THE ABSOLUTE ONE ETERNAL BE-NESS

1. An Omnipresent, Eternal, Boundless, and Immutable PRINCIPLE on which all speculation is impossible, since it transcends the power of human conception and could only be dwarfed by any human expression or similitude. It is beyond the range and reach of thought - in the words of Mandukya, "unthinkable and unspeakable."

To render these ideas clearer to the general reader, let him set out with the postulate that there is one absolute Reality which antecedes all manifested, conditioned, being. This Infinite and Eternal Cause - dimly formulated in the "Unconscious" and "Unknowable" of current European philosophy - is the rootless root of "all that was, is, or ever shall be." It is of course devoid of all attributes and is essentially without any relation to manifested finite Being. It is "Be-ness" rather than Being (in Sanskrit, Sat), and is beyond all thought or speculation. SD 1, p. 14

2. 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 limit its conception of being in a similar manner, 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. But 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 Maya which veils them, and in which they are hidden. Alone the Initiate, rich with the lore acquired by numberless generations of his predecessors, directs the "Eye of Dangma" (the spiritual seership of a purified Soul - Ed.) toward the essence of things on which no Maya can have any influence. SD 1, p. 45

3. The "Absolute Consciousness," they tell us, "behind" phenomena, which is only termed unconsciousnes in the absence of any element of personality, transcends human conception. Man, unable to form one concept except in terms of empirical phenomena, is powerless from the very constitution of his being to raise the veil that shrouds the mystery of the Absolute. Only the liberated Spirit is able to faintly realise the nature of the source whence it sprung and whither it must eventually return. ...

As the highest Dhyan Chohans (Archangels - Ed.), however, can but bow in ignorance before the awful mystery of Absolute Being; and since, even in that culmination of conscious existence - "the merging of the individual in the universal consciousness" - to use a phrase of Fichte's - the Finite cannot conceive the Infinite, nor can it apply to its own standard of mental experiences, how can it be said that the "Unconscious" and the Absolute can have even an instinctive impulse or hope of attaining clear self-consciousness? A Vedantin would never admit this Heglian idea; and the Occultist would say that it applies perfectly to the awakened MAHAT, the Universal Mind already projected into the phenomenal world as the first aspect of the changeless ABSOLUTE but never to the latter. "Spirit and Matter, or Purusha and Prakriti are but the two primeval aspects of the One and Secondless" we are taught. SD 1, p. 51

4. Paranishpanna, remember, is the summum bonum, the Absolute, hence the same as Paranirvana. Besides being the final state it is that condition of subjectivity which has no relation to anything but the one absolute truth (Para-marthasatya) on its plane. It is that state which leads one to appreciate correctly the full meaning of Non-Being, which, as explained, is absolute Being. Sooner or later, all that now seemingly exists, will be in reality and actually in the state of Paranishpanna. But there is a great difference between conscious and unconscious "being."

The condition of Paranishpanna, without Paramartha, the Self-analysing consciousness ... is no bliss, but simply extinction (for Seven Eternities). Thus, an iron ball placed under the scorching rays of the sun will get heated through, but will not feel or appreciate the warmth, while a man will. It is only "with a mind clear and undarkened by personality, and an assimilation of the merit of manifold existences devoted to being in its collectivity (the whole living and sentient Universe), that one gets rid of personal existence, merging into becoming one with the Absolute, and continuing in full possession of Paramartha." SD 1, pp. 53-54

5. Hence Non-being is "Absolute Being," in esoteric philosophy. In the tenets of the latter even Adi-Buddha (first or primeval wisdom) is, while manifested, in one sense an illusion, Maya, since all the gods, including Brahma, have to die at the end of the "Age of Brahma" (the Creator God - Ed.); the abstraction called Parabrahm alone - whether we call it Ensoph or Herbert Spencer's Unknowable - being "the One Absolute" Reality. The One secondless Existence is ADWAITA, "Without a Second," and all the rest is Maya, teaches the Adwaita philosophy. SD 1, p. 54 (foot-note)

6. The fundamental Law - 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," for it becomes "substance" on the plane of the manifested Universe, an illusion, while it remains a "principle" in the beginingless 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. 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 a being of any kind, that can be conceived by human intellect. It is best described as neither Spirit nor matter, but both. "Parabrahmam and Mulaprakriti" are One, in reality, yet two in the Universal conception of the manifested, even in the conception of the One Logos, the first manifestation, to which, as the able lecturer in the "Notes on the Bhagavadgita" shows, IT appears from the objective standpoint of the One Logos as Mulaprakriti and not as Parabrahman; as its veil and not the one REALITY hidden behind, which is unconditioned and absolute. SD 1, pp. 273-274

7. "The latter (the one Reality - the Absolute) must never be mentioned in words or speech lest it should take away some of our spiritual energies that aspire towards Its state, gravitating ever onward unto IT spiritually, as the whole physical universe gravitates towards ITS manifested centre - cosmically." SD 1, p. 290 (Extracts from a Private Commentary hitherto kept secret.)

8. The expression "All is One Number, issued from No Number" relates again to that universal and philosophical tenet just explained .... That which is absolute is of course No Number; but in its later significance it has an application in Space as in Time. It means that not only every increment of time is part of a larger increment, up to the most indefinitely prolonged duration conceivable by the human intellect, but also that no manifested thing can be thought of except as part of a larger whole: the total aggregate being the One manifested Universe that issues from the unmanifested or Absolute - called Non-Being or "No-Number," to distinguish it from BEING or "the One Number." SD 1, pp. 87-88

9. Moreover, Esoteric philosophy reconciles all religion, strips every one of its outward, human garments, and shows the root of each to be identical with that of every other great religion. It proves the necessity of an absolute Divine Principle in nature. It denies Deity no more than it does the Sun. Esoteric philosophy has never rejected God in nature, nor Deity as the absolute and abstract Ens. It only refuses to accept any of the gods of the so-called monotheistic religions, gods created by man in his own image and likeness, a blasphemous and sorry caricature of the Ever Unknowlable. SD 1, Introduction p. xx

10. "The knowledge of the absolute Spirit, like the effulgence of the sun, or like heat in fire, is naught else than the absolute Essence itself," says Sankaracharya. IT - is the "Spirit of the Fire," not fire itself; therefore, "the attributes of the latter, heat or flame, are not the attributes of the Spirit, but of that of which the Spirit is the unconscious cause." Is not the above sentence the true key-note of the later Rosicrucian philosophy? Parabrahm is, in short, the collective aggregate of Kosmos in its infinity and eternity, the "THAT" and "THIS" to which distributive aggregates cannot be applied. "In the beginning THIS was the Self, one only" (Aitareya Upanishad); the great Sankaracharya explains that "THIS" referred to the Universe (Jagat); the sense of the words, "In the beginning," meaning before the reproduction of the phenomenal Universe. SD 1, p. 6-7

11. The Secret Doctrine ... postulates a "One Form of Existence" as the basis and source of all things. But perhaps the phrase, the "One Form of Existence," is not altogether correct. The Sanskrit word is Prabhavapyaya, "the place, or rather plane, whence emerges the origination, and into which is the resolution of all things," says a commentator. ...

The Puranic Commentators explain it by Karana - "Cause" - but the Esoteric philosophy, by the ideal spirit of that cause. It is, in its secondary stage, the Svabhavat of the Buddhist philosopher, the eternal cause and effect, omnipresent yet abstract, the self-existent plastic Essence and the root of all things, viewed in the same dual light as the Vedantin views his Parabrahm and Mulaprakriti, the one under two aspects. SD 1, p. 46

ANGELS - MESSENGERS OF THE DIVINE

1. 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 to them one name or another, and call them Dhyan-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 differ morally from the terrestrial human beings on their higher (less material) spheres, 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 those 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 maya than man can ever be, unless he is an adept who keeps his two personalities - the spiritual and the physical - entirely separated. SD 1, pp. 274 - 275

2. ... None of these Beings, high or low, have either 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 ... 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 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 beams, 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. There 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 it is evident. Having no element of personality in their essence they can have no personal qualities, such as attributed by men, in their exoteric religions, to their anthropomorphic God. ...

"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 Dhyanis; 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. SD 1, pp. 275 - 276