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Alone, the One Form of Existence (a)

(a) The tendency of modern thought is to recur to the archaic idea of a homogeneous basis for apparently widely different things—heterogeneity developed from homogeneity. Biologists are now searching for their homogeneous protoplasm and Chemists for their protyle, while Science is looking for the force of which electricity, magnetism, heat, and so forth, are the differentiations.

The Secret Doctrine carries this idea into the region of metaphysics, and 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 Prabhavâpyaya, “the place [or rather plane] whence is the origination, and into which is the resolution of all things,” as a commentator says.

It is not the “Mother of the World,” as translated by Wilson;66 for Jagad Yoni, as shown by Fitzedward Hall, is scarcely so much the “Mother of the World,” or the “Womb of the World,” as the “Material Cause of the World.” The Purânic commentators explain it by Kârana, “Cause,” but Esoteric Philosophy, by the ideal spirit of that cause. In its secondary stage, it is the Svabhâvat 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 Vedântin views his Parabrahman and Mûlaprakriti, the one under two aspects.

Scholars speculate on the possibility of the Vedânta, and the Uttara Mîmânsâ especially, having been “evoked by the teachings of the Buddhists”.

whereas, on the contrary, it is Buddhism, the teaching of Gautama Buddha, that was “evoked” and entirely upreared on the tenets of the Secret Doctrine, of which a partial sketch is here attempted, and on which, also, the Upanishads are made to rest.67

According to the teachings of Shrî Shankarâchârya our contention is undeniable.68

stretched boundless, infinite, causeless, in Dreamless sleep (b); Life pulsated unconscious in Universal Space, throughout that All-Presence, which is sensed by the Opened Eye of Dangma.65

(b) “Dreamless Sleep” is one of the seven states of consciousness known in Oriental Esotericism. In each of these states a different portion of the mind comes into action; or as a Vedântin would express it, the individual is conscious in a different plane of his being.

The term “Dreamless Sleep,” in this case, is applied allegorically to the Universe to express a condition somewhat analogous to that state of consciousness in man, which, not being remembered in a waking state, seems a blank, just as the sleep of the mesmerized subject seems to him an unconscious blank when he returns to his normal condition, although he has been talking and acting as a conscious individual would.

But where was Dangma when the Âlaya of the Universe69was in Paramârtha (a)70

(a) Here we have before us the subject of centuries of scholastic disputations. The two terms “Âlaya,” and “Paramârtha,” have been the causes of dividing schools and splitting the truth into more [pg 079]different aspects than any other mystic words. Âlaya is the Soul of the World or Anima Mundi—the Over-Soul of Emerson—which according to esoteric teaching changes its nature periodically.

Âlaya, though eternal and changeless in its inner essence on the planes which are unreachable by either men or cosmic gods (Dhyâni-Buddhas), changes during the active life-period with respect to the lower planes, ours included.

During that time not only the Dhyâni-Buddhas are one with Âlaya in Soul and Essence, but even the man strong in Yoga (Mystic Meditation) “is able to merge his soul with it,” as Aryâsanga, of the Yogâchârya school, says.

This is not Nirvâna, but a condition next to it. Hence the disagreement. Thus, while the Yogâchâryas of the Mahâyâna School say that Âlaya (Nyingpo and Tsang in Tibetan) is the personification of the Voidness, and yet Âlaya is the basis of every visible and invisible thing, and that, though it is eternal and immutable in its essence, it reflects itself in every object of the Universe “like the moon in clear tranquil water”; other schools dispute the statement.

The same for Paramârtha.

The Yogâchâryas interpret the term as that which is also dependent upon other things (paratantra); and the Madhyamikas say that Paramârtha is limited to Paranishpanna or Absolute Perfection; i.e., in the exposition of these “Two Truths” of the Four, the former believe and maintain that, on this plane, at any rate, there exists only Samvritisatya or relative truth; and the latter teach the existence of Paramârthasatya, Absolute Truth.71 “No Arhat, O mendicants, can reach absolute knowledge before he becomes one with Paranirvâna. Parikalpita and Paratantra are his two great enemies.”72

Parikalpita (in Tibetan Kun-tag) is error, made by those unable to realize the emptiness and illusionary nature of all; who believe something to exist which does not—e.g., the Non-Ego. And Paratantra is that, whatever it is, which exists only through a dependent or causal connection, and which has to disappear as soon as the cause from which it proceeds is removed—e.g., the flame of a wick. Destroy or extinguish it, and light disappears.

Esoteric Philosophy teaches that everything lives and is conscious, but not that all life and consciousness are similar to those of human or even animal beings. Life we look upon as the One Form of [pg 080]Existence, manifesting in what is called Matter; or what, incorrectly separating them, we name Spirit, Soul and Matter in man.

Matter is the Vehicle for the manifestation of Soul on this plane of existence, and Soul is the Vehicle on a higher plane for the manifestation of Spirit, and these three are a Trinity synthesized by Life, which pervades them all.

The idea of Universal Life is one of those ancient conceptions which are returning to the human mind in this century, as a consequence of its liberation from anthropomorphic Theology. Science, it is true, contents itself with tracing or postulating the signs of Universal Life, but has not yet been bold enough to even whisper “Anima Mundi”! The idea of “crystalline life,” now familiar to Science, would have been scouted half a century ago.

Botanists are now searching for the nerves of plants; not that they suppose that plants can feel or think as animals do, but because they believe that some structure, bearing the same relation functionally to plant life that nerves bear to animal life, is necessary to explain vegetable growth and nutrition. It seems hardly possible that Science, by the mere use of terms such as “force” and “energy,” can disguise from itself much longer the fact that things that have life are living things, whether they be atoms or planets.

But what is the belief of the inner Esoteric Schools, the reader may ask. What are the doctrines taught on this subject by the Esoteric “Buddhists”? With them, we answer, Âlaya has a double and even a threefold meaning. In the Yogâchârya system of the contemplative Mahâyâna School, Âlaya is both the Universal Soul, Anima Mundi, and the Self of a progressed Adept. “He who is strong in the Yoga can introduce at will his Âlaya by means of meditation into the true nature of Existence.”

“The Âlaya has an absolute eternal existence,” says Aryâsanga, the rival of Nâgârjuna.73 In one sense it is Pradhâna, which is explained in Vishnu Purâna as, “that which is the unevolved cause, is emphatically called, by the most eminent sages, Pradhâna, original base, which is subtile Prakriti, viz., that which is eternal, and which at once is [or comprehends what is] and [what] is not, or is mere process.”74

“The indiscrete cause which is uniform, and both cause and effect, and which those who are acquainted with first [pg 081]principles, call Pradhâna and Prakriti, is the incognizable Brahma who was before all,”75 i.e., Brahma does not put forth evolution itself or create, but only exhibits various aspects of itself, one of which is Prakriti, an aspect of Pradhâna.

“Prakriti” however, is an incorrect word, and Âlaya would explain it better.

Prakriti is not the “uncognizable Brahma”.

It is wrong to teach that the Anima Mundi, the One Life or Universal Soul, was made known only by Anaxagoras, or during his age.

Anaxagoras brought the teaching forward simply to oppose the too-materialistic conceptions of Democritus on cosmogony, based on the exoteric theory of blindly driven atoms.

Anaxagoras of Clazomenæ, however, was not its inventor, but only its propagator, as was also Plato.

That which he called Mundane Intelligence, Nous (Νοῦς), the principle that according to his views is absolutely separated and free from matter and acts with design, was called Motion, the One Life, or Jîvâtmâ, in India, ages before the year 500 b.c.

Only the Âryan philosophers never endowed this principle, which with them is infinite, with the finite “attribute of thinking.”76

This leads naturally to the “Supreme Spirit” of Hegel and the German Transcendentalists—a contrast that it may be useful to point out.

The schools of Schelling and Fichte have diverged widely from the primitive archaic conception of an Absolute Principle, and have mirrored an aspect only of the basic idea of the Vedânta.

Even the “Absoluter Geist” shadowed forth by von Hartmann in his pessimistic philosophy of the “Unconscious,” while it is, perhaps, the closest approximation made by European speculation to the Hindû Advaitin doctrines, yet similarly falls far short of the reality.

According to Hegel, the “Unconscious” would never have undertaken the vast and laborious task of evolving the Universe, except in the hope of attaining clear Self-Consciousness.

In this connection it is to be borne in mind that in designating Spirit, a term which the European Pantheists use as equivalent to Parabrahman, as Unconscious, they do not attach to the expression the connotation it usually bears. It is employed in the absence of a better term to symbolize a profound mystery.

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

As the highest Dhyân Chohan, 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 it 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?77 A Vedântin, moreover, would never admit this Hegelian 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.

The matter-moving Nous, the animating Soul, immanent in every atom, manifested in man, latent in the stone, has different degrees of power; and this Pantheistic idea of a general Spirit-Soul pervading all Nature is the oldest of all the philosophical notions.

Nor was the Archæus a discovery either of Paracelsus or of his pupil Van Helmont; for this same Archæus is “Father-Æther,” the manifested basis and source of the innumerable phenomena of life—localized. The whole series of the numberless speculations of this kind are but variations on the same theme, the key-note of which was struck in this “primeval revelation.”

and the Great Wheel was Anupâdaka (b)?

(b) “Anupâdaka” means parentless, or without progenitors. It is a mystical designation having several meanings in our philosophy.

By this name Celestial Beings, the Dhyân Chohans or Dhyâni-Buddhas, are generally meant.

These correspond mystically to the human Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, known as the Mânushi (Human) Buddhas, which latter are also designated Anupâdaka, once that their whole personality is merged in their compound Sixth and Seventh Principles, or Âtmâ-Buddhi, and they have become the “Diamond-Souled” (Vajrasattvas78), or full Mahâtmâs.

The “Concealed Lord” (Sangbai Dag-po), “the one merged with the Absolute,” can have no parents since he is Self-Existent, and one with the Universal Spirit (Svayambhû),79 the Svabhâvat in its highest aspect.

The mystery of the Hierarchy of the Anupâdaka is great, its apex being the universal Spirit-Soul, and the lower rung the Mânushi-Buddha: and even every soul-endowed man also is an Anupâdaka in a latent state. Hence—when speaking of the Universe in its formless, eternal, or absolute condition, before it was fashioned by the Builders—the expression, “the great Wheel [Universe] was Anupâdaka.”