the beginningless and endless abstract, visible and invisible SPACE. It is the omnipresent Reality: impersonal, because it contains all and everything. Its impersonality is the fundamental conception of the System. It is latent in every atom in the Universe, and is the Universe itself.

- Secret Doctrine, I, 273

It is the True. It is the Self, and thou art It.

- Chhanadogya-Upanishad

The Tao which can be expressed in words is not the eternal Tao; the name which can be uttered is not its eternal name. Without a name, it is the Beginning of Heaven and Earth; with a name, it is the Mother of all things. Only one who is eternally free from earthly passions can apprehend its spiritual essence; he who is ever clogged by passions can see no more than its outer form. These two things, the spiritual and the material, though we call them by different names, in their origin are one and the same. This sameness is a mystery - the mystery of mysteries. It is the gate of all spirituality.

- Sayings of Lao-tse

We open Volume I of H.P. Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine this evening at page 13, and we read the second paragraph, which is as follows:

The reader has to bear in mind that the Stanzas given treat only of the Cosmogony of our own planetary System and what is visible around it, after a Solar Pralaya. The secret teachings with regard to the Evolution of the Universal Kosmos cannot be given, since they could not be understood by the highest minds in this age, and there seem to be very few Initiates, even among the greatest, who are allowed to speculate upon this subject. Moreover the Teachers say openly that not even the highest Dhyani-Chohans have ever penetrated the mysteries beyond those boundaries that separate the milliards of Solar systems from the "Central Sun," as it is called. Therefore, that which is given relates only to our visible Kosmos, after a "Night of Brahm_." [8]

We choose this as the general text of our study this evening. Following the Teacher's instructions, as we understand them, it seems not only appropriate but necessary to open our study of the more secret matters of which The Secret Doctrine treats, by asking in what manner or by what method do we obtain an understanding and a realization of these doctrines? Do they come to us as dogmatic teachings, or are they derived, following the definition that Webster gives of Theosophy in his dictionary, by inner spiritual communion with 'God'? There is something in Webster's definition which is true. The Theosophist does believe that he has within himself the faculty of approaching divine things, of raising the inner man so that he can thereby obtain a more accurate mental representation of things as they are, or of Reality.

But on the other hand, if everyone did this, without proper and capable guidance and leading and teaching, extreme vanity and human conceit as well as many other forces in the human economy, would inevitably lead to an immense diversity of opinions and teachings and doctrines, each man believing that he had the truth and he only, and hence that those who followed him and preached his views should form with him a special 'church' or 'sect' of their own. The words themselves would probably be avoided, but it would amount to that.

Therefore, here we find the use, the benefit, the appositeness, of the Theosophical doctrines which our Teachers have given to us, to the effect that these teachings have come down to us from immemorial antiquity - transmitted from one Teacher to another - and that originally they were communicated to the nascent human race, when once it became self-conscious, by Beings from a higher sphere - Beings who themselves were of divine origin; and further, that this communication or emanation of their spiritual and higher intellectual selves into us, gave us our own higher principles. For the Teachers have told us that these doctrines have been checked or proved age after age, generation after generation, by innumerable spiritual seers, to use Helena Petrovna Blavatsky's own words - checked in every respect, checked as to fact, checked as to origin, checked as to operation on the human mind.

Now then, as the older students of this School - many of whom are here present - know well, the faculties by which man can attain a knowledge of truth, of the Real, can be called upon or evoked at any moment in any place, provided the right conditions are made, so that the striving soul may thus reach successfully upward or inward, and know. Sometimes, in the most simple teachings are found the most divine truths. And why? Because the simple teachings are the fundamental ones. [9]

Consider for a moment, therefore, the seven principles of man, in their connection with the seven principles of the universe. The seven principles of man are a likeness or copy of the seven cosmic principles. They are actually the offspring of the seven cosmic principles, limited in their action in us by the workings of the Law of Karma, but running in their origin back into That which is beyond: into that which is the Essence of the universe or the Universal; in, beyond, within, to the Unmanifest, to the Unmanifestable, to that first Principle which Helena Petrovna Blavatsky enunciates as the leading thought of the Wisdom-Philosophy of The Secret Doctrine.

These principles of man are reckoned as seven in the philosophy by which the human, spiritual, and psychical economy has been explained to us in the present age. In other ages these principles, or parts, of man were differently reckoned - the Christian reckons them as Body, Soul, and Spirit, and does not know the difference between the soul and the spirit: he thinks there must be a difference but does not know what it is; and many say that the soul and spirit are the same.

Some of the Indian thinkers divided man into a basic fourfold entity, others into a fivefold. The Jewish philosophy, as found in the Qabbalah which is the esoteric tradition of the Jews, teaches that man is divided into four parts:

1. The highest and most spiritual of all, that principle or part which is to us a mere breath of being, they called Neshamah.

2. The second principle was called Ruahh or Spiritual Soul, spelled sometimes Ruach according to another method of transliteration.

3. The Astral Soul (or Vital Soul) was called Nefesh, the third next lower, which man has in common with the brutes.

4. Then comes the Guf or physical vehicle, the house in which all these others dwell.

Over all, and higher than all, higher than the Neshamah - which is not an emanation of this Highest, not a creation, not an evolution, but of which it was the production in a sense which we shall later have to explain - there is the Ineffable, the Boundless, called Ain Suf.

The Sanskrit terms which have been given by our Teachers to the seven principles of man in our own Theosophical Philosophy, are as follows, and we can get much help from explaining the original Sanskrit meanings of them, and illustrating the sense in which those words were used, and why they were chosen.

1. Sthula means coarse, gross, not refined, heavy, bulky, fat in the sense of bigness. Sharira comes from a root which can best be translated by saying that it is that which is easily dissolved, easily worn away; the idea being something transitory, foam-like, full [10] of holes, as it were. Note the meaning hid in this: it is very important.

2. The second principle let us call the Linga-sharira. Linga is a Sanskrit word which means characteristic mark; hence model, pattern. It, as we all know, forms the model or pattern on which the physical body is built - this physical body, composed mostly of porosity, if the expression be pardoned; the most unreal thing we know, full of holes, foamy as it were. We will revert to this thought later.

3. The third principle, commonly called the Life-Principle, is Prana. Now this word is used here by our Philosophy in a general sense. There are, as a matter of fact, a number of life-currents, vital fluids. They have several names. One system gives the number as three; another as five, which is the commonly accepted number; another as seven; another twelve, as is found in some Upanishads; and one old writer even gives them as thirteen.

4. Then there is the Kama-principle; the word kama means desire. It is the driving or impelling force in the human economy; colorless, neither good nor bad, only such as the mind and soul direct its use.

5. Then comes Manas; the Sanskrit root of this word means to think, to cogitate, to reflect mental activity, in short.

6. Then comes Buddhi, or the Spiritual Soul, the vehicle or carrier of the highest principle of all, the Atman. Now Buddhi comes from a Sanskrit root budh. This root is commonly translated, to enlighten, but a better translation is to awaken and, hence, to understand; Buddha, the past participle of this root is applied to one who is spiritually awakened, no longer living a living death, but awakened to the spiritual influence from within or from 'above'. Buddhi is the principle in us which gives us spiritual consciousness, and is the vehicle of the most high part of man. This highest part is the Atman.

7. This principle (Atman) is a universal one; but during incarnations its lowest parts, if we can so express it, take on attributes, because it is linked with the Buddhi as the Buddhi is linked with the Manas, as the Manas is linked to the Kama, and so on down the scale.

Atman is also sometimes used of the Universal Self or Spirit which is called in the Sanskrit writings Brahman (neuter), and the Brahman or Universal Spirit is also called the Paramatman, a compound Sanskrit term meaning the highest or most universal Atman. The root of Atman is hardly known. Its origin is uncertain, but the general meaning is that of self.

Beyond Brahman is the Para-brahman. Para is a Sanskrit word meaning beyond. Note the deep philosophical meaning of this; there is no attempt here to limit the Illimitable, the [11] Ineffable, by adjectives; it simply means beyond the Brahman. In the Sanskrit Vedas and in the works deriving therefrom and belonging to the Vedic literary cycle, this beyond is called That, as this world of manifestation is called This. Other very expressive terms are Sat, the Real; and Asat, the Unreal or the manifested universe; in another sense Asat means 'not Sat', i.e., even beyond (higher than) Sat.

Now this Para-brahman is intimately connected with Mula-prakriti - a word we shall explain in a moment. Their interaction and intermingling cause the first nebulous thrilling, if the words will pass, of the Universal Life when spiritual desire first arose in it in the beginnings of things. Such is the old teaching, employing of necessity the old anthropocentric tropes, clearly understood to be only human metaphors, human similes; for the conceptions of the Seers of ancient times, their teachings, their doctrines, had to be told in human language to the human mind.

Now then, a man can reach inward, going 'upward' step by step, climbing higher as his spiritual force and power wax greater and more subtle, until he reaches beyond his normal faculties, and steps beyond the 'Ring Pass Not', as Helena Petrovna Blavatsky calls it in her Secret Doctrine. Where and what is this 'Ring Pass Not'? It is, at any period of man's consciousness, the utmost reach that his spirit can attain. There he stops, and looks into the Beyond - into the Unmanifested from which we came. The Unmanifest is in us; it is the Inmost of the inmost in our souls, in our spirits, in our essential beings. We can reach towards it. We can actually reach it never.

Now, where is Reality? Is the Real, is the True, to be found in these lower ventures of materiality? Or is it to be found in the State of Being from which everything came?

The ancient Stoics in their really wonderful philosophy taught, and the same teaching originated in the esoteric philosophy of Hellas or Greece - as found later in the Neo-Platonic teachings - these ancient Stoics taught that Truth can be known; that the most real thing, the greatest thing, was to be found in ever-receding vistas, as the Spirit of man strived inward, and beyond, veil after veil falling away as the Wise Man (their technical term) advances in the evolution of his soul. They taught that the material universe was illusory precisely as our Teachers tell us of the Maya; and the Stoic understood (and this teaching is our own) that this apparently dense, gross, heavy, material universe is phenomenally unreal, mostly built up of holes, so to say - a teaching which is beginning to be reechoed even today in the writings and thoughts of the more intuitional of our scientists.

The Stoics taught that the ether was denser than the most dense material thing, fuller than the most full material thing - using [12] human words, of course. To us, with our human eyes, trained only to see objects of illusion, it appears to be the most diaphanous, the thinnest, the most ethereal. What was the Reality, the Real, behind this All? The real thing? They said it was God, Life of Life, Truth of Truth, Root of Matter, Root of Soul, Root of Spirit. When the Stoic was asked: What is God? he nobly answered: What is God not?

Turning now to the Ancient Wisdom of Hindustan, to the Upanishads, let us take from the Chhanadogya-Upanishad, mainly in the sixth lecture, a conversation between a father and his son. Hearken to the Ancient Wisdom, going back far beyond the time when the ancient Brahmanical teachings and the Brahmanas became what they are today - to the time when real men taught real things. The son asks:

If a man who has slept in his own house, rises and goes to another village, he knows that he has come from his own house. Why then do people not know that they have come from the Sat? [A Sanskrit word meaning the Real, the Ineffable of which we have spoken.]

And the father teaches his son as follows:

These rivers, my son, run, the eastern towards the east, the western towards the west. They go from sea to sea. They become indeed sea. And as those rivers, when they are in the sea, do not know, I am this or that river,

In the same manner, my son, all these creatures, when they have come from the True [that is the Real] know not that they have come from the True [on account of the Maya]. Whatever these creatures are here, whether a lion, or a wolf, or a boar, or a worm, or a midge, or a gnat, or a mosquito, that they become again and again.

Now listen:

"That which is that subtle essence, in it all that exists has its self. It is the True, It is the Self, and thou, O Svetaketu, art it." "Please, Sir, inform me still more," said the son. "Be it so, my child," the father replied.

Now the son is supposed to ask, "How is it that living beings, when in sleep or death they are merged again in the Sat [that is, the Real], are not destroyed? Waves, foam, and bubbles arise from the water, and when they merge again in the water, they are gone."

"If someone were to strike at the root of this large tree, here," says the father, "it would bleed, but live. If he were to strike at its stem, it would bleed, but live. If he were to strike at its top, it would bleed, but live. Pervaded by the living Self that tree stands firm, drinking in its nourishment and rejoicing;" [13]

"But if the life (the living Self) leaves one of its branches, that branch withers; if it leaves a second, that branch withers; if it leaves a third, that branch withers. If it leaves the whole tree, the whole tree withers. In exactly the same manner, my son, know this."

Thus he spoke:

"This (body) indeed withers and dies when the living self has left it; the living Self dies not. That which is that subtle essence, in it all that exists has its self. It is the True. It is the Self, and thou, O Svetaketu, art it."

"Please, Sir, inform me still more," said the son. "Be it so, my child!" the father replied. "Fetch me from thence a fruit of the Nyagrodha tree." "Here is one, Sir." "Break it." "It is broken Sir." "What do you see there?" "These seeds, almost infinitesimal." "Break one of them." "It is broken, Sir." "What do you see there?" "Not anything, Sir." The father said: "My son, that subtle essence which you do not perceive there, of that very essence this great Nyagrodha tree exists. Believe it, my son. That which is the subtle essence, in it all that exists has its self. It is the True. It is the Self, and thou, O Svetaketu, art it." "Please, Sir, inform me still more," said the son. "Be it so, my child," the father replied.

"Place this salt in water, and then wait on me in the morning." The son did as he was commanded. The father said to him: "Bring me the salt, which you placed in the water last night." The son having looked for it, found it not, for, of course, it was melted. The father said: "Taste it from the surface of the water. How is it?" The son replied: "It is salt." "Taste it from the middle. How is it?" The son replied: "It is salt." "Taste it from the bottom, how is it?" The son replied: "It is salt." The father said: "Throw it away and then wait on me." He did so; but salt exists forever. Then the father said: "Here also, in this body, forsooth, you do not perceive the True [Sat], my son; but there indeed it is."

"That which is the subtle essence [that is, the saltiness of the salt], in it all that exists has its self. It is the True. It is the Self, and thou, O Svetaketu, art it." "Please Sir, inform me still more," said the son. "Be it so, my child," the father replied. (Translation by Max Muller).

Let us turn to another part of this Upanishad, to the eighth lecture. And we read as follows: "Harih, Om." Hari is the name of several Deities - of Shiva, and Vishnu - but here, apparently, it is used for Shiva, which, as our first Teacher has taught us, is preeminently the divine protector of the mystic occultist. 'Om' is a word considered very holy in the Brahmanical literature. It is a syllable of invocation, and its general usage, as elucidated in the literature treating of it, which is rather voluminous, for this word 'Om' has attained to almost divinity, is that it should never be uttered aloud, or in the presence of an outsider, a foreigner, or a non-Initiate, but it should be uttered in the silence of one's heart, in the intimacy of one's inner closet. [14] We also have reason to believe, however, that it was uttered, and uttered aloud in a monotone by the disciples in the presence of their Teacher. This word is always placed at the beginning of any scripture that is considered of unusual sanctity.

The teaching is, that prolonging the uttering of this word, both of the O and the M, with the mouth closed (precisely as the Teacher has taught us to do it in this School), it reechoes in and arouses vibration in the skull, and affects, if the aspirations be pure, the different nervous centers of the body for great good.

The Brahmanas say that it is an unholy thing to utter this word in any place which is unholy. I now read:

There is this city of Brahman [that is, the heart and the body], and in it the palace, the small lotus (of the heart), and in it that small ether.

The Sanskrit word which Muller, the translator, has not given here for 'small ether', doubtless because he knew not how to translate it, is antarakasa, a compound Sanskrit word meaning within the Akasa. He called it 'small ether', doubtless because he knew not how to translate it - too difficult. I read again:

Now what exists within that small ether, that it is to be sought for, that is to be understood. And if they should say to him: "Now with regard to that city of Brahman, and the palace in it, i.e., the small lotus of the heart, and the small ether within the heart, what is there within it that deserves to be sought for, or that is to be understood?"

Then he should say: "As large as this ether (all space) is, so large is that ether within the heart. Both heaven and earth are contained within it, both fire and air, both Sun and Moon, both lightning and stars; and whatever there is of him (the Self) here in the world, and whatever is not [i.e., 'whatever has been or will be' says Max Muller], all that is contained within it."

And if they should say to him: "If everything that exists is contained in that city of Brahman, all beings and all desires (whatever can be imagined or desired), then what is left of it, when old age reaches it and scatters it, or when it falls to pieces?"

Then he should say: "By the old age of the body, that (the ether, or Brahman within it) does not age; by the death of the body, that (the ether, or the Brahman within it) is not killed. That (the Brahman) is the true Brahma-city (not the body). In it all [true] desires are contained. It is the Self, free from sin, free from old age, from death and grief, from hunger and thirst, which desires nothing but what it ought to desire, and imagines nothing but what it ought to imagine. Now as here on earth people follow as they are commanded, and depend on the object which they are attached to, be it a country or a piece of land,"

"And, as here on earth, whatever has been acquired by exertion, perishes, so perishes whatever is acquired for the next world by [15] sacrifices and other good actions performed on earth. Those who depart from hence without having discovered the Self and those true desires, for them there is no freedom in all the worlds. But those who depart from hence, after having discovered the Self and those true desires, for them there is freedom in all the worlds." [16]

Chapter III

THE DOCTRINE OF MAYA: OBJECTIVE IDEALISM THE BASIS OF MORALS: ROOTED IN THE SPIRITUAL UNITY - THE DIVINITY - OF THE ALL. THE SELF AND THE "SELVES".

Maya or illusion is an element which enters into all finite things, for everything that exists has only a relative, not an absolute, reality, since the appearance which the hidden noumenon assumes for any observer depends upon his power of cognition. To the untrained eye of the savage, a painting is at first an unmeaning confusion of streaks and daubs of color, while an educated eye sees instantly a face or a landscape. Nothing is permanent except the one hidden absolute existence which contains in itself the noumena of all realities. The existences belonging to every plane of being, up to the highest Dhyani-Chohans, are, in degree, of the nature of shadows cast by a magic lantern on a colorless screen; but all things are relatively real, for the cogniser is also a reflection, and the things cognised are therefore as real to him as himself. Whatever reality things possess must be looked for in them before or after they have passed like a flash through the material world; but we cannot cognise any such existence directly, so long as we have sense-instruments which bring only material existence into the field of our consciousness. 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 the absolute Consciousness, and blended our own with it, shall we be free from the delusions produced by Maya.

- Secret Doctrine, I, 39, 40

The Universe is called, with everything in it, MAYA, because all is temporary therein, from the ephemeral life of a firefly to that of the Sun. Compared to the eternal immutability of the One, and the changelessness of that Principle, the Universe, with its evanescent ever-changing forms, must be necessarily, in the mind of a philosopher, no better than a will-o'-the-wisp. Yet, the Universe is real enough to the conscious beings in it, which are as unreal as it is itself.

- Secret Doctrine, I, 274

In taking up again this evening our study of The Secret Doctrine at the point we reached a fortnight ago, I open Helena Petrovna Blavatsky's book, the first volume, at page 17, and read the third fundamental postulate - at least a portion of it:

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 - though the Cycle of Incarnation (or "Necessity") in accordance with Cyclic and Karmic law, during the whole term. In other words, no purely spiritual Buddhi (divine Soul) can have an independent (conscious) existence before the spark which issued from the pure Essence of the Universal Sixth principle - or the OVER-SOUL - has (a) passed through [17] every elemental form of the phenomenal world of that Manvantara, and (b) acquired individuality, first by natural impulse, and then by self-induced and self-devised efforts (checked by its Karma), thus ascending through all the degrees of intelligence, from the lowest to the highest Manas, from mineral and plant, up to the holiest archangel (Dhyani-buddha).

Paul, the Apostle of the Christians "to the Gentiles", as they call him, according to the Christian Gospels in Acts, xvii, verses 23-28, spoke to an assembly of the Athenians on Mars Hill, commonly called the Areopagus, and he said the following (the translation being ours):

For as I passed by and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription: "To the Unknowable God." For in It we live and move and have our being, as certain also of your own poets have said, "For we are also of Its line."

The poets of whom Paul speaks were probably Cleanthes the Stoic, and Aratus. It is perhaps well to mention that the sense of 'Unknowable', as used in connection with this word Agnostos, is that employed by Homer, by Plato, and by Aristotle. This Greek word Agnostos also permits the translation 'unknown', but merely because the Unknown in this connection is the Unknowable.

The Athenians had raised an altar to the Ineffable, and with the true spirit of religious devotion they left it without further qualification; and Paul, passing by and seeing it, thought he saw an excellent chance to 'make hay while the sun shone', so to say, and claimed the Unknowable to which this altar had been raised, as the Jewish God, Jehovah.

A fortnight ago, following the Teacher's instructions, we stated how it was that man could form some conception of that Ineffable Principle of which Helena Petrovna Blavatsky speaks on pages 14-19 of her Secret Doctrine, as being the first of the three fundamental postulates, necessary in order to understand the true teachings of the Esoteric Wisdom; and we saw that man has in himself, as was then said, a faculty transcending the ordinary human intellectual power - something in him by which he can raise himself upwards or, perhaps better, inwards, towards the Inmost Center of his own being, which in very truth is that Ineffable: from It we came, back to It we are journeying through the aeons of time.

All the ancient philosophers taught the truth concerning this same fundamental principle, each in his own way, each with different terms, each in the language of the country where it was promulgated, but always there was taught the central truth: that in the inmost being of man there lives a divinity, and this [18] divinity is the offspring of the Highest, and that man can become a God in the flesh or he can sink - as the Teacher's words have told us this evening - lower even than the common average of humanity, so that he becomes at first obsessed or beset, and finally possessed by the daemons of his own lower nature and by those of the lower sphere; and by these particular daemons we mean the elemental forces of life, of chaotic life, or of the material sphere of being.

Again, how is it that man cannot see these truths intimately and immediately? We all know the answer is, on account of the illusion under which his mind labors, the illusion which is a part of himself, not cast upon him from the outside: he sees, for instance, and his mind reacts to the vision, and the reaction is conducted along the lines of the illusion, which, taking the ancient Sanskrit word, our first Teacher has called Maya.

This is a technical term in the ancient Brahmanical philosophy. Let us examine its root. What does the word Maya come from? It comes from a Sanskrit root ma; the meaning of ma is to measure, and by a trope of speech - that is by a figure of speech - it comes to mean to effect, or to form, and hence to limit. There is an English word mete, meaning to measure out, from the same Indo-European root. It is found in the Anglo-Saxon as the root met, it is found in the Greek as med, and it is found in the Latin also in the same form.

Now Maya, as a technical term, has come to mean - ages ago in the wonderful Brahmanical philosophy it was understood very differently from what it is now usually understood to be - the fabrication by man's mind of ideas derived from interior and exterior impressions, and hence the illusory aspect of man's thoughts as he considers and tries to interpret and understand life and his surroundings - and thence was derived the sense which it technically bears, illusion. It does not mean that the exterior world is non-existent; if it were, it obviously could not be illusory; it exists, but is not. It is 'measured out' or it stands out to the human spirit as a mirage. In other words, we do not see clearly and plainly and in their reality the vision and the visions which our mind and senses present to the inner life and eye.

The familiar illustrations of Maya in the Vedanta, which is the highest form that the Brahmanical teachings have taken, and which is so near to our own teaching in many respects, were such as follows: A man at eventide sees a coiled rope on the ground, and springs aside, thinking it a serpent. The rope is there, but no serpent.

Another illustration is what is called the 'horns of the hare'. Now the animal called the hare has no horns, but when it also [19] is seen at eventide its long ears seem to project from its head in such fashion that it appears even to the seeing eye as being a creature with horns. The hare has no horns, but there is then in the mind an illusory belief that an animal with horns exists there.

That is what Maya means: not that a thing seen does not exist, but that we are blinded and our mind perverted by our own thoughts and our own imperfections, and do not as yet arrive at the real interpretation and meaning of the world, of the universe around us. By ascending inwardly, by rising up, by inner aspiration, by an elevation of soul, we can reach upwards or rather inwards toward that plane where Truth abides in fullness.

Bernard of Clairvaux, the French mystic of the Middle Ages, said that one way of doing this, and he spoke truly, was by 'emptying the mind', pouring out the trashy stuff it contains, the illusory beliefs, the false views, the hatreds, suspicions, carelessness, etc., and that by emptying out all this trash, the temple within is cleansed, and the light from the God within streams forth into the soul - a wonderful figure of thought for a Christian Mystic, but a true one.

It may be asked: What relationship has our wonderful philosophy to the many so-called idealistic systems of Europe, particularly in Germany, and represented by Bishop Berkeley in Britain? The answer is that there are points of contact, naturally, because the men who evolved these systems of philosophy were earnest men, and no man can earnestly think and strive upwards without arriving at some visions of truth, some faint perceptions of the inner life - but none of the systems of idealism which they taught is exactly the idealism; which Theosophy is. Theosophy is not an absolute idealism, it does not teach that the external universe is absolutely non-existent and that all external phenomena merely exist in the mind.

Theosophy is not exactly either the idealism of Kant nor the wonderful pessimistic idealism of Schopenhauer - wonderful as this great thinker was, and wonderful precisely because he derived his knowledge (and confessed it openly) from the Orient. The idealism of Theosophy is nearest to the philosophy of the German philosopher, von Schelling, who taught (principally) that truth was to be perceived by receding inwards and taking it from the Spirit, and that the outward world is 'dead mind' or perhaps rather inert mind - not the mind of the thinker obviously, but the mind of the Deity. Now this is called 'objective idealism' because it recognizes the external object as having existence; it is not non-existent, as absolute idealism would put it. Schelling's ideas come nearest but by no means equal the grandiose [20] teaching which our great Teachers have taught us is the Truth.

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky says on page 631 of the first volume of The Secret Doctrine:

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 standpoint, and the objective relations in it between various conscious Egos so long as this illusion lasts.

The teaching, as all older students of the Esoteric School know - and I believe that many of them are here present this evening - is that Maya is thus called from the action of Mula-prakriti, or root-nature, the coordinate principle of that other line of coactive consciousness which we call Para-brahman. We remember that we discussed these questions at our former meeting, and we say that from the moment when manifestation begins, it acts dualistically, that is to say, that everything in Nature from that point onwards is crossed by pairs of opposites, such as long and short, high and low, night and day, good and evil, consciousness and non-consciousness, etc. - and that all these things are essentially mayavic or illusory - real while they last, but the lasting is not eternal. It is through and by these pairs of opposites that the self-conscious soul learns Truth.

What is the basis of morals? This is the most important question that can be asked of any system of thought. Is morality based on the dicta of man? Is morality based on the conviction in most men's hearts that for human safety it is necessary to have certain abstract rules which it is merely convenient to follow? Are we mere opportunists? or is morality, ethics, based on Truth, which it is not merely expedient for man to follow, but needful, necessary? Surely upon the latter!

And in the third Fundamental Postulate which we read at the opening of our study this evening, we find, as was before said, the very elements, the very fundamentals, of a system of morality greater than which, profounder than which, more persuasive than which, perhaps, it would be impossible to imagine anything.

On what, then, is morality based? And by morality I mean not merely the opinion which some pseudo-philosophers have, that morality is more or less that which is 'good for the community', based on the mere meaning of the Latin word mores, 'good customs', as opposed to bad. No! morality is that instinctive hunger of the human heart to do righteousness, to do good to every man because it is good and satisfying and ennobling to do so.

When man realizes that he is one with all that is, inwards and outwards, high and low; that he is one with them, not merely [21] as members of a community are one, not merely as individuals of an army are one, but like the molecules of our own flesh, like the atoms of the molecule, like the electrons of the atom, composing one unity - not a mere union but a spiritual unity - then he sees Truth.

Everyone of us belongs to, and is an inhering part of, that Sublime and Ineffable Mystery - the ALL - which contains and is individual and spiritual unity.

We have all of us one inward universal Self, and each one has also his individual ego. The ego springs from the Self and the Self is the Ineffable, the Inmost of the Inmost, one in all of us - giving each one of us that sense of selfhood; although by extension of meaning we also speak, and properly speak, of the 'lower self', because this is a tiny ray from the Highest. Even the evil man, as our present great Teacher has taught us, has in himself not merely the spark of the divine, but the very ray of divinity itself: he is both the selfish ego and the Universal Self.

Why then are we taught that when we attain selflessness, we attain the Divine? Precisely because selflessness is the attribute of the Paramatman, the Universal Self, where all personality vanishes. Paramatman is a Sanskrit compound, meaning highest or supreme self.

If we examine our own spirits, if we reach inwards, if we stretch ourselves inwards, as it were, towards the Inmost, every one of us may know that as he goes farther, farther, farther in, the self becomes selfless, the light becomes pure glory.

What a thought, that in the heart of each one of us there dwells, there lives, the Ever-Unfolding, the Constant, the Eternal, the Changeless, knowing no death, knowing no sorrow, the very divinity of all! How it dignifies human life! What courage does it give to us! How does it clear away all of the old moldy superstitions! What unspeakable visions of Reality, of the Truth, do we obtain when we go inwards, after having emptied the mind, as Bernard says, of all the mental trash that encumbers it!

These are the doctrines of our Teachers; our present Outer Head is telling us it daily, hinting at it in this way and in that way, using these words and those words, taking the opportunity on every occasion that presents itself to awaken us, to instill these eternal truths into us.

When man has reached the state where he realizes this and has so 'emptied his mind' that it is filled only with the Self Itself, with the selfless selfhood of the Eternal - what did the ancients call this state? What did they call such a man himself? They called the state, 'Bodhi'; and they called the human, 'Buddha'; and the organ in and by which it was manifested, 'Buddhi'. All these words came from a Sanskrit root, meaning to awaken. [22] When man has awakened from the living death in which we live, when he has cast off the toils of mind and flesh and, to use the old Christian term, has put on the 'garments of eternity', then he has awakened, he is a Buddha. And the ancient Brahmanical teachings, found today even in the Vedanta, state that he has become one with - not 'absorbed' as is constantly translated - but has become one with the Self of selves, with the Paramatman, the Supreme Self.

Hearken a moment to the wisdom of the ancient Orient, not the voice of modern Brahmanism (excepting the Vedanta) but to a book which was ancient before our ancestors knew anything higher than the quasi-barbaric ideas which Europe had two thousand years ago.

We read from the Chhanadogya-Upanishad, one of the most important of the 108 or more Upanishads. The very word 'Upanishad' signifies 'Esoteric treatise'. We read from the eighth lecture, seventh, eighth, and ninth sections. They contain such truth that the Teacher has permitted us to take up our time in reading it.

"Prajapati said" - we interrupt by saying that Prajapati is a Sanskrit word meaning governor or lord or master of progeny. The word is applied to many of the Vedic gods, but in particular to Brahm_ - that is to say the third step from Para-brahman - the evolver-creator, the first and most recondite figure of the triad consisting of Brahm_, Vishnu, and Shiva. Brahm_ is the Emanator or Evolver, Vishnu the Sustainer or Preserver, and Shiva, which may be translated euphemistically perhaps as 'beneficent', the Regenerator. This name is very obscure. However:

Prajapati said: "The Self which is free from sin, free from old age, from death and grief, from hunger and thirst, which desires nothing but what it ought to desire, and imagines nothing but what it ought to imagine, that it is which we must search out, that it is which we must try to understand. He who has searched out that Self and understands it, obtains all worlds and all desires."

We interrupt to ask why? Because this Self of selves, this Inmost, is all worlds: it is All, it is Everything. Now to quote:

The Devas [gods] and Asuras [demons] both heard these words, and said: "Well, let us search for that Self by which, if one has searched it out, all worlds and all desires are obtained."

Thus saying Indra went from the Devas, Virochana from the Asuras, and both, without having communicated with each other, approached Prajapati, holding fuel in their hands, as is the custom for pupils approaching their master.

They dwelt there as pupils for thirty-two years. Then Prajapati asked them: "For what purpose have you dwelt here?" [23]

They replied: "A saying of yours is being repeated, viz. 'the Self which is free from sin, free from old age, from death and grief, from hunger and thirst, which desires nothing but what it ought to desire, and imagines nothing but what it ought to imagine, that it is which we must search out, that it is which we must try to understand. He who has searched out that Self and understands it, obtains all worlds and all desires.' Now we both have dwelt here because we wish is for that Self."

Prajapati said to them: "The person that is seen in the eye, that is the Self. This is what I have said. This is the immortal, the fearless, this is Brahman."

Interrupting: the Self that is seen in the eye is a figure of speech not infrequently found in the ancient Sanskrit writings; it signifies that sense of an indwelling presence that one sees when he looks into the eyes of another.

They asked: "Sir, he who is perceived in the water, and he who is perceived in a mirror, who is he?"

He replied: "He himself indeed is seen in all these."

(Eighth Section) "Look at your Self in a pan of water, and whatever you do not understand of your Self, come and tell me."

They looked in the water-pan. Then Prajapati said to them:

"What do you see?"

They said: "We both see the self thus altogether, a picture even to the very hairs and nails."

Prajapati said to them: "After you have adorned yourselves, look again into the water-pan."

They, after having adorned themselves, having put on their best clothes and cleaned themselves, looked into the water-pan.

Prajapati said: "What do you see?"

They said: "Just as we are, well adorned, with our best clothes and clean, thus we are both there, Sir, well adorned, with our best clothes and clean."

Prajapati said "That is the Self, this is the immortal, the fearless, this is Brahman."

Then both went away satisfied in their hearts.

And Prajapati, looking after them, said: "They both go away without having perceived and without having known the Self, and whoever of these two, whether Devas or Asuras, will follow this doctrine will perish."

Interrupting: they saw Maya and not the Self.

Now Virochana, satisfied in his heart, went to the Asuras and preached that doctrine to them, that the self (the body) alone is to be worshiped, that the self (the body) alone is to be served, and that he who worships the self, and serves the self, gains both worlds, this and the next.

Therefore they call even now a man who does not give alms here, who has no faith, and offers no sacrifices, an Asura, for this is the doctrine of Asuras. They deck out the body of the dead with perfumes, [24] flowers, and fine raiment by way of ornament, and think they will thus conquer that world.

(Ninth Section) But Indra, before he had returned to the Devas, saw this difficulty.

Interrupting: the difficulty now comes which Indra saw.

As this self (the shadow in the water) is well adorned, when the body is well adorned, well dressed, when the body is well dressed, well cleaned, if the body is well cleaned, that self will also be blind, if the body is blind, lame, if the body is lame, crippled if the body is crippled, and will perish in fact as soon as the body perishes. Therefore I see no good in this (doctrine).

Taking fuel in his hand he came again as a pupil to Prajapati. Prajapati said to him: "Maghavat [Indra], as you went away with Virochana, satisfied in your heart, for what purpose did you come back?"

He said: "Sir, as this self (the shadow) is well adorned, when the body is well adorned, well dressed, when the body is well dressed, well cleaned, if the body is well cleaned, that self will also be blind, if the body is blind, lame if the body is lame, crippled if the body is crippled, and will perish in fact as soon as the body perishes. Therefore I see no good in this (doctrine)."

"So it is indeed, Maghavat," replied Prajapati; "but I shall explain him (the true Self) further to you. Live with me another thirty-two years."

Indra was able to see beyond the maya of the personal self, and therefore was searching for the Real, for the True, the Self Itself.

The translation is Max Muller's. It may be well to add in conclusion that all translations which have been made and may hereafter be made are made by ourself, from any one of the ancient languages, and if any quotation is taken from another translator, his name will be given. [25]

Chapter IV

FROM PRIMORDIAL POINT TO UNIVERSE AND MAN. HOW DOES MANIFESTATION ARISE? MANVANTARA AND PRALAYA.

The Scintillas are the "Souls," and these Souls appear in the threefold form of Monads (units), atoms, and gods - according to our teaching. "Every atom becomes a visible complex unit (a molecule), and once attracted into the sphere of terrestrial activity, the Monadic Essence, passing through the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms, becomes man." (Esoteric Catechism.) Again, "God, Monad, and Atom are the correspondences of Spirit, Mind, and Body (Atma, Manas, and Sthula-sharira) in man." In their septenary aggregation they are the "Heavenly Man" (see Kabala for the latter term); thus, terrestrial man is the provisional reflection of the Heavenly ¼ "The Monads (Jivas) are the Souls of the Atoms, both are a fabric in which the Chohans (Dhyanis, gods) clothe themselves when a form is needed." (Esoteric Catechism.)

- Secret Doctrine, I, 619

Para-brahman (the One Reality, the Absolute) is the field of Absolute Consciousness, i.e., that Essence which is out of all relation to conditioned existence, and of which conscious existence is a conditioned symbol. But once that we pass in thought from this (to us) Absolute Negation, duality supervenes in the contrast of Spirit (or consciousness) and Matter, Subject and Object.

Spirit (or Consciousness) and Matter are, however, to be regarded, not as independent realities, but as the two facets or aspects of the Absolute (Para-brahman) which constitute the basis of conditioned Being whether subjective or objective.

¼

Hence it will be apparent that the contrast of these two aspects of the Absolute is essential to the existence of the "Manifested Universe." Apart from Cosmic Substance, Cosmic Ideation could not manifest as individual consciousness, since it is only through a vehicle of matter that consciousness wells up as "I am I," a physical basis being necessary to focus a ray of the Universal Mind at a certain stage of complexity. Again, apart from Cosmic Ideation, Cosmic Substance would remain an empty abstraction, and no emergence of consciousness could ensue.

The "Manifested Universe," therefore, is pervaded by duality, which is, as it were, the very essence of its EX-istence as "manifestation." But just as the opposite poles of subject and object, spirit and matter, are but aspects of the One Unity in which they are synthesized, so, in the manifested Universe, there is "that" which links spirit to matter, subject to object.

This something, at present unknown to Western speculation, is called by the occultists Fohat. It is the "bridge" by which the "Ideas" existing in the "Divine Thought" are impressed on Cosmic substance as the "laws of Nature."

- Secret Doctrine, I, 15, 16

Before we open our study of The Secret Doctrine this evening, it should be said that the Teacher has asked me to repeat what was before stated with reference to the nature of these studies, that is, that they are a simplification of The Secret Doctrine in the sense of an explanation and unfolding of the meaning of the teachings that the book contains; and in order to achieve these ends, it will be of course necessary to bring to bear upon these doctrines for comparison and in order to show analogy or identity, lines of thought from [26] the great religions of the world and from the great minds of ancient times; because these, in their essence, have sprung from the central source of men's thought and religion which we today call Theosophy.

Yet before we can really embark upon the study of The Secret Doctrine itself, as a book, it will be necessary during the course of our studies to clear from our path certain stumbling-blocks which are in the way of each of us; certain ideas and so-called principles of thought which have been instilled into our minds from childhood, and which, on account of the psychological effect they have on our minds, really prevent us from grasping the truths of Being that Helena Petrovna Blavatsky has so masterly given us in The Secret Doctrine.

In addition, it will be necessary to investigate certain very ancient principles of thought, and to penetrate more deeply into the real meaning of the ancient religions and philosophies than has ever been done in any modern books, because those books have been written by men who know nothing about the Esoteric Philosophy, men who were mostly rebels against the barren ecclesiasticism of the Christian Church; who, in order to gain freedom from those chains of ecclesiasticism, actually went too far the other way, and saw nothing but priestcraft and evil-doing in these old religions, and in the acts and teachings of the men who taught them, priests, philosophers, or scientists.

We really, also, cannot understand The Secret Doctrine unless we have made these preliminary studies. We may read it as a book, as we would take down a book from the shelf in the public library and read it, but in doing so we do not get the essence, the heart, the core of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky's meaning.

Another point always to keep in mind is, that we are, as the Teacher has told us more than once in these meetings, actually assembled here as fellow-students and members of the Inner School - we are undertaking the study of the very doctrines which formed the core of the heart of the teachings of the Mysteries of ancient days. These Mysteries were divided into two general parts, the Lesser Mysteries and the Greater.

The Lesser Mysteries were very largely composed of dramatic rites or ceremonies, with some teaching; the Greater Mysteries were composed of, or conducted almost entirely on the ground of, study, and later were proved by personal experience in initiation. In the latter was explained - among other things - the secret meaning of the mythologies of the old religions, as for instance the Greek.

The active and nimble mind of the Greeks produced a mythology which for grace and beauty is perhaps without equal, but it nevertheless is very difficult to explain; the Mysteries of Samothrace [27] and of Eleusis - the greater ones - explained among other things what these myths meant. These myths formed the basis of the exoteric religions; but note well that exotericism does not mean that the thing which is taught exoterically is in itself false, but merely that it is a teaching given without the key to it: such teaching is symbolic, illusory, touching on the truth: the truth is there, but without the key to it - which is the esoteric meaning - it yields no proper sense.

We open our study of The Secret Doctrine, this evening, by reading from Volume I, page 43, second and third paragraphs:

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. Our "Universe" is only one of an infinite number of Universes, all of them "Sons of Necessity," because links in the great Cosmic chain of Universes, each one standing in the relation of an effect as regards its predecessor, and being a cause as regards its successor.

The appearance and disappearance of the Universe are pictured as an outbreathing and inbreathing of "the Great Breath," which is eternal, and which, being Motion, is one of the three aspects of the Absolute - Abstract Space and Duration being the other two. When "the Great Breath" is projected, it is called the Divine Breath, and is regarded as the breathing of the Unknowable Deity - the One Existence - which breathes out a thought, as it were, which becomes the Kosmos. (See Isis Unveiled.) So also it is when the Divine Breath is inspired again the Universe disappears into the bosom of "the Great Mother," who then sleeps, "wrapped in her invisible robes."

A fortnight ago we were studying the question of Maya and the relationship of the inner being of man to the Ineffable Essence; it remains for us briefly to study how man, who has a personal element in him, sprang forth from the very essence of impersonality, if one may so call it. We can say at once that the Infinite and Impersonal never becomes finite and personal. How, then, does the spirit of man (already the first film over the face of the Absolute, as it were) come into being? Let us remember that the manifestation of worlds, and, deductively, of the beings who inhabit those worlds, took place in the extension of matter popularly called 'space'. A center, first, is 'localized' - a very poor word to use! - and is, de facto, not infinite, not eternal; if it were, it could neither manifest nor come into outward existence, for this is limitation. The Eternal, the Ineffable, the Infinite, does not ever manifest at all, either partially or in toto. Words themselves are misleading in treating of these subjects; but what can we say? We must use human expressions in order to convey our Meaning.

How then arose manifestation? The Ancient Wisdom tells [28] us the following: In the seeds of life remaining in space from a planet which had previously run its Manvantara and had passed into latency or Prakriti Pralaya - there came (when the hour struck for manifestation to begin again) into being in these seeds of life the activity called in Sanskrit trishna (thirst, if you like, desire for manifestation), thus forming the center around which was to gather a new universe. It had by karmic necessity its particular place in space and was to produce its particular kind of progeny: gods, monads, atoms, men, and the three elementary - or elemental - kingdoms of the world as we see it around us: from the karmic seeds which were brought over and which were lying latent from the preceding Manvantara.

The Universe reembodies itself (it does not 'reincarnate', which means coming into flesh), following precisely the analogical lines, mutatis mutandis, that the soul of man does in reincarnating, making the necessary allowances for varying conditions. As man is the product of his former life, or rather of his lives, so is a universe, a solar system, a planet, an animal, an atom - the very great as well as the so-called infinitesimal - the fruitage, the flower, of what went before. Each of these bears its load of karma precisely as the soul of man does.

The teachings relating to the evolving of the inner planes of Being, which precede and produce the outer planes, are very esoteric, as our Teachers have told us, and belong to a study higher than we venture to approach at the present time, but we can form some general idea of how it is done, as has already been said, by analogy and by comparison with the life of man.

When manifestation begins, what is called 'duality' supervenes. It would seem to be a procession something like this, were we to symbolize it by the diagram shown.

Consider this uppermost straight line a hypothetical plane: it may be, humanly speaking, immeasurable miles in depth or in extension, but mere extension has nothing to do with the general concept. Above it stretches the infinitude of the Boundless, and below the diagram is the Boundless, and inwards through it is the Boundless, interpenetrating everywhere; but for purposes of our present illustration we will say that it is 'above'.

Let us place anywhere we may please a point A, another one A¢ here, and a third A² there. We have now reached, after a long period of latency or Pralaya has passed, a period of manifestation or Manvantara; such a point as A, or A¢ or A², we will call the Primordial Point, the first breaking-through into the cosmic plane below; the spirit-force above arising into activity in the seeds of being and forcing its way down into the lower life of manifestation - not pushed nor moved by anything outside of itself - is driven into manifestation by the karmic life of its own essential [29] [30] being, by the thirst of desire or blossoming forth, like a fresh upspringing in early summer of a flower, in which the tendency in manifestation is outward. This first appearance is conceived of in philosophy as the First or Primordial Point; this is the name given to it in the Jewish Theosophy called the Qabbalah.

From the moment that the Point, as it were the seed of life, the germ of being - all these are but names for the one thing, the spiritual atom, the spiritual monad, call it what you will - from the moment that it bursts through into the lower life as it were, differentiation or duality sets in and continues thenceforward to the end of the Great Cycle, forming the two side-lines of the diagrammatic triangle. We may call one A-B the Brahm_ (masculine), and the other A-C the Prakriti or Nature (feminine). Brahm_ is frequently also called Purusha, a Sanskrit word meaning Man, the Ideal Man, like the Qabbalistic Adam Qadmon, the primordial entity of space, containing in Prakriti or Nature all the septenary scales of manifested being.

At all times, from the very first instant when duality sets in, there is an unceasing attraction between these two lines or poles, and they join. Remember that this symbol is merely a paradigm, that it is merely a paradigmatic scheme or representation. Absolutely, it would be absurd to say that life and beings proceed into manifestation as geometric triangles only; but we can represent it symbolically to our minds in this fashion. When these two join, the Father and the Mother, spirit (or Reality) and illusion (or maya), Brahm_ (or Purusha) and Prakriti (or Nature), their union produces the Son. In the Christian scheme they give the spiritual or primordial Son the name of Christos; in the Egyptian scheme Osiris and Isis (or her twin sister Nephthys - which is merely the more recondite side of Isis) produce their son Horus, the spiritual Sun, physically the Sun or the Light-Bringer; and so similarly in the different schemes that the ancient world has handed down to us.

From the interaction of these three, by interpolar action, by the spiritual forces working in and out, two other lines fall downwards - according to the mystical way in which this scheme of emanation is taught - and they also join and form the square - or the manifested Kosmos.

Now from the Central or Primordial Point is born or proceeds the Sun of Life. By It and through It is our union with the Ineffable. Man may be down here a physical being on earth, or anywhere else a luminous, ethereal entity: but it matters not where he is or what his body: for once the seven principles of his being are in action, man the thinking entity, is produced, linked by his seventh principle, and his sixth, with that Sun of Life. [31]

To every 'man' of the unnamable multitudes of self-conscious beings belonging to this Kosmos or Universe, there extend respectively upwards or downwards, two natures: one of which is a ray of spirit connecting him with the divine of the Divinest, and from that extending upwards in all directions and linking us in every sense of the word with the Ineffable, the Boundless, which is, therefore, the core of our being, the center of our essence.

The appearance and evolution of man as a human being on this planet Terra, follow the same line of Nature's wonderful analogical working that a planet does in space, or a Sun does with its brothers of a solar system, the planets. Man, thus being in very truth a child of Infinity, the offspring of the Ineffable, has latent within himself the capacity of the Universe.

And on this fact depends what we have so often been told of the getting of 'powers'. The very method by which we do not get them, the very way of missing and losing them, is to run after them, strange as it may sound, because this is the impulse of vanity and selfishness. If we, then, selfishly seek them, what do we get? We get the action of the lower powers upon us; it is a growing thirst for sensation which we do get, and this leads us towards and into the nether abyss of Matter, the opposite pole of the Boundless, if it is followed.

But in the great Soul who has passed by and thrown off this thirst for personal acquisition, in whom the grasping spirit for self is no longer dominant, who feels his Oneness with everything that is, who feels that every human being, yea the very pismire that laboriously crawls up a sand-knob only to tumble down again, is himself - no metaphor but an actuality: a different body, but the same life, the same essence, the same things latent in it as in him - in him indeed lies the power of ascending the ladder of Being, drawn by the link with the Highest in his innermost nature. He and they are both filled full of latent powers and forces, and he and they may become in time very Gods, blazing, as it were, with power like the Sun; and the only way is utter selflessness, because selflessness, paradoxical as it may sound, is the only way to the Self, the Self Universal. The personal self shuts the door before us.

Of course we cannot crush out of our being the sense of selfhood, nor is that desirable; but in the lowest aspect it takes upon itself the forms of all selfishness, until the being of the man who follows the 'left-hand path', as they call it, or the path downwards, ends in what the early Christians - stealing from the Greeks - called Tartarus, the place of disintegration.

When man ascends beyond the reach of matter, he has cast off the bondage of Maya, or illusion. Let us remember that when [32] manifestation opens, Prakriti becomes or rather is Maya; and Brahm_, the Father, is the spirit of the consciousness, or the Individuality. These two are really one, yet they are also the two aspects of the one Life-ray acting and reacting upon itself, much as a man himself can say, "I am I". He has the faculty of self-analysis, or self-division; all of us know it, we can feel it in ourselves; one side of us, in our thoughts, can be called the Prakriti or the material element, or the Mayavi element, or the element of illusion; and the other, the spirit, the individuality, the God within.

Yet as man sees life, as he runs his eye down the scale of beings, he sees it through Maya; in fact, he is the child of Maya on one side, as he is of the Spirit on the other. Both are in him. His lesson is to learn that the two are one and that they are not separate; then he no longer is deceived. His lesson is to understand that Maya, the great Deluder, is the famous snake or serpent of antiquity, which leads us out from the 'Garden of Eden' (employing a Biblical metaphor), through experience and suffering to learn what illusion is - and is not.

Also matter, which is the mayavi manifestation of Prakriti on this plane (and I mean here physical matter), itself is not substantial. The most dense and rigid things we can think of, perhaps, are the metals, and actually they are, perhaps, the most porous, the most foamlike, the most evanescent, as seen from the other or higher side of being, from the other side of the plane. So well is this now beginning to be understood that even our more intuitive scientists are telling us that 'space', which seems to us so thin, and tenuous, is in reality more rigid than the hardest steel. Why is it that electricity prefers metals as a path, to common wood, or cotton-wool, or some other such thing?

Before we go farther, it would seem necessary to study a little what we mean by the words Manvantara and Pralaya. Let us take Manvantara first. This word is a Sanskrit compound, and as such means nothing more than 'between two Manus'; more literally, 'Manu - between'. 'Manu', or 'Dhyani-Chohan,' in the Esoteric System, is the entities collectively which appear first at the beginning of manifestation and from which, like a cosmic tree, everything is derived or born. Manu actually is the (spiritual) tree of life of any Planetary Chain, of manifested being. Manu is thus (in one sense) the third logos; as the second is the Father-Mother, the Brahm_ and Prakriti; and the first is what we call the Unmanifest Logos, or Brahman (neuter) and its cosmic veil Pradhana.

Pradhana is also a Sanskrit compound, meaning that which is 'placed before'; and from this, it has become a technical term in philosophy, and means what we would call the first [33] filmy appearance of root-matter, 'placed before', or rather around, Brahman, as a Veil. Root-matter is mula-prakriti, root-nature, and corresponding to it as the other or active pole, is Brahman (neuter). That from which the First or Unmanifest Logos proceeds is called Para-brahman, and Mula-prakriti is Its Kosmic Veil. Para-brahman is another Sanskrit compound, meaning 'beyond Brahman'. Mula-prakriti, again, as said above, is a Sanskrit compound meaning mula-root, prakriti-nature.

First, then, the Boundless, symbolized by the ¡; then Para-brahman, and Mula-prakriti its other pole; then lower, Brahman and its Veil Pradhana; then Brahm_-prakriti or Purusha-prakriti (Prakriti being also maya); the manifested Universe appearing through and by this last: Brahm_-prakriti, Father-Mother. In other words, the second logos, Father-Mother, is the producing cause of manifestation through their son, which in a Planetary Chain is Manu. A Manvantara, therefore, is the period of activity between any two Manus, on any plane, since in any such period there is a root-Menu at the beginning of Evolution, and a seed-Menu at its close, preceding a Pralaya.

Pralaya: this is also a Sanskrit compound, formed of laya, from a Sanskrit root li, and the prefix pra. What does li mean? It means to dissolve, to melt away, to liquefy, as when one pours water upon a cube of salt or of sugar. The cube of salt or of sugar vanishes in the water; it dissolves, changes its form; and this may be taken as a figure, as a symbol, of what Pralaya is: a crumbling away, a vanishing away of matter into something else which is yet in it, and surrounds it, and interpenetrates it. That is Pralaya, usually translated as the state of latency, state of rest, state of repose, between two Manvantaras or lifecycles. If we remember distinctly the meaning of the Sanskrit word, our minds take a new bent in direction, follow a new thought; we get new ideas; we penetrate into the arcanum of the thing that takes place.

Now there are many kinds of Manvantaras; also many kinds of Pralayas. There are, for instance, the Universal Manvantara and the Universal Pralaya, and these are called Prakritika, because it is the Pralaya or vanishing away, melting away, of Prakriti or Nature. Then there is the Solar Pralaya. Sun in Sanskrit is Surya, and the adjective from this is Saurya; hence, the Saurya Pralaya, Saurya Pralaya, the Pralaya of the solar system. Then, thirdly, there is the terrestrial or Planetary Pralaya. The Sanskrit word for earth is Bhumi, and the adjective corresponding to this is Bhaumika: hence, the Bhaumika Pralaya. Then we can say that there is the Pralaya or death of the individual man. Man is purusha; the corresponding adjective is paurusha: hence, the Paurusha Pralaya, or death of man. So, then, we have given examples of [34] various pralayas: first of the Prakritika, or dissolution of Nature; next the Solar Pralaya, the Saurya; next the Bhaumika or the passing away of the earth; and then the Paurusha, or the death of man. And these adjectives apply equally well to the several kinds of Manvantaras, or lifecycles.

There is another kind of Pralaya which is called Nitya. In its general sense, it means 'constant' or 'continuous', and can be exemplified by the constant or continuous change - life and death - of the cells of our bodies - it is a state in which the entity, the indwelling and dominating entity, remains, but its different principles and rupas undergo continuous change. Hence it is called Nitya. It applies to the body of man, to the outer sphere of earth, to the earth itself, to the solar system, and to all Nature.

It is likewise represented by a symbol that our first great Teacher, H.P. Blavatsky, has given us from the Oriental Wisdom, the out-breathing and in-breathing of Brahm_. This symbol, by the way, is not solely Indian. It is found in the ancient Egyptian texts, where one or another of the Gods, Khnumu, for instance, breathes forth from his mouth the cosmic egg. It is also found alluded to in the Orphic Hymns, where the cosmic serpent breathes forth as an egg the things which are to be, or the future universe. Everywhere, especially where ancient religion or philosophy has longest retained its hold, there do we find the symbol of the cosmic egg. Religions of less age and of less influence do not so often employ it. The cosmic egg was found as a symbol in Egypt; it was found in Hindustan; it was found in Peru, where the 'Mighty Man', the Sanskrit Purusha, the Ideal Man, the Paradigmatic Man, was called Manco Capac, and his wife and sister was called Mama Oello, which means 'Mother-egg'; these brought the universe into being, becoming later the Sun and the Moon respectively.

Why did the Ancients symbolize the beginning of manifestation under the form of an egg? Let us ask: Is it not a fine symbol? As the egg producing the chick contains the germ of life (laid by its mother, the hen, and fructified by the other pole of being) so the cosmic egg, which is the Primordial Point of which we spoke in the early part of our study this evening, also contains the germ of life. The egg itself also can be called the germ of life, and the germ of life within the egg can be called the inner germ - that more subtle point which receives those impulses of which we have spoken before, coming down from the highest center of communication between the outward world and the inner, the lines of inner magnetic action and reaction. And when the chick within the egg is formed, it bursts its shell and comes forth into the light of day, precisely as we saw was the case with the Primordial Point. When the karmic hour had struck, it burst forth, as it were, into [35] other spheres of manifestation and activity. The Ancients, carrying the figure still farther, even spoke of Heaven as a domelike affair, as the upper part of an egg-shell.

Let us think more deeply of these ancient symbols. The Ancients were not fools. There is a deep meaning in these olden figures of speech. Why did Homer speak of his Olympus, the abode of Zeus and the Gods, as being brazen, like brass, one of the hardest and most intractable things that the Greeks knew? Why did Hesiod speak of the same as made of iron? Because they realized that the life here in matter and of matter, was based upon an evanescent substratum, and that the lower world of matter is, as has been so often said, evanescent, foamy, full of holes, as it were, and unreal. [36]

Chapter V

THE ESOTERIC TEACHINGS AND THE NEBULAR THEORY. GODS BEHIND THE KOSMOS: WHY NATURE IS IMPERFECT.

To make of Science an integral whole necessitates, indeed, the study of spiritual and psychic, as well as physical, Nature. Otherwise it will ever be like the anatomy of man, discussed of old by the profane from the point of view of his shell-side and in ignorance of the interior work ¼

¼ The duty of the Occultist lies with the Soul and Spirit of Cosmic Space, not merely with its illusive appearance and behavior. 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.

With the latter, Occultism has nought to do. It is only with the theories of such men of learning as Kepler, Kant, Oersted, and Sir W. Herschel, who believed in a Spiritual world, that Occult Cosmogony might treat, and attempt a satisfactory compromise. But the views of those physicists differed vastly from the latest modern speculations. Kant and Herschel had in their mind's eye speculations upon the origin and the final destiny, as well as the present aspect, of the Universe, from a far more philosophical and psychic standpoint; whereas modern Cosmology and Astronomy now repudiate anything like research into the mysteries of being. The result is what might be expected: complete failure and inextricable contradictions in the thousand and one varieties of so-called scientific theories, and in this theory as in all others.

The nebular hypothesis, involving the theory of the existence of a primeval matter, diffused in a nebulous condition, is of no modern date in astronomy as everyone knows. Anaximenes, of the Ionian school, had already taught that the sidereal bodies were formed through the progressive condensation of a primordial pregenetic matter, which had almost a negative weight, and was spread out through Space in an extremely sublimated condition.

- Secret Doctrine, I, 588-590

With the Teacher's permission there are three points which it would seem necessary to touch upon slightly, before we begin our evening's study.

The first is with regard to the question of morals, that is to say, right conduct based upon right views, right thinking. We have touched upon this matter at nearly every meeting of this Lodge, because the line, the path, of duty - of right conduct based upon right views - is the Path of all who would tread onward to the Ancient Wisdom and to the Ancient Mysteries. Our Teachers have told us this again and again, and the great thinkers, philosophers, and religious men, of all ages, have told us the same thing.

These meetings, as our present Teacher has told us so often, are not for purposes of intellectual study only, nor to amuse ourselves with abstruse and mystic knowledge; but mainly, firstly, principally, for the purpose of gaining a right foundation for right views, which shall govern human conduct. When we have this [37] foundation we have the beginnings of all laws; we can affect the world not only by our own views and by our own acts, but by those of other members who will come in and swell our number; and, further, we shall be able in time to affect for good even the governments of the world, not directly and immediately perhaps, but at least indirectly and in the course of time. All the horrible things that perplex and confuse and distress mankind today arise wholly, almost, out of a lack of right views, and hence, a lack of right conduct. We have the testimony of the Greek and Roman initiates and thinkers that the Ancient Mysteries of Greece taught men, above everything else, to live rightly and to have a noble hope for the life after death.

Next, the second point: in our last meeting we touched upon the Ancient Mysteries in the ancient Mystery Schools, and we took as examples those of Greece, from which the Romans derived their own Mysteries - but we touched upon one point only, the mythological aspect; and this mythological aspect comprises only a portion - a relatively small portion - of what was taught in the Mystery Schools, principally at Samothrace and at Eleusis. At Samothrace was taught the same Mystery Teaching that was current elsewhere in Greece, but here it was more developed and recondite; and the foundation of these Mystery Teachings was morals. The noblest and greatest men of ancient times in Greece were initiates in the Mysteries of these two seats of esoteric knowledge.

In other countries farther to the east they had other Mystery Schools or "colleges", and this word "college" by no means necessarily meant a mere temple or building; it meant "association", as in our modern word colleague, "associate". The Teutonic tribes of northern Europe, the Germanic tribes - which included Scandinavia - had their Mystery-colleges also; and teacher and neophytes stood on the bosom of Mother-Earth, under Father-Ether, the boundless sky, or in subterranean receptacles, and taught and learned. We state here at once that the core, the heart, the center, of the Ancient Mysteries was the abstruse problems dealing with Death. These teachings we still have, and when the Teacher says that it is time to give them out, they will be forthcoming; she is the judge as to when this shall be.

The third point is with regard to the paradigms or diagrams which we may find necessary to use from time to time in order to illustrate certain teachings. Remember that these paradigms are relative and changeable; they are not hard and fast or absolute things; this fact must be kept always clear in the mind, and around these diagrams or paradigms the mind should never be allowed to crystallize. Why? Because any paradigm, any particular combination of geometrical lines, can illustrate different [38] thoughts or things, as, for instance, the paradigm of the triangle from which hangs the square (as used at our last meeting) can apply equally as well to the highest combined principle in man, the spiritual-mental monad, as to the lower principles into which the monad falls at the beginning of incarnation or manifestation, and from which it will resurrect when the first chimes of the pralayic bells are heard in the Akasic spaces.

We will now resume our study. We take up, as our general theme, the same two paragraphs on p. 43 of Volume I of The Secret Doctrine, which we read at our last meeting: paragraphs one and two:<