Kamic versus Manasic Action

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Confusing Words Series · 23 pages

A 23-page study built around a two-column comparison of kamic or psychic action against manasic or noetic action, so that the two can be followed point by point rather than reconstructed from scattered passages. The metaphysical ground is laid first: motion or the Great Breath, and so sound, is Motion Unmanifested — beginningless and endless, the one eternal life, the basis and genesis of the subjective and objective universe alike; while all psychic activity, from its lowest to its highest manifestations, is vortical motion, the material term for Motion Manifested.

The image the series editor uses for the distinction is worth the file on its own: the body is an Aeolian harp chorded with two sets of strings, one of pure silver and one of catgut, and when the breath of the divine Fiat brushes softly over the first a man becomes like unto his God — the Christos — while the other set, the Chrēstos, feels it not. The claim that follows carries the argument into physiology: every cell and every organ in the body is endowed with a consciousness and memory of its own kind, so that cells respond to manasic as well as kamic impulses, and each elicits the corresponding noetic or psychic action. The columns that follow work that distinction out in detail.

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