Man, the Measure of All Things: In the Stanzas of Dzyan

By Sri Madhava Ashish and Sri Krishna Prem

This volume is a study of the symbols of cosmic origins. It throws a new and searching light upon The Stanzas of Dzyan, a little-known collection of cosmogenic verses relating to cosmogenesis as set forth in H. P. Blavatsky’s great work The Secret Doctrine.

“We are considering the universe as a tissue of psychic experience,” say the authors. “Our categories are psychic ones, and with their help we have attempted to show that the process of conscious manifestation is entirely a movement within the unity of consciousness being toward the achievement of self-conscious experience.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Quest Books
• Release date: Sep 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9780835631877

Sri Madhava Ashish

Sri Madhava Ashish (1920–1997) was a Scottish-born naturalized Indian spiritualist, mystic, writer, and agriculturist. When World War II ended, he stayed on in India to continue his spiritual searches. He moved to Mirtola Ashram, a spiritual base at the foothills of the Himalayas. He also took up the name Madhava Ashish. When Sri Krishna Prem, head of the ashram, died in 1965, Ashish became the head and oversaw the management of the institution until his death. He was the author of What Is Man?; Man, Son of Man; and An Open Window. In 1992, the Indian government awarded him the civilian honor of the Padma Shri for his contributions to the agriculture sector in India.

Book preview

STANZA ONE

Being the first of seven Stanzas from

The Book of Dzyan

Translated by H. P. Blavatsky in her book

The Secret Doctrine, Book I, Part 1

‘Cosmic Evolution’

The Eternal Parent, wrapped in her ever-invisible Robes, had slumbered once again for Seven Eternities.

Time was not, for it lay asleep in the infinite bosom of duration.

Universal Mind was not, for there were no Ah-hi to contain it.

The seven ways to bliss were not. The great causes of misery were not, for there was no one to produce and get ensnared by them.

Darkness alone filled the boundless all, for Father, Mother, and Son were once more one, and the Son had not yet awakened for the new wheel and his pilgrimage thereon.

The seven sublime Lords and the seven Truths had ceased to be, and the Universe, the son of Necessity, was immersed in Paranishpanna, to be outbreathed by that which is and yet is not. Naught was.

The causes of existence had been done away with; the visible that was, and the invisible that is, rested in eternal non-being-the one being.

Alone, the one form of existence stretched boundless, infinite, causeless in dreamless sleep; and life pulsated unconscious in universal space, throughout that All-Presence which is sensed by the opened eye of the Dangma.

But where was the Dangma when the Ālaya of the Universe was in Paramārtha and the great wheel was Anupādaka?

BEING IN LATENCY

The first Stanza begins with the unmanifest origins of all things. It seeks to describe what cannot be described, and therefore has to proceed by a series of negations. These serve at the same time to introduce us to some of the terms that are to take their place in the scheme unfolded in subsequent verses.

The manifestation of a universe is considered as a cyclic event which has occurred before and will occur again. Between manifestations all is withdrawn into the Darkness of nonexistence. This is the point at which the story opens.

From one point of view the new universe will be an ab initio new creation; from another it will be a repetition of countless previous creations. Contradictory though these two themes may seem in theory, they are reconciled by our experience of life. To each one of us life is forever new, notwithstanding that we know it to be an endless repetition of well established patterns.

   ‘So the dawn wind of creation must be thought of as of a double origin: one of the Spirit, moving without motion or any why, the other actuated by and because of past events.’l

The one view places the origin of phenomena in eternal principles; the other in infinitely extended time. Neither view in itself can tell the whole story, for Time and Eternity are mutually dependent terms.

We have to perceive the possibility of each creation being an entirely new event without relationship to the past, otherwise the problem is merely pushed off into an infinite regression. Yet, because it has to be seen as metaphysically possible, that is not the same as saying that it necessarily is so.

(I) The Eternal Parent, wrapped in her ever-invisible Robes, had slumbered once again for Seven Etemities.¹

This Eternal Parent is the great Matrix, the great Mother, Universal Nature, known to Hindu philosophy as Mūlaprakriti and to Spinoza as Natura naturans. She is the Womb out of which is born all that will be born in the Universe. Her being must not, however, be conceived as an ocean of ‘matter’, though it is often symbolised as the great dark Waters, the waters of chaos—in Greek mythology the goddess Rhea, the ‘flow’. Matter she is not, even by courtesy, for ‘matter’ does not yet exist; yet she is that out of which what is called matter will emerge and is, so to speak, the ontological basis of what seems to us ‘stuff’. It is useless to try and describe her in neat intellectual counters for, even when not ‘slumbering’, i.e. even when a cosmos is manifested, she is still what Hindu thought terms avyakta, nnmanifest. She is also known as Avidyā, a word which plays on the double meaning of the root vid, to know and to be, for Avidyā is the great non-knowing as well as the great non-being. She is the great non-knowing because she is the ‘content’ side of the unitary and ultimate Reality referred to in this verse as the Ever-Invisible Robes. She is non-being because in her is nothing definite, nothing that exists in the root sense of that word, i.e. to stand forth.

She is not, for all existences are born from her, while she herself is Ajā², the great unborn. She knows not, for her whole Being throbs with a passionate yearning to be known. If she is sometimes termed. unconscious, it is only in the sense that she is not the bright forthshining awareness of the Father, the Light of lights, who is her opposite pole; yet it must always be remembered that it is she who, in her dark being, draws forth that Light. But for her, that light would not shine forth, and the tides that surge within her massive depths are tides of Life, without which there would be no life at all. Devoid of form, empty of forms, she holds within her darkly living heart the potentiality of all forms. To consider her ‘dead’, as was done by the later, intellectualised Sānkhya in India and, tacitly, by much scientific thought, is an entire mistake. If it is she who sends us forth in finitude, it is also she to whom that finitude returns to rest, and the ever-living universe around us is, as we shall see, a Web of which She is one of the Weavers.

The conception is a similar one to Plato’s Receptacle;¹ devoid of any geometrical form, it is ‘the foster mother of all becoming’. Whitehead summarises as follows: ‘It is there as a natural matrix for all transitions of life and it is changed and variously figured by the things that enter it; so that it differs in its character at different times. Since it receives all manner of experiences into its own unity, it must itself be bare of all forms. We shall not be wrong if we describe it as invisible, formless and all-receptive. It is a locus which persists and forms an emplacement for all occasions of experience. That which happens in it is conditioned by the compulsion of its own past² and by the persuasion of its immanent ideas.’³ Whitehead also states that it imposes a common relationship on all that happens and is the source of the ‘immanence of Law derived from the mutual immanence of actualities’.

It may be of interest to note that Whitehead says of the Platonic Receptacle that ‘It seems to be a more subtle notion that Aristotle’s matter which of course is not the matter of Galileo and Newton’,⁴ thus implying that the Aristotelian ‘matter’ refers to the same fundamental principle, though in a less subtle manner.

Many readers of early Theosophical literature have been puzzled and some have scoffed openly at the statements found therein about ‘matter’ as the one Eternal.¹ Perhaps they will now realise that the scoff were premature and arose through insufficient thought about what the word matter meant to ancient thinkers as opposed to Galileo and Newton. Those who persist in thinking in terms of nineteenth century billiard balls or even in terms of twentieth century electronic systems have only themselves to thank if the archaic teachings appear to them ridiculous.

To get any image of it, one should turn to psychological processes and imagine it as like the matrix of dark dreamless sleep in which potentially exist, and out of which emerge, the bright images of a dream. Abstractly considered, it is the root of all objectivity, though not in itself an ‘object’ in the sense in which we are accustomed to use the term.

The Eternal Parent at this stage is not isolated from its source, the unitary Root of consciousness and form alike. This Source is known to Hindu thought as the Parābrahman in which knower, known and knowledge are all one unity, and to Buddhist thought as Shūnya the ‘Void’, or as the Tathāgata Garbha, the Womb of Buddhahood; sometimes also as the Bkūtakoti, the Limit of Being. That unitary Source is here referred to as the Ever-invisible Robes in which the Eternal Parent lay wrapped in slumber. That One is forever a mystery. Never under any circumstances can It become ‘visible’ even to the eye of thought Neither ‘gods’ nor men can or will ever see It, as Hindu books have repeatedly told us, for it is beyond the differentiation of seer and seen. Of It nothing is said for nothing can be said. But words are not the only symbols by which meaning is conveyed, and it is by attending to the direct feeling perception of concrete symbols and not by the logical intellect alone that a sense of the meaning of such glyphs of transcendent principles is to be obtained. Such at least has been the practice of Seers who doubtless knew their own business better than those who have criticised them without having shared their experience. Indeed, whenever exponents have attempted too much in this connection, the inevitable substitution of the symbol for the reality and the consequent confusion has led to a debasement of the conception of the supreme Principle by allocating to it qualities that truly belong to manifest