TSDD Appendix 4

*A Paper read before the Blavatsky Lodge of the T.S. by William Kingsland, President*

 
“I know that some have come to grief over the various celestial Hierarchies of Dhyani-Chohans, being totally unable to connect these with the physical forces with which they are familiar, or to see any connection whatever between them and the physical universe.

 
Perhaps if they would dematerialize their ideas of celestial beings, disconnect them from all preconceived ideas of Angels and Archangels derived from Biblical fairy tales, instilled into their youthful minds – not an easy matter, by the way – and give free play to their intuition, they will be able to surmount what at present appears to them such a formidable obstacle.

 
The mysteries of Parabrahman have been touched upon more than once, and it has been pointed out that this term is not used to designate either a God or a machine, but as purely metaphysical abstraction – albeit the one reality, the absolute.

 
Nevertheless Parabrahman appears to have been a very hard nut for some to crack, as also the first and second Logos, Brahma and Brahmā, Fohat, and a host of other personified forces.

 
We can hardly be surprised if the casual and superficial reader should be lost in the vast pantheon of The Secret Doctrine, and should fly for comparative intellectual safety to the orthodox doctrine of the trinity.

 
But let us not, as students of The Secret Doctrine, be hasty in forming either our conceptions or our conclusions. We must bear in mind that we are dealing with the imaginative powers of the Eastern mind, and with the deepest and most subtle of metaphysical and philosophical systems.

 
Let us try and understand The Secret Doctrine in its materialized form, and then, when we have mastered this form, we may be the better able to understand what that form represents.

 
Setting aside now all concrete ideas having reference to the form in which the teachings are moulded, I imagine that those who have followed closely the course of instructions, cannot have failed to have grasped some general principles of the utmost importance.

 
They cannot have failed to have obtained such a broad and comprehensive view of the law of evolution, of the essential unity and oneness of nature – including in that term both the visible and the invisible universe – and of the law of correspondences and analogy, such as could not have been obtained by them by the study of half the scientific books in the world.”

 
H. P. Blavatsky