Astral Light Is a Term Very Little Understood

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Confusing Words Series · 8 pages

From the Transactions of the Blavatsky Lodge, answering the question of what is meant by prototypes existing in the Astral Light. The phrase itself is called a convenience for something very little understood — the realm of Akasha, or primordial light manifested through divine ideation, the latter taken as a generic term for the universal and divine mind reflected in the waters of space or chaos. That reflection is the Astral Light proper: a mirror which both reflects and reverses a higher plane.

The realm of Akasha is described as undifferentiated noumenal and abstract space, later occupied by Chidakasam, the field of primordial consciousness, and having seven fields in occult philosophy. The first is latent consciousness, coeval with the first and second unmanifested Logoi — the light which shines in darkness and which the darkness comprehended not, in St John's phrase. When the hour strikes for the third Logos, a lower field of differentiated consciousness radiates from that latent potentiality: Mahat, the collectivity of the Dhyani-Chohans of sentient life, of which Fohat is the representative on the objective plane and the Manasaputras on the subjective. The distinction the file exists to make comes at the end: Akasha is eternal, the Astral Light periodic, and the Astral Light mirrors the three higher planes without extending beyond the fourth, where Akasha begins.

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