The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1Theosophy / New ThoughtMystical / EsotericEnglishShareThe Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 181893 edition - EnglishMoreVersion - 1 available1893 editionLanguageEnglishEspañol‹The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 1The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 2The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 3The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 4The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 5The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 6The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 7The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 8The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 9The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 10The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 11The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 12The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 13The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 14The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 15The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 16The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 17The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 18The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 19The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 20The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 21The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 22The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 23The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 24The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 25The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 26The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 27The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 28The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 29The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 30The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 31The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 32The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 33The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 34The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 35The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 36The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 37The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 38The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 39The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 40The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 41The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 42The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 43The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 44The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 45The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 46The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 47The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 48The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 49The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 50The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 51The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 52The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 53The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 54The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 55The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 56The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 57The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 58The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 59The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 60The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 61The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 62The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 63The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 64The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 65The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 66The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 67The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 68The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 69The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 70The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 71The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 72›Son Were Once More One, And The Son Had Not Yet Awakened For The NewThe Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 18ListenPlay this chapter in spoken English.Save chapterListen to chapter1WHEEL(61) AND HIS PILGRIMAGE THEREON (b). 2(a) “Darkness is Father‐Mother: Light their Son,” says an old Eastern proverb. Light is inconceivable except as coming from some source which is the cause of it: and as, in the case of Primordial Light, that source is unknown, though so strongly demanded by reason and logic, therefore it is called “Darkness” by us, from an intellectual point of view. As to borrowed or secondary light, whatever its source, it can be only of a temporary mâyâvic character. Darkness, then, is the Eternal Matrix in which the Sources of Light appear and disappear. Nothing is added to darkness to make of it light, or to light to make it darkness, on this our plane. They are interchangeable; and, scientifically, light is but a mode of darkness and vice versâ. Yet both are phenomena of the same noumenon—which is absolute darkness to the scientific mind, and but a gray twilight to the perception of the average Mystic, though to that of the spiritual eye of the Initiate it is absolute light. How far we discern the light that shines in darkness depends upon our powers of vision. What is light to us is darkness to certain insects, and the eye of the clairvoyant sees illumination where the normal eye perceives only blackness. When the whole Universe was plunged in sleep—had returned to its one primordial element—there was neither centre of luminosity, nor eye to perceive light, and darkness necessarily filled the “Boundless All.” 3(b) The “Father” and “Mother” are the male and female principles in Root‐Nature, the opposite poles that manifest in all things on every plane of Kosmos—or Spirit and Substance, in a less allegorical aspect, the resultant of which is the Universe, or the “Son.” They are “once more one,” when in the Night of Brahmâ, during Pralaya, all in the objective Universe has returned to its one primal and eternal cause, to reäppear at the following Dawn—as it does periodically. Kârana—Eternal Cause—was alone. To put it more plainly: Kârana is alone during the Nights of Brahmâ. The previous objective Universe has dissolved into its one primal and eternal Cause, and is, so to say, held in solution in Space, to differentiate again and crystallize out anew at the following Manvataric Dawn, which is the commencement of a new Day or new activity of Brahmâ—the symbol of a Universe. In esoteric parlance, Brahmâ is Father‐Mother‐Son, or Spirit, Soul and Body at once; each personage being symbolical of an attribute, and each attribute or quality being a graduated efflux of Divine Breath in its cyclic differentiation, involutionary and evolutionary. In the cosmico‐physical sense, it is the Universe, the Planetary Chain and the Earth; in the purely spiritual, the Unknown Deity, Planetary Spirit, and Man—the son of the two, the creature of Spirit and Matter, and a manifestation of them in his periodical appearances on Earth during the “Wheels,” or the Manvantaras. 46. THE SEVEN SUBLIME LORDS AND THE SEVEN TRUTHS HAD CEASED TO BE, (a) AND THE UNIVERSE, THE SON OF NECESSITY, WAS IMMERSED IN PARANISHPANNA,(62) (b) TO BE OUTBREATHED BY THAT WHICH IS, AND YET IS NOT. NAUGHT WAS (c). 5(a) The “Seven Sublime Lords” are the Seven Creative Spirits, the Dhyân Chohans, who correspond to the Hebrew Elohim. It is the same Hierarchy of Archangels to which St. Michael, St. Gabriel, and others belong, in Christian Theogony. Only while St. Michael, for instance, is allowed in dogmatic Latin Theology to watch over all the promontories and gulfs, in the Esoteric System the Dhyânis watch successively over one of the Rounds and the great Root‐Races of our Planetary Chain. They are, moreover, said to send their Bodhisattvas, the human correspondents of the Dhyâni‐Buddhas during every Round and Race. Out of the “Seven Truths” and Revelations, or rather revealed secrets, four only have been handed to us, as we are still in the Fourth Round, and the world also has had only four Buddhas, so far. This is a very complicated question, and will receive more ample treatment later on. 6So far “there are only Four Truths, and Four Vedas”—say the Buddhists and Hindûs. For a similar reason Irenæus insisted on the necessity of Four Gospels. But as every new Root‐Race at the head of a Round must have its revelation and revealers, the next Round will bring the Fifth, the following the Sixth, and so on. 7(b) “Paranishpanna” is the Absolute Perfection to which all Existences attain at the close of a great period of activity, or Mahâmanvantara, and in which they rest during the succeeding period of repose. In Tibetan it is called “Yong‐Grub.” Up to the day of the Yogâchârya School the true nature of Paranirvâna was taught publicly, but since then it has become entirely esoteric; hence so many contradictory interpretations of it. It is only a true Idealist who can understand it. Everything has to be viewed as ideal, with the exception of Paranirvâna, by him who would comprehend that state, and acquire a knowledge of how Non‐Ego, Voidness, and Darkness are Three in One, and alone self‐existent and perfect. It is absolute, however, only in a relative sense, for it must give room to still further absolute perfection, according to a higher standard of excellence in the following period of activity—just as a perfect flower must cease to be a perfect flower and die, in order to grow into a perfect fruit, if such a mode of expression may be permitted. 8The 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 of a cause as regards its successor. 9The 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 symbols 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. So also is it that when the Divine Breath is inspired, the Universe disappears into the bosom of the Great Mother, who then sleeps “wrapped in her Ever‐Invisible Robes.” 10(c) By “that which is, and yet is not” is meant the Great Breath itself, which we can only speak of as Absolute Existence, but cannot picture to our imagination as any form of Existence that we can distinguish from Non‐ Existence. The three periods—the Present, the Past and the Future—are in Esoteric Philosophy a compound time; for the three are a composite number only in relation to the phenomenal plane, but in the realm of noumena have no abstract validity. As said in the Scriptures: “The Past Time is the Present Time, as also the Future, which, though it has not come into existence, still is,” according to a precept in the Prasanga Madhyamika teaching, whose dogmas have been known ever since it broke away from the purely esoteric schools.(63) Our ideas, in short, on duration and time are all derived from our sensations according to the laws of association. Inextricably bound up with the relativity of human knowledge, they nevertheless can have no existence except in the experience of the individual Ego, and perish when its evolutionary march dispels the Mâyâ of phenomenal existence. What is time, for instance, but the panoramic succession of our states of consciousness? In the words of a Master, “I feel irritated at having to use these three clumsy words—Past, Present, and Future—miserable concepts of the objective phases of the subjective whole, they are about as ill‐adapted for the purpose as an axe for fine carving.” One has to acquire Paramârtha lest one should become too easy a prey to Samvriti—is a philosophical axiom.(64) 117. THE CAUSES OF EXISTENCE HAD BEEN DONE AWAY WITH; (a) THE VISIBLE THAT WAS, AND THE INVISIBLE THAT IS, RESTED IN ETERNAL NON‐BEING—THE ONE BEING (b). 12(a) “The Causes of Existence” mean not only the physical causes known to Science, but the metaphysical causes, the chief of which is the desire to exist, an outcome of Nidâna and Mâyâ. This desire for a sentient life shows itself in everything, from an atom to a sun, and is a reflection of the Divine Thought propelled into objective existence, into a law that the Universe should exist. According to Esoteric teaching, the real cause of that supposed desire, and of all existence, remains for ever hidden, and its first emanations are the most complete abstractions mind can conceive. These abstractions must of necessity be postulated as the cause of the material Universe which presents itself to the senses and intellect, and must underlie the secondary and subordinate powers of Nature, which have been anthropomorphized and worshipped as “God” and “gods” by the common herd of every age. It is impossible to conceive anything without a cause; the attempt to do so makes the mind a blank. This is virtually the condition to which the mind must come at last when we try to trace back the chain of causes and effects, but both Science and Religion jump to this condition of blankness much more quickly than is necessary, for they ignore the metaphysical abstractions which are the only conceivable causes of physical concretions. 13These abstractions become more and more concrete as they approach our plane of existence, until finally they phenomenalize in the form of the material Universe, by a process of conversion of metaphysics into physics, analogous to that by which steam can be condensed into water, and water frozen into ice. 14(b) The idea of “Eternal Non‐Being,” which is the “One Being,” will appear a paradox to anyone who does not remember that we limit our ideas of Being to our present consciousness of Existence; making it a specific, instead of a generic term. An unborn infant, could it think in our acceptation of that term, would necessarily in a similar manner limit its conception of Being to the intra‐uterine life which alone it knows; and were it to endeavour to express to its consciousness the idea of life after birth (death to it), it would, in the absence of data to go upon, and of faculties to comprehend such data, probably express that life as “Non‐ Being which is Real Being.” In our case the One Being is the noumenon of all the noumena which we know must underlie phenomena, and give them whatever shadow of reality they possess, but which we have not the senses or the intellect to cognize at present. The impalpable atoms of gold scattered through the substance of a ton of auriferous quartz may be imperceptible to the naked eye of the miner, yet he knows that they are not only present there, but that they alone give his quartz any appreciable value; and this relation of the gold to the quartz may faintly shadow forth that of the noumenon to the phenomenon. Only the miner knows what the gold will look like when extracted from the quartz, whereas the common mortal can form no conception of the reality of things separated from the Mâyâ which veils them, and in which they are hidden. 15Alone the Initiate, rich with the lore acquired by numberless generations of his predecessors, directs the “Eye of Dangma” toward the essence of things on which no Mâyâ can have any influence. It is here that the teachings of Esoteric Philosophy in relation to the Nidânas and the Four Truths become of the greatest importance; but they are secret. 168. ALONE, THE ONE FORM OF EXISTENCE (A) STRETCHED BOUNDLESS, INFINITE, ‹Previous chapterThe Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 17Next chapterThe Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 19›Similar passagesBy tradition and source labelFind similarCompare selectedCompare with similarAsk Deep ThoughtSelect passages to search for parallels.Tap any verse to select it, then compare selected passages or ask Deep Thought. Public domain in the United States via Project Gutenberg