The Law of Karma Is Unknown and Unknowable

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

Thirteen pages opened by an abstract of key concepts written by the series editor, which is unusually dense and states the whole position before the sources are given. The frontispiece is by Alex Fishgoyt.

The abstract works largely by denial. The Unknowable is not a force behind phenomena, nor a storehouse of energy; it is called essentially the same as our own consciousness, persisting unchanging in quantity while ever changing in form, and having no kinship of nature with evolution. Only the First Cause and its direct emanations — our spirits, described as scintillas from the eternal central sun which will be reabsorbed at the end of time — are incorruptible and eternal, all else being illusion, corruptible and ephemeral, and named as the heresy and legacy of separateness. Divine thought is said to be definable only through the numberless manifestations of cosmic substance in which it is sensed spiritually, and then only by those intellectually and ethically fit to do so. Consciousness is described as unfolding out of an unknowable and ever-concealed centre and infusing itself through everything, the mental agitating the molecular. Spirit and matter are both emanations of the one reality, that perfect unmanifested consciousness or non-being which is and will remain unknown; personal consciousness is a differentiation in space and time of a ray of universal consciousness, with the one life on the subjective side and myriad lives immanent in every atom on the objective. The Kabbalists are cited as never ceasing to repeat that primal intelligence can never be comprehended or located and must therefore remain nameless and negative. The last claim is the strongest, and gives the file its title its full force: that even when the Logos reposes in the bosom of Parabrahman it cannot see Parabrahman except as Mūlaprakriti, the mighty expanse of cosmic matter which veils it from even the highest logoic perception — so that Parabrahman is unknown to the Logos as it is to ourselves.

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