The Doctrine of Emanations‏

I was driving in to work one morning and it was just starting to get light. My commute is usually about thirty-five to forty-five minutes, so I have some time to think. I usually listen to audiobooks or podcasts, but this time I just wanted quiet. I let my thoughts drift in and out and I was thinking about numerology. How did numbers get their meanings? Who decided what four meant as opposed to seven and so on? Is it all just arbitrary? Then, in an abrupt instant, something slapped me in the face.

“I suddenly understood the answers to my questions, as if I'd received an instant reply. It was like someone had written them down for me on a note, folded it infinitesimally tight, then dropped it into my mind, sprinkled some water drops on it, and let it grow.”

Or at least that’s what it felt like. I suddenly understood the answers to my questions, as if I’d received an instant reply. It was like someone had written them down for me on a note, folded it infinitesimally tight, then dropped it into my mind, sprinkled some water drops on it, and let it grow. That little note unfolded before my mind’s eye and I saw a brilliant and radiant electric-blue sphere or orb. It swelled and then divided itself in half vertically. There were now two halves, but then they began to divide again and again, so that there were three, then four, and five, and so on up to ten.

Mind you, I was still driving, but it wasn’t like a hallucination or anything disconcerting. I was calm, safe, and aware of the road and where I was going, but I was also having an epiphany. I would frequently take time to silently ask questions during my drives, but this was a unique moment. It culminated with a phrase that came to me as if out of the center of the divided sphere: “the pattern of emergence.” I use this phrase a lot now, but don’t feel like I can take any credit for it. It was just given to me on a note in my mind. However, what struck me about that phrase, “the pattern of emergence,” is it seemed closely related to another occult principle I was intimately aware of, what we may call, “The Doctrine of Emanations.”

A common thread we see between eastern philosophy and the classical Greek is what is often referred to as, “The Doctrine of Emanations,” or what O.G. occultist, Madame Blavatsky describes as, "the many out of one and the one out of many." The Pythagorean "Tetractys," is one of most well-known illustrations of this. As you see in the accompanying image, it is a triangle comprised of four rows of dots, beginning with one at the apex, a second row of two, a third row of three, and a fourth row of four, making ten dots total. So, you see, first there is nothing, then the one. From one comes two, from the two come the three, and from the three, the four, such that from the initial one come the perfect ten, the numerological value of wholeness.

You may be thinking, “yeah, so what? What’s that got to do with me?” Well, everything. It has everything to do with who you are, what you are, how you are, why you are, where you came from, and where you’re going. The implication here is that YOU… yes, you… You are an emanation.

Hold on a tick. That may be a bit much. Let’s back up quick. Before we go there, let’s see what Madame Blavatsky had to say about the Tetractys and the Doctrine of Emanations:

"The key to the Pythagorean dogmas is the general formula of unity in multiplicity, the one evolving the many and pervading the many. This is the ancient doctrine of emanation in few words. Even the apostle Paul accepted it as true. ‘Out of him and through him and in him all things are.’ This, as we can see by the following quotation, is purely Hindu and Brahmanical:

‘When the dissolution -- Pralaya -- had arrived at its term, the great Being -- Para-Atma or Para-Purusha -- the Lord existing through himself, out of whom and through whom all things were, and are and will be . . . resolved to emanate from his own substance the various creatures’ (Manava-Dharma-Sastra, book i., slokas 6 and 7).

The mystic Decad 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10 is a way of expressing this idea. The One is God, the Two, matter; the Three, combining Monad and Duad, and partaking of the nature of both, is the phenomenal world; the Tetrad, or form of perfection, expresses the emptiness of all; and the Decad, or sum of all, involves the entire cosmos. The universe is the combination of a thousand elements, and yet the expression of a single spirit -- a chaos to the sense, a cosmos to the reason.”

- Helena Blavastsky, from "Plato and Platonism"

Yeah, that’s a lot to swallow, but it describes what I saw and felt. Doesn’t reality too often seem like a “chaos to the senses?” And yet, we have those rare moments when we tune ourselves to illumined reason, wherein the order and, dare I say, “pattern of emergence,” become clearer. The symbol of the Tetractys attempts to describe how the ALL, the One Life, entered into communion with itself to cause the manifold manifestations we may behold. Why did it do it? Why does it apparently do it cyclically, according to many of the occult testaments of the world? I don’t know, but I think the best answer we can come up with right now is that the ALL wanted to know itself.

In that instant, there is a knower and a known which makes two and the relation between one and two gives birth to three and from the three comes the rainbow of expression and all its myriad forms and appearances. A great analogy is like a single beam of pure white light streaming through a prism and refracting into all the colors. All those colors emanate from that one beam. That is a pattern of emergence no? Underlying all of this is the supreme Nothing, that part of the ALL which IS before all was, the changeless Cause of all causes.

You see the Qabalists even had names for these types of nothing: Ain, Ain Soph, and Ain Soph Aur. Ain is the ABSOLUTE Nothing, the inconceivable infinite deep. Ain Soph is the first emanation, or limitlessness. It is the first condition and is the Will. Then Ain Soph Aur, the Endless Light, is infinite potentiality in the most primordial substance: light. This is an oversimplification but suffices for our discussion. The Indian sages referred to this ABSOLUTE (which is simultaneously All and Nothing) as Parabrahm, but it had many names.

Brahma, the creative force, had to be an emanation of that changeless Nothing because they reasoned that the very act of creating would require the ABSOLUTE to change. So, if we stretch our feeble memories back to the distant moment of creation, and one wonders how many of those there have been, we may witness the divine contradiction that everything comes from Nothing, or rather, emanated from Nothing. Yet, from those primary emanations, we all derive our being and therefore, is it really that bizarre to say that we too are emanations?

From the angle of our little existence, it seems unfathomable to conceive of a reality where little old me is somehow an emanation of the ABSOLUTE, the ALL, but Aleister Crowley has a wonderful quote that I think indicates this connection. He said, “every man and woman is a star.” Madame Blavatsky likewise wrote that every person is a “God in an animal body.” So, this begs the question, am I an emanation from the One?

Her book, The Secret Doctrine, describes the moment of creation much like how we’ve come to conceive of the Big Bang, except this involves Will and “the pattern of emergence.” I implore you to read what it says about Cosmogenesis in her book, but I will add several lines from the description here:

“DARKNESS ALONE FILLED THE BOUNDLESS ALL, FOR FATHER, MOTHER AND SON WERE ONCE MORE ONE, AND THE SON HAD NOT AWAKENED YET FOR THE NEW WHEEL AND HIS PILGRIMAGE THEREON”

“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”

- From “The Secret Doctrine,” by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, pp 40, 45

So, in the beginning, or rather the most recent beginning, there was Nothing. Then the stillness of a focused point. Blavatsky mentions another Pythagorean symbol, but in relation to this focussed point: a single dot within a circle. The circle is infinity and the point is the center from which everything else proceeds. It represents the pervasive nature of the One. In the Baghavad Gita, Krishna says, “having pervaded this entire universe with a fragment of myself, I remain.”

Everything explodes from the center outward at unfathomable rates and begins to slow the further it gets from its source, growing denser and denser till we arrive at the furthest reaches, the outer crust of existence, Malkuth, the final Sephiroth. This is where we are now and what the Gnostics called “hell.” And yet, even in hell, we are all pervaded with a spark from that first stupendous source of Light, which lays dormant in us, waiting to be nourished and cultivated so that the purpose of the One Life, the ABSOLUTE, may be fulfilled. Each spark is a promise of that fulfillment.

Whoa, Frank. I think we got off course. What does this have to do with the point within the circle and me being an emanation? Well, that symbol of the dot within the circle represents another Pythagorean concept called the “Monad.” Analogically speaking, as the One is the center of “his” system, so do we also have a center within ourselves, which we must eventually be reunited with and this is the Monad, our sort of “personal Father in heaven,” or from another angle, our true selves. This is what I think Crowley meant by his saying that “every man and woman is a star” and what Blavatsky meant when she said that we are all “Gods in animal bodies.”

That center in ourselves may be regarded as our first cause, again from one angle, and thus our various sheaths or bodies of manifestation are emanations from it, including the soul itself. From the Monad comes the soul and from the soul come the mind, emotions, and physical body. They emanate from it, as the many colors of light emanate from the one stream. Then, analogically again, that center of ourselves is an emanation from a still greater center, and we can logically follow the causal chain back to the real First Cause, the ABSOLUTE, Parabrahm, the One Life, the ALL.

This conception was lost in mainstream Christianity but was preserved by the Gnostics. The thread of that tradition can be seen subtly extending into the mystery schools of today. Occult author and teacher, Alice Bailey liked to take a jab at the materialistic and dogmatic presentation of Christ’s teachings, referring to it as “Churchianity.” The teaching that all beings extend from the One life and are therefore divine in their own right sort of undermined Church authority, so it’s really no surprise that the “Doctrine of Emanations” was distorted into endless boinking and begetting in the Old Testament, but St. Paul even alluded to this essential unity when he said, “the whole of creation travails and groans together.”

So? Big deal. I’m an emanation. Doesn’t change my life one lick. Right? Well no, it doesn’t, unless you’re one of the unlucky few who starts to unpleasantly question their reality, in which case, you usually start to have the sense that there must be more to life than the physical senses can show you. C.S. Lewis famously said that “the fact that I have longings that can’t be satisfied by this world is evidence that I was made for another.” Cognitive Scientist from U.C. Irvine, Dr. Donald Hoffman is already proving this fact in mathematics and experiments, that our senses have developed biologically to not show us things as they exist, but how can we prove it to ourselves? This necessarily involves an identity crisis wherein the keen observer starts to wonder, “who am I?” or rather, “where does ‘I’ come from?” If I am an emanation, then am I this body? Am I the torrent of thoughts feelings and sensations that coarse through the field of my attention? What even is attention? Eventually, the practices of self-observation and self-inquiry enter in to help us.

We can intellectually accept the idea that we are emanations, but seeing it for ourselves, that is, becoming conscious of it, is a whole other thing. Things are only valid for you once you’ve understood them in consciousness and the only means we have at our disposal to see if any of this is even remotely true is by investigating our own consciousness. Self-inquiry is wonderful term for it, but at its core, we are talking about directed attention. The big superpower WE all have is the ability to direct our attention… or at least train ourselves to.

It may sound so easy that you never even try. We take for granted that we know ourselves. It is the most fundamental misunderstanding that we all must grapple with. We assume that people can see us and that we can see them, but do they really see you and do you really see them? How much of your experience is visible to others? If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll undoubtedly say very little. So we actually know very little about other people and they in turn know very little about us.

Self-observation or self-inquiry is the process of turning your attention toward the sensation of “I” as best you can, whenever it occurs to you. Gurdjieff called this process “self-remembering” and Alice Bailey called it “self-recollectedness.” At first, you’re stuck in an endless series of negations, “not this, not this, not this,” but eventually you start to subtly approach a place of affirmation. The more you practice it, you may notice that you take things less personally, are less reactive, start to consider the needs of others more spontaneously, and you get a lot smarter and funnier. That’s because you are linking things and making connections.

Becoming gradually aware of how things exist as they are isn’t necessarily about seeing things any differently or in some magical way, although that’s part of it. Rather, it’s becoming aware of relationship. We are progressively becoming aware of how things relate to one another. If this little object in the world I call Frank is an emanation, then it has no inherent or substantial existence of its own. If it has no inherent or substantial existence of its own, then it must be dependent on something else in order to live and move and have its being. If that’s the case, where do I fit in? I’m not this meat bag, nor these wimpy feelings, nor these insane thoughts, but then who or what am I? This question follows us for a long time and its ok to not have an answer.

We’ll take on self-inquiry as a separate topic for another post, but I hope at least there is some interesting food for thought here. Again, we should never take anyone’s word for anything, but take what rings true for us as a working hypothesis, and go out and prove it to ourselves. What do you have to lose? … besides your self?