The President: Stanza 3, Sloka 10. “Father-Mother spin a web,” etc. (Reads from The Secret Doctrine.)
Mr. A. Keightley: Question 1. “You state that Spirit and Matter are the opposite ends of the same web; last Thursday you spoke about such opposites as light and darkness, heat and cold, void and space and fullness of all that exists. In what sense are these three pairs of opposites associated with matter and spirit?”
Mme. Blavatsky: I think in that sense everything in the universe is in association with it, with every spiritual matter, because there is always either one or the other that predominates in every subject that you can think of.
Mr. A. Keightley: Then do light, heat, and void correspond with matter, darkness, cold, etc.?
Mme. Blavatsky: What is it, which question do you put now?
Mr. A. Keightley: The first question.
Mme. Blavatsky: Pure matter is pure spirit. It cannot be understood even if admitted by our finite intellects. Of course you cannot see other {either} pure matter or spirit, because they are perfectly one in occultism.
258 THE SECRET DOCTRINE DIALOGUES The President: They are the noumena of the opposites.
Mme. Blavatsky: There is but one thing, call it element, force or god, anything you like, it is always one. This is what occult science teaches; and after differentiation come all and everything that is. With regard to this question I can only say that neither light nor darkness as optical effects are matter, nor are they spirit, but both are the qualities of ether, the intermediate agent in the manifested universal universe, for ether is dual. Ether is not as science knows it, but ether, as it really exists—that ether of which the ancient philosophers speak—is dual, because it is the earliest differentiation on our plane of manifestation of consciousness. It is dual in the objective, and dual as the middle Akasa in the subjective universe. In the former case, it is pure differentiated matter; in the latter, elemental. In other words spirit becomes objective matter, and objective spirit eludes our physical senses—
Mr. A. Keightley: Are the other elements beyond ether more differentiated than ether? Are they triple and quadruple?
Mme. Blavatsky: What {do} you call beyond ether? Ether is universal.
Mr. A. Keightley: For instance, the five elements are ether, air, fire, water and earth.
Mme. Blavatsky: The ether which is an element is certainly not the ether that science speaks about.
Mr. A. Keightley: No, I am not alluding to science in this particular. You stated there are five elements developed in accordance with the races.
Mme. Blavatsky: Yes. The fifth is not developed yet, that which the ancient Greeks called Zeus, that they call the deity of all. Of course, if they spoke in one sense, it was; if in another sense, it was not. Now, the Zeus of Homer certainly was not Akasa in all his Don Juanic peregrinations.
259 9. MEETING MARCH 7, 1889 The President: Isn’t it rather true to describe those elements as the different stages?
Mme. Blavatsky: Of course. Now that physical science has given the name of elements to everything it believes to be homogeneous and finds after a time it is esoteric, of course this is different; but otherwise I don’t see it. The elements are those which are manifested here as the element of fire, the element of water, or the element of earth and so on. They are certainly elements because they are entirely distinct from each other, though there is not an element that has not got some other element in it. It is simply that one aspect predominates.
Mr. A. Keightley: That is the point I was meaning. Are there three main aspects, say, in fire?
Mme. Blavatsky: What three main aspects? You may make three. Ether is dual, certainly, because ether is the first differentiated celestial fire, as we call it.
Mr. A. Keightley: Is there a triple aspect in the element next below ether in differentiation?
Mme. Blavatsky: You must not mix ether with the others. Ether is an element which follows the four elements that we admit and accept, and the aether is its abstract or general sense. One you will spell “ether” and the other “aether.”
The President: When you speak of the dual ether, you speak of the Æther of the Greek.
Mme. Blavatsky: Certainly. That is why they made all the other gods androgynous. They made the god or the goddess just as the Hindus had: it is the two aspects of the deity, and every one of them is certainly or does certainly belong to ether. You may call them solar or lunar gods; they are the gods of the ether. They all return to that first element, to the god of Brahmâ, from which they emanated.
Mr. Kingsland: Do you call that dual because it is the middle
260 THE SECRET DOCTRINE DIALOGUES point, so to speak, between spirit and matter that is mentioned in the Stanza?
Mme. Blavatsky: Yes, because otherwise it will be no more on the higher planes, it will become Akasa.
Mr. Kingsland: It is exactly the intermediate point.
Mme. Blavatsky: Yes. It plays the same relation between the cosmos and the moon, our little earth, as Manas plays between the Monad and the body, just in the same way as it is mentioned in The Secret Doctrine.
Mr. B. Keightley: Then what were you driving at about the triple aspect?
The President: That was only, I think, because Arch was somewhat misunderstanding the way in which HPB was using the word ether.
Mme. Blavatsky: You look at the Orientalists—they translate invariably Akasa as ether. I say nothing can be more erroneous than that, because ether is something which science suspects of being particled or something equivocal. What do they call it? Some strange name—“hypothetical agent” and so on. And of course it must be something particled, since it says if it were not matter it could not do the functions that it does in the eyes of science, and Akasa is a perfectly homogeneous thing, it is the rootless root of all, it is Mulaprakriti, it is the rootless root of Nature, that which is perfectly unknown to us.
Mr. A. Keightley: That is the Akasa in its highest aspect.
Mme. Blavatsky: Yes, but not ether. Ether is the Astral Light of the Kabalists; it is devilish infernal sight, as they call it, it is Astral Light in its earliest aspects.
The President: Arch is confusing again aether and ether.
Mr. A. Keightley: No, I am not. There we get a distinction between ether, the fifth element of those five.
261 9. MEETING MARCH 7, 1889 Mme. Blavatsky: It is not yet developed, and therefore you can hardly call it an element. It is to be developed with the Fifth Race.
Mr. Kingsland: Then that is the lowest aspect of Akasa.
Mme. Blavatsky: Yes. It is the lowest aspect to us who are the lowest aspect of all kinds of beings and of the celestial aristocracy. Of course it appears very grand, because as the proverb says: “a little eel by itself imagines itself a Himalaya.” So we do in our conceit, but it is a very low thing.
Mr. Kingsland: But that ether you were speaking of is actually what science calls the hypothetical medium which transmits light.
Mme. Blavatsky: Yes, and poor science does not know whether to believe it or not.
Mr. Kingsland: Still, there it is.
Mme. Blavatsky: Well, what is question 2?
Mr. A. Keightley: In Stanza 3, Sloka 10, it is said: “Brahmâ as ‘the germ of unknown darkness’ is the material from which all evolves and develops.” Goethe is quoted as expressing the same idea in the lines “Thus at the roaring loom of Time I ply, and weave for God the garment thou see’st him by.”106 It is one of the axioms of logic that it is impossible for the mind to believe anything of that of which it comprehends nothing. Now, if this “material” above mentioned, which is Brahmâ, be formless, then no idea concerning it can enter the mind, for the mind can perceive nothing where there is no form. It is the “garment” or the manifestation in form of God which we see or perceive, and it is by this and this alone that we can know anything of him. Question 2: What is the first form of this material which human consciousness can recognize?
Mme. Blavatsky: Well, do you direct the question psychically or physiologically, or as a question coming from materialistic science,
262 THE SECRET DOCTRINE DIALOGUES physical science?
Dr. Williams: Purely as a question of no significance to me, whatever materialists or any sect believe. I use the word materialists in quotation points, desiring you to use the word just as you did in your own sense.
Mme. Blavatsky: In my sense I would not pay the slightest attention to materialistic science. I do not believe in this materialistic science. I say they are very great in small details, but on the whole they do not satisfy anyone.
Dr. Williams: I don’t use the word material in the sense in which Huxley uses it, or any of those.
Mme. Blavatsky: I want you to say in what sense you use it. I say the first sense in which we can imagine matter, or that which is in our conception of matter, that is to say, the most refined of all, the mother as we call it, the primordial. I will say it is a circle, because in all the occult books, in all the teachings and philosophies, it is impossible to imagine one’s self any other first form than that of a circle. It is impossible in the Aristotelian logic, it would be a [ ] of that; but as we deal with metaphysics, and from the standpoint of the adepts in the occult sciences, then I must answer you just as occultism says. If you take, for instance, in the physical science, we will say the first geometrical figure is a triangle, but this is on the manifested plane, it is not in the world of abstraction. The first thing that you see is certainly a circle. Now this circle you can either limit or take it just according to the capacities of your conceptions and of your intuition, and you can make it limitless, all depends upon your powers of conceiving things. You can expand it ad infinitum, make of it a limitless circle—not only in words, in which you will say a circle is something, the circumference is everywhere and so on, you know the well-known saying—but I don’t use any other figure than that. Does that satisfy you? They make us conceive of a circle first of all, and this circle which is all, and embraces all and has no plane. Let us imagine something that is—well, as large as we can imagine
263 9. MEETING MARCH 7, 1889 it—and you might expand and extend ad infinitum. If we contract it to our conceptions, it is because we want to make it conceivable to the finite intellect.
Dr. Williams: I suppose it would be a safe thing to say that the finite intellect cannot conceive of anything except what is finite.
Mme. Blavatsky: I beg your pardon: there are moments that you can conceive far beyond that, which your physical brain can conceive. Certainly you cannot conceive it if {you} simply hold to the matter and to this manifested universe, but there are moments that you can conceive far more; in your dreams you can conceive of things that you cannot when you are awake.
Dr. Williams: I understand that, but my point was after all it would be a finite conception, because the conception of a finite being.
Mme. Blavatsky: No, because this circle of light and of everything is not a being; and then you can conceive it limitless, certainly. If it is limitless you can go and search for limits, but you can conceive it is limitless. Let us say it will only apply to the manifested universe, to the objective; even that, certainly, to the astronomer must appear limitless, if they are accustomed to look through their telescopes, and do as they have to do. It must appear limitless to them.
Dr. Williams: They always think from the standpoint of space and time. That is why they say it is not limitless.
Mme. Blavatsky: That is where they limit their intellect. Once they go beyond that, they break their noses and nothing comes out of it.
Dr. Williams: When you get beyond space and time, have not you got beyond all circles of form?
Mme. Blavatsky: Most assuredly. Then you have no need for symbols and signs. Everything is in such a way then that it is impossible to express it in words.
Dr. Williams: Then that just brings us right back to the point of the
264 THE SECRET DOCTRINE DIALOGUES question, and that was what the first form was which comes within the range of human consciousness and finite consciousness. It is not, it seems to me, so much a question of what we may imagine as what we are bound to think by the loss of the constitution of the human mind.
Mme. Blavatsky: It is a circle, I say again. It is proved Kabalistically and occultly that the first thing you may imagine when you want to imagine something is a circle.
Dr. Williams: That is exactly the point I wanted to reach.
Mme. Blavatsky: Those who tell you the biggest absurdity in science tell you you can square the circle, positively square it, and make of it any figure you like for it’s in all in all.
Mr. Kingsland: Isn’t it a sphere, rather than a circle?
Mme. Blavatsky: Circle or sphere, call it what you like. Of course it is a sphere—it has circumference but no plane.
Mr. A. Keightley: Then what is the next figure you get after the circle?
Mme. Blavatsky: If you begin, the first figure will be a triangle.
Mr. B. Keightley: The circle is the central point first; then the triangle.
Mme. Blavatsky: The first figure is no figure: the circle with the point; it is simply primeval germ, and it is the first thing you imagine at the beginning of differentiation, but the triangle is the one you have to conceive of, once that matter begins to differentiate, once you have passed the zero point, the Laya. It is this I wanted to say, it is just this. Brahmâ is called an atom, Anu, because atom could not be an atom, because it is for us an atom that we don’t see, we simply imagine it is a kind of mathematical point and so on, but in reality an atom can be extended and made absoluteness. It is the germ, it is not the atom from the standpoint of the physicists or the chemists, it is
265 9. MEETING MARCH 7, 1889 from the occult standpoint, it is the infinitesimally small and totallic {totally?} Brahmâ. It may be the unknown limited quantity, a latent atom during Pralaya, active during the life cycles, but one which has neither circumference or plane, only limitless expansion. Therefore also the circle is but the geometrical symbol in the subjective world and it becomes the triangle in the objective. That is my answer, and it is finished. So do you understand now?
Mr. A. Keightley: I don’t see how it becomes a triangle in the objective. That is what puzzled me always.
Mme. Blavatsky: If that circle is limited it would be a very difficult thing. Then there would be two things having no relation to each other, unless you put the triangle in the circle.
Mr. A. Keightley: That of course is a figure one has always seen.
Mme. Blavatsky: How is it in The Secret Doctrine? It is a circle, and the point then becomes the plane and with that the triangle; and this plane has nothing to do with what we imagine. It is that boundary from which begins the manifested universe. When you want to follow into cosmogony and theogony then you have to imagine the triangle, because from this first triangle, if you take this Pythagorean definition, it begins descending, as I explained to you last time, then coming back on itself, making the plane and then going up again and disappearing in darkness. That is it.