SPIRIT is no entity in the sense of having form; for, as Buddhist philosophy has it, where there is a form, there is a cause for suffering. Only the liberated Spirit is able to faintly realise the nature of the source whence it sprung and whither it must eventually return.
Spirit alone has no form, and therefore cannot be said to exist. Whenever man (the ethereal, inner man) reaches that point when he becomes utterly spiritual, hence, formless, he has reached a state of perfect bliss. MAN as an objective being becomes annihilated, but the spiritual entity with its subjective life, will live forever, for spirit is incorruptible and immortal. "There is but one unknown -- the ultimate substratum of Spirit (Space). That which is not the Absolute and the One is, in virtue of that very differentiation, however far removed from the physical senses, always accessible to the spiritual human mind, which is a corruscation of the undifferentiable Integral." The Hermetists and the later Rosicrucians held that all things visible and invisible were produced by the contention of light with darkness, and that every particle of matter contains within itself a spark of the divine essence -- or light, spirit -- which, through its tendency to free itself from its entanglement and return to the central source, produced motion in the particles, and from motion forms were born.
Absolute, Divine Spirit is one with absolute Divine Substance: Parabrahm and Mulaprakriti are one in essence. Though our teachings insist upon the identity of spirit and matter, and though we say that spirit is potential matter, and matter simply crystallized spirit (e.g., as ice is solidified steam); yet since the original and eternal condition of the all is not spirit but meta-spirit, so to speak, (visible and solid matter being simply its periodical manifestations), we maintain that the term spirit can only be applied to the true individuality. Primordial matter is co-eternal with Spirit, and is not our visible, tangible, and divisible matter, but its extreme sublimation. Pure Spirit is but one remove from the no-Spirit, or the absolute all. Unless you admit that man was evolved out of this primordial Spirit-Matter, and represents a regular progressive scale of "principles" from meta-Spirit down to the grossest matter, how can we ever come to regard the inner man as immortal, and at the same time as a spiritual Entity and a mortal man?
It is a fundamental principle of the Occult philosophy, this same homogeneity of matter and the immutability of natural laws, which are so much insisted upon by materialism; but that unity rests upon the inseparability of Spirit from matter, and, if the two are once divorced, the whole Kosmos would fall back into chaos and non-being. Spirit is matter on the seventh plane; matter is Spirit -- on the lowest point of its cyclic activity; and both -- are Maya. Esoteric philosophy rejects every claim to the "miraculous," and accepts nothing outside the uniform and immutable laws of Nature. But it teaches a cyclic law, a double stream of force (or spirit) and of matter, which, starting from the neutral centre of Being, develops in its cyclic progress and incessant transformations.
Divine Thought cannot be defined, or its meaning explained, except by the numberless manifestations of Cosmic Substance in which the former is sensed spiritually by those who can do so. The occultists are often misunderstood because, for lack of better terms, they apply to the essence of Force under certain aspects the descriptive epithet of substance. Now the names for the varieties of "substance" on different planes of perception and being are legion. Eastern Occultism has a special appellation for each kind; but Science -- like England, in the recollection of a witty Frenchman, blessed with thirty-six religions and only one fish-sauce -- has but one name for all, namely, "Substance." What, then, is the "primordial Substance," that mysterious object of which Alchemy was ever talking, and which became the subject of philosophical speculation in every age? What can it be finally, even in its phenomenal pre-differentiation? Even that is ALL manifested Nature and -- nothing to our senses. It is mentioned under various names in every Cosmogony, referred to in every philosophy, and shown to be, to this day, the ever grasp-eluding PROTEUS in Nature. We touch and do not feel it; we look at it without seeing it; we breathe it and do not perceive it; we hear and smell it without the smallest cognition that it is there; for it is in every molecule of that which in our illusion and ignorance we regard as Matter in any of its states, or conceive as a feeling, a thought, an emotion. ... In short, it is the "upadhi," or vehicle, of every possible phenomenon, whether physical, mental, or psychic.
In Theosophical teachings the term "Spirit" is applied solely to that which belongs directly to Universal Consciousness, and which is its homogeneous and unadulterated emanation. The Monad is impersonal and a god per se, albeit unconscious on this plane. For, divorced from its third (often fifth) principle, Manas, which is the horizontal line of the first manifested triangle or trinity, it can have no consciousness or perception of things on this earthly plane. "The highest sees through the eyes of the lowest" in the manifested world; Purusha (Spirit) remains blind without the help of Prakriti (matter) in the material spheres; and so does Atma-Buddhi without Manas. But each individual spirit -- this individuality lasting only throughout the manvantaric life-cycle -- may be described as a centre of consciousness, a self-sentient and self-conscious centre; a state, not a conditioned individual.
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