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Key IdeasThe Theosophical Society in Australia |
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Key IdeasThe Theosophical Society in Australia |
The Key Ideas or basic principles circulating around the Theosophical Society since 1875—
derived from Vedanta, Buddhism, Plato, the Kabbalah, Alchemy, the ancient Mysteries and various other sources and put together in a new synthesis by HP Blavatsky, her Teachers and her followers
and treated as hypotheses, propositions and premises not binding on any member
There is one fundamental law and that is the radical unity of the ultimate essence of each part of Nature
The universe is eternal and exists in two basic modes, manifest and unmanifest; it is the site of the periodic appearance and disappearance of worlds and of life
There is no dead matter, everything is endowed with some form of consciousness, and everything is a product of consciousness
The human being is a microcosm
As it is above so it is below
The universe is guided from within and everything takes place on the inner planes first
There is a fundamental identity of all souls with the universal Over-Soul. Each soul is like a spark of the Over-Soul or the One, and those sparks go through a process of spiritual evolution in a series of incarnations, according to cyclic and karmic laws
Everything that happens is the result of natural law
The name given to the above by HP Blavatsky was Theosophy, but, principally, the word theosophy means divine wisdom (theosophia) and does not refer to these ideas at all but rather to a state of wisdom that is an inherent property of the Soul, or of Consciousness, when divested of all accretions in the form of thought.
The Theosophical Society is not the only place one might encounter these ideas, which particularly since the 1970s have gained a fairly wide currency in one form or another, synthesized anew by the likes of Aldous Huxley, Paul Brunton and Ken Wilber. But to give credit where it is due, the Theosophical Society was ahead of its time in its vindication of ancient traditions, and its critique of dogmatic theology and scientific materialism—a stand that is as relevant today as it was in 1875.