Theosophy Brings the Wisdom of Love Before the Soul

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 26 pages

Twenty-six pages with a contents page and abstract, under a running heading calling them philosophical keys to The Secret Doctrine. *It is the best short bridge on the site between the doctrine and the conduct* — it sets out the three fundamental propositions and then asks what follows from them for a person's behaviour.

The three propositions are given in order, with their page references: Proposition 1, cosmogenesis; Proposition 2, law governing cosmos and man; Proposition 3, anthropogenesis. Each has an entire section of this website devoted to it, so this file works as a way in to all three. A section headed the Gordian knot of the Second Proposition unravelled takes on the hardest of them, which is the one about law and therefore about karma. Then the file turns, and the turn is what makes it worth reading. Assimilation of universal laws is called the first key to manhood — that is, the doctrine is not offered as information but as something to be absorbed until it changes what a person does. Two short sections follow, describing theosophists metaphysically and then ethically, which are the two answers the whole section of this site keeps circling. And the final key is stated as an act rather than an understanding: sacrificing the ephemeral to the eternal, with two courses of conduct set side by side so the reader can see what that means in practice.

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