The God-Idea Expressed Theistically and Philosophically

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Living the Life Series · 13 pages

A thirteen-page compilation opened by an abstract of central ideas and key concepts, written as continuous prose rather than as a list of headings. It is among the more recently revised files in the section, dated May 2024, and states the doctrinal position that several other files in this series assume.

The denial comes first and is unqualified: the idea of an extra-cosmic personal God is called a philosophical impossibility, existing nowhere in the cosmos or beyond it. What is offered in its place is stated in the same breath — that the God of Theosophy is the cosmos itself, our earth being His footstool, and that this Deity, like the God of Spinoza and of the true Advaitī, neither thinks nor creates, because it is All-thought and All-creation. A refinement follows against a common misreading: there is no over-soul or under-soul, but only one infinite pre-cosmic Substance and Thought remaining in the Universe of Ideas, whose first differentiation in the manifested world is purely spiritual, the beings generated in it having no consciousness related to our highest conceptions. The image the file returns to is of the ocean: Deity is a Unity in which all other units merge and from which they are indistinguishable except through the prism of theistic Maya, and the question is put whether the individual drops of the curling waves of a universal ocean can have independent existence. The contrast that gives the title its two halves closes the abstract — that while the theist proclaims his God a gigantic universal Being, the Theosophist declares the One Absolute to be not-Being but an ever-developing cyclic evolution, the perpetual motion of nature visible and invisible, moving and breathing even during its long pralayic sleep.

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