Theos-Talk Archives (July 2004 Message tt00153)

July 10 2004

Dear Gerry:

I again say we agree and seem to be confirming our views with the doctrines
available metaphysically.

On what basis is the "Real Me: the (my) inner "Observer" and "Director,"
"Chooser," etc... not "real? "

And even if, agreeably to you (and the doctrines), it is a Maya, on every
plane of differentiation and manifestation, except the "imputed" utterly
transcendent, then, where does that MAYA originate? And Why ?  

I think the "Why" is important. I say this because in the Universe there is
nothing that does not have a reason. Shall we call it a "lure?" In that case
who provides it, and, for whom is it created? Has it a purpose ?

Since it is here, and we are here (is this a contrast or a statement of fact
?) our logic makes, as you show, quoting the various "Schools," a series of
"imputations." But their source remains to us obscure, conjectural. How do
we resolve this? 

I guess that is what is meant by the "Causeless Cause."  

I was looking at this on p. 6 SECRET DOCTRINE, Vol. 1:

"...if the Parabrahmam of the Hindus may be taken as a representative of the
hidden and nameless deities of other nations, this absolute Principle will
be found to be the prototype from which all the others were copied.
Parabrahm is not "God," because It is not a God. "It is that which is
supreme, and not supreme (paravara)," explains Mandukya Upanishad (2.28). IT
is "Supreme" as CAUSE, not supreme as effect. 

Parabrahm is simply, as a "Secondless Reality," the all-inclusive Kosmos —
or, rather, the infinite Cosmic Space — in the highest spiritual sense, of
course. 

Brahma (neuter) being the unchanging, pure, free, undecaying supreme Root,
"the ONE true Existence, Paramarthika," and the absolute Chit and Chaitanya
(intelligence, consciousness) cannot be a cognize, "for THAT can have no
subject of cognition." 

Can the flame be called the essence of Fire? This Essence is "the LIFE and
LIGHT of the Universe, the visible fire and flame are destruction, death,
and evil." "Fire and Flame destroy the body of an Arhat, their essence makes
him immortal." (Bodhi-mur, Book II.) "The knowledge of the absolute Spirit,
like the effulgence of the sun, or like heat in fire, is naught else than
the absolute Essence itself," says Sankaracharya. IT — is "the Spirit of the
Fire," not fire itself; therefore, "the attributes of the latter, heat or
flame, are not the attributes of the Spirit, but of that of which that
Spirit is the unconscious cause." 

Is not the above sentence the true key-note of later Rosicrucian
philosophy?

Parabrahm is, in short, the collective aggregate of Kosmos in its infinity
and eternity, the "THAT" and "THIS" to which distributive aggregates can not
be applied. "In the beginning THIS was the Self, one only" (Aitareya
Upanishad); the great Sankaracharya, explains that "THIS" referred to the
Universe (Jagat); the sense of the words, "In the beginning," meaning before
the reproduction of the phenomenal Universe.... the Upanishads, which state,
as in the Secret Doctrine, that "this" cannot create, they do not deny a
Creator, or rather a collective aggregate of creators, but only refuse, very
logically, to attribute "creation" and especially formation, something
finite to an Infinite Principle.

With them, Parabrahmam is a passive because an Absolute Cause, the
unconditioned Mukta. It is only limited Omniscience and Omnipotence that are
refused to the latter, because these are still attributes (as reflected in
man's perceptions); and because Parabrahm, being the "Supreme ALL," the ever
invisible spirit and Soul of Nature, changeless and eternal, can have no
attributes; absoluteness very naturally precluding any idea of the finite or
conditioned from being connected with it. 

And if the Vedantin postulates attributes as belonging simply to its
emanation, calling it "Iswara plus Maya," and Avidya (Agnosticism and
Nescience rather than ignorance), it is difficult to find any Atheism in
this conception.† Since there can be neither two INFINITES nor two ABSOLUTES
in a Universe supposed to be Boundless, this Self-Existence can hardly be
conceived of as creating personally. 

In the sense and perceptions of finite "Beings," THAT is Non-"being," in the
sense that it is the one BE-NESS; for, in this ALL lies concealed its
coeternal and coeval emanation or inherent radiation, which, upon becoming
periodically Brahmâ (the male-female Potency) becomes or expands itself into
the manifested Universe. 

Narayana moving on the (abstract) waters of Space, is transformed into the
Waters of concrete substance moved by him, who now becomes the manifested
WORD or Logos. 
 
The orthodox Brahmins, those who rise the most against the Pantheists and
Adwaitees, calling them Atheists, are forced, if Manu has any authority in
this matter, to accept the death of Brahmâ, the creator, at the expiration
of every "Age" of this (creative) deity (100 Divine years — a period which
in our years requires fifteen figures to express it). Yet, no philosopher
among them will view this "death" in any other sense than as a temporary
disappearance from the manifested plane of existence, or as a periodical
rest. 

The Occultists are, therefore, at one with the Adwaita Vedantin philosophers
as to the above tenet. They show the impossibility of accepting on
philosophical grounds the idea of the absolute ALL creating or even evolving
the "Golden Egg," into which it is said to enter in order to transform
itself into Brahma — the Creator, who expands himself later into gods and
all the visible Universe. 

They say that Absolute Unity cannot pass to infinity; for infinity
presupposes the limitless extension of something, and the duration of that
"something"; and the One All is like Space — which is its only mental and
physical representation on this Earth, or our plane of existence — neither
an object of, nor a subject to, perception. 

If one could suppose the Eternal Infinite All, the Omnipresent Unity,
instead of being in Eternity, becoming through periodical manifestation a
manifold Universe or a multiple personality, that Unity would cease to be
one. Locke's idea that "pure Space is capable of neither resistance nor
Motion" — is incorrect. 

Space is neither a "limitless void," nor a "conditioned fulness," but both:
being, on the plane of absolute abstraction, the ever-incognisable Deity,
which is void only to finite minds, and on that of mayavic perception, the
Plenum, the absolute Container of all that is, whether manifested or
unmanifested: it is, therefore, that ABSOLUTE ALL. 

There is no difference between the Christian Apostle's "In Him we live and
move and have our being," and the Hindu Rishi's "The Universe lives in,
proceeds from, and will return to, Brahma (Brahmâ)": for Brahma (neuter),
the unmanifested, is that Universe in abscondito, and Brahmâ, the
manifested, is the Logos, made male-female in the symbolical orthodox
dogmas. The God of the Apostle-Initiate and of the Rishi being both the
Unseen and the Visible SPACE. Space is called in the esoteric symbolism "the
Seven-Skinned Eternal Mother-Father." It is composed from its
undifferentiated to its differentiated surface of seven layers. 

"What is that which was, is, and will be, whether there is a Universe or
not; whether there be gods or none?" asks the esoteric Senzar Catechism. And
the answer made is — SPACE. 

It is not the One Unknown ever-present God in Nature, or Nature in
abscondito, that is rejected, but the God of human dogma and his humanized
"Word." In his infinite conceit and inherent pride and vanity, man shaped it
himself with his sacrilegious hand out of the material he found in his own
small brain-fabric, and forced it upon mankind as a direct revelation from
the one unrevealed SPACE. 

The Occultist accepts revelation as coming from divine yet still finite
Beings, the manifested lives, never from the Unmanifestable ONE LIFE; from
those entities, called Primordial Man, Dhyani-Buddhas, or Dhyan-Chohans, the
"Rishi-Prajâpati" of the Hindus, the Elohim or "Sons of God," the Planetary
Spirits of all nations, who have become Gods for men. He also regards the
Adi-Sakti — the direct emanation of Mulaprakriti, the eternal Root of THAT,
and the female aspect of the Creative Cause Brahmâ, in her A'kásic formof
the Universal Soul — as philosophically a Maya, and cause of human Maya. But
this view does not prevent him from believing in its existence so long as it
lasts, to wit, for one Mahamanvantara; nor from applying Åkâsva, the
radiation of Mulaprakriti, to practical purposes, connected as the
World-Soul is with all natural phenomena, known or unknown to science. "
[S D I 7 - 10]

Does this make sense to you?

If this timelessness is a fact, then the so-called duality of the MONAD (as
ATMA-BUDDHI) is in fact a trinity (ATMA-BUDDHI-MAHAT). I can well see how
our present mental limits place difficulties in our way of securing
precision of that which is forever transcendent of all limitations. Yet, it
always leaves a "trace" of "ITSELF." [ I mean the one indefinable BE-NESS,
as it is timeless and all-pervasive.]

I would say, if we can secure a motive, then we derive a purpose. If we
posit "compassion" -- there has to be a basis for it. This primordial
motive,
would (it seems to me) to be involved in the "substance" of the "Eternal
Thought" in the "Eternal Mind" if such exists! 

I do NOT equate "myself" with the body-form I use. I can see that is almost
totally, what one might call, a temporary lodging place. So, I imagine that
the REALITY does not equate itself with the manifested Universe it uses to
clothe itself. I am faced with the paradox: The 'Supreme' in me ( a ray or
a spark ?) IS, yet is not. I simply do not grasp in this anything of the
"anatma." 

My "anatma" is "matter," or limitation meant? 

Best wishes

Dallas
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Gerald Schueler [mailto:gschueler@earthlink.net] 
Sent: Tuesday, July 06, 2004 8:32 AM
To: Theosophy Study List
Subject: RE: "exoteric/esoteric," Dallas and ...

<< I answered that I, myself, the personality that I am, bears the current
name: "Dallas." But as this personality, as I looked at it from within
myself, could be changed, the "Real "Me" had no "name" but was most
definitely 'there.' >>

The "Real Me" is a mayavic illusion that does not exist the way we seem to
experience it. 

Most people would say that their self is their physical body. 

When hungry they say "I am hungry." But when we try to locate a self
within the components of the body we don't find it there. So, we say that
our self is our mind. We say "I think" and "I feel." But when we carefully
look at all of the components of our mind, we find no self. 


So we posit a Higher Self that uses or controls the body and mind, but again
we cannot locate it. 

No matter how deep within we look, even at the spiritual level,
we find nothing that is a self, we find only more components. 

What is it that gives us this feeling that a self is "definitely there?" 

It is due to Maya, to the false experience of a subjective self or I that is
separate from an objective not-self or Not-I. 

We experience life on all seven planes of duality as if we were a subjective
consciousness that is conscious of an external objective universe. 

When we mentally/conceptually carry this false experience into Beness, the
nondual Monad is experienced as if it were a consciousness center, a center
of pure conscious awareness that is conscious of Beness. 

This pure awareness is said to be absolute by the Mind
Only school and is said to be absolute by Blavatsky if we take her words
literally. 

Essentially, the Mind Only school teaches that the Not-I is a
projection of the I, and that stopping the projection eliminates the Not-I
leaving only the I. 

The Middle Way school says that we can go farther, and
we can transcend even this consciousness center; that the I in its highest
possible definition is just another imputation. 

When we do so, we completely merge the I into the Not-I to experience the
indivisible Monad.

There is no longer an I as such, nor is there a Not-I as such. It is only
at this point, in this totally nondual experience, that Maya is eliminated.

At the nondual level, the I is a pure consciousness center and the Not-I is
Beness. But this split is purely conceptual because there is no separation
in the experience of nonduality. 

So, the actual experience of nonduality is ineffable, and to try to describe
it requires us to divide up the indivisible, which we human beings are prone
to do with some relish. The bottom line here is that the I or "Real Me" is
an imputation at every possible level and does not exist even
conventionally. 

This is how Buddha's doctrine of anatman is understood in the Middle Way
school which is said to be the highest and most profound school in Tibetan
Buddhism. And one of the people who said this was the great Dzogchen Master
Longchenpa.
  
Jerry S.