THEOSOPHY – THE WORD

LIFE

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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; unrealisable, 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,” 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.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p2]

The Occultist accepts revelation as coming from divine yet still finite Beings, the manifested lives, never from the Unmanifestable ONE LIFE; from those entities, called Primordial Man, Dhyani-Buddhas, or Dhyan-Chohans, the “Rishi-Prajapatis” of the Hindus, the Elohim or “Sons of God,” the Planetary Spirits of all nations, who have become Gods for men. He also regards the Adi-Sakti – the direct emanation of Mulaprakriti, the eternal Root of THAT, and the female aspect of the Creative Cause Brahmâ, in her Akasic form of the Universal Soul – as philosophically a Maya, and cause of human Maya. But this view does not prevent him from believing in its existence so long as it lasts, to wit, for one Mahamanvantara; nor from applying Akasa, the radiation of Mulaprakriti, to practical purposes, connected as the World-Soul is with all natural phenomena, known or unknown to science.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p9-10]

(1.) The ABSOLUTE; the Parabrahm of the Vedantins or the one Reality, SAT, which is, as Hegel says, both Absolute Being and Non-Being.
(2.) The first manifestation, the impersonal, and, in philosophy, unmanifested Logos, the precursor of the “manifested.” This is the “First Cause,” the “Unconscious” of European Pantheists.
(3.) Spirit-matter, LIFE; the “Spirit of the Universe,” the Purusha and Prakriti, or the second Logos.
(4.) Cosmic Ideation, MAHAT or Intelligence, the Universal World-Soul, the Cosmic Noumenon of Matter, the basis of the intelligent operations in and of Nature, also called MAHA-BUDDHI.

The ONE REALITY; its dual aspects in the conditioned Universe.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p16]

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, and has not yet been bold enough even to 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 hardly seems possible that science can disguise from itself much longer, by the mere use of terms such as “force” and “energy,” the fact that things that have life are living things, whether they be atoms or planets.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p49]

Nor can it be said that the “Lord God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life,” unless that God is identified with the “ONE LIFE, omnipresent though invisible, and unless the same operation is attributed to “God” on behalf of every living Soul – or Nephesh, which is the vital Soul, not the divine Spirit or Ruah, which ensures to man alone a divine degree of immortality, that no animal, as such, could ever attain in this cycle of incarnation.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p225]

Science, dimly perceiving the truth, may find bacteria and other infinitesimals in the human body, and see in them but occasional and abnormal visitors to which diseases are attributed. Occultism – which discerns a life in every atom and mo lecule, whether in a mineral or human body, in air, fire or water – affirms that our whole body is built of such lives, the smallest bacteria under the microscope being to them in comparative size like an elephant to the tiniest infusoria.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p225fn]

Thus far, for individual, human, sentient, animal and vegetable life, each the microcosm of its higher macrocosm. The same for the Universe, which manifests periodically, for purposes of the collective progress of the countless lives, the outbreathings of the One Life; in order that through the Ever-Becoming, every cosmic atom in this infinite Universe, passing from the formless and the intangible, through the mixed natures of the semi-terrestrial, down to matter in full generation, and then back again, reascending at each new period higher and nearer the final goal; that each atom, we say, may reach through individual merits and efforts that plane where it re-becomes the one unconditioned ALL. But between the Alpha and the Omega there is the weary “Road” hedged in by thorns, that “goes down first, then –

winds up hill all the way
Yes, to the very end. . . . .”

Starting upon the long journey immaculate; descending more and more into sinful matter, and having connected himself with every atom in manifested Space – the Pilgrim, having struggled through and suffered in every form of life and being, is only at the bottom of the valley of matter, and half through his cycle, when he has identified himself with collective Humanity. This, he has made in his own image. In order to progress upwards and homewards, the “God” has now to ascend the weary uphill path of the Golgotha of Life. It is the martyrdom of self-conscious existence. Like Visvakarman he has to sacrifice himself to himself in order to redeem all creatures, to resurrect from the many into the One Life. Then he ascends into heaven indeed; where, plunged into the incomprehensible absolute Being and Bliss of Paranirvana, he reigns unconditionally, and whence he will re-descend again at the next “coming,” which one portion of humanity expects in its dead-letter sense as the second advent, and the other as the last “Kalki Avatar.”

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p268]

The whole order of nature evinces a progressive march towards a higher life. There is design in the action of the seemingly blindest forces. The whole process of evolution with its endless adaptations is a proof of this. The immutable laws that weed out the weak and feeble species, to make room for the strong, and which ensure the “survival of the fittest,” though so cruel in their immediate action – all are working toward the grand end. The very fact that adaptations do occur, that the fittest do survive in the struggle for existence, shows that what is called “unconscious Nature” is in reality an aggregate of forces manipulated by semi-intelligent beings (Elementals) guided by High Planetary Spirits, (Dhyan Chohans), whose collective aggregate forms the manifested verbum of the unmanifested LOGOS, and constitutes at one and the same time the MIND of the Universe and its immutable LAW.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p277-8]

Nature taken in its abstract sense, cannot be “unconscious,” as it is the emanation from, and thus an aspect (on the manifested plane) of the ABSOLUTE consciousness. Where is that daring man who would presume to deny to vegetation and even to minerals a consciousness of their own. All he can say is, that this consciousness is beyond his comprehension.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p277fn]

Marshalled by blind conservatism, conceit and prejudice, they are constantly on the watch, ready to strangle every truth, which, awakening from its age-long sleep, happens to knock for admission. Such has been the case ever since man became an animal. That this proves in every case moral death to the revealers, who bring to light any of these old, old truths, is as certain as that it gives LIFE and REGENERATION to those who are fit to profit even by the little that is now revealed to them.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p299]

But regarding Life – Vital Force – as a power far more exalted than either light, heat, or electricity, and indeed capable of exerting a controlling power over them all (this is absolutely occult) we are certainly disposed to view with satisfaction that speculation which supposes the photosphere to be the primary seat of vital power, and to regard with a poetic pleasure that hypothesis which refers the Solar energies to Life.

Thus, we have an important scientific corroboration for one of our fundamental dogmas – namely, that (a) the Sun is the store-house of Vital Force, which is the Noumenon of Electricity; and (b) that it is from its mysterious, never-to-be-fathomed depths, that issue those life currents which thrill through Space, as through the organisms of every living thing on Earth.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p531]

The “principle of Life” may kill when too exuberant, as also when there is too little of it. But this principle on the manifested (or our) plane is but the effect and the result of the intelligent action of the Host”– collectively, Principle – the manifesting LIFE and LIGHT. It is itself subordinate to, and emanates from the ever-invisible, eternal and Absolute ONE LIFE in a descending and a re-ascending scale of hierarchic degrees – a true septenary ladder, with SOUND (or the Logos) at the upper end and the Vidyadharas (the inferior Pitris) at the lower.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p539]

The Sun is the heart of the Solar World (System) and its brain is hidden behind the (visible) Sun. From thence, sensation is radiated into every nerve-centre of the great body, and the waves of the life-essence flow into each artery and vein. . . . The planets are its limbs and pulses.” (Commentary.) ....

Thus, there is a regular circulation of the vital fluid throughout our system, of which the Sun is the heart – the same as the circulation of the blood in the human body – during the manvantaric solar period, or life; the Sun contracting as rhythmically at every return of it, as the human heart does. Only, instead of performing the round in a second or so, it takes the solar blood ten of its years, and a whole year to pass through its auricles and ventricles before it washes the lungs and passes thence to the great veins and arteries of the system.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p541]

For, at the risk of being laughed at by the whole world of physicists, the Occultists maintain that all the “Forces” of the Scientists have their origin in the Vital Principle, the ONE LIFE collectively of our Solar system – that “life” being a portion, or rather one of the aspects of the One Universal LIFE.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p591]

This is a mistake, which implies a material agent, distinct from the influences which move it, i.e., blind matter and perhaps “God” again, whereas this ONE Life is the very God and Gods”Itself”.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p603fn]

Thus the Occultists are not alone in their beliefs. Nor are they so foolish, after all, in rejecting even the “gravity” of modern Science along with other physical laws, and in accepting instead attraction and repulsion. They see, moreover, in these two opposite Forces only the two aspects of the universal unit, called “MANIFESTING MIND”; in which aspects, Occultism, through its great Seers, perceives an innumerable Host of operative Beings: Cosmic Dhyan-Chohans, Entities, whose essence, in its dual nature, is the Cause of all terrestrial phenomena. For that essence is co-substantial with the universal Electric Ocean, which is LIFE; and being dual, as said – positive and negative – it is the emanations of that duality that act now on earth under the name of “modes of motion”; even Force having now become objectionable as a word, for fear it should lead someone, even in thought, to separate it from matter! It is, as Occultism says, the dual effects of that dual essence, which have now been called centripetal and centrifugal forces, negative and positive poles, or polarity, heat and cold, light and darkness, etc., etc.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p604]

Hence Cupid or Love in his primitive sense is Eros, the Divine Will, or Desire of manifesting itself through visible creation. Thence Fohat, the prototype of Eros, becomes on Earth the great power “Life-electricity,” or the Spirit of “Life-giving.” Let us remember the Greek Theogony and enter into the spirit of its philosophy. We are taught by the Greeks that all things, gods included, owe their being to the Ocean and his wife Tethys, the latter being Gaea, the Earth or Nature. But who is Ocean? Ocean is the immeasurable SPACE (Spirit in Chaos), which is the Deity (see Vol.I.); and Tethys is not the Earth, but primordial matter in the process of formation. In our case it is no longer Aditi-Gaea who begets Ouranos or Varuna, the chief Aditya among the seven planetary gods, but Prakriti, materialised and localised.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.II, p65]

But there are certainly “designers”, though these are neither omnipotent nor omniscient in the absolute sense of the term. They are simply Builders, or Masons, working under the impulse given them by the ever-to-be-unknown (on our plane) Master Mason – the ONE LIFE and Law. Belonging to this sphere, they have no hand in, or possibility of working on any other, during the present Manvantara, at any rate.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.II, p732]

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(b) Prana
(b) Life, or Vital principle.
(b) Necessary only to a, c, d, and the functions of the lower Manas, which embrace all those limited to the (physical) brain.

[The Key to Theosophy, p91]

The remaining "Principle" "Prana," or "Life," is, strictly speaking, the radiating force or Energy of Atma -- as the Universal Life and the ONE SELF, – ITS lower or rather (in its effects) more physical, because manifesting, aspect. Prana or Life permeates the whole being of the objective Universe; and is called a "principle" only because it is an indispensable factor and the deus ex machina of the living man.

[The Key to Theosophy, p176]

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The first and the last notes will represent to you the first and last spheres in the cycle of evolution – the highest! the one you strike once is our planet. Remember you have to reverse the order on the pianoforte: begin with the seventh note, not with the first. The seven vowels chanted by the Egyptian priests to the seven rays of the rising sun to which Memnon responded, meant but that. The one Life-principle when in action runs in circuits even as known in physical science. It runs the round in human body, where the head represents and is to the Microcosmos (the physical world of matter) what the summit of the cycle is to the Macrocosmos (the world of universal spiritual Forces); and so with the formation of worlds and the great descending and ascending “circle of necessity.”

[Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, Letter 44, Chronological Edition or Letter 120, Barker Numbering.]

When we speak of our One Life we also say thtit penetrates, nay is the essence of every atom of matter; and that therefore it not only has correspondence with matter but has all its properties likewise, etc. – hence is material, is matter itself.

[Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, Letter 88, Chronological Edition or Letter 271, Barker Numbering.]

But what is “Spirit” pure and impersonal per se? Is it possible that you should not have realized yet our meaning? why, such a Spirit is a nonentity, a pure abstraction, an absolute blank to our senses – even to the most spiritual. It becomes something only in union with matter – hence it is always something since matter is infinite and indestructible and non-existent without Spirit which, in matter is Life. Separated from matter it becomes the absolute negation of life and being, whereas matter is inseparable from it. Ask those who offer the objection, whether they know anything of “life” and “consciousness” beyond what they now feel on earth. What conception can they have – unless natural born seers – of the state and consciousness of one’s individuality after it has separated itself from gross earthy body? What is the good of the whole process of life on earth – you may ask them in your turn – if we are as good as “pure” unconscious entities before birth, during sleep, and, at the end of our career? Is not death, according to the teachings of Science, followed by the same state of unconsciousness as the one before birth? Does not life when it quits our body become as impersonal as it was before it animated the foetus? Life, after all, the greatest problem within the ken of human conception, is a mystery that the greatest of your men of Science will never solve. In order to be correctly comprehended, it has to be studied in the entire series of its manifestations, otherwise it can never be, not only fathomed, but even comprehended in its easiest form – life, as a state of being on this earth. It can never be grasped so long as it is studied separately and apart from universal life. To solve the great problem one has to become an occultist; to analyze and experience with it personally in all its phases, as life on earth, life beyond the limit of physical death, mineral, vegetable, animal and spiritual life; life in conjunction with concrete matter as well as life present in the imponderable atom. Let them try and examine or analyze life apart from organism, and what remains of it? Simply a mode of motion; which, unless our doctrine of the all-pervading, infinite, omnipresent Life is accepted – though it be accepted on no better terms than a hypothesis only a little more reasonable than their scientific hypotheses which are all absurd – has to remain unsolved.

[Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett, Letter 93B, Chronological Edition or Letter 315-6, Barker Numbering.]

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In the induced state described, as in that of a deep swoon, the brain no more dreams than if it were dead. One century, if passed, would appear no longer than one second, for all perception of time is lost for him who is subjected to it. Nor do the hairs or nails grow under such circumstances, though they do for a certain time in a body actually dead, which proves if anything can, that the atoms and tissues of the physical body are held under conditions quite different from those of the state we call death. For, to use a physiological paradox, life in a dead animal organism is even more intensely active than it ever is in a living one, which as we see, does not hold good in the case under notice.

[C.W.II, p469]

The ONE LIFE is either “MUKTA” (absolute and unconditioned) and can have no relation to anything nor to any one; or it is “BADDHA” (bound and conditioned), and then it cannot be called the ABSOLUTE; the limitation, moreover, necessitating another deity as powerful as the first to account for all the evil in this world. Hence, the Arahat secret doctrine on cosmogony admits but of one absolute, indestructible, eternal, and uncreated UNCONSCIOUSNESS (so to translate), of an element (the word being used for want of a better term) absolutely independent of everything else in the universe; a something ever present or ubiquitous, a Presence which ever was, is, and will be, whether there is a God, gods or none; whether there is a universe or no universe; existing during the eternal cycles of Maha Yugas, during the Pralayas as during the periods of Manvantara: and this is SPACE, the field for the operation of the eternal Forces and natural Law, the basis (as our correspondent rightly calls it) upon which take place the eternal intercorrelations of Akasa-Prakriti, guided by the unconscious regular pulsations of Sakti – the breath or power of a conscious deity, the theists would say – the eternal energy of an eternal, unconscious Law, say the Buddhists. Space then, or Fan, Bar-nang (Mahs-Sunyata) or, as it is called by Lao-tze, the “Emptiness” is the nature of the Buddhist Absolute. (See Confucius’ “Praise of the Abyss.”) The word jiva then, could never be applied by the Arahats to the Seventh Principle, since it is only through its correlation or contact with matter that Fo-hat (the Buddhist active energy) can develop active conscious life; and that to the question “how can Unconsciousness generate consciousness?” the answer would be: “Was the seed which generated a Bacon or a Newton self-conscious?”

[C.W.III, p423]

The Brahman, or Parabrahm, the ABSOLUTE of the Vedantins, is neuter and unconscious, and has no connection with the masculine Brahmâ of the Hindu Triad, or Trimurti. Some Orientalists rightly believe the name derived from the verb “brih,” to grow or increase, and to be, in this sense, the universal expansive force of nature, the vivifying and spiritual principle, or power, spread throughout the universe and which in its collectivity is the one Absoluteness, the one Life and the only Reality.

[C.W.III, p424]

Truly has Henry Khunrath, the greatest of the alchemists and Rosicrucians of the middle ages, shown spirit in man – as in every atom – as a bright flame enclosed within a more or less transparent globule, which he calls soul. And since the men of science confessedly know nothing of (a) the origin of either matter or force; (b) nor of electricity or life; and (c) their knowledge of the ultimate molecules of inorganic matter amounts to a cipher; why, I ask, should any student of Occultism, whose great masters may know, perchance, of essences which the professors of modern materialistic school can neither “see, smell, nor taste,” why should he be expected to take their definitions as to what is MATTER and what FORCE as the last word of unerring, infallible science?

[C.W.IV, p216-7]

Therefore do the Occultists maintain that the philosophical conception of spirit, like the conception of matter, must rest on one and the same basis of phenomena, adding that Force and Matter, Spirit and Matter, or Deity and Nature, though they may be viewed as opposite poles in their respective manifestations, yet are in essence and in truth but one, and that life is present as much in a dead as in a living body, in the organic as in the inorganic matter. This is why, while science is searching still and may go on searching forever to solve the problem “What is life?” the Occultist can afford to refuse taking the trouble, since he claims, with as much good reason as any given to the contrary, that Life, whether in its latent or dynamical form, is everywhere. That it is as infinite and as indestructible as matter itself, since neither can exist without the other, and that electricity is the very essence and origin of – Life itself. “Purush” is non-existent without “Prakriti”; nor, can Prakriti, or plastic matter have being or exist without Purush, or spirit, vital energy, LIFE. Purush and Prakriti are in short the two poles of the one eternal element, and are synonymous and convertible terms. Our bodies, as organized tissues, are indeed “an unstable arrangement of chemical forces,” plus a molecular force – as Professor Bain calls electricity – raging in it dynamically during life, tearing asunder its particles, at death, to transform itself into a chemical force after the process, and thence again to resurrect as an electrical force or life in every individual atom. Therefore, whether it is called Force or Matter, it will ever remain the Omnipresent Proteus of the Universe, the one element – LIFE – Spirit or Force at its negative, Matter at its positive pole; the former the MATERIO-SPIRITUAL, the latter, the MATERIO-PHYSICAL Universe – Nature, Svabhavat or INDESTRUCTIBLE MATTER.

[C.W.IV, p225-6]

It is most probable that when The Religion of the Future is read in its completeness, there will be found more than one page and chapter, perchance, that will appear to the correctly-informed occultist as grotesque and heterodox. Yet though it may sin in its details, it is perfectly correct in its essential features as far as we understand it. Let our students of occult science judge.

The peculiar tenet of The Religion of the Future is that Matter and Life are equally eternal and indestructible; that the Universal Life is the Supreme Being, not necessarily Omnipotent, but of powers infinitely transcending anything of which we have a conception on earth; that man, on becoming fitted for absorption by moral purity, is absorbed into this Universal Life or Supreme Being, being subject to frequent appearances on earth, until that moral purity is attained- and that the sum of all the experiences of the noblest of animated beings, from all parts of the Universe, is added constantly to the intelligence of the Universal Life.

We have italicized the most striking passages. Rendered in plain language and amplified, the Arhat esoteric doctrine teaches that (1) “‘Matter and Life are equally eternal and indestructible,’ for – they are one and identical; the purely subjective – hence (for physical science) unprovable and unverifiable – matter becoming the ONE life or what is generally termed ‘Spirit.’ (2) The hypothetical deity (or God as a personal Being) as something unattainable by, and incomprehensible to, logic and reason, being never speculated upon or taught – since occult science takes nothing on faith – is classified with the highest of abstractions, and perceived and accepted in what we call ‘UNIVERSAL LIFE.’ (3) Omnipotent only through, and in conjunction with, the immutable, eternal Laws of Nature which are thus the basis upon which Life works, it is not ‘necessarily Omnipotent,’ per se. (4) That man is absorbed into, and becomes one with, the Universal Life, or Parabrahm, only after he is entirely purified, i.e., disenthralled from matter and gone beyond the sphere of sense – is a doctrine recognized alike by Buddhist, Hindu and other old Asiatic philosophies; as also (5) that man is ‘subject to frequent appearances on earth,’ until his double evolution – moral and physical – is achieved throughout the seven Rounds and he has reached the ultimate perfection. The latter doctrine is carefully explained by ‘Lay Chela’ in the later ‘Fragments of Occult Truth.’ (6) And last, ‘the sum of all the experiences’ of man from all parts of the Universe, ‘is added constantly to the intelligence of the Universal Life’ – means simply this fundamental doctrine of the Secret Science: ‘UNIVERSAL INTELLIGENCE is the sum total, or the aggregate of all the intelligences, past, present and future of the universe.’ It is the Ocean of Intelligence formed of countless drops of intelligences, which proceed from, and return to it. If they were all taken out, to the last drop, there would be no more Ocean.” (Book of the Arhats, Sect. IV, leaf 39.)

[C.W.IV, p452-3]

... there never was a religion but paid reverence to the Sun and Fire as the fittest emblems of Life, hence – of the life-giving principle; nay, that there is not, even at present, one single creed on our globe (including Christianity) but has preserved this reverence in its ritualism, though the emblems with time have been changed and disfigured?

[C.W.IV, p530]

2nd Principle: LIFE or rather the vital ray which animates us and which is borrowed from the inexhaustible reservoir of the Universal Life.

[C.W.V, p49]

Therefore, do they say that the great men of science of the West knowing nothing or next to nothing either about cometary matter, centrifugal and centripetal forces, the nature of the nebulæ, or the physical constitution of the Sun, stars, or even the moon, are imprudent to speak so confidently as they do about the “central mass of the sun” whirling out into space planets, comets, and what not. Our humble opinion being wanted, we maintain: that it evolutes out but the life principle, the soul of these bodies, giving and receiving it back in our little solar system, as the “Universal Life-giver,” the ONE LIFE gives and receives it in the Infinitude and Eternity; that the Solar System is as much the Microcosm of the ONE Macrocosm, as man is the former when compared with his own little solar cosmos.

[C.W.V, p154]

... our occult theory, viz., that there is neither organic nor inorganic matter or particles, but that every atom is permeated with Life – is in fine the vehicle of Life itself.

[C.W.V, p288]

Now it is a well-known principle of Occultism that the ONE LIFE which pervades ALL connects all the bodies in space. All heavenly bodies have thus mutual relation, which is blended with man’s existence, since he is but a microcosm in the macrocosm. Every thought, as much as action, is dynamic and is impressed in the imperishable Book of Nature – the Akasa, the objective aspect of the UNMANIFESTED LIFE. All our thoughts and actions thus produce the vibrations in space, which mould our future career. And astrology is a science which, having determined the nature of the laws that govern these vibrations, is able to state precisely a particular or a series of results, the causes of which have already been produced by the individual in his previous life.

[C.W.VI, p228-9]

Amid the early joys of existence, when we are still full of the vital energies of yourth, we are yet apt, each of us, at the first pang of sorrow, after a failure, or at the sudden appearance of black cloud, to accuse life of it; to feel life a burder, and often to curse our being.

[C.W.VIII, p116]

The reasonableness of Conscious Existence can be proved only by the study of the primeval – now esoteric – philosophy. And it says “there is neither death nor life, for both are illusions; being (or be-ness) is the only reality.” This paradox was repeated thousands of ages later by one of the greatest physiologists that ever lived. “Life is Death” said Claude Bernard. The organism lives because its parts are ever dying. The survival of the fittest is surely based on this truism. The life of the superior whole requires the death of the inferior, the death of the parts depending on and being subservient to it. And, as life is death, so death is life, and the whole great cycle of lives forms but ONE EXISTENCE – the worst day of which is on our planet.

[C.W.VIII, p124]

Is not even a stone held together by the “cohesion” of its particles, and attracted to the earth by “gravitation”? But what else is this “cohesion” and “gravitation” but energy, and what is “energy” but the soul, an anterior principle called force, which produces an outward manifestation called matter? . . . . . . . All things possess life, all things possess soul, and there may be soul-beings . . . . . . . invisible to our physical senses, but which may be perceived by our soul.

[C.W.VIII, p131]

Then follows a philosophical conversation on WILL, in which the latter, in individual man, is said to become the stronger if it only uses the universal Will-Power in Nature, itself remaining passive in the LAW. This sentence has to be well understood, lest it should lead the reader into the error of accepting pure mediumistic passivity as the best thing for spiritual and occult development. A phenomenon is produced on a passing cloud, into which apparent life is infused by the Master’s hand, stretched towards it; this is again explained by showing that LIFE is universal and identical with WILL.

[C.W.VIII, p132]

Says the lecturer [Tolstoy]: –
Let us grant for a moment that all that which modern science longs to learn of life, it has learnt, and now knows; that the problem has become as clear as day; that it is clear how organic matter has, by simple adaptation, come to be originated from inorganic material; that it is as clear how natural forces may be transformed into feelings, will, thought, and that finally, all this is known, not only to the city student, but to every village schoolboy, as well.

I am aware, then, that such and such thoughts and feelings originate from such and such motions. Well, and what then? Can I, or cannot I, produce and guide such motions, in order to excite within my brain corresponding thoughts? The question – what are the thoughts and feelings I ought to generate in myself and others, remains still, not only unsolved, but even untouched.

[C.W.VIII, p242]

So are we, Theosophists and Eastern Occultists, “Hylo-Zoists”; but it is because with us “life” is the synonym both of Spirit and Matter, or the ONE eternal and infinite LIFE whether manifested or otherwise. That LIFE is both the eternal IDEA and its periodical LOGOS. He who has grasped and mastered this doctrine completely has thereby solved the mystery of BEING.

[C.W.IX, p62]

Esoteric Science, holding that nothing in nature is inorganic, but that every atom is a “life,” does not agree with “Modern Science” as to the meaning attached to “Spontaneous Generation.” We may deal with this later. – H.P.B.

[C.W.IX, p74]

III. The Occultist or Esoteric standpoint, which looks upon the distinction between organic and inorganic matter as fallacious and non-existent in nature. For it says that matter in all its phases being merely a vehicle for the manifestation through it of LIFE -- the Parabrahmic Breath – in its physically pantheistic aspect (as Dr. Richardson would say, we suppose) it is a super-sensuous state of matter, itself the vehicle of the ONE LIFE, the unconscious purposiveness of Parabrahm.

(3) It is just this. A human being can “live” quite separated from his Spiritual Soul – the 7th and 6th principles of the ONE LIFE or “Atma-Buddhi”; but no being – whether human or animal – can live separated from its physical Soul, Nephesh or the Breath of Life (in Genesis). These “seven souls” or lives (that which we call Principles) are admirably described in the Egyptian Ritual and the oldest papyri. Chabas has unearthed curious papyri and Mr. Gerald Massey has collected priceless information upon this doctrine; and though his conclusions are not ours, we may yet in a future number quote the facts he gives, and thus show how the oldest philosophy known to Europe – the Egyptian – corroborates our esoteric teachings.

[C.W.IX, p80]

In a word, how, seeing that the main objects of the Theosophical Society are misinterpreted by those who are most willing to serve us personally, are we to deal with the rest of mankind, with that curse known as ‘the struggle for life,’ which is the real and most prolific parent of most woes and sorrows, and all crimes? Why has that struggle become the almost universal scheme of the universe? We answer: because no religion, with the exception of Buddhism has hitherto taught a practical contempt for this earthly life, while each of them, always with that one solitary exception, has through its hells and damnations inculcated the greatest dread of death. Therefore do we find that ‘struggle for life’ raging most fiercely in Christian countries, most prevalent in Europe and America. It weakens in the pagan lands, and is nearly unknown among Buddhist populations. . . . Teach the people to see that life on this earth, even the happiest, is but a burden and an illusion, that it is but our own Karma, the cause producing the effect, that is our own judge, our saviour in future lives – and the great struggle for life will soon lose its intensity. . . .

[C.W.X, p80]

Life and activity are but the two different names for the same idea, or, what is still more correct, they are two words with which the men of science connect no definite idea whatever. Nevertheless, and perhaps just for that, they are obliged to use them, for they contain the point of contact between the most difficult problems over which, in point of contact between the most difficult problems over which, in fact, the greatest thinkers of the materialistic school have every tripped.

[C.W.XII, p147fn]

Yes; it is MOTION; but not all “molecular” motion, as the writer means us to infer. Motion as the GREAT BREATH (Vide The Secret Doctrine, Vol. I, sub voce) – ergo “sound” at the same time – is the substratum of Kosmic-Motion. It is beginningless and endless, the one eternal life, the basis and genesis of the subjective and the objective universe; for LIFE (or Be-ness) is the fons et origo of existence or being.

[C.W.XII, p355]

Claude Bernard, one of the greatest physiologists of this age, said that organized matter was per se inert – even living matter in that sense, he explains, “has to be considered, as lacking spontaneity,” although it can become and manifest its special properties of life, under the influence of excitation, for, he adds, “living matter is irritable.” If so, then the materialistic negation of life and mind outside and independent of matter becomes a fallacy condemned out of its own mouth. For to excite it, there must be an agent outside of matter to do so. And if there is such an agent to irritate or excite matter, then the materialist and physiologist can no longer say that “life is a property of matter or of living organised substance.” Dr. Paul Gibier – the latest scientific convert to transcendental psychology – objects to this and says, that “if organized, living matter were indeed inert, demanding an exterior stimulant to manifest its properties, it would become incomprehensible how the hepatic cell could continue, as well demonstrated, to secrete sugar long after the liver had been separated from the body.” Occultism says that there is no such thing as inert, dead or even inorganic matter. As sponge is the product of water, created, living and dying in the water, whether ocean or lake, after which it changes form but can never die in its particles or elements, so is matter. It is created and informed by life in the Ocean of Life, which LIFE is but another name for Universal Mind or Anima Mundi, one of the “four faces of Brahmâ” on this manifested plane of ours, the visible universe.

[C.W.XII, p413-4]

Imagine, for illustration’s sake, the one homogeneous, absolute and omnipresent Essence, above the upper step of the “stair of the seven planes of worlds,” ready to start on its evolutionary journey. As its correlating reflection gradually descends, it differentiates and transforms into subjective, and finally into objective matter. Let us call it at its north pole Absolute Light; at its south pole (which to us would be the fourth or middle step, or plane, counting either way) we know it esoterically as the One and Universal Life. Now mark the difference. Above, LIGHT; below, Life. The former is ever immutable; the latter manifests under the aspects of countless differentiations. According to the occult law, all potentialities included in the higher become differentiated reflections in the lower; and according to the same law, nothing which is differentiated can be blended with the homogeneous.

[C.W.XII, p629]

--oOo--