Who Furnished Man with His Immortal Monad?

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 2 pages

Two pages built on a passage from "The Doctrine of Avatāras" in Blavatsky Collected Writings volume XIV, with a quotation from the Commentary on the Book of Dzyan and several substantial explanatory footnotes.

The passage first disposes of a related subject in order to get to its own. The Watchers are described as one placed as guardian or regent over each of the seven divisions of the earth, as there is one over each of the fourteen Lokas — but it is not with these that the passage is concerned, rather with the Seven Breaths which furnish man with his immortal Monad in his cyclic pilgrimage. The Commentary is then quoted, and it describes a descent followed by a return: the Flame or Breath descends on its own region as Lord of Glory, calls into conscious being the highest of the emanations of that region, and ascends again to its primeval seat, from where it watches over and guides its countless beams, which are the Monads. How it chooses is the point most worth noticing. Its Avatāras are chosen only from those who had the Seven Virtues in them in a previous incarnation — explained in a footnote as one who, without the benefit of initiation, becomes as pure as any adept by the simple exertion of his own merit, so that at his next incarnation his body becomes the Avatāra of his Watcher or, as a Christian would say, his Guardian Angel. All the rest are overshadowed, each by one of the countless beams — and the passage adds that even the beam is a part of the Lord of Lords. A further footnote treats the hierarchies of Prajāpatis and Rishis, first seven, then ten, then twenty-one, as the same doctrine, and identifies the biblical patriarchs and Jacob's dream as carrying the same occult meaning.

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