Macrocosm and Microcosm
Theosophy 101 - What's It All About
The Ancient Wisdom Tradition
V The Prismatic Universe: A Sevenfold Mystery
– Macrocosm / Microcosm – Reflections of the Universe
Related References
(HPB, Transactions of the Blavatsky Lodge: p. 74)
Man is the microcosm of the macrocosm; the god on earth is built on the pattern of the god in nature. But the universal consciousness of the real Ego transcends a millionfold the self-consciousness of the personal or false Ego.
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(HPB, Key to Theosophy, p. 83)
THE UNITY OF ALL IN ALL
ENQUIRER. Having told me what God, the Soul and Man are not, in your views, can you inform me what they are, according to your teachings?
THEOSOPHIST. In their origin and in eternity the three, like the universe and all therein, are one with the absolute Unity, the unknowable deific essence I spoke about some time back. We believe in no creation, but in the periodical and consecutive appearances of the universe from the
subjective on to the objective plane of being, at regular intervals of time, covering periods of immense duration.
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(HPB, Secret Doctrine, Vol. II p. 273)
This Decade representing the Universe and its evolution out of Silence and the unknown Depths of the Spiritual Soul, or anima mundi, presented two sides or aspects to the student. It could be, and was at first so used and applied to the Macrocosm, after which it descended to the Microcosm, or Man. There was, then, the purely intellectual and metaphysical, or the “inner Science,” and the as purely materialistic or “surface science,” both of which could be expounded by and contained in the Decade. It could be studied, in short, from the Universals of Plato, and the inductive method of Aristotle. The former started from a divine comprehension, when the plurality proceeded from unity, or the digits of the decade appeared, but to be finally re-absorbed, lost in the infinite Circle. The latter depended on sensuous perception alone, when the Decade could be regarded either as the unity that multiplies, or matter which differentiates, its study being limited to the plane surface; to the Cross, or the Seven which proceeds from the ten – or the perfect number, on Earth as in heaven.
(HPB, Secret Doctrine, Vol. I, p. 269)
“The History of Creation and of this world from its beginning up to the present time is composed of seven chapters. The seventh chapter is not yet written.”
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(T. Subba Row, Theosophist, 1881.)
…..the grand panorama of the ever periodically recurring Law — impressed upon the plastic minds of the first races endowed with Consciousness by those who reflected the same from the Universal Mind -…
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(Wm. Q. Judge, Bhagavad Gita, p. 64)
“All this universe is pervaded by me in my invisible form; all things exist in me, but I do not exist in them. Nor are all things in me; behold this my divine mystery: myself causing things to exist and supporting them all but dwelling not in them.”
(Wm. Q. Judge, Bhagavad Gita, Chap. X)
“I established the Universe with a single portion of myself and remain separate.”
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(HPB, Isis Unveiled I, p. 212)
Man is a little world — a microcosm inside the great universe. Like a foetus, he is suspended, by all his three spirits, in the matrix of the macrocosmos; and while his terrestrial body is in constant sympathy with its parent earth, his astral soul lives in unison with the sidereal anima mundi. He is in it, as it is in him, for the world-pervading element fills all space, and is space itself, only shoreless and infinite. As to his third spirit, the divine, what is it but an infinitesimal ray, one of the countless radiations proceeding directly from the Highest Cause — the Spiritual Light of the World? This is the trinity of organic and inorganic nature — the spiritual and the physical, which are three in one, and of which Proclus says that “The first monad is the Eternal God; the second, eternity; the third, the paradigm, or pattern of the universe”; the three constituting the Intelligible Triad. Everything in this visible universe is the outflow of this Triad, and a microcosmic triad itself.
(HPB, Isis Unveiled II, p. 276 )
The first races of men were spiritual, and their protoplastic bodies were not composed of the gross and material substances of which we see them composed now-a-day. The first men were created with all the faculties of the Deity, and powers far transcending those of the angelic host; for they were the direct emanations of Adam Kadmon, the primitive man, the Macrocosm; while the present humanity is several degrees removed even from the earthly Adam, who was the Microcosm, or “the little world.”
(HPB, Isis Unveiled II, p. 458)
Thus water represents the duality of both the Macrocosmos and the Microcosmos, in conjunction with the vivifying SPIRIT, and the evolution of the little world from the universal cosmos.
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(Wm. Q. Judge, Epitome of Theosophy, p. 9)
……the universe being one thing and not diverse, and everything within it being connected with the whole and with every other thing therein, of which upon the upper plane (below referred to) there is a perfect knowledge, no act or thought occurs without each portion of the great whole perceiving and noting it. Hence all are inseparably bound together by the tie of Brotherhood.
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References for further reading
HPB, Secret Doctrine Vol. I, p. 269, A Few Occult Aphorisms
HPB, Secret Doctrine Vol. I. pgs. 289-294 Seven Powers
HPB, Secret Doctrine Vol. I. p. 594
HPB, Secret Doctrine, Vol. II p. 273
HPB, Isis Unveiled I, p. 212
HPB, Isis Unveiled II, p. 276, 458
HPB, The Key to Theosophy, p. 83, Section VI
HPB, Transactions of the Blavatsky Lodge: p. 74
Wm. Q. Judge, Bhagavad Gita, p. 64, Chap. 10
Wm. Q. Judge, Epitome of Theosophy, p. 9