How Vibration Brings Forth Sound, Form, and Colour

C. Kotayya · Secret Doctrine's First Proposition Series · 21 pages

Twenty-one pages carrying C. Kotayya's essay *in two parts, prefaced by quick definitions from the series editor and closing with suggested reading for students and a further list for advanced students. It is illustrated throughout from The True Colours of Man, the fifth of the site's Major Works, and carries a table of tattvas showing their sounds, forms and colours*.

The argument builds from the physical upward. There can be no sound without vibration, since sound is the consequence of vibration; and vibration is caused by differences in the density of material particles, the solid being moved by the liquid and the liquid by the gaseous. From that Kotayya draws a chain connecting air, breath, life, sound and form. The turn comes with the claim that divine spirit animates inert mass, and that cosmic mind is the prime mover of everything in the manifested universe, physical forces being only secondary effects guided by spiritual ones. The most unusual sections are the three that follow, which apply the doctrine to particulars a reader can test against his own experience: the colours of the human voice, the colours of musical instruments, and the colours of languages. The second part is more schematic, setting out the table of tattvas with their sounds, forms and colours, and proposing a correspondence between the four states of matter and the four states of consciousness. The file is one of very few in this library by an author other than Blavatsky or Judge, and it earns its place by treating a metaphysical claim as something with observable consequences.

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