October 1, 1999
In the "beginning," that which is called in mystic phraseology "Cosmic Desire" evolves into absolute Light. Now light without any shadow would be absolute light - in other words, absolute darkness - as physical science seeks to prove. That shadow appears under the form of primodial matter...
-Secret Doctrine Vol I page 201.

October 2, 1999
To see and appreciate the difference - the immense gulf that separates terrestrial matter from the finer grades of supersensuous matter - every astronomer, every chemist and physicist ought to be a psychometer, to say the least; he ought to be able to sense for himself that difference in which he now refuses to believe. Mrs. Elizabeth Denton, one of the most learned, and also one of the most materialistic and sceptical women of her age - the wife of Professor Denton, the well-known American geologist and the author of "The Soul of Things" - was, nevertheless, one of the most wonderful psychometers of some years ago. This is what she described in one of her experiments; with a particle of a meteorite placed on her forehead, in an envelope, the lady, not being aware of what it contained, said: "What a difference between that which we recognise as matter here and that which seems like matter there! In the one, the elements are so coarse and so angular, I wonder that we can endure it all, much more that we can desire to continue our present relations to it; in the other, all the elements are so refined, they are so free from those great, rough angularities, which characterize the elements here, that I can but regard that as by so much the more than this, the real existence.
-Secret Doctrine Vol I page 201 first footnote.

October 3, 1999
The great "Wars in Heaven," in the Purânas; the wars of the Titans, in Hesiod and other classical writers; the "struggles," also in the Egyptian legend between Osiris and Typhon, and even those in the Scandinavian legends, all refer to the same subject. Northern Mythology refers to it as the battle of the Flames, the sons of Muspel who fought on the field of Wigred. All these relate to Heaven and Earth, and have a double and often even a triple meaning, and esoteric application to things above as to things below. They relate severally to astronomical, theological and human struggles; to the adjustment of orbs, and the supremacy among nations and tribes. The "Struggle for Existence" and the "Survival of the Fittest" reigned supreme from the moment that Kosmos manifested into being, and could hardly escape the observant eye of the ancient Sages. Hence the incessant fights of Indra, the god of the Firmament, with the Asuras - degraded from high gods into Cosmic demons; and with Vritri or Ah-hi; the battles fought between stars and constellations, between Moon and planets - later on incarnated as kings and mortals. Hence also the War in Heaven of Michael and his Host against the Dragon...
-Secret Doctrine Vol I page 202.

October 4, 1999
The "BEING" just referred to, which has to remain nameless, is the Tree from which, in subsequent ages, all the great historically known Sages and Hierophants, such as the Rishi Kapila, Hermes, Enoch, Orpheus, etc., etc., have branched off. As objective man, he is the mysterious (to the profane - the ever invisible) yet ever present Personage about whom legends are rife in the East, especially among the Occultists and the students of the Sacred Science. It is he who changes form, yet remains ever the same. And it is he again who holds spiritual sway over the initiated Adepts throughout the whole world.
-Secret Doctrine Vol I page 207.

October 5, 1999
He is, as said the "Nameless One" who has so many names, and yet whose names and whose very nature are unknown. He is the "Initiator," called the "GREAT SACRIFICE." For, sitting at the threshold of LIGHT, he looks into it from within the circle of Darkness, which he will not cross; nor will he quit his post till the last day of this life-cycle. Why does the solitary Watcher remain at his self-chosen post? Why does he sit by the fountain of primeval Wisdom, of which he drinks no longer, as he has naught to learn which he does not know - aye, neither on this Earth, nor in its heaven? Because the lonely, sore-footed pilgrims on their way back to their home are never sure to the last moment of not losing their way in this limitless desert of illusion and matter called Earth-Life. Because he would fain show the way to that region of freedom and light, from which he is a voluntary exile himself, to every prisoner who has succeeded in liberating himself from the bonds of flesh and illusion. Because, in short, he has sacrificed himself for the sake of mankind, though but a few Elect may profit by the GREAT SACRIFICE.
-Secret Doctrine Vol I page 208.

October 6, 1999
It is under the direct, silent guidance of this MAHA - (great) - GURU that all the other less divine Teachers and instructors of mankind became, from the first awakening of human consciousness, the guides of early Humanity. It is through these "Sons of God" that infant humanity got its first notions of all the arts and sciences, as well as of spiritual knowledge; and it is they who have laid the first foundation-stone of those ancient civilizations that puzzle so sorely our modern generation of students and scholars.
-Secret Doctrine Vol I page 208.

October 7, 1999
Let those who doubt this statement explain the mystery of the extraordinary knowledge possessed by the ancients - alleged to have developed from lower and animal-like savages, the cave-men of the Palaeolithic age- on any other equally reasonable grounds. Let them turn to such works as those of Vitruvius Pollio of the Augustan age, on architecture, for instance, in which all the rules of proportion are those taught anciently at initiations, if he would acquaint himself with the truly divine art, and understand the deep esoteric significance hidden in every rule and law of proportion. No man descended from a Palaeolithic cave-dweller could ever evolve such a science unaided, even in millenniums of thought and intellectual evolution. It is the pupils of those incarnated Rishis and Devas of the third Root Race, who handed their knowledge from one generation to another, to Egypt and Greece with its now lost canon of proportion; as it is the Disciples of the Initiates of the 4th, the Atlanteans, who handed it over to their Cyclopes, the "Sons of Cycles" of of the "Infinite", from whom the name passed to the still later generation of Gnostic priests. It is owing to the divine perfection of those architectural proportions that the Ancients could build those wonders of all the subsequent ages, their Fanes, Pyramids, Cave-Temples, Cromlechs, Cairns, Altars, proving they had the powers of machinery and a knowledge of mechanics to which modern skill is like a child's play, and which that skill refers to itself as the 'works of hundred-handed giants.'"
-Secret Doctrine Vol I page 208 footnote.

October 8, 1999
The Druidical circles, the Dolmen, the Temples of India, Egypt and Greece, the Towers and the 127 towns in Europe which were found "Cyclopean in origin" by the French Institute, are all the work of initiated Priest-Architects, the descendants of those primarily taught by the "Sons of God," justly called "The Builders." This is what appreciative posterity says of those descendants. "They used neither mortar nor cement, nor steel nor iron to cut the stones with; and yet they were so artfully wrought that in many places the joints are not seen, though many of the stones, as in Peru, are 18ft. thick, and in the walls of the fortress of Cuzco there are stones of a still greater size." (Acosta, vi.,14.) "Again, the walls of Syene, built 5,400 years ago, when that spot was exactly under the tropic, which it has now ceased to be, were so constructed that at noon, at the precise moment of the solar solstice, the entire disc of the Sun was seen reflected on their surface - a work which the united skill of all the astronomers of Europe would not now be able to effect." -(Kenealy, "Book of God.")
-Secret Doctrine Vol I page 209 second footnote.

October 9, 1999
When, moved by the law of Evolution, the Lords of Wisdom infused into him the spark of consciousness, the first feeling it awoke to life and activity was a sense of solidarity, of one-ness with his spiritual creators. As the child's first feeling is for its mother and nurse, so the first aspirations of the awakening consciousness in primitive man were for those whose element he felt within himself, and who yet were outside, and independent of him. DEVOTION arose out of that feeling, and became the first and foremost motor in his nature; for it is the only one which is natural in our heart, which is innate in us, and which we find alike in human babe and the young of the animal.
-Secret Doctrine Vol I page 210.

October 10, 1999
How comes our physical body to the state of perfection it is found in now? Through millions of years of evolution, of course, yet never through, or from, animals, as taught by materialism. For, as Carlyle says: - " ... The essence of our being, the mystery in us that calls itself 'I,' - what words have we for such things? - it is a breath of Heaven, the highest Being reveals himself in man. This body, these faculties, this life of ours, is it not all as a vesture for the UNNAMED?'
-Secret Doctrine Vol I pages 211 to 212.

October 11, 1999
The breath of heaven, or rather the breath of life, called in the Bible Nephesh, is in every animal, in every animate speck as in every mineral atom. But none of these has, like man, the consciousness of the nature of that highest Being, as none has that divine harmony in its form which man possesses.
-Secret Doctrine Vol I page 212.

October 12, 1999
It is, as Novalis said, and no one since has said it better, as repeated by Carlyle: - "There is but one temple in the universe, and that is the body of man. Nothing is holier than that high form ... We touch heaven when we lay our hand on a human body!" "This sounds like a mere flourish of rhetoric," adds Carlyle, "but it is not so. If well meditated it will turn out to be a scientific fact; the expression .. of the actual truth of the thing. We are the miracle of miracles, - the great inscrutable Mystery."
-Secret Doctrine Vol I page 212.

October 13, 1999
That germ will become the spiritual potency in the physical cell that guides the development of the embryo, and which is the cause of the hereditary transmission of faculties and all the inherent qualities in man. The Darwinian theory, however, of the transmission of acquired faculties is neither taught nor accepted in Occultism.
-Secret Doctrine Vol I page 219.

October 14, 1999
Evolution, in it [occultism], proceeds on quite other lines; the physical, according to esoteric teaching, evolving gradually from the spiritual, mental, and psychic. This inner soul of the physical cell - this "spiritual plasm" that dominates the germinal plasm - is the key that must open one day the gates of the terra incognita of the Biologist, now called the dark mystery of Embryology.
-Secret Doctrine Vol I page 219.

October 15, 1999
They are all subject to Karma, and have to work it out through every cycle. For, as the doctrine teaches, there are no such privileged beings in the universe, whether in our or in other systems, in the outer or the inner worlds, as the angels of the Western Religion and the Judean. A Dhyan Chohan has to become one; he cannot be born or appear suddenly on the plane of life as a full-blown angel.
-Secret Doctrine Vol I page 221.

October 16, 1999
The Celestial Hierarchy of the present Manvantara will find itself transferred in the next cycle of life into higher, superior worlds, and will make room for a new hierarchy, composed of the elect ones of our mankind.
-Secret Doctrine Vol I page 221.

October 17, 1999
Being is an endless cycle within the one absolute eternity, wherein move numberless inner cycles finite and conditioned. Gods, created as such, would evince no personal merit in being gods. Such a class of beings, perfect only by virtue of the special immaculate nature inherent in them, in the face of suffering and struggling humanity, and even of the lower creation, would be the symbol of an eternal injustice quite Satanic in character, an ever present crime. It is an anomaly and an impossibility in Nature.
-Secret Doctrine Vol I pages 221 to 222.

October 18, 1999
Darwin's theory, viewing the embryological cell as an essence or the extract from all other cells, is set aside; it is incapable of accounting for hereditary transmission. There are but two ways of explaining the mystery of heredity; either the substance of the germinal cell is endowed with the faculty of crossing the whole cycle of transformations that lead to the construction of a separate organism and then to the reproduction of identical germinal cells; or, those germinal cells do not have their genesis at all in the body of the individual, but proceed directly from the ancestral germinal cell passed from father to son through long generations. It is the latter hypothesis that Weissmann accepted and has worked upon; and it is to this cell that he traces the immortal portion of man. So far, so good; and when this almost correct theory is accepted, how will Biologists explain the first appearance of this everlasting cell?
-Secret Doctrine Vol I footnote on page 223.

October 19, 1999
Nevertheless, the two chief difficulties of the science of embryology - namely, what are the forces at work in the formation of the foetus, and the cause of "hereditary transmission" of likeness, physical, moral or mental - have never been properly answered; nor will they ever be solved till the day when scientists condescend to accept the Occult theories.
-Secret Doctrine Vol I page 223.

October 20, 1999
It comes to this: Mankind in its first prototypal, shadowy form, is the offspring of the Elohim of Life (or Pitris); in its qualitative and physical aspect it is the direct progeny of the "Ancestors," the lowest Dhyanis, or Spirits of the Earth; for its moral, psychic, and spiritual nature, it is indebted to a group of divine Beings, the name and characteristics of which will be given in Book II.
-Secret Doctrine Vol I page 224.

October 21, 1999
Collectively, men are the handiwork of hosts of various spirits; distributively, the tabernacles of those hosts; and occasionally and singly, the vehicles of some of them.
-Secret Doctrine Vol I page 224.

October 22, 1999
... We are approaching the time when the pendulum of evolution will direct its swing decidedly upwards, bringing Humanity back on a parallel line with the primitive third Root-Race in Spirituality. During its childhood, mankind was composed wholly of that Angelic Host, who were the indwelling Spirits that animated the monstrous and gigantic tabernacles of clay of the Fourth Race - built by (as they are now also) and composed of countless myriads of lives.
-Secret Doctrine Vol I page 225.

October 23, 1999
The "tabernacles" [our bodies] have improved in texture and symmetry of form, growing and developing with the globe that bore them; but the physical improvement took place at the expense of the spiritual inner man and nature. The three middle principles in earth and man became with every race more material; the Soul stepping back to make room for the physical intellect; the essence of elements becoming the material and composite elements now known.
-Secret Doctrine Vol I page 225.

October 24, 1999
Man is not, nor could he ever be, the complete product of the "Lord God"; but he is the child of the Elohim, so arbitrarily changed into the singular masculine gender. The first Dynanis, commissioned to "create" man in their image, could only throw off their shadows, like a delicate model for the Nature Spirits of matter to work upon. ... Man is, beyond any doubt, formed physically out of the dust of the Earth, but his creators and fashioners were many.
-Secret Doctrine Vol I page 225.

October 25, 1999
Nor can it be said that the "Lord God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life," unless that god is identified with the ONE LIFE," Omnipresent though invisible, and unless the same operation is attributed to "God" on behalf of every living soul - or Nephesch, which is the vital Soul, not the divine Spirit or Ruach, which ensures to man alone a divine degree of immortality, that no animal, as such, could ever attain in this cycle of incarnation.
-Secret Doctrine Vol I page 225.

October 26, 1999
No Eastern (Aryan) esoteric works are so far published, but we possess the Egyptian papyri which speak clearly of the seven principles or the "Seven Souls of Man." The Book of the Dead gives a complete list of the "transformations" that every defunct undergoes, while divesting himself, one by one, of all those principles - materialised for the sake of clearness into ethereal entities or bodies. We must, moreover, remind those who try to prove that the ancient Egyptians knew nothing of and did not teach Reincarnation, that the "Soul" (the Ego or Self) of the defunct is said to be living in Eternity: it is immortal, "co-eval with, and disappearing with the Solar boat," i.e., for the cycle of necessity. This "Soul" emerges from the Tiaou (the realm of the cause of life) and joins the living on Earth by day, to return to Tiaou every night. This expresses the periodical existences of the Ego.
-Secret Doctrine Vol I pages 226 to 227.

October 27, 1999
Nevertheless, there was a time when the whole world was "of one lip and of one knowledge," and Man knew more of his origin than he does now, and thus knew that the Sun and Moon, however large a part they do play in the constitution, growth and development of the human body, were not the direct causative agents of his appearance on Earth; these agents being, in truth, the living and intelligent Powers which the Occultists call Dhyan Chohans.
-Secret Doctrine Vol I pages 229 to 230.

October 28, 1999
As to this, a very learned admirer of the Jewish Esotericism tells us that "the Kabala says expressly that Elohim is a 'general abstraction' what we call in mathematics 'a constant co-efficient' or a 'general function' entering into all construction, not particular; that is, by the general ratio 1 to 31415, (the astro-Dhyanic and) Elohistic figures." To this the Eastern Occultist replies: Quite so, it is an abstraction to our physical senses. To our spiritual perceptions, however, and to our inner spiritual eye, the Elohim or Dhyanis are no more an abstraction than our soul and spirit are to us. Reject the one and you reject the other - since that which is the surviving Entity in us is partly the direct emanation from, and partly those celestial entities themselves.
-Secret Doctrine Vol I page 230.

October 29, 1999
Creation is an incorrect word to use, as no religion, not even the sect of the Visishta Adwaitees in India - one which anthropomorphises even Parabrahman - believes in creation out of nihil as Christians and Jews do, but in evolution out of pre-existing materials.
-Secret Doctrine Vol I footnote page 233.

October 30, 1999
The concluding sentence of this sloka shows how archaic is the belief and the doctrine that man is seven-fold in his constitution. The thread of being which animates man and passes through all his personalities, or rebirths on this Earth (an allusion to Sutratma), the thread on which moreover all his "Spirits" are strung - is spun from the essence of the "threefold," the "fourfold'" and the "fivefold"' which contain all the preceding.
-Secret Doctrine Vol I page 236.

October 31, 1999
Just as milliards of bright sparks dance on the waters of an ocean above which one and the same moon is shining, so our evanescent personalities - the illusive envelopes of the immortal MONAD-EGO - twinkle and dance on the waves of Maya. They last and appear, as the thousands of sparks produced by the moon-beam, only so long as the Queen of the Night radiates her lustre on the running waters of life: the period of a Manvantara; and then they disappear, the beams - symbols of our eternal spiritual egos - alone surviving, re-merged in, and being, as they were before, one with the Mother-Source.
-Secret Doctrine Vol I page 237.