Divine Mind Governs the Ocean of Light and Life
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's Third Proposition Series · 46 pages
Forty-six pages in two parts, opened by an abstract of central ideas giving each position with its page number. Part 1 is Blavatsky's essay Kosmic Mind, first published in Lucifer in 1890 and republished in Blavatsky Collected Writings volume XII, pages 133 to 150. Part 2 is a set of selections from the diary of Nikolay Ivanovich Pirogoff, the Russian surgeon, who lived from 1810 to 1881 and whose memoirs were published posthumously; a note by Boris de Zirkoff records that the manuscript of the diary was held by the Military-Medical Museum. The two halves belong together because Blavatsky's essay quotes Pirogoff at length, and this file prints the man himself after printing what she made of him.
The proposition the file defends is that mind is not produced by brains. It opens on the atom: every atom endowed with consciousness, mind and free will within the limits of evolutionary law; every atom a little universe in itself; every organ and cell of the human body credited with a brain of its own, with memory, experience and discriminative powers. From there it argues that the human brain is not the only organ of thought in the universe, that the so-called lower forms of life are neither unconditioned nor senseless, and — the point for which Pirogoff is summoned — that Universal Mind needs no physico-chemical or mechanical brain to transmit ideas and knowledge. Around that sit several of the sharper formulations in this section: that imagination is the memory of preceding births, and that validated by faith and will and applied to reason it is the hallmark of genius and a reliable guide to the blind senses; that mystery is the negation of common sense as metaphysics is sublime poetry; and that physical science is self-doomed to a squirrel-like progress around a wheel of matter bounded by the five senses. On the Absolute the file is careful: "That" or "It" is the reservoir of All-Thought and the causeless cause of every manifesting intellection, but it is an error to attribute creative thought to it, since this supreme essence is passive. The naturalistic evidence is handled with relish — the Vampyrella, a tiny reddish cell that hunts among aquatic plants and finds the one it wants, is produced as what the abstract calls a terrible blow at the puffed-up bladder of materialism. Part 2 lets Pirogoff speak for himself, a man described as a most profound mystic and philosopher from his thirty-ninth year who kept his innermost beliefs from even those closest to him, and whose idealism, the file maintains, no scientific sophistry can blunt.
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