The Key to the Mystery of Buddha

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Buddhas and Initiates Series · 22 pages

The key of the title is a claim about method: that the mystery of Buddha and of other initiated adepts lies in a correct understanding of the reflections in man of the seven principles or powers in nature, physically, and of the seven hierarchies of being, intellectually and spiritually. The seven principles are the manifestation of one indivisible Spirit, but only at the end of the manvantara, when the seven merge again into an absolute unity, uncreated and impartite.

From that the central doctrine follows. The purified egotistical principle — the astral and personal ego of an adept — though merging with its highest Ego, Atma-Buddhi, may for purposes of universal mercy separate itself from its divine Monad and lead on this plane of illusion a distinct independent conscious life under a borrowed illusive shape, so serving two ends at once: the exhaustion of its own individual Karma, and the saving of millions less favoured from the effects of mental blindness. Disembodied consciousness is treated not as an effect but as a cause — a ray of the all-pervading limitless Flame whose reflections alone differentiate, ubiquitous and incapable of being localised or centred on any subject, its effects felt in the region of matter while it remains the highest quality of the divine soul. After the death of an initiate, human consciousness is transformed into the independent principle itself, and the former personal ego becomes pure impersonal consciousness untainted by any ego.

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