Prana Is the Driving Force Behind Life

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 6 pages

Six pages assembled from The Secret Doctrine, volume I pages 525-26 and following, with each section introduced by a summary heading and the sources given in footnotes — including Blavatsky's remarks on an article by Dr B.W. Richardson in The Popular Science Review.

The framework is a division of everything in nature into two kinds of matter, one essentially active and ethereal and the other passive and motionless. Gross ponderable matter is called the body or shell, the female passive principle, and the Fohatic force the second principle, prāna, the male and active one — the same substance appearing as the second principle of Earth on this globe, of air in the atmosphere, of the solar body and its seven rays in the Sun, and of something else again in sidereal space, the whole being one homogeneous unity of which the parts are differentiations. Prāna alone, with no atom to act upon, would be quiescent and dead; life is produced by the action of Fohat upon a body, simple or compound. Death is described mechanically rather than morally: when a body dies it passes into the same polarity as its male energy and repels the active agent, which then loses hold of the whole and fastens on the molecules — an action called chemical, and identified with Vishnu the Preserver transforming himself into Rudra-Śiva the Destroyer. A distinction is then insisted on: prāna is not abstract life or Jīva but its aspect in a world of delusion, a constant cyclic out-breathing and in-breathing of the One Life. The later pages give the physiological correspondences. The heart is the organ of spiritual consciousness and corresponds to prāna, but only because prāna and the auric envelope are essentially the same; the animal consciousness is made up of the consciousness of all the cells in the body except those of the heart; the heart represents the higher triad while liver and spleen represent the quaternary; and the heart is the abode of the spiritual man while the psycho-intellectual man dwells in the head with its seven gateways, the seven-leaved lotus called the Cave of Buddha.

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