Atman Is a Ray from a Spark of Uncreated Ray

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 37 pages

A 37-page study whose first claim is that Atman is not a possession but a universality: the Universal Self, the One Self in All, the Real Self, of which all else are reflections on heaving seas. It is the highest spiritual soul and alone proceeds directly from the One. The names are gathered from three traditions — Atum or Atmu is the Atman of the Egyptians, the ever-concealed God; Atmetos, the Indivisible, is the Atman of the Greeks. Having no will of its own, being no conditioned thing, it nonetheless has the same power over brute force as the universal principle of which it is part.

Max Müller is cited for the difficulty the word makes for translators: that Atman cannot be rendered soul, spirit or intelligence, because it is all of them and none of them in particular, these being only its attributes and having no independent existence outside it. Two further points give the study its shape. In the animal Atman is far less developed — for which, the file notes, animal Karma is correspondingly far lighter than ours. And in man Atman is one in three and three in one, forming the higher immortal triad, the soul of the spiritual man lit by its own light which the Neoplatonists called the Nous Augoeides — a term treated separately elsewhere in this section.

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