Proposition 3: Creation in Ten Occult Aphorisms

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's Third Proposition Series · 7 pages

Seven pages carrying ten numbered aphorisms from a private commentary, taken from The Secret Doctrine volume I, pages 289 to 292. *They are printed with the original's own typography* — the capitals and small capitals that mark technical terms, and the square brackets that mark editorial insertions — so a reader sees the text as it stands in the book rather than smoothed out.

The first aphorism gives the flavour of the rest and is worth quoting nearly whole, because the compression is the point. The Initial Existence, in the first twilight of the Mahā-Manvantara — that is, after the great dissolution which follows every age of Brahmā — is a conscious spiritual quality. In the manifested world of solar systems it is, in its objective subjectivity, like the film from a divine breath to the gaze of the entranced seer. It spreads as it issues from Laya throughout infinity as a colourless spiritual fluid. And it is on the seventh plane, and in its seventh state, in our planetary world. That is a great deal of doctrine in four sentences, and it is characteristic of the whole set: each aphorism states one stage of the descent from unmanifested being into the world of form, with the technical vocabulary — Laya, Manvantara, Pralaya, the numbered planes and states — carrying the weight that a page of explanation would otherwise have to carry. The file is therefore best used as something to work through slowly, or as a summary to return to after reading the longer studies in this section. For a reader who wants the same material expanded, "Evolution of the human life-wave on earth" and "Adventures and Peregrinations of the Metaphysical Atom" both develop it at length.

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