Theos-Talk Archives (November 2001 Message tt00466)

Saturday, November 24, 2001


Dear Jeff:


We are all beginners here and trying to help one another. Some
started studying a little earlier than others, but basically, we
are all learners. The School we are in is the enormous School of
Life.

Every World, or Planet is supposed to offer the same general
curriculum to entities (Intelligences endowed with consciousness)
who are proceeding (broadly) from Ignorance to a full knowledge,
and a moral wisdom of how to use this information beneficently
and constructively.



But, first let me offer briefly some concepts,. as I understand
them:



1.	Manifestation and evolution is presumed to come from
"somewhere."

2.	Since this does not appear to be a physical locality the
philosophers who considered the paradox concluded that a
designation ABSOLUTE or ABSOLUTENESS might be used providing no
qualities of limitations are ascribed to this ABSOLUTE. It is
not NO-THING nor is it a THING. But it is presumed to include
these both. Also when the Universe peters out and ends all
things are supposed to re-become a part of the ABSOLUTE again.
[Return to the Source from which they emanated.] The question
is: What force will be bringing everything back into life?
I'll leave that there.

3.	The word MONAD means UNITY. and we can presume that the
ABSOLUTE (as above described / defined) is EVERYTHING hence,
UNITY. It is THE MONAD. We are also Monads, but we are
fragments (or "Rays") of the ONE ORIGINAL MONAD. We are seen as
separate INDIVIDUALITIES, but our parentage is identical. Hence
we are all brothers and sisters -- one Family.

Now how do we bridge the gap between NO-THING and ourselves since
we are all "something ?"

4.	Metaphysics presumes that out of the ABSOLUTENESS there is a
periodical (under the universal Law of Karma) radiation, of
CONSCIOUSNESS and INTELLIGENCE. This "desires to know itself."
A mirror or a barrier of some kind would then be needed for it
to "mirror and see ITSELF."

5.	It is presumed that the primary manifestation is SPIRIT (or
Perfection). And for it to "see itself" a mirror of PRIMORDIAL
PURE MATTER is needed.

6.	In Manifestation, the MONAD is presumed to be a duality -- the
contrast (like the poles of a magnet) would be SPIRIT and MATTER
conjoined at every point.

7.	The eternal Witness (or Observer) of the interaction of this
living, vibrant DUALITY is the MIND. It is "mid-way" so to say,
between the two Poles. It is deemed that it has and is a direct
radiation from and of the ABSOLUTE -- Its direct link to every
Monad.



On the subject of the Monad and its definition, here are some :

Monad (Gr.) The Unity, the one.; but in Occultism it often
means the unified triad, Atma-Buddhi-Manas, or the duad,
Atma-Buddhi, that immortal part of man which reincarnates in the
lower kingdoms, and gradually progresses through them to Man and
then to the final goal-Nirvana."
T. Glossary p. 216


"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 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."	S D I p. 268


"The breath ( human Monad) needed a form; the Fathers gave it,
The breath needed a gross body; the Earth moulded it. The
Breath needed the Spirit of Life; the Solar Lhas breathed it
into its form . The breath needed a mirror of its body (astral
shadow ); "We gave it our own, " said the Dhyanis. The breath
needed a vehicle of desires (Kama-rupa) ; "It has it, said the
Drainer of Waters (Sushi, the fire of passion and animal
instinct) . The breath needed a mind to embrace the Universe;
"We cannot give that," said the Fathers. "I never had it.,"
said the Spirit of the Earth. "The form would be consumed were
I to give it mine," said the Great (solar) Fire . . . (nascent)
Man remained an empty, senseless Bhuta . . . Thus have the
boneless given life to those who became (later) men with bones in
the third (race . . . "	Stanza IV (17) of Dzyan, S D II 105


"Pilgrim" is the appellation given our Monad (the two in one
Atma-Buddhi ] ) during its cycle of incarnation. It is the only
immortal and eternal principle in us, being an indivisible part
of the integral whole-the Universal Spirit, from which it
emanates, and into which it is absorbed at the end of the cycle.
When it is said to emanate from the one spirit, an awkward and
incorrect expression has to be used, for lack of appropriate
words in English.. The Vedantins call it Sutratma (Thread Soul)
. . ."	SD II 16-17fn


"Man is certainly no special creation, and he is the product of
Nature's gradual perfective work, like any other living unit on
this Earth. But this is only with regard to the human
tabernacle. That which lives and thinks in man and survives that
frame, the masterpiece of evolution-is the "Eternal Pilgrim," the
Protean differentiation in space and time of the One Absolute
"unknowable." . . . For we, too, claim that it is the "Soul,"
or the inner man, that descends on Earth first, the psychic
astral, the mould 0n which the physical man is gradually
built-his Spirit, intellectual and moral faculties awakening
later on as that physical stature grows and develops. "Thus
incorporeal Spirits to smaller forms reduced their shapes immense
,". . . and became the men of the Third and Fourth Races. Still
later, ages after, appeared the men of our Fifth Race, reduced
from the still gigantic (in our modern sense) stature of their
primeval ancestors, to about half of that size at present."	S D
II p. 728


". . . the Monad or Jiva per se cannot be even called spirit; it
is a ray, a breath of the Absolute, or the Absoluteness rather,
and the Absolute Homogeneity, having no relations with the
conditioned and relative finiteness, is unconscious on our plane.
Therefore, besides the material which will be needed for its
future human form, the monad requires a spiritual model, or
prototype, for that material to shape itself into; and, an
intelligent consciousness to guide its evolution and progress,
neither of which is possessed by the homogeneous monad, or by the
senseless though living matter,. The Adam of dust requires the
Soul of Life to be breathed into him: the two middle principles,
which are the sentient life of the irrational animal and the
Human Soul, for the former is irrational without the latter.
Kama and Manas or Kama-Manas ] It is only when . . . man has
become separated into male and female, that he will be endowed
with this conscious, rational, individual Soul, (Manas) "the
principle, or the intelligence of the Elohim," to receive which,
he has to eat of the fruit of Knowledge from the Tree of Good and
Evil. . . . after having reached a certain point, they [ the
"Elohim," or Pitris, lower Dhyan Chohans ] will meet the
incarnating senseless monads, encased in the lowest matter, and
blending the two potencies, Spirit and Matter, the union will
produce that terrestrial symbol of the "Heavenly Man" in
space-perfect man, In Sankhya philosophy Purusha (spirit) is
spoken of as something impotent unless he mounts on the shoulders
of a Prakriti (matter), which, left alone, is-senseless. But in
the secret philosophy they are viewed as graduated. . . Both are
inseparable, yet ever separated. . . . the two poles of the same
homogeneous substance, the root-principle of the universe."	S D
I p. 247


"...Buddhi is the faculty of cognizing the channel through which
divine knowledge reaches the "Ego," the discernment of good and
evil, "divine conscience" also; and "Spiritual Soul," which is
the vehicle of Atma. "When Buddhi absorbs our Ego-tism (destroys
it) with all its Vikaras, Avalokiteshvara [Universal Wisdom]
becomes manifested to us, and Nirvana, or Mukti, is reached,
"Mukti" being the same as Nirvana, i.e., freedom from the
trammels of "maya" or illusion."	S D I p. xix


"The Sixth principle in Man (Buddhi, the Divine Soul) though a
mere breath, in our conceptions, is still something material when
compared with divine "Spirit" (Atma) of which it is the carrier
or vehicle.. Fohat, in his capacity of Divine Love (Eros), the
electric Power of affinity and sympathy, is shown allegorically
as trying to bring the pure Spirit, the Ray inseparable from the
One absolute, into union with the Soul, the two constituting ion
Man the Monad, and in Nature the first link between the ever
unconditioned and the manifested."	S D I p. 119


" The fundamental identity of all Souls with the Universal Over
Soul, the latter being itself an aspect of the Unknown Root;
and the obligatory pilgrimage for every Soul-a spark of the
former-through the Cycle of Incarnation (or "Necessity") in
accordance with Cyclic and Karmic law, during the whole term. . .
. no purely spiritual Buddhi (divine Soul) can have an
independent (conscious) existence before the spark which issued
from the pure Essence of the Universal Sixth principle,--or the
over soul,--has passed through every elemental form of the
phenomenal world of that Manvantara, and acquired individuality,
first by natural impulse, and then by self-induced and
self-devised efforts (checked by its Karma), thus ascending
through all the degrees of intelligence, from the lowest to the
highest Manas, from mineral and plant, up to the holiest
archangel (Dhyani Buddha),

The pivotal doctrine of the Esoteric philosophy admits no
privileges or special gifts in man, save those won by his own Ego
through personal effort and merit throughout a long series of
metempsychoses and reincarnations."	SD I p. 17


"Man tends to become a God and then-God, like every other atom in
the Universe."	S D I p. 159


"The same difficulty of language is met with in describing the
"stages" through which the Monad passes. Metaphysically
speaking, it is of course an absurdity to talk of the
"development" of a Monad, or to say that it becomes "Man." . . .
It stands to reason that Monad cannot either progress or develop,
or even be affected by the changes of states it passes through.
It is not of this world or plane, and may be compared only to an
indestructible star of divine light and fire, thrown down on our
Earth as a plank of salvation for the personalities in which it
indwells. It is for the latter to cling to it; and thus
partaking of its divine nature, obtain immortality. Left to
itself the Monad will cling to no one; but, like the "plank," be
drifted away to another incarnation by the unresisting current of
evolution."
S D I p. 174-5fn



". . . to complete the septenary man, to add to his three lower
principles and cement them with the spiritual Monad-which could
never dwell in such a form otherwise than in an absolutely latent
state-two connecting principles are needed: Manas and Kama.
This requires a Spiritual Fire of the middle principle from the
fifth and third states of Pleroma. But this fire is the
possession of the Triangles, not of the (perfect) Cubes, which
symbolize Angelic Beings: [ Footnote : The triangle becomes a
Pentagon (five-fold) on Earth. ] . . . The human Ego is neither
Atman nor Buddhi, but the higher Manas: the intellectual
fruition and the efflorescence of the intellectual
self-consciousness Egotism-in the higher spiritual sense. The
ancient works refer to it as Karana Sarira on the plane of the
Sutratma, which is the golden thread on which, like beads, the
various personalities of this higher Ego are strung.. . . these
Beings were returning Nirvanees, from preceding
Maha-Manvantaras-ages of incalculable duration which have rolled
away in the Eternal. . . The thread of radiance which is
imperishable and dissolves only in Nirvana, re-emerges from it
in its integrity on the day when the Great Law calls all things
back into action. . . "	S D II p. 80

"The monad-a truly "indivisible thing," . . . is here rendered as
the Atma in conjunction with Buddhi and the higher Manas. This
trinity is one and eternal, the latter being absorbed in the
former at the termination of all conditioned and illusive life.
The monad, then, can be traced through the course of its
pilgrimage and its changes of transitory vehicles only from the
incipient stage of the manifested Universe. . . . Atma alone is
the one real and eternal substratum of all-the essence and
absolute knowledge-the kshetragna. { Footnote: ...atma (spirit)
alone is what remains after the subtraction of the sheaths and
that it is the only witness, or synthesized unity." )
S D I p. 570-1

:Atma (our seventh principle) being identical with the universal
Spirit, and man being one with it in his essence, what it then
the Monad proper ? It is that homogeneous spark which radiates
in millions of rays from the primeval "Seven;" . . . It is the
emanating spark from the uncreated ray-a mystery. . . .
Adi-Buddha. . . the One unknown, without beginning or end,
identical with Parabrahm and Ain-Soph, emits a bright ray from
its darkness.. This is the Logos (the first), or Vajradhara, the
Supreme Buddha . . . As the Lord of all Mysteries he cannot
manifest, but sends into the world of manifestation his heart-the
"diamond heart," Vajrasattva . . . This is the second logos of
creation, from whom emanate the seven . . . Dhyani Buddhas,
called Anupadaka, "the parentless."

These Buddhas are the primeval monads from the world of
incorporeal being, the Arupa world, wherein the Intelligences (on
that plane only) have neither shape nor name, in the exoteric
system, but have their distinct seven names in esoteric
philosophy. These Dhyani Buddhas emanate, or create from
themselves, by virtue of Dhyana, celestial Selves-the super-human
Bodhisattvas. These incarnating at the beginning of every human
cycle on earth as mortal men, become occasionally, owing to their
personal merit, Bodhisattvas among the Sons of Humanity, after
which they may re-appear as Manushi (human) Buddhas.

The Anupadaka (or Dhyani Buddhas) are thus identical with the
Brahmanical Manasaputra, "mind-born sons"-whether of Brahma or
either of the other two Trimurtian Hypostases, hence identical
also with the Rishis and Prajapatis...."	S D I p. 571


"Plato . . . the great Initiate Philosopher said: for the ego
(the "Higher Self" when merged with and in the divine Monad) is
Man, and yet the same as the "other," the Angel in him
incarnated, as the same with the universal Mahat."	S D II p 88


================================


Best wishes,

Dallas

==================================

From: J N
Sent: Saturday, November 24, 2001 12:09 PM
To:
Subject: Newbie question


As you will be able to tell from this posting, I am absolutely
brand new to
Theosophy. My questions will obviously be naive and boring to
most. Any
help I can get will be appreciated.

I see the word "monad" come across from time to time. Can
someone offer a
definition for this word?

CUT