Tag Archives: #Gautama Buddha

Evo­lu­tion is, in fact, not a thing in itself, but a pro­ce­dure of Nature, and is wholly gov­erned by the karmic causes orig­i­nated in pre­vi­ous peri­ods of the exis­tence of any evolv­ing entity what­so­ever. — G. de Purucker, H. P. Blavatsky: The Mys­tery, p. 150

Every­thing in nature is dual, and so is evo­lu­tion. I would like to share some thoughts with you about the evo­lu­tion of the cos­mos, par­tic­u­larly how the One becomes the many.

It is dif­fi­cult for the human mind to grasp that con­scious­ness, although essen­tially one, has dif­fer­en­ti­ated itself dur­ing the evo­lu­tion­ary process into innu­mer­able smaller cen­ters of con­scious­ness, some­times referred to as sparks or dewdrops.

Two well-known quo­ta­tions illus­trate this thought. Sir Edwin Arnold in his Light of Asia remarks that Gau­tama Bud­dha is like the dew­drop that “slips into the shin­ing sea” (Bk. 8).

Again, in Chap­ter 10 of the Bhagavad-Gita, Krishna says about him­self, “I estab­lished this whole uni­verse with a sin­gle por­tion of myself, and yet remain sep­a­rate.” G. de Purucker gives still another exam­ple in his Eso­teric Tra­di­tion:

man in his septem­par­tite or decem­par­tite con­sti­tu­tion [is] a hier­ar­chi­cal aggre­gate of hosts of beings over which the spirit of his con­sti­tu­tion pre­sides as the Hier­arch or Logos, remain­ing sep­a­rate and dis­tinct from its chil­dren which it emanates dur­ing each incar­na­tion; and yet these hosts of beings form in their aggre­gate man’s con­sti­tu­tion or the vehi­cle of his spirit. — p. 170

Now where does this dual evo­lu­tion begin? With THAT –

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. — H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doc­trine 1:14

This eter­nal Prin­ci­ple forms the first fun­da­men­tal propo­si­tion of the mod­ern pre­sen­ta­tion of theos­o­phy. Look­ing at the sec­ond propo­si­tion, we find the uni­ver­sal law of periodicity:

But once that we pass in thought from this (to us) Absolute Nega­tion, dual­ity super­venes in the con­trast of Spirit (or con­scious­ness) and Mat­ter, Sub­ject and Object. — 1:15

Dual­ity, then, is basic to man­i­fes­ta­tion itself.

The high­est duad the human mind can con­ceive of is called in Hindu phi­los­o­phy  Parabrah­man (beyond Brah­man) and Mulaprakriti (root-nature), the cos­mic veil of Parabrahman.

A sec­ond duad emanates from the first one: Brah­man and Prad­hana. Brah­man is the first or unman­i­fested Logos, the active or divine side of evo­lu­tion, while Prad­hana is its veil or pas­sive oppo­site pole.

From Brah­man and Prad­hana is born the son, Brahma, a name which comes from a San­skrit root mean­ing “expan­sion.” He rep­re­sents the spir­i­tual energy-consciousness aspect of our solar sys­tem, its active pole.

The gar­ments of Brahma, his illu­sory, mate­r­ial man­i­fes­ta­tions or phe­nom­ena, emanate from his pas­sive oppo­site pole, Prakriti. Although at the point here described the phys­i­cal man­i­fes­ta­tion of our solar sys­tem has not yet begun, three evo­lu­tion­ary phases of a dual char­ac­ter have already occurred.

Two lines of evo­lu­tion can be observed, a sub­jec­tive and an objec­tive one: Parabrahman-Brahman-Brahma as the sub­jec­tive line; and Mulaprakriti-Pradhana-Prakriti as the objec­tive line.

With the appear­ance of Brahma, the first “day” of his life begins, a period which lasts 100 divine years. Accord­ing to Brah­man­i­cal cal­cu­la­tions, Brahma’s life lasts 4,320 mil­lion x 36,000 x 2 years — quite a long time! Yet all is rel­a­tive, as HPB explains: “The Eter­nity of the Uni­verse … [is] peri­od­i­cally ‘the play­ground of num­ber­less Uni­verses inces­santly man­i­fest­ing and dis­ap­pear­ing,’ … ‘The Eter­nity of the Pil­grim’ is like a wink of the Eye of Self–Exis­tence” (Ibid. 1:16–17).

There­after Brahma con­tin­ues its dual evo­lu­tion. How can we describe this process of the com­ing into being of Brahma’s gar­ment — our home, our solar gar­ment? G. de Purucker writes in Fountain-Source of Occultism:

Our solar sys­tem began in Space, in the womb of Aditi, the Eter­nal Mother, as a neb­ula — not by chance, but as one of the stages in its new imbod­i­ment. As this neb­ula slowly moved in space, at its heart there began to be a con­den­sa­tion of its sub­stance. This con­den­sa­tion became the sun, and a lit­tle later at var­i­ous points within that neb­ula sim­i­lar but smaller con­den­sa­tions of the neb­u­lar mate­r­ial occurred, and these became the plan­ets. — p. 118

But who or what stands behind all this? Which cos­mic intel­li­gences plan and build up this uni­verse? They are the archi­tects and builders, to use the mod­ern theo­soph­i­cal terms for such cos­mic beings. Speak­ing of these beings, HPB says:

In every Cos­mogony, behind and higher than the cre­ative deity, there is a supe­rior deity, a plan­ner, an Archi­tect, of whom the Cre­ator is but the exec­u­tive agent. And still higher, overand around, within and with­out, there is the unknow­able and the unknown, the Source and Cause of all these Ema­na­tions. – The Secret Doc­trine 2:43

Purucker says further:

Every uni­tary being within nature, such as a sun or a planet, is in con­se­quence an imbod­ied entity, divine in its high­est parts, spir­i­tual in the part sub­or­di­nate to the divine, hav­ing an intel­lec­tual essence or mind, and all these man­i­fest­ing through the lower gar­ments, includ­ing the phys­i­cal body. – Fountain-Source of Occultism, p. 209

Human under­stand­ing divides the man­i­fested uni­verse into two inter­de­pend­ing parts: the light–side, the spir­i­tual or divine side of nature; and the matter-side, the vehic­u­lar aspect. The light–side is rep­re­sented by the archi­tects and the matter-side by the builders.

In real­ity it is almost impos­si­ble to mark a divid­ing line between the two: both are built up by hosts of cos­mic mon­ads which dif­fer only in their degree of devel­op­ment, and at the tran­si­tion point they are vir­tu­ally identical.

H. P. Blavatsky divided these mon­ads into two par­al­lel tri­ads: the light triad con­sist­ing of gods-monads-atoms; and the vehic­u­lar triad con­sist­ing of chaos-theos-cosmos. When these two tri­ads unite, the gods work in chaos, the mon­ads in theos, and the atoms in cosmos.

Con­sid­er­ing each triad indi­vid­u­ally, we see that on the spir­i­tual side the gods work through the mon­ads, and the mon­ads work through the atoms; while on the mate­r­ial side, chaos works in theos and theos works in cosmos.

We can apply this cos­mic pat­tern to the human con­sti­tu­tion, for in human evo­lu­tion there are also two lines and three stages. The two lines can be called the spir­i­tual and the mate­r­ial. The three stages of evo­lu­tion are the monadic, the intel­lec­tual, and the phys­i­cal, and they work together simul­ta­ne­ously. Refer­ring to the sev­en­fold human con­sti­tu­tion, we have:

1. Atman and bud­dhi (the higher duad), the first stage;

2. Manas and kama (the mid­dle duad), the sec­ond stage;

3. Prana, the astral body, and the phys­i­cal body (the lower triad), the third stage.

The prin­ci­ples of our con­sti­tu­tion are insep­a­ra­bly inter­wo­ven and inter­min­gled, espe­cially because human­ity belongs to a class of monadic beings where spirit and mat­ter are more or less in balance.

How­ever, all such clas­si­fi­ca­tions are, in my view, sim­ply arti­fi­cial intel­lec­tual cre­ations which have value only as work­ing hypothe­ses when we are try­ing to under­stand the man­i­fested cos­mos. They have no inde­pen­dent reality.

The process of dual evo­lu­tion is beau­ti­fully explained by the term sutrat­man:

It is this sutrat­man, this thread–self, this consciousness-stream, or rather stream of consciousness-life, which is the fun­da­men­tal and indi­vid­ual Self­hood of every entity, and which, reflected in and through the sev­eral inter­me­di­ate vehi­cles or veils or sheaths or gar­ments of the invis­i­ble con­sti­tu­tion of man, or of any other being in which a monad enshrouds itself, pro­duces the ego cen­ters of self–con­scious exis­tence. — G. de Purucker, Occult Glos­sary

By reflect­ing on the role of dual­ity in the evo­lu­tion­ary process, we can get at least a basic idea of the way in which the One becomes the many, an event in which we all take part. In apply­ing it to our­selves, we may sub­sti­tute the words “uni­ver­sal broth­er­hood” for the One.

Cycli­cally a spe­cial effort is made to bring home to mankind this sub­lime fact of uni­ver­sal nature. In the begin­ning only a few are ready to accept uni­ver­sal broth­er­hood, but nonethe­less the idea starts to spread. As a seed grad­u­ally grows into an organ­ism, so the idea of broth­er­hood becomes a move­ment — in our time it is called the Theo­soph­i­cal movement.

Although the broth­er­hood ideal is the cre­ator and sup­porter of the move­ment, it is not affected by the movement’s fate: move­ments come and go, but uni­ver­sal broth­er­hood, our essen­tial one­ness, was, is, and ever will be.