Proposition 1: The Mystery of Being

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's First Proposition Series · 13 pages

Thirteen pages subtitled Unfolding Logoic Consciousness, and laid out *in a two-column arrangement* — a condensed statement of each step in the narrow left column, the fuller quotation beside it — which makes a difficult subject unusually easy to follow.

The epigraph, from The Secret Doctrine volume II, gives the definition the file works from: the esoteric meaning of Logos, speech or word, is the rendering in objective expression, as in a photograph, of the concealed thought; the Logos is the mirror reflecting Divine Mind and the universe is the mirror of the Logos, as man reflects in himself all that he finds in his universe, the Earth. What follows is essentially a table of equivalents for one thing under many names — a Breath of Darkness moving over the slumbering Waters of Life; a Ray descending from no-place and shooting like a falling star through the planes of non-being into the first world of being; Brahmā, first god of the Hindu Trimurti; passive Wisdom in heaven and conscious, self-active Wisdom on earth; the Ain-Soph of the Kabbalist; the First Cause of the Bible; the Germ that dwelleth in darkness; and the Highest Consciousness of the occultist, defined more precisely as the sum total of Dhyāni-Chohanic consciousness, a compound unity of manifested living spirits which is the parent-source and nursery of all mundane monads. The central section is headed the eternal pilgrimage from darkness to light, and it reads the three Logoi as personified stages of one journey of Divine Consciousness — from the summits of unmanifested subjectivity down to the rayless depths of self-conscious objectivity, marking the beginning of another cycle of necessity through the flesh. The Stanza is set out with the three stages marked in the text itself: darkness radiates light, the First Logos; light drops one solitary ray into the waters, into the mother deep, the Second; the ray shoots through the virgin-egg and drops the periodical germ which condenses into the world egg, the Third. Pythagoras's never-manifested Monad, radiating One and then Two and then Three to form the first complete geometrical figure, is given as the same account in another vocabulary.

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