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4-62 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
aspect] of Parabrahman. . . When once it starts into existence as a conscious
being, .... from its objective standpoint, Parabrahman appears to it as
Mulaprakriti. Please bear this in mind ... for here is the root of the whole
difficulty about Purusha and Prakriti felt by the various writers on Vedantic philosophy.
. . . This Mulaprakriti is material to it [the Logos], as any material
object is material to us. This Mulaprakriti is no more Parabrahman than the
bundle of attributes of a pillar is the pillar itself;
Parabrahman is an unconditioned
and absolute reality, and Mulaprakriti is a sort of veil thrown over it. Parabrahman
by itself cannot be seen as it is. It is seen by the Logos with a veil thrown
over it, and that veil is the mighty expanse of Cosmic Matter. . , . Parabrahman,
after having appeared on the one hand as the Ego, and on the other as Mulaprakriti,
acts as the one energy through the Logos.*
And the lecturer explains what he means by this acting of Something
which is Nothing, though it is the All, by a fine simile. He
compares the Logos to the Sun through which light and heat radiate,
but whose energy, light and heat, exist in some unknown condition in
Space and are diffused in Space only as visible light and heat, the Sun
being only the agent thereof. This is the first triadic hypostasis. The
quaternary is made up by the energizing light shed by the Logos.
The Hebrew Kabalists stated it in a manner which is esoterically
identical with the Vedantic. Ain Suph, they taught, could not be comprehended,
could not be located, nor named, though the Causeless
Cause of all. Hence its name, Ain Suph, is a term of negation, "the
Inscrutable, the Incognizable, and the Unnameable." They made of
it, therefore, a Boundless Circle, a Sphere, of which human intellect,
with the utmost stretch, could only perceive the vault. In the words
of one who has unriddled much in the Kabalistical system most
thoroughly, in one of its meanings, in its numerical and geometrical
esotericism
Close your eyes, and from your own consciousness of perception try and think
outward to the extremest limits in every direction. You will find that equal lines
or rays of perception extend out evenly in all directions, so that the utmost effort of
perception will terminate in the vault of a sphere. The limitation of this sphere
will, of necessity, be a great Circle, and the direct rays of thought in any and every
direction must be right line radii of the circle. This, then, must be, humanly
speaking, the extremest all-embracing conception of the Ain Suph manifest, which
formulates itself as a geometrical figure, viz., of a circle, with its elements of curved
circumference and right line diameter divided into radii. Hence, a geometrical
shape is the first recognizable means of connection between the Ain Suph and the
intelligence of man.t
* Ibid., p. 304. t The Masonic Review, June, 1886.