Masonic, Occult and Esoteric Online Library
Fundamentals Of The Esoteric Philosophy
By Gottfried de Purucker
Six Numbered Items
NOTE
The study of the Three Fundamental Propositions, advises Madame Blavatsky, should be followed by that of the numbered items in the Summing Up at the end of Volume I (Part I). It would seem to have been her intention to gather together in a few orderly paragraphs the essential features of the Secret Doctrine so far presented. She begins, however, in the first of the numbered paragraphs, with a reference back to the Introductory section of the work, in which she had assembled a great range of evidence that establishes beyond doubt the existence of an esoteric tradition. Furthermore, arriving at the sixth numbered paragraph, she refuses to confine herself to mere recapitulation, and adds a considerable amount of explanatory information about those Hierarchies of Beings through whose agency `the Universe is worked and guided'. Even so, she reverts more than once to the fundamental law of the whole system, the essential Oneness of existence.
SUMMING UP - Six Numbered Items
The writer of the present statement must be prepared beforehand to meet with great opposition and even the denial of such statements as are brought forward in this work. Not that any claim to infallibility, or to perfect correctness in every detail of all that is herein written, has ever been put forward. Facts are there, and they can hardly be denied. But, owing to the intrinsic difficulties of the subjects treated of, and the almost insurmountable limitations of the English tongue, as of all other European languages, to express certain ideas, it is more than probable that the writer has failed to present the explanations in the best and clearest form; yet all that could be done, under every adverse circumstance, has been done, and this is the utmost that can be expected of any writer.(v1 p272)
Let us recapitulate and show, by the vastness of the subjects expounded, how difficult, if not impossible, it is to do them full justice.
1. The Secret Doctrine is the accumulated Wisdom of the Ages, and its cosmogony alone is the most stupendous and elaborate of all systems, even as veiled in the exotericism of the Puranas. But such is the mysterious power of occult symbolism, that the facts which have actually occupied countless generations of initiated seers and prophets to marshal, set down and explain, in the bewildering series of evolutionary progress, are all recorded on a few pages of geometrical signs and glyphs. The flashing gaze of those seers has penetrated into the very kernel of matter, and recorded the soul of things there, where an ordinary profane observer, however learned, would have perceived but the external work of form. But modern science believes not in the "soul of things", and hence will reject the whole system of ancient cosmogony. It is useless to say that the system in question is no fancy of one or several isolated individuals; that it is an uninterrupted record, covering thousands of generations of seers, whose respective experiences were made to test and verify the traditions, passed on orally by one early race to another, of the teachings of higher and exalted Beings, who watched over the childhood of Humanity; that for long ages the "Wise Men" of the Fifth Race, of the stock saved and rescued from the last cataclysm and shifting of continents, had passed their lives in learning, not teaching. How did they do so? It is answered: by checking, testing, and verifying, in every department of Nature, the traditions of old by the independent visions of great Adepts; that is to say, men who have developed and perfected their physical, mental, psychic and spiritual organizations to the utmost possible degree. No vision of one Adept was accepted till it was checked and confirmed by the visions - so obtained as to stand as independent evidence - of other Adepts, and by centuries of experience.
2. The fundamental law in that system, the central point from which all emerges, around and towards which all gravitates, and upon which is hung all its philosophy, is the One Homogeneous Divine SUBSTANCE-PRINCIPLE, the One Radical Cause.
..... Some few, whose lamps shone brighter, have been led From cause to cause to nature's secret head, And found that one first Principle must be .....
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.
3. The universe is the periodical manifestation of this unknown Absolute Essence. To call it "essence", however, is to sin against the very spirit of the philosophy. For though the noun may be derived in this case from the verb esse, "to be", yet IT cannot be identified with 1 being of any kind, that can be conceived by human intellect. IT is best described as neither Spirit nor Matter, but both. Parabrahman and Mulaprakriti are One, in reality, yet two in the universal conception of the manifested, even in the conception of the One Logos, its first manifestation, to which ..... IT appears from the objective standpoint as Mulaprakriti, and not as Parabrahman; as its veil, and not the One Reality hidden behind, which is unconditioned and absolute.
4. The universe, with everything in it, is called Maayaa, because all is temporary therein, from the ephemeral life of a fire-fly 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.
5. Everything in the universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is CONSCIOUS, i.e., endowed with a consciousness of its own kind and on its own plane of perception. We men must remember that, simply because we do not perceive any signs which we can recognize of consciousness, say, in stones, we have no right to say that no consciousness exists there. There is no such thing as either "dead" or "blind" matter, as there is no "blind" or "unconscious" law. These find no place among the conceptions of Occult Philosophy. The latter never stops at surface appearances, and for it the noumenal essences have more reality than their objective counterparts; wherein it resembles the system of the mediaeval Nominalists, for whom it was the universals that were the realities, and the particulars which existed only in name and human fancy.
6. The universe is worked and guided, from within outwards. As above, so it is below; as in heaven, so on earth; and man, the microcosm and miniature copy of the macrocosm, is the living witness to this Universal Law and to the mode of its action. We see that every external motion, act, gesture, whether voluntary or mechanical, organic or mental, is produced and preceded by internal feeling or emotion, will or volition, and thought or mind. As no outward motion or change, when normal, in man's external body, can take place unless provoked by an inward impulse, given through one of the three functions named, so with the external or manifested universe. The whole Kosmos is guided, controlled and animated by almost endless series of Hierarchies of sentient Beings, each having a mission to perform, and who - whether we give them one name or another, whether we call them Dhyaan Chohans or Angels - are "messengers" in the sense only that they are the agents of Karmic and Cosmic Laws. They vary infinitely in their respective degrees of consciousness and intelligence, and to call them all pure Spirits without any of the earthly alloy "which time is wont to prey upon" is only to indulge in poetical fancy. For each of these Beings either was, or prepares to become, a man, if not in the present, then in a past or a coming cycle (Manvantara). They are perfected, when not incipient, men; and in their higher, less material spheres differ morally from terrestrial human beings only in that they are devoid of the feeling of personality and of the human emotional nature - two purely earthly characteristics. The former, or the "perfected", have become free from these feelings, because (a) they have no longer fleshly bodies - an ever-numbing weight on the Soul; and (b) the pure spiritual element being left untrammelled and more free, they are less influenced by maayaa than man can ever be, unless he is an Adept who keeps his two personalities - the spiritual and the physical - entirely separated. The incipient Monads, having never yet had terrestrial bodies, can have no sense of personality or EGO-ism. That which is meant by "personality" being a limitation and relation, or, as defined by Coleridge, "individuality existing in itself but with a nature as a ground", the term cannot of course be applied to non-human entities; but, as a fact insisted upon by generations of Seers, none of these Beings, high or low, have either individuality or personality as separate Entities, i.e., they have no individuality in the sense in which a man says, "I am myself and no one else"; in other words, they are conscious of no such distinct separateness as men and things have on earth. Individuality is the characteristic of their respective Hierarchies, not of their units, and these characteristics vary only with the degree of the plane to which those Hierarchies belong: the nearer to the region of homogeneity and the One Divine, the purer and the less accentuated is that individuality in the Hierarchy. They are finite in all respects, with the exception of their higher principles - the immortal Sparks reflecting the Universal Divine Flame, individualized and separated only on the spheres of Illusion by a differentiation as illusive as the rest. They are "Living Ones", because they are the streams projected on the Kosmic screen of Illusion from the ABSOLUTE LIFE; Beings in whom life cannot become extinct before the fire of ignorance is extinct in those who sense these "Lives". Having sprung into being under the quickening influence of the uncreated beam, the reflection of the great Central Sun that radiates on the shores of the river of life, it is the inner Principle in them which belongs to the waters of immortality, while its differentiated clothing is as perishable as man's body. Therefore Young was right in saying that
Angels are men of a superior kind ......
and no more. They are neither "ministering" nor "protecting" angels, nor are they "Harbingers of the Most High"; still less the "Messengers of wrath" of any God such as man's fancy has created. To appeal to their protection is as foolish as to believe that their sympathy may be secured by any kind of propitiation; for they are, as much as man himself is, the slaves and creatures of immutable Karmic and Kosmic Law. The reason for this is evident. Having no elements of personality in their essence, they can have no personal qualities such as are attributed by men, in exoteric religions, to their anthropomorphic God - a jealous and exclusive God, who rejoices and feels wrathful, is pleased with sacrifice, and is more despotic in his vanity than any finite foolish man. Man ..... being a compound of the essences of all these celestial Hierarchies, may succeed in making himself, as such, superior, in one sense, to any Hierarchy or Class, or even combination of them. "Man can neither propitiate nor command the Devas", it is said. But, by paralyzing his lower personality, and arriving thereby at the full knowledge of the non-separateness of his Higher SELF from the One Absolute SELF, man can, even during his terrestrial life, become as "One of Us". Thus it is by eating of the fruit of knowledge, which dispels ignorance, that man becomes like one of the Elohim, or the Dhyaanis; and once on their plane, the Spirit of Solidarity and perfect Harmony, which reigns in every Hierarchy, must extend over him and protect him in every particular.
The chief difficulty which prevents men of science from believing in divine as well as in nature spirits is their materialism. The main impediment before the Spiritualist which hinders him from believing in the same, while preserving a blind belief in the "Spirits" of the Departed, is the general ignorance of all, except some occultists and Kabalists, about the true essence and nature of matter. It is on the acceptance or rejection of the theory of the unity of all in Nature, in its ultimate Essence, that mainly rests the belief or unbelief in the existence around us of other conscious beings, besides the Spirits of the Dead. It is on the right comprehension of the primeval evolution of Spirit-Matter and its real Essence that the student has to depend for the further elucidation in his mind of the Occult Cosmogony, and for the only sure clue which can guide his subsequent studies.
In sober truth, as just shown, every so-called "Spirit" is either a disembodied or a future man. As from the highest Archangel (Dhyaan Chohan) down to the last conscious "Builder" (the inferior class of Spiritual Entities), all such are men, having lived aeons ago, in other Manvantaras, on this or other Spheres, so the inferior, semi-intelligent and non-intelligent Elementals are all future men. The fact alone, that a Spirit is endowed with intelligence, is a proof to the occultist that such a Being must have been a man, and acquired his knowledge and intelligence throughout the human cycle. There is but one indivisible and absolute Omniscience and Intelligence in the universe, and this thrills throughout every atom and infinitesimal point of the whole Kosmos, which has no bounds, and which people call SPACE, considered independently of anything contained in it. But the first differentiation of its reflection in the manifested world is purely spiritual, and the beings generated in it are not endowed with a consciousness that has any relation to the one we conceive of. They can have no human consciousness or intelligence before they have acquired such, personally and individually. This may be a mystery, yet it is a fact in Esoteric Philosophy, and a very apparent one too.
The whole order of Nature evinces a progressive march towards a higher life. There is design in the action of the seemingly blindest forces. The whole process of evolution with its endless adaptations is a proof of this. The immutable laws that weed out the weak and feeble species to make room for the strong, and which ensure the "survival of the fittest", though so cruel in their immediate action, all are working toward the grand end. The very fact that adaptations do occur, that the fittest do survive in the struggle for existence, shows that what is called "unconscious Nature" is in reality an aggregate of forces, manipulated by semi-intelligent beings (Elementals), guided by High Planetary Spirits (Dhyaan Chohans), whose collective aggregate forms the manifested verbum of the unmanifested LOGOS, and constitutes at one and the same time the MIND of the universe and its immutable LAW.(v1 p277-278)
The Secret Doctrine
v1 p272-278
v1 p293-298
v1 p316-320
