The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 of 4: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and PhilosophyBlavatsky, H. P. (Helena Petrovna)
Religion
The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 of 4: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy
Blavatsky, H. P. (Helena Petrovna)
Theosophy
An archaic Manuscript—a collection of palm leaves made impermeable to
water, fire, and air, by some specific and unknown process—is before the
writer’s eye. On the first page is an immaculate white disk within a dull
black ground. On the following page, the same disk, but with a central
point. The first, the student knows, represents Kosmos in Eternity, before
the reäwakening of still slumbering Energy, the Emanation of the World in
later systems. The point in the hitherto immaculate disk, Space and
Eternity in Pralaya, denotes the dawn of differentiation. It is the Point
in the Mundane Egg, the Germ within it which will become the Universe, the
All, the boundless, periodical Kosmos—a Germ which is latent and active,
periodically and by turns. The one circle is divine Unity, from which all
proceeds, whither all returns: its circumference—a forcibly limited
symbol, in view of the limitation of the human mind—indicates the
abstract, ever incognizable PRESENCE, and its plane, the Universal Soul,
although the two are one. Only, the face of the disk being white, and the
surrounding ground black, clearly shows that its plane is the sole
knowledge, dim and hazy though it still is, that is attainable by man. It
is on this plane that the manvantaric manifestations begin; for it is in
this SOUL, that slumbers, during the Pralaya, the Divine Thought,(27)
wherein lies concealed the plan of every future cosmogony and theogony.
It is the ONE LIFE, eternal, invisible, yet omnipresent, without beginning
or end, yet periodical in its regular manifestations—between which periods
reigns the dark mystery of Non‐Being; unconscious, yet absolute
Consciousness, unrealizable, yet the one self‐existing Reality; truly, “a
Chaos to the sense, a Kosmos to the reason.” Its one absolute attribute,
which is Itself, eternal, ceaseless Motion, is called in esoteric parlance
the Great Breath,(28) which is the perpetual motion of the Universe, in
the sense of limitless, ever‐present Space. That which is motionless
cannot be Divine. But then there is nothing in fact and reality absolutely
motionless within the Universal Soul.
Almost five centuries B.C. Leucippus, the instructor of Democritus,
maintained that Space was eternally filled with atoms actuated by a
ceaseless motion, which, in due course of time, as they aggregated,
generated rotatory motion, through mutual collisions producing lateral
movements. Epicurus and Lucretius taught the same doctrine, adding however
to the lateral motion of the atoms the idea of affinity—an Occult
teaching.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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