Diagram 2: The Force of the Mineral Monas

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's Third Proposition Series · 1 page

*A single diagram sheet, dated 11 February 2017, redrawn by Philaletheians UK from About the Mineral Monad — Blavatsky's reply to a question by an English Fellow of the Society, Frederick W.H. Myers, first published in The Theosophist volume IV number 12, September 1883, and republished in Five Years of Theosophy and in her Collected Writings* volume V. It accompanies "Blavatsky on the Force of the Mineral Monas" in this section.

The sheet is portrait, on a pale marbled ground, with the title in blue script across the top. Beneath it four short paragraphs give the doctrine: that the divine but wholly unconscious Mineral Monas assumes latent consciousness in the mineral kingdom, progresses as semi-consciousness in the plant kingdom, and arouses the germ of full consciousness in the animal kingdom; that the Mineral Monas is not directly involved in forming objective worlds, matter's atomic aggregation being only the vehicle through which the lower and higher intelligences thrill; that Monas is Light itself, crystallised and immetallised, the middle point between the three lower or subjective and the three higher or objective esoteric kingdoms below man; and that its self-evolving force brings forth the Mukhya Creation of the Vishnu-Purāna. The figure itself is the useful part. Two large crossed diagonals form an hourglass on each side of a vertical green line, with Mineral Kingdom labelled at both top and bottom — the beginning and the end of the same journey. The left-hand pair is labelled Spirit descends into matter on its downward stroke and Gradual evolution of form on its upward one; the right-hand pair reads Re-ascent of Spirit and Dissipation of form. Points lettered a, b, c and d mark the stages down each arm, with numbered circles 1, 2 and 3 ranged inward from each side toward a central pair marked D, and arrows at the outer edges labelled Lower Elemental Group on the left and Higher Elemental Group on the right. Read together, the two halves say that form is built up as spirit descends and dissolved as spirit re-ascends, and that the two processes run at once.

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