TT.ORG Publishes eBook Version of The Origins of Self-Consciousness in the Secret Doctrine

The Origins of Self-Consciousness in the Secret Doctrine is a compilation of passages chosen from the approximately 1500+ pages of The Secret Doctrine that isolate and group together the Theosophical teachings about the mysterious evolutionary origins of consciousness in Nature and self-consciousness in Man into one organic work. The Table of Contents, the 41 Sections, the dedicated Glossary, and the Index will all help to guide the reader through these difficult teachings. All of the passages deal specifically with the subject of the title - The Origins of Self-Consciousness in The Secret Doctrine - and show that, between the reflective self-consciousness of man and the mentality of animals (both belonging to distinctly different kingdoms), there is an impassable abyss.

As H.P. Blavatsky says in the Section entitled "Man - “ A God in Animal Form": "What is human mind in its higher aspect, whence comes it, if it is not a portion of the essence "and, in some rare cases of incarnation, the very essence “ of a higher Being: one from a higher and divine plane? Can man "a god in the animal form “ be the product of Material Nature by evolution alone, even as is the animal, which differs from man in external shape, but by no means in the materials of its physical fabric, and is informed by the same, though undeveloped, Monad "seeing that the intellectual potentialities of the two differ as the Sun does from the glow worm? And what is it that creates such difference, unless man is an animal plus a living god within his physical shell? Let us pause and ask ourselves seriously the question, regardless of the vagaries and sophisms of both the materialistic and the psychological modern sciences."