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The Secret Doctrine establishes three fundamental propositions:

An omnipresent, Eternal, Boundless, and Immutable PRINCIPLE on which all speculation is impossible, since it transcends the power of human conception and could only be dwarfed by any human expression or similitude. It is beyond the range and reach of thought - in the words of Mandukya, "unthinkable" and "unspeakable".

To render these ideas clearer to the general reader, let him set out with the postulate that there is one absolute Reality which antecedes all manifested, conditioned being. This Infinite and Eternal Cause - dimly formulated in the Unknowable of current European philosophy - is the rootless root of "all that was, is, or ever shall be". It is of course devoid of all attributes and is essentially without any relation to manifested, finite Being. It is "Be-ness" rather than Being (in Sanskrit, Sat), and is beyond all thought or speculation.
The Secret Doctrine, i 14
H. P. BLAVATSKY

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__Clearly, there is no insuperable difficulty in thinking seriously about the First Fundamental of Gupta Vidya. But in thinking of boundless vastitude, if one tries to do so in terms of numbers or in terms of spatial concepts of largeness, one encounters a problem. For example, if one thought of all the grains of sand upon this earth, one might as well call them infinite. And yet, one has common sense and intelligence enough to know that actually there is a finite limit to the number of all the grains of sand upon all the beaches upon this globe. And indeed, one does not have to know very much astronomy to know that there must be a finite limit to everything that is manifested, whether they be planets, stars, galaxies, galactic systems or even grains of sand. No wonder the latter is a favourite metaphor of enlightened beings like Gautama Buddha. There is no human being who cannot understand the notion of the immensity involved in what is so infinitesimally small to the naked eye, a grain of sand. The infinite in the infinitesimal can be experienced by a thinking being not just with reference to the sky and sea, but also with reference to trillions upon trillions of grains of sand. And yet, however unutterable these are in magnitude, they must ultimately be finite. They exist, then, in every noble yet imperfect attempt of any soul to characterize the Absolute, the God beyond all gods.

__From this it is also clear that any attempt to begin to understand the Absolute in terms of an image or icon, let alone in terms of something which is outside the cosmos and which is crudely anthropomorphic, would be absurd. It would be the surest way of caricaturing the notion of Deity since, if there is any deity less than the Absolute, that would not be the highest conceivable source worthy of human adoration. Can there be a deity which is equivalent to the Absolute? 'Deity' itself is an abstract notion, and the word 'Absolute' is an imperfect term which has relativity built into it. This can be seen clearly from the use of 'absolute' in ordinary speech: any references to something that we call 'absolutely true' or 'absolutely correct', like any measure of 'absolute heat' or 'absolute cold', are relative to a particular scale of measurements or a particular system of concepts. One does not have to be highly trained in informal logic or formal mathematics to realize that these are necessary notions, but still notions that are man-made, notions that have limitation built into them.

__If this is so, we can appreciate the assistance given by enlightened beings to limited and imperfect minds in helping them to get beyond mere spatial or numerical magnitudes and metaphors by invoking poetical speech. Poetical speech is truer, less faulty, more evocative, even though it may involve the imagery of the visible, tangible and spatial. But man is capable of coining and formulating imagery, in art as in science, in poetry as in mathematics, which points beyond itself. And that is why many of the greatest Rishis and Sages have come as Kavis, Divine Poets. They have chosen, instead of characterizing or conceptualizing the Absolute, to celebrate it, to adore it. Therefore, all the great hymns are magnificent acts of celebration - celebrations of life, celebrations of the dignity of death, celebrations of the integrity as well as the compassion of all the laws that work throughout manifestation. The Absolute extends our view of what is known and unknown, pointing beyond all possible pathways, to what is essentially unknowable, transcending all knowledge and cognition.

__If there is an Eternal Wisdom in this universe, hidden in the very depths of manifestation, that Eternal Wisdom can only be one aspect of the Absolute. If there is universal ideation, ceaseless ideation by the very greatest beings in all evolution, that universal ideation would be seen because of their greatness merely as a mode of participation in only a tiny portion of the Absolute. And yet, any notion of the Absolute, with all its vastness, its transcendence and its grandeur, would be meaningless if it denied significance to the very least being, to the shortest-lived insect. If the Absolute could not itself be invoked for the sake of giving meaning and beauty, dignity and truth, to the least particle, to whatever existed for the most fleeting second, it would not really afford a proper understanding either of life or the cosmos. It would not be a proper function of the exercise of the human capacity for comprehension through knowledge of life, and therefore it would fail. All human efforts to include, as to exclude, will necessarily fall far short of any attempt to characterize the Absolute. The Absolute summons that in us which does not merely want to characterize or describe, but to understand ceaselessly, to make understanding an eternal process of ceaseless learning, coeval with ceaseless living in a world of ceaseless change, under which remains an indestructible core of changelessness. That core is in every atom, in every being, in every second, in every moment, everywhere and always.

__Given this, we can see why the great metaphors of the ancient scriptures are really invitations to deep, calm and continuous reflection upon everything that is. The 'Boundless All', 'that which is and yet is not', 'Eternal Non-being', 'the One Form of Existence', 'the Eternal Parent' and 'the All-Presence' are all expressions that help us because of the beauty of language, and because of the beauty of the concepts they evoke. The ubiquitous presence of Deity can no more be denied than we can deny the existence of the sun and its omnipresent light. Even if there were myriad suns and myriad worlds, the process of the diffusion of light must be analogous to what makes our living possible on this earth and our experience of the visible sun at dawn, midday and dusk. The wise celebrate the ever-present Invisible Sun even in the light of the physical world that surrounds us in our physical bodies. They thereby recognize the ever-existing, invisible Spiritual Sun that gives spiritual and mental illumination ceaselessly. The notion of life is inseparable from the notion of light, but also inseparable from divine cosmic electricity. There is a pulsation thrilling and throbbing even in the darkest period of non-manifestation, and that has sometimes been saluted as the Eternal Great Breath. The breathing in and breathing out of worlds and universes would itself have no meaning if there were not a ceaseless breathing at the very core of all life and light, and of all cosmic electricity.

__Yet every one of these poetic notions gets tainted and tortured by the intrinsic limitations of human beings who must start with the limits of the known and extend them. To do this, they must emulate the greatest human beings who always, the more they know, become even more aware of what they do not know. The more gnostic they are, the more agnostic they become and the more they rejoice in the fact that the mathematics of the cosmos transcends the greatest possible representations in laws and equations, in theorems and theories. The authentic beginning of advanced thinking in philosophy of science is the recognition, through the study of mathematical logic, set theory and mathematics, that this is intrinsically so. This is especially true today because of the impressive work in the nineteenth century of outstanding minds who demonstrated conclusively how many infinities one could find in mathematics. One can even construct modes of non-Euclidean geometry in which an infinitude of points can still be related to what is capable of being mapped.

__Impressive though this may be, it is but a small part of human knowledge, only a small representation in recent history within a limited field of a knowledge that is as old as thinking man. Many human beings have experienced this in the realm of feeling even more grandly than they have experienced it in the realm of thought. Consider the ecstasy of a child. Consider the sadness of a human being who is ready to finish a single day in the endless series of days that makes up the wheel of existence. Consider the poignancy felt when nearing the moment of death, which is really no more than a trivial hour in a ceaseless journey. All of these are universal experiences of the transcendence of feeling. In all cultures, civilizations and societies, among human beings who are highly sensitive to the deeper levels and subtler vibrations of feeling, there is a firm recognition that more is said through intimation than through explicit representation in external speech or form. This is part of the poetry of human life, part of the poetry of cosmic existence.

__What is unsaid is more significant and more real than what is said, because it brings us closer to the Absolute. What is thought by human beings, but thought in a way that they are not even aware of, is often closer and truer to the intrinsic nature of life itself, of consciousness and of the Absolute, than all the thoughts that they bring to the forefront of their attention, let alone the thoughts they articulate and share. There is, therefore, no sense in which a human being can expect to begin to understand the Absolute except by accepting the fact that one is born alone, dies alone and lives alone. So does everything in Nature. And yet, there is nothing in Nature that is not bound up with everything else that exists. This is true in the realm of atoms, true in the realm of plants, true in the realm of human beings. Still, there is a secret solitude to the life journey of every ant, of every fly, of every flower and also of every human being.

__The Absolute, then, is the very ground of all reality. All denials of it are meaningless, because they simply trap one in the unreal, which itself is only like a minor shadow of what is an ever-present veil upon the Absolute. To have a sense of the meaning of sacred metaphors such as the 'All-Presence' or the 'Boundless All' is to make come alive infinitude within finitude, transcendence within immanence, boundless space within visible space, eternal duration within limited time. The Absolute is the only conceivable ground of all experience, and it must lie continuously before our physical eyes, as well as our mind's eye and our soul's eye. To make the Absolute the ground of our being, our thinking, our living and our feeling is to recognize that everything which is by its very nature limited because of language, because of gesture, because of definition, because of its captivity within space-time, is merely a kind of apologetic, imperfect representation of that which is beyond representation in the realm of thought and the realm of feeling.

__This is not difficult to understand. We are only speaking of what we already know, and what we know that we know. But we cannot bring what we know that we know in the depth of our being - which has sometimes been called the 'I am I' consciousness - into the realm of that which is limited. Therefore, the Absolute is that from which we are self-alienated, owing to our needlessly self-devised limitations. Ultimately, in a Platonic sense or as Shankaracharya pointed out, there is only one error, and that is the root of all errors. It is the treating of that which is ever changing as enduring, that which is unreal as real, or that which is finite as if it had a kind of indefinite extension in the realm of time. This applies to all worlds, all lives, all acts and all relationships. It applies to all religions, all philosophies, all sciences and all systems of thought. That is why it applies to the entire gamut of what we call civilization, which is only at best like a mask upon the great secret, unspeakable, unthinkable pilgrimage of the immortal soul of all Humanity. In other words, in consciousness we can dare further and go beyond what we can construct through thoughts, words, formulations and expressions. We all know this, and that is because most of our life is spent either in sleep or in states of consciousness where we are in no position to articulate our thoughts to anyone, or even to ourselves. Thus philosophers in the East have said that you cannot even begin to pronounce upon human nature until you can first address yourself to Being in all states of non-manifestation, which actually far exceed, in their impact upon our being, what we regard as visible and temporal states.