Blavatsky Blogger
Taking Theosophical
ideas
into the 21st
century
H P Blavatsky the Emanationist
which
gets there in the end.
H P Blavatsky postulated a
Conscious Life Force,
which
drives our progress
and
knows where we’re going.
H P
Blavatsky maintained that the development of life forms is driven by a
conscious life force which seeks to find expression and this force exists
throughout nature and in all kingdoms of nature. As Theosophy postulates that
there is no dead matter in the Universe, then this force is also operating in
the Mineral Kingdom.
The quest
for expression leads the conscious life force to generate increasingly higher
forms which emanate from the blueprint created by that force although the
principle of involution, or descent into matter, means that emphasis between physical
and spiritual progress changes. This runs counter to a pure Theory of Evolution
in which a blind force leads species to change over a period of time and a
spiritual dimension is not considered.
The
operation of a conscious driving life force means that all life forms have a
spiritual dimension or spiritual ego and are effectively projected into
physical existence with characteristics already created in concept. Development
will continue on other plains of nature during physical life and even when the
entity no longer has a presence on the physical plane.
Here are
definitions of Evolution and Emanation from H P Blavatsky’s Theosophical
Glossary, published 1892
Evolution.
The
development of higher orders of animals from lower. As said in
prudently avoiding and ignoring the higher or spiritual
evolution, which would force our contemporaries to confess the superiority of
the ancient philosophers and psychologists over themselves. The ancient sages,
ascending to the
UNKNOWABLE,
made their starting- point from the first manifestation of the unseen, the
unavoidable, and, from a strictly logical reasoning, the absolutely necessary
creative Being, the Demiurgos of the universe.
Evolution began with
them from pure spirit, which descending lower and
lower down, assumed at last a visible and comprehensible form, and became
matter. Arrived at this point, they speculated in the Darwinian method, but on
a far more large and comprehensive basis.”
The
Doctrine of Emanation.
In its
metaphysical meaning, it is opposed to Evolution, yet one with it. Science
teaches that evolution is physiologically a mode of generation in which the
germ that develops the foetus pre-exists already in
the parent, the development and final form and characteristics of that germ
being accomplished in nature; and that in cosmology the process takes place
blindly through the correlation of the elements, and their various compounds.
Occultism
answers that this is only the apparent mode, the real process being Emanation,
guided by intelligent Forces under an immutable LAW. Therefore, while the
Occultists and Theosophists believe thoroughly in the doctrine of Evolution as
given out by Kapila and Manu, they are Emanationists rather than Evolutionists. The doctrine of
Emanation was at one time universal. It was taught by the Alexandrian as well
as by the Indian philosophers, by the Egyptian, the Chaldean
and Hellenic Hierophants, and also by the Hebrews (in their Kabbala, and even
in Genesis). For it is only owing to deliberate
mistranslation that the Hebrew word asdt
has been translated “angels” from the Septuagint, when it means Emanations, Æons, precisely as with the Gnostics. Indeed, in
Deuteronomy (xxxiii., 2) the word asdt or ashdt is translated as” fiery law”, whilst the correct
rendering of the passage should be “from his right hand went [
not a fiery law, but a fire according to law “; viz., that the fire of
one flame is imparted to, and caught up by another like as in a trail of
inflammable
substance.
This is
precisely emanation as shown in
“In
Evolution, as it is now beginning to he understood, there is supposed to be in
all matter an impulse to take on a higher form—a supposition clearly expressed
by Manu and other Hindu philosophers of the highest antiquity. The
philosopher’s tree illustrates it in the case of the zinc solution. The controversy
between the followers of this school and the Emanationists
may he briefly stated thus The Evolutionist stops all inquiry at the borders of
‘ the Unknowable “; the
Emanationist believes that nothing can be evolved—or, as
the word means,
unwombed or born—except it has first been involved,
thus indicating that life is
from a spiritual potency above the whole.”
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The Blavatsky
Blogger
Taking Theosophical
ideas
into the 21st
century
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