A Dialogue With H.P.B.

Dear friends,

Discussions about the nature of the universe are essential to Theosophy.

The meditative reading of “The Secret Doctrine” led us to forget our illusory nature and reconcile us with the eternal. In the realm of Unity there is no separateness.

I would like to invite you all to a meeting with H.P.B. and some of her students, where she clarifies some misconceptions about aspects of the occult doctrine.

Having the transcription of such discussions when HPB herself was present is a privilege of theosophy students.

Below is just a excerpt of the “Secret Doctrine Commentaries” that we have published at our website www.TheosophyOnline.com .

Best regards, Joaquim

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Causation, Illusion, and the Absolute

A Dialogue With H.P.B. in the London Lodge

Helena P. Blavatsky

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The following text is part of “The Secret

Doctrine Commentaries”[1], the 689 pp. volume

containing shorthand transcriptions of 21 meetings of

H.P.Blavatsky with theosophists in London. Besides

H.P.B., the active participants in this fragment of

conversation are T.B. Barbottle (the President), Bertram

Keightley, Archibald Keightley and Dr. Williams.

H.P.B. examines in the present fragment the relation

between Maya or Illusion and the twelve Nidanas, the

Chain of Causation of the manifested world. In the

transcription, the sign “[ ]” means a missing word. At

the moment when the fragment begins, H.P.B has finished to

answer question number three, and will examine question four.

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Mr. A. Keightley: “Are Nidana and Maya the (great causes of misery) aspects of the Absolute?”

Mme. Blavatsky: Is that number 4?

Mr. A. Keightley: That is number 4.

Mme. Blavatsky: Now what can Nidana, I ask myself, and Maya have to do with each other? Nidana means the concatenation of cause and effect. The twelve Nidanas are the enumeration of the chief causes which produce material for Karma to strike you very heavily. Maya is simply an illusion. Now what has Nidana to do with Maya? I cannot understand what analogy, what idea one has in common with the other. If you take the universe as an illusion, a Maya, then certainly the Nidanas as being in the universe are included in the Maya, but apart from that, what has one thing to do with the other?

Mr. B. Keightley: Then why do you class them together in that way?

Mme. Blavatsky: They are two distinct things. Maya is an illusion. You think yourself a very grand fellow, that you can go and compete with any Ah-his [2], and any of the [ ]. But you make a fool of yourself and then comes Nirvana and shows it to you. It is just then, I think, that the man cannot take into his own head that he is not separate from the one and he goes and thinks himself a very great man in his own individuality, and he is nothing at all. He is still one in reality. It is nothing but Maya, an illusion; but taking this Maya, it is illusion or ignorance that brings us to commit all the acts which awaken the Nidanas, which produce the first cause of Nidana; this cause having been produced, the effects follow and there is Karma. Of course Nidanas and the production of bad Karmic effects and Maya are at the root of every evil. If we knew what we are we would not do such things. Everyone of us thinks he or she is a unit and something very grand in the eyes of all the authorities upstairs that you may think of; we are simply a drop of water in the ocean, not to be distinguished from another drop in the ocean, that is all we are. This sense of separateness is at the root of all evil. You know, there is no correspondence, no analogy, except the one I gave just now.

The President: The only possible analogy is that they both of them are synonymous with manifestation, inasmuch as there cannot be any manifestation without the production of Nidanas on the one hand and Maya on the other.

Mme. Blavatsky: You think you can produce something but in reality you cannot produce anything at all.

The President: The instant one single chain of a causation is started by any manifestation whatever, there is the Nidana.

Mme. Blavatsky: Now let us say: I have dressed myself in a red dress, I go out and because I am dressed in a red dress I have produced a cause, and a bull goes for me because I irritated his nerves; there is the Maya of the bull and there is the Nidana I have produced. So you can put two and two together. It is just an illusion which makes us produce the most Nidanas.

The President: “Are Nidana and Maya aspects of Absolute”, is the exact form of the question.

Mr. A. Keightley: The question really ought to be separated; the question is to ask, first of all, is Maya an aspect of the Absolute?

Mme. Blavatsky: It cannot be an aspect of the Absolute. It is {an} aspect of the differentiation, if you put it this way. If Maya means an illusion, everything that is differentiated is an illusion also, but it cannot be an aspect of the Absolute.

The President: Maya is a manifestation surely.

Mme. Blavatsky: Certainly; the Absolute cannot have any manifestation whatever, it can have reflection at best.

Mr. A. Keightley: In one of the old articles in The Theosophist, Maya is described as the cause of manifestation. I forget by who.

Mme. Blavatsky: Perhaps by some Hindu.

Mr. A. Keightley: By some good Hindu metaphysician. I am not sure if it was not Subba Row himself. He describes Maya as the cause of differentiation.

Mme. Blavatsky: If there were no Maya, there would be nothing - no differentiation.

The President: But if there were no differentiation, there would be Maya so you cannot put one before other, can you?

Mr. B. Keightley: But you are taking Maya as the cause of differentiation, therefore the moment you get behind differentiation, where is the Maya? Mme. Blavatsky said that even Nirvana is a Maya.

Dr. Williams: Maya is a collective term meaning all manifestation.

Mme. Blavatsky: Certainly; they say that every thing is an illusion, because first of all no two persons in the world see things in the same way. They may see it alike on general principles, but they won’t see it altogether in the same way. And secondly, that which has a beginning and an end is not a reality, and, being less than the wink of the eye, it is an illusion, a momentary deception of the senses. This is why they call it an illusion. They call reality only that which ever was, is, and will be, which cannot be, now, that absolute consciousness or what they call Parabrahman, or what in Kabbalah is called Ain-Soph.

Dr. Williams: The term, it seems to me, applies to the complex points of differentiation. Differentiation applies to the unit and the other term applies to the collection of units.

Mr. A. Keightley: Yes, that is the way to explain it.

NOTES:

[1] “The Secret Doctrine Commentaries - the unpublished 1889 instructions”, H.P. Blavatsky. The volume has 689 pp. and was published in 2010 by the Theosophical Society (Point Loma) and I.S.I.S. Foundation, the Hague, The Netherlands, whose website is www.blavatskyhouse.org . The fragment we publish will be found at pages 48-51.

[2] Ah-his - Serpents, Dhyan Chohans, Dragons of Wisdom. (“Theosophical Glossary”, H.P. Blavatsky, Theososphy Company, 1990.)

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