Dear Steve Hope this post helps answers your question about Fohat.
What is Fohat and what is its role in Emanation?
In the process of Emanation Fohat plays an important role.
4.1 What is Fohat?
The main verbal root foh is a Tibetan-Mongolian word which could be translated as Buddha-life or Buddha-vitality. Fohat is a philosophical term, having the general meaning of cosmic life or cosmic vitality, ever guided by cosmic mind or intelligence [2]. Why did the Mongolians use this term? Because they refused to see in the wonderful, symmetrical, mathematical and harmonic structure of the Universe, a play of blind and soulless forces on dead matter such as has been the dominating way of scientific thinking in the West for so many years. They gave it the name Fohat because their consciousness conceived of the cosmic vitality under its proper meaning – Buddha-life:
- the intelligent buddhic foundation of the manifested universe;
- the cosmic life, conveyed by universal consciousness, universal wisdom, and therefore correctly understood to be universal life, embodying and directed by universal intelligence.
In the Secret Doctrine I (p. 107-8) this is expressed as follows:
Fohat is the steed: the Cosmic Thought is the rider.
The source of Fohat is Cosmic kama or desire in the Cosmic Thought [3]. In a specific meaning it is identical with the old mystic Greek word Eros. In the Symposium of The Dialogues of Plato Socrates discusses with his friends the characteristics of the god Eros. They conclude that Eros can neither be beautiful or good, because you only desire what you don’t possess yet. Subsequently Socrates speaks of the lessons he learned from a wise lady called Diotima who described Eros generally as the desire (the love) of the everlasting possession of the good ..... and that, through this desire, man seeks immortality [4]. From this we may conclude that Fohat or Eros is the desire, the driving force, to bring a being from its present - relative - disharmonious state into a state of balance, of harmony. This force is expressed as a delta, a difference in “voltage,” “pressure,” “height,” etc.
So we can say that on the human plane Fohat corresponds to desire or passion. In another way, we also might call it kama-prana or prana-kama; desire combined with vitality. Those two are inseparable, because there is vitality in every one of the human principles. Fohat is the incessantly operating, ever moving driving force in Nature. It is incessant action and is both constructive and destructive. For through the incessant operation endless transitions take place from one phase of manifested existence to another. Fohat is operating both at macrocosmic and microcosmic level: between the suns of the Milky Way and between the electrons of an atom and between the atoms.
4.2 What is the role of Fohat in the process of Emanation?
What is exactly the relation between Emanation and Fohat?
As human beings, we can say it means that we are living in the emanated force-field, the life-sphere, the fohatic sphere, the pranic sphere, of the divinity of our solar system. In a similar way the cells and atoms of our physical body are living in the emanated force-field, the life-sphere, the fohatic sphere, the pranic sphere, of the divinity of our human constitution. In The Secret Doctrine I p. 16 Madame Blavatsky describes the essential character of Fohat as: the "bridge" by which the "Ideas" existing in the "Divine Thought" are impressed on Cosmic substance as the "laws of Nature." Fohat being the cosmic life in the sense of the vital flow in a universe, is divisible into seven or ten principles or elements [5]. Each one of them is a vitality with its own svabhava or characteristic, and their unity forming the generalized Fohat of which Madame Blavatsky wrote in the Secret Doctrine I p. 143: "Each world has its Fohat, who is omnipresent in his own sphere of action. But there are as many Fohats as there are worlds, each varying in power and degree of manifestations.”
4.3 How to recognize the operatings of Fohat?
How to recognize the operating of Fohat?
Please remember that the universe - from the Theosophical standpoint - is alive because it is filled with living beings, whatever we call them: cosmic spirits, planetary spirits, divinities, etc. We are all living in the life-sphere, the fohatic sphere, the pranic sphere, of the divinity of our solar system [6]. Now with respect to all movements of the world that we see around us: the earthquakes, the meteorological phenomena, rains, lightning, moving of clouds, thunder-storms, hail-storms, sunny and bright days; all those are movements of the vital essence of the planetary spirit working in and with the co-operation of the solar spirit, as that solar spirit moves within the life-sphere of an entity still greater, the galactic spirit, which in its turn moves within the life-sphere of a still vaster spirit. All those movements are based on Fohat: the driving force, which expresses itself as a delta, a difference in “voltage,” “pressure,” “height,” etc.
We see the same image with the countless beings which compose a person’s body, where they live and move and have their being, within the hierarchy of the constitution of the vehicles of spirit. It is a wonderful image to recognise the symmetry, harmony and beauty of the universe. Please be aware that on every occasion when you see the action of a natural force, you are seeing the automatic workings of the vitality of our own particular planetary, or it may be solar spirit. We may call those automatic workings the habit patterns of those cosmic beings. For us human beings, this is difficult to imagine. If we compare it to the human plane: a being living on an electron, helping to form one of the atoms of my body may not have understanding when I raise my arm, but nevertheless all the interrelated forces giving my body life, affect every molecule, every atom, every electron in my body. In precisely the same way the cosmic spirits, the Forces of Nature, have a range of action so vast, an intellect so far-reaching and a time-period so immense, that we cannot grasp it.
A last point to complete the general description of Fohat is the idea of the Circulations of the Cosmos. The Circulations of the Cosmos are the pathways or channels connecting the invisible worlds of the solar system by means of the vital and “nervous” cosmic flows. The solar system, just as the human body, has its own network of nerves, arteries, and veins, as well as its pathways along which run to and from the flows of forces embodying various degrees of cosmic life. The sun, as the heart and brain of the solar system [7], receives the circulations of the solar system at its North Pole. They pass through the heart of the sun, are cleansed and washed and leave at the south pole of the sun. The same picture applies to the planets, like our Earth: each has its receptor at the North Pole, and its ejector at the South Pole. And the periodic pulsations in those circulating flows are the “heart beats” of the organism of the solar system. We can recognize an identical image for the flows in the blood and nervous system in the human body.
In this respect I would like to mention a relevant quotation from ‘Notes on the Bhagavad-Gita’ by W.Q. Judge and R. Crosbie: