THEOSOPHY – THE WORD

LIGHT

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Nothing is added to darkness to make of it light, or to light to make it darkness, on this our plane. They are interchangeable, and scientifically light is but a mode of darkness and vice versa. Yet both are phenomena of the same noumenon – which is absolute darkness to the scientific mind, and but a gray twilight to the perception of the average mystic, though to that of the spiritual eye of the Initiate it is absolute light. How far we discern the light that shines in darkness depends upon our powers of vision. What is light to us is darkness to certain insects, and the eye of the clairvoyant sees illumination where the normal eye perceives only blackness. When the whole universe was plunged in sleep – had returned to its one primordial element – there was neither centre of luminosity, nor eye to perceive light, and darkness necessarily filled the boundless all.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p41]

According to the tenets of Eastern Occultism, DARKNESS is the one true actuality, the basis and the root of light, without which the latter could never manifest itself, nor even exist. Light is matter, and DARKNESS pure Spirit. Darkness, in its radical, metaphysical basis, is subjective and absolute light; while the latter in all its seeming effulgence and glory, is merely a mass of shadows, as it can never be eternal, and is simply an illusion, or Maya. Even in the mind-baffling and science-harassing Genesis, light is created out of darkness “and darkness was upon the face of the deep” (ch. i. v. 2.) – and not vice versa. “In him (in darkness) was life; and the life was the light of men” (John i, 4). A day may come when the eyes of men will be opened; and then they may comprehend better than they do now, that verse in the Gospel of John that says “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehendeth it not.” They will see then that the word “darkness” does not apply to man’s spiritual eyesight, but indeed to “Darkness,” the absolute, that comprehendeth not (cannot cognize) transient light, however transcendent to human eyes. Demon est Deus inversus. The devil is now called Darkness by the Church, whereas, in the Bible he is called the “Son of God” (see Job), the bright star of the early morning, Lucifer (see Isaiah). There is a whole philosophy of dogmatic craft in the reason why the first Archangel, who sprang from the depths of Chaos, was called Lux (Lucifer), the “Luminous Son of the Morning,” or manvantaric Dawn.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p70-1]

Now, why is Light called in the Stanzas “cold flame”? Because in the order of Cosmic evolution (as taught by the Occultist), the energy that actuates matter after its first formation into atoms is generated on our plane by Cosmic heat; and because Kosmos, in the sense of dissociated matter, was not, before that period. The first primordial matter, eternal and coeval with Space, “which has neither a beginning nor an end,” is “neither hot nor cold, but is of its own special nature,” says the Commentary.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p82]

This “World of Truth” can be described only in the words of the Commentary as “A bright star dropped from the heart of Eternity; the beacon of hope on whose Seven Rays hang the Seven Worlds of Being.” Truly so; since those are the Seven Lights whose reflections are the human immortal Monads – the Atma, or the irradiating Spirit of every creature of the human family. First, this septenary Light; then: –

(c) The “Divine World” – the countless Lights lit at the primeval Light – the Buddhis, or formless divine Souls, of the last Arupa (formless) world; the “Sum Total,” in the mysterious language of the old Stanza. In the Catechism, the Master is made to ask the pupil: –

“Lift thy head, oh Lanoo; dost thou see one, or countless lights above thee, burning in the dark midnight sky?”
“I sense one Flame, oh Gurudeva, I see countless undetached sparks shining in it.”
“Thou sayest well. And now look around and into thyself. That light which burns inside thee, dost thou feel it different in anywise from the light that shines in thy Brother-men?”
“It is in no way different, though the prisoner is held in bondage by Karma, and though its outer garments delude the ignorant into saying, ‘Thy Soul and My Soul.’ ”

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p120]

... it does not seem reasonable that the Occult teaching should be held as unphilosophical when it says “Thus were the Arupa and Rupa worlds formed: from ONE light seven lights; from each of the secen, seven times seven”, etc., etc.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p122]

In its Unity, primordial light is the seventh, or highest, principle, Daiviprakriti, the light of the unmanifested Logos. But in its differentiation it becomes Fohat, or the “Seven Sons.” The former is symbolised by the Central point in the double-Triangle; the latter by the hexagon itself, or the “six limbs” of the Microprosopus, the Seventh being Malkuth, the “Bride” of the Christian Kabalists, or our Earth

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p216]

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“And God said let there be light,” and “there was light.” Now the latter does not mean light at all, but in the Kabala, the androgyne “Adam Kadmon,” or Sephirah (Spiritual light), for they are one; or, according to the Chaldean “Book of Numbers,” the secondary angels, the first being the Elohim who are the aggregate of that “fashioning” god. For to whom are those words of command addressed? And who is it who commands? That which commands is the eternal Law, and he who obeys, the Elohim, the known quantity acting in and with x, or the coefficient of the unknown quantity, the Forces of the ONE Force. All this is Occultism, and is found in the archaic STANZAS. It is perfectly immaterial whether we call these “Forces” the Dhyani-Chohans, or the Ophannim, as St. John does.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p337]

Primary Creation is called the Creation of Light (Spirit); and the Secondary – that of Darkness (matter). Both are found in Genesis, i. 2, and at the beginning of chapter ii. The first is the emanation of self-born gods (Elohim); the second of physical nature.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p450]

The Occultists are taken to task for calling the Cause of light, heat, sound, cohesion, magnetism, etc., etc., a substance. Clerk Maxwell has stated that the pressure of strong sunlight on a square mile is about 3¼lbs. It is, they are told, “the energy of the myriad ether waves;” and when they call it a “substance” impinging on that area, their explanation is proclaimed unscientific.

There is no justification for such an accusation. In no way – as stated more than once before now – do the Occultists dispute the explanations of Science, as affording a solution of the immediate objective agencies at work. Science only errs in believing that, because it has detected in vibratory waves the proximate cause of these phenomena, it has, therefore, revealed ALL that lies beyond the threshold of Sense. It merely traces the sequence of phenomena on a plane of effects, illusory projections from the region that Occultism has long since penetrated. And the latter maintains that those etheric tremors, are not, as asserted by Science, set up by the vibrations of the molecules of known bodies – the matter of our terrestrial objective consciousness, – but that we must seek for the ultimate causes of light, heat, etc., etc., in MATTER existing in super-sensuous states – states, however, as fully objective to the spiritual eye of man, as a horse or a tree is to the ordinary mortal. Light and heat are the ghost or shadow of matter in motion. Such states can be perceived by the SEER or the Adept during the hours of trance, under the Sushumna ray – the first of the Seven Mystic rays of the Sun.

Thus, we put forward the Occult teaching which maintains the reality of a supersubstantial and supersensible essence of that Akasa (not ether, which is only an aspect of the latter), the nature of which cannot be inferred from its remoter manifestations – its merely phenomenal phalanx of effects – on this terrene plane.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p514-5]

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]

But this is simply the effect produced in our atmosphere and its immediate surroundings, all, in fact, which falls within the range of our terrestrial consciousness. Jupiter Pluvius sent his symbol in drops of rain, of water composed, as is believed, of two “elements,” which chemistry dissociates and recombines. The compound molecules are in its power, but their atoms still elude its grasp. Occultism sees in all these Forces and manifestations a ladder, the lower rungs of which belong to exoteric physics, and the higher are traced to a living, intelligent, invisible Power, which is, as a rule, the unconcerned, and exceptionally, the conscious cause of the sense-born phenomenon designated as this or another natural law.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p554]

“Light is the first begotten, and the first emanation of the Supreme, and Light is Life, says the Evangelist [and the Kabalist]. Both are electricity – the life principle, the anima mundi, pervading the universe, the electric vivifier of all things. Light is the great Protean magician, and under the Divine Will of the architect, [or rather the architects, the “Builders” (called One collectively)], its multifarious, omnipotent waves gave birth to every form as well as to every living being. From its swelling electric bosom, spring matter and spirit. Within its beams lie the beginnings of all physical and chemical action, and of all cosmic and spiritual phenomena; it vitalizes and disorganizes; it gives life and produces death, and from its primordial point gradually emerged into existence the myriads of worlds, visible and invisible celestial bodies. It was at the ray of this First mother, one in three, that “God,” according to Plato, “lighted a fire which we now call the sun”, and which is not the cause of either light or heat, but merely the focus, or, as we might say, the lens, by which the rays of the primordial light become materialized, are concentrated upon our solar system, and produce all the correlations of forces.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p579-80]

How true it is will be fully demonstrated only on that day when his discovery of radiant matter will have resulted in a further elucidation with regard to the true source of light, and revolutionized all the present speculations. Further familiarity with the northern streamers of the aurora borealis may help the recognition of this truth.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.I, p621fn]

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The Occultists call the light Daiviprakriti in the East, and the light of Christos in the West. It is the light of the LOGOS, the direct reflection of the ever-Unknowable on the plane of Universal manifestation.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.II, p38]

First, then, the Sephiroth are described as Light, that is, they themselves are a function of, indeed, the same as, the manifestation of the Ain Soph; and they are so from the fact that “Light” represents the ratio 20612 to 656, as part of the “Words”, DBRIM, 41224, or, as to the Word, Dabar, (206 = 10 cubits). “Light” is so much the burden of the Cabbalah as to explaining the Sephiroth, that the most famous book on the Cabbalah is called Zohar, or “Light”. In this we find expressions of this kind: “The Infinite was entirely unknown and diffused no light before the luminous point violently broke through into vision”. – “When he first assumed the form (of the crown, or the first Sephirah), He caused 9 splendid lights to emanate from it, which, shining through it, diffused a bright light in all directions”; that is these 9 with his one (which was the origin, as above, of the 9), together, made the 10, that is , or , or the sacred Ten (numbers, or Sephiroth), or Tod – and these numbers were “the Light”. Just as in the Gospel of St. John, God (Alhim, 31415 to one) was that Light (20612 to 6561) by which (Light) all things were made.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.II, p38]

Esoteric philosophy maintains that during the Samdhyas, the “Central Sun” emits creative light – passively, so to say. Causality is latent. It is only during the active periods of being that it gives rise to a stream of ceaseless energy, whose vibrating currents acquire more activity and potency with every rung of the hebdomadic ladder of Being which they descend.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.II, p239]

The earliest Zoroastrians did not believe in Evil or Darkness being co-eternal with Good or Light, and they give the same interpretation. Ahriman is the manifested shadow of AHURA-MAZDA (Asura-mazda), himself issued from Zervan Akarana “boundless (circle of) Time” or the Unknown Cause. “Its glory,” they say of the latter, “is too exalted, its light too resplendent for either human intellect or mortal eye to grasp and see.” Its primal emanation is eternal light, which, from having been previously concealed in DARKNESS was called to manifest itself and thus was formed Ormazd, the “King of Life.” He is the “first-born” in BOUNDLESS TIME, but, like his own antitype (pre-existing Spiritual idea), has lived within darkness from all eternity.

[The Secret Doctrine Vol.II, p488]

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ENQ. All this does not explain to me how this illusion called the universe originates; how the conscious to be, proceeds to manifest itself from the unconsciousness that is.

THEO. It is unconsciousness only to our finite consciousness. Verily may we paraphrase verse v, in the 1st chapter of St. John, and say "and (Absolute) light (which is darkness) shineth in darkness (which is illusionary material light); and the darkness comprehendeth it not." This absolute light is also absolute and immutable law. Whether by radiation or emanation – we need not quarrel over terms – the universe passes out of its homogeneous subjectivity on to the first plane of manifestation, of which planes there are seven, we are taught. With each plane it becomes more dense and material until it reaches this, our plane, on which the only world approximately known and understood in its physical composition by Science, is the planetary or Solar system -- one sui generis, we are told.

[The Key to Theosophy, p85]

Both the human Spirit (or the individuality), the reincarnating Spiritual Ego, and Buddhi, the Spiritual soul, are pre-existent. But, while the former exists as a distinct entity, an individualization, the soul exists as pre-existing breath, an unscient portion of an intelligent whole. Both were originally formed from the Eternal Ocean of light;...

[The Key to Theosophy, p106]

There is a spiritual consciousness, the Manasic mind illumined by the light of Buddhi, that which subjectively perceives abstractions; and the sentient consciousness (the lower Manasic light), inseparable from our physical brain and senses. This latter consciousness is held in subjection by the brain and physical senses, and, being in its turn equally dependent on them, must of course fade out and finally die with the disappearance of the brain and physical senses. It is only the former kind of consciousness, whose root lies in eternity, which survives and lives for ever, and may, therefore, be regarded as immortal. Everything else belongs to passing illusions.

[The Key to Theosophy, p179]

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The word Hirana does not mean “gold” but the golden light of divine knowledge, the first principle in whose womb is contained the light of the eternal truth which illuminates the liberated soul when it has reached its highest abode. It is, in short, the “Philosopher’s Stone” of the alchemist, and the Eternal Light of the Fire Philosopher.

[C.W.II, p285fn]

The three sides of the triangles represent to the Occultists as to the Aryans -- spirit, matter, and middle nature (the latter identical in its meaning with space); hence also – the creative, preservative, and destructive energies, typified in the “Three Lights.” The first light infuses intelligent, conscious life throughout the universe, thus answering to the creative energy; the second light produces incessantly forms out of cosmic preexistent matter and within the cosmic circle, hence is the preservative energy; the third light produces the whole universe of gross physical matter; and, as the latter keeps gradually receding from the central spiritual light, its brightness wanes, and it becomes Darkness or EVIL leading to Death.

[C.W.III, p314]

And now the results of old and modern investigation fully corroborate what they had always affirmed, namely, that in reality there is no such thing as a “chemical ray,” a “light ray,” or a “heat ray.” There is nothing but radiant energy; or, as a man of science expresses it in the Scientific American, radiant energy – “motion of some kind, causing vibrations across space of something between us and the sun—something which, without understanding fully [verily so!], we call ‘ether,’ and which exists everywhere, even in the ‘vacuum’ of a radiometer.” The sentence [though] confused, is none the less, the last word of science. Again: “We have always one and the same cause, radiant energy, and we give this one thing different names, ‘actinism,’ ‘light,’ or ‘heat.’” And we are also told that the miscalled chemical or actinic rays, as well as those which the eye sees as blue or green, or red, and those which the thermometer feels – “are all due to one thing – motion of the ether.”

[C.W.IV, p221]

The only saving principle dwells in man himself, and has never dwelt outside of his immortal divine self; i.e., it is the true Christos, as it is the true Buddha, the divine inward light which proceeds from the eternal unmanifesting unknown ALL. And this light can only be made known by its works—faith in it having to remain ever blind in all, save in the man himself who feels that light within his soul.

[C.W.VIII, p162]

It may be called a treatise on the Alchemy of Soul. For that “solitary” light in man, which burns for ever, and can never be darkness in its intrinsic nature, though the “animal” outside us may remain blind to it – is that “Light” upon which the Neo-Platonists of the Alexandrian school, and after them the Rosecroix and especially the Alchemists, have written volumes, though to the present day their true meaning is a dark mystery to most men.

[C.W.VIII, p248]

Q. Is “Darkness” the same as the “Eternal Parent Space” spoken of in Sloka (1)?

A. Not at all. Here “the boundless all” is the “Parent Space”; and Cosmic Space is something already with attributes, at least potentially. “Darkness,” on the other hand, and in this instance, is that of which no attributes can be postulated: it is the Unknown Principle filling Cosmic Space.

Q. Is Darkness, then, used in the sense of the opposite pole to Light?

A. Yes, in the sense of the Unmanifested and the Unknown as the opposite pole to manifestation, and that which falls under the possibility of speculation.

Q. Darkness is not opposed to Light, then, but to differentiation; or rather, may it not be taken as the symbol of Negativeness?

A. The “Darkness” here meant can be opposed to neither Light nor Differentiation, as both are the legitimate effects of the Manvantaric evolution – the cycle of Activity. It is the “Darkness upon the face of the Deep,” in Genesis: Deep being here “the bright son of the Dark Father” – Space.

Q. Is it that there is no Light or simply nothing to manifest, and no one to perceive it?

A. Both. In the sense of objectivity, both light and darkness are illusions – maya; in this case, it is not Darkness as absence of Light, but as one incomprehensible primordial Principle, which, being Absoluteness itself, has for our intellectual perceptions neither form, colour, substantiality, nor anything that could be expressed by words.

Q. When does Light proceed from that Darkness?

A. Subsequently, when the first hour for manifestation strikes.

Q. Light, then, is the first manifestation?

A. It is, after differentiation has begun and at the third stage of evolution only. Bear in mind that in philosophy we use the word “ Light” in a dual sense: one to signify eternal, absolute light, in potentia, ever present in the bosom of the unknown Darkness, coexistent and coeval with the latter in Eternity, or in other words, identical with it; and the other as a Manifestation of heterogeneity and a contrast to it. For one who reads the Vishnu-Purana, for instance, understandingly, will find the difference between the two terms well expressed in Vishnu; one with Brahmâ, and yet distinct from him. There, Vishnu is the eternal x, and at the same time every term of the equation. He is Brahma (neuter) essentially matter and Spirit, which are Brahma’s two primordial aspects – Spirit being the abstract light.

[C.W.X, p331-2]

I told you already that neither Darkness nor Light are to be used in the sense of opposites, as in the differentiated world. Darkness is the term which will give rise to the least misconceptions. For instance, if the term “Chaos” were used, it would be liable to be confounded with chaotic matter.

Q. The term light was, of course, never used for physical light?

A. Of course not. Here light is the first potentiality awakening from its laya condition to become a potency; it is the first flutter in undifferentiated matter which throws it into objectivity and into a plane from which will start manifestation.

[C.W.X, p337]

4. In it, the Logos as a unity, was Life, and the Life was the Light of “men” (viz., the initiates; for the profane are called “shades [chhayas] and images”).

This Light (...) is Atma-Buddhi, of which Kundalini, or the sacred fire, is a Siddhi or power; it is the serpentine or spiral force, which if misused can kill.

5. And the Light of Life, as one Essence, shineth in Darkness and the Darkness comprehended it not.

Neither does this Essence of the Logos comprehend Parabrahman, nor does Parabrahman comprehend the Essence. They are not on the same plane, so to speak.

[C.W.XI, p488]

In The Secret Doctrine it is almost revealed that the “Sons of Fohat” are the personified forces known, in a general way as Motion, Sound, Heat, Light, Cohesion, Electricity (or Electric) Fluid, and Nerve Force (or Magnetism).

[C.W.XII, p620]

(1) 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]

Before the creation the Primal Light filled all, so that there was no void at all; but when the Supreme Being, residing within this light, resolved to display his perfections in the worlds; he retired within himself and formed around him a void space. Into this void he let fall his 1st Emanation, a ray of Light which is the cause and principle of all existence uniting in itself the generative and conceptive force (hermaphrodite the reason why) being father and mother in the sublimest secrecy pervading, without which nothing can subsist.

[C.W.XIII, p351-2]

In the Secret Wisdom of the East that auxiliary is found collectively in the first emanations of Primeval Light, the Seven Dhyani-Chohans, who have been shown to be identical with the “Seven Spirits of the Presence” of the Roman Catholics.

[C.W.XIV, p46fn]

In this Chaos are formed the “Waters”, Mother Isis, Aditi, etc. They are the “Waters of Life”, in which primordial germs are created – or rather re-awakened – by the primordial Light.

[C.W.XIV, p241]

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