Formless Space Is Abstract, Infinite, Immutable Be-ness

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's First Proposition Series · 11 pages

Eleven pages with a contents page and abstract of central ideas, cast largely as *a dialogue between a Buddhist prince and Blavatsky* and carrying two tables — Akasha and Astral Light compared and contrasted, and the semi-exoteric constitution of man.

Formless space is identified with Akasha and defined by three terms: abstract universe, infinite in the sense of having endless dimensions, and immutable Be-ness. The universe of being is described as subject to change in its periodical manifestations, with man as the microcosm made in the image of the macrocosm. A claim about matter follows which the dialogue form makes vivid: that the matter composing the objects we see and touch continually returns to its pre-primordial condition of purity and light, which no mortal eye can see or bear. The section most likely to surprise a reader concerns the order of creation, and it reverses the familiar one — the man of clay is said to have been the first human being on earth with the animal kingdoms coming after him, the animals created much later than Adam and brought to him to be named, their bodies formed out of the cast-off atoms of human life-waves preceding ours. The constitution of man is then set out sevenfold: the immortal higher triad as the true individuality, and the lower tetrad, overshadowed by it, as the false individuality or personality of the man of clay, whose animal soul and body are perishable though his molecules are thrown off for the benefit of the lower kingdoms. The treatment of Nirvana is deliberately unromantic — an actionless yet impersonal subjective state, rooted in non-being, a refuge against rebirth from which the nirvanee cannot return to earth should he change his mind, and which is called illusion because it does not exist for us.

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