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- Lucifer, vol. 9, no. 52, December 1891, pp. 297-299
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Title for references: Coryn H.A.W. - Some Postulates of Theosophy
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297 The Universe is embodied consciousness, or Spirit in Matter.
Spirit, life, action, consciousness, subjectivity, are all convertible terms.
Force is the phenomenalisation or objectivation of the highest subjective life which thenceforth becomes the spectator, and force the concept. Then begins the illusionary ascription of self-standing reality to the concepts.
Matter, objectivity, the acted-on, are convertible terms; being names given to changes in phenomenal consciousness in accordance with the laws of consciousness as the formative spirit.
Force or action, after the disappearance or before the appearance of that which is acted on, is for us an empty abstraction. The acted-on, after the disappearance or before the appearance of that which acts on it, is also for us an empty abstraction.
The Universe may, therefore, for clearness of comprehension, be symbolised by a triangle.
298 Without the uniting base, with the interaction suspended, both sides ascend into nothingness, the apex.
Man, as we know him, has his personal consciousness on base G, but there are occupants of all the other bases; for matter exists in seven degrees of density and complexity, and so also consciousness in correspondence.
Advance to a higher plane occurs when the illusionary nature of the lower is perceived, and the whole ascent is completed when the phenomenal consciousness passes above the false ascription of self-standing reality to nature and is absorbed into the true universal self with knowledge of itself.
Although to mind on the upper six bases and à fortiori on the seventh, the apex is an empty abstraction and unconscious, yet the apex as the absolute synthesis, the beginning and the end, is not inconceivable from its empty nothingness, for it is eternal and illimitable potentiality, but from its illimitability. It cannot be brought into conception, and to our minds appears nothing. But it is the source and container of everything and is supra-, not sub-conscious.
The ascription of self-standing reality to nature is the cause of pain, which is thus an educator and disappears with the disappearance of the cause. This is the Eastern Law of Karma, or the law that adjusts the reaction upon the man of his acts, the reaction being a change in his personal consciousness.
The outcome of evolution is the raising of our present consciousness up through the base-lines to the apex. The ultimate spirit is that which by its inner evolutionary force effects this. But that evolution which in time will be the lot of all men, is capable of acceleration by individuals. And those who have done this occupy the six upper bases. The occupants of each base are the teachers of those on the next lower. The originators of this and other Theosophical movements occupy base F.
Their teaching is in the form of metaphysical axioms on the one side, and on the other of certain directions as to the mode of concentrating and training consciousness so that it may realise the truth of the axioms. Western Philosophy often arrives at the same axioms, but is ignorant of the “Yoga” steps in the ascending education of consciousness which are necessary to realise them.
The Ultimate Spirit, the apex of the triangle, the root and container of all the manifested, both subjective and objective, of the Root-Ego and its reflections into the consciousness of men, and of all the procedent grades of 299 matter, in descending the sides of the triangle, in making itself object to itself, becomes the spectator and the spectacle, and at the end of evolution has subsumed the objective under self-consciousness.
The conscious states of individual men are the phenomenalisation, or the turning towards the objective of the self-consciousness of the World-Ego. Into the consciousness of men the primal self-consciousness is reflected, just as the reflection itself (the self-consciousness of men) is reflected into, or lies behind, each of man’s states of consciousness. The self-consciousness of man, therefore, though illusionary in the highest sense, is yet as much possessed of temporary reality as the self-consciousness of the World-Ego, or as the total objective, parallel with which it comes into being, and goes out of being.
The survey of evolution shows men attaining to increasingly delicate touch of each other's states of consciousness, resulting in love or sympathy as emotions, and unselfishness in action. As evolution advances, the sense of unity of source and destiny, due to the presence in consciousness of the Universal Ego as its supporter and root, becomes continually stronger.
The Egoism of man, though, like that of the World-Ego, dissolved on the plane of absolute reality in the intervals between Manvantaras or complete cosmic dramas, the plane of subjective space, is yet a real and continuous thread through the eternal succession of Manvantaras, just as through each man’s succession of incarnations, reappearing in a richer degree with each Manvantara.
Rhythm of motion is exhibited in the recurrent incarnation of individuals and in the recurrent incarnations or materialisations of the primal spirit-apex. Consciousness becomes complex and richer with each incarnation of the unit-man, and each successive universal drama brings more from the infinite plane of subjective potentiality into the definiteness of self-conscious potency.
Matter is the clothing or objectivation of consciousness, and during its existence is continuously mobile. It is the educator of self-consciousness, and having served its purpose returns to its essence. Though the modifications of human consciousness due to its past interplay and contact with matter, remain therein as knowledge and basis of action, such past modifications are not concretely present in local and phenomenal memory, for their continuous and concrete presence would involve confused and defective concentration upon the immediate present.
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