Be-ness

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In the Theosophical Glossary H. P. Blavatsky defines the term in the following way:

Be-ness. A term coined by Theosophists to render more accurately the essential meaning of the untranslatable word Sat. The latter word does not mean “Being” for it presupposes a sentient feeling or some consciousness of existence. But, as the term Sat is applied solely to the absolute Principle, the universal, unknown, and ever unknowable Presence, which philosophical Pantheism postulates in Kosmos, calling it the basic root of Kosmos. and Kosmos itself— “Being” was no fit word to express it. Indeed, the latter is not even, as translated by some Orientalists, “the incomprehensible Entity”; for it is no more an Entity than a non-Entity, but both. It is, as said, absolute Be-ness, not Being, the one secondless, undivided, and indivisible All—the root of all Nature visible and invisible, objective and subjective, to be sensed by the highest spiritual intuition, but’ never to be fully comprehended.[1]

Blavatsky applies this term to the Absolute Reality in the Proem of the Secret Doctrine, where she writes:

. . . this Self-Existence can hardly be conceived of as creating personally. In the sense and perceptions of finite “Beings,” THAT is Non-“being,” in the sense that it is the one BE-NESS. . .[2]

Notes

  1. H. P. Blavatsky, Theosophical Glossary (Krotona, CA: Theosophical Publishing House, 1918), 50.
  2. H. P. Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine vol. I (Wheaton, Ill: Theosophical Publishing House, 1993), 7.