Practical realization of the three objects of the TS
To begin with, it is very difficult and not even necessary to talk about compassion, because on the one hand it refers to the sphere of some spiritual abilities or maybe feelings, and on the other hand to the active work. So my talk will be short; I would like just to explain why it is so, and to how to show to people of a logical, technical mindset why there is compassion, how it works, and give to those people who are mainly interested in the problems of matter an opportunity for a little wider outlook.
All of you have heard of the three Logoi. Some are of the opinion that there's no more, for instance, the First Logos, because the Logoi are being unfolded sequentially one after another. On the one hand, it is so, but on the other, it's not so, because from a Buddhist point of view, any cause continues to exist metaphysically, and as soon as the causes disappear, their consequences also disappear (they are connected). And also if we recall that the microcosm is a reflection of the macrocosm, and take into account that our higher triad exists simultaneously, we cannot say, for example, that when the Buddhi emerges, the Atma disappears. Based on this concept, we can conclude that the three Logoi exist simultaneously and all of them are at work. Another thing is that in our life they manifest themselves in different ways and not always explicitly, not always visibly. And usually (it comes from science, and in theosophy we've got the same approach) we are used to to study planes, subplanes, energy centers, globes and other things like that — all this pertains to the world of Brahma, the world of matter and intellect. (I gained the first knowledge in any spiritual sciences from the devotees of Hare Krishna movement in the 80's, and they explained it to me like this: Brahma is the supply manager of the universe). And, in fact, physicists, studying the world, study this world of Brahma. Although everything is one, the qualities of these three Logoi, among which Brahma is the third, are inexpressible through each other and act in parallel. We can say that reality has three fundamental qualities.
And as there is a world of matter and reason, so there is a world of consciousness, and compassion belongs to it, to the world of the Second Logos, or Vishnu. And there is a manifestation of the divine will, or Self — this is the world of Śiva, the most difficult to comprehend. But there is one circumstance that allows you to get some idea of these worlds, though incomplete. Why can we get into some kind of intellectual speculation about these aspects? Because each Logos is again triple in its manifestation, and accordingly there is also the manifestation of Brahma and the manifestation of Śiva in the world of Vishnu, due to which manifestations the first three rays are obtained, which are conventionally called the ray of will, the ray of love-wisdom and the ray of active intellegence, and just likewise, there are three manifestations in the world of Brahma too — they are three well-known gunas of nature.[1]
Due to the fact that in each of the three divisions there are still other divisions, not everything in the world of Brahma is well explained by the laws of logic, and it is not possible to render everything to predestination. The most noticeable manifestation of this is what scientists have encountered in quantum physics (in fact, there are still several so-called “interpretations” of the quantum world, because there is no single explanation). There is only a phenomenon that we observe — that at a quantum level, particles behave unpredictably. Their general behavior fits into some kind of probability distribution and is described by a function (as the voting of people), but we cannot predict the behavior of each particular particle as to its left or right path of going around an obstacle. We can only imagine the particle as a wave and write some kind of wave function, which is a probability function. Well, this is all yesterday’s science (even Blavatsky pointed out that they can’t solve wave-particle duality: “Undulatory or corpuscular theory — it is all one. It is speculation from the aspects of phenomena, not from the knowledge of the essential nature of the cause and causes” — SD vol.I, part. III, Sect.6). And I think that this is a manifestation of the First Logos in the world of matter, that is, the aspect of the will in the world of Brahma. An elementary particle exherts its elementary will. And if it is so, then there should be also a manifestation of the second Logos in the world of particles. It is to the Second Logos that we relate the ideas of love, compassion, the possibility of teaching and, accordingly, discipleship, all kinds of mysticism, which is irrational and does not fit into any logical schemes. And now, quite recently, a few years ago, another phenomenon difficult to explain called coupled or entangled quanta was discovered by the physicists. That is, these quanta released by a pair, copy each other's state, and when one is affected, the other changes (sometimes it is mirrored, the spins there may be opposite). But one way or another, speaking in terms of interaction (and when it was all discovered, they decided that a new type of interaction was found, which should be investigated), it turned out that the speed of this “interaction” is difficult to measure, it occures, roughly speaking, instantly, — at least 100,000 times faster than the speed of light. Of course, we cannot give an exact value — this has not been measured still, but for simplicity sake we can say that the speed of this interaction is infinite. And again, it's just a statement of fact, there is no explanation. And I conclude that this is a manifestation of the Vishnu aspect in the material world. It turns out that not only elementary particles have elementary will, but elementary compassion too.
And on the one hand, this is a kind of lesson for us, that even at such a low level as the mineral kingdom, all these qualities are already manifested, and even more so it's appropriate for us to manifest them; secondly, we should conclude from this that animals and plants are more able to feel anything, and take this into account; and thirdly, thanks to these ideas, we can attract the attention of physicists to theosophy, because it seems to me that theosophy, due to this concept, provides a philosophical explanation for some phenomena in the quantum world, for which there is no purely scientific and rational explanation yet. (I’ll make a small note, what’s the difference — there are a lot of descriptions in physical science, descriptions by formulas, but this is not a rational explanation, but just fixing a certain regularity using the mathematical apparatus, what is convenient, but doesn't mean at all that an explanation for a particular phenomenon is already found).
Footnotes
- ↑ This conception of subaspects is explained at length in The Seven Rays by Ernest Wood.