10. Eastern Cosmology
The wisdom of the East, as codified in theVedas and the Upanishads-
resurrected by theosophists at the turn of the century and made avail-
able in translation to the West-is based on a fundamental mystery,
considered "incomprehensible to intellect and unconveyable by
words," qualified as the "Absolute" or "Ultimate Reality." As the same
mystery appears to haunt both the world of physics and of mathemat-
ics, nothing may be lost by following the occult tradition as it depicts a
universe miraculously springing from this Absolute, like Egypt's cos-
mos from Atum's autoerotic hand or Pantagruel from Gargantua's ear.
Especially is this true since this background serves to make more com-
prehensible the truly amazing spiritual world of Rudolf Steiner. Not an
easy subject to condense without the risk of malung it denser, this ef-
fort is primarily indebted to the works of Dr. I. K.Taimni, professor of
Eastern philosophy in Madras, India.
Ultimate Reality, in this Eastern tradition, is seen as pure unmani-
fest consciousness, simultaneously, like the Higgs vacuum, a void and a
plenum, the source of everything, yet beyond the range of even the
highest adept. Poetically described as "in perfect balance, always per-
fectly integrated (in no way differentiated), serenely harmonized," it is
seen as a synthesis of all possible opposites, the source of everything
manifest or unmanifest, eternally the same, though remarkably cyclical
in its manifestation, appearing and disappearing in vast alternating cy-
cles of creation and dissolution. It is a world like that the medieval mys-
tic Meister Eckhart spun out of stardust by a predicateless Godhead
behind God, unknowable not only to humans but to itself, essence and
potential of all things.