Phase 1:
The first phase takes us from personality to individuality. What are our actions, what do we say and what is the response? The officiating priest is the one who offers the sacrifice during the ceremony. It is crucial to realise what the sacrifice actually is. What are we offering? In this part of the Holy Eucharist our visible offertory consists of the unconsecrated bread and the equally unconsecrated wine and water as an offering of praise and thanksgiving. At the same time there is also an invisible offer, namely our personality. We should take careful note of the fact that the paten, the golden disc that initially covers the chalice, does not yet enter into the equation. We precisely describe these acts in the liturgical text when the officiating priest says: "We lay before Thee, O Lord, these Thy creatures of bread and wine, in token of our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving; for here we offer and present unto Thee ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a holy and continual sacrifice unto Thee".

What we are therefore saying here is, that we are offering our personalities, our souls and our bodies, to Him whom directs and governs our lives: the Lord. The purpose of our sacrifice is to be a symbol and a channel of our love and devotion to the Lord. We also add our aspirations for this sacrifice, we say: "May our strength be spent in Thy service and our love poured forth upon Thy people".

What exactly is being achieved during the first phase? In brief, the following: We are giving up our own restricted personality, surrendering it for the benefit of an impersonal, higher purpose, thereby forging a bond of unity with all participants. We are prepared, as human beings, to offer our strength and our love to the work of the Lord. We pronounce ourselves ready to become His servants. As we know from The Science of Sacraments, this is also how the Temple, wherein the Divine Power will be poured forth at a later stage, is being erected. This phase then ends with Preface and Sanctus, thereby evoking the mighty hosts of Angels, who will assist us in our work as His servants.

Phase 2:
With the evocation and the arrival of Angels and Archangels comes a complete change of atmosphere in the church. The arrival of these great and powerful Beings, standing there in all their glory, is an awe-inspiring moment for the celebrant. It is difficult to describe what it means to a celebrant to be allowed to evoke these magnificent, radiant Beings. The celebrant feels and perhaps even 'sees' the descent of the hosts of Angels when they place Themselves behind and around the altar. The church is filled with Their radiant light and Their glorious presence. Of course this experience is not just confined to the celebrant; everyone present may sense the arrival of these Creatures of Light, who will accompany our renewed sacrifice. We should always remember that all participants fully experience the mysteries of the Holy Eucharist and that the celebrant is only the person performing the sacred acts on behalf of the congregation.

So let us look closer at what the celebrant does on behalf of the congregation. During the first phase, the gifts are offered as un-purified and unconsecrated vehicles for our love and devotion. But now, during the second phase, we approach Him with the intention that His Power may be poured forth into them. Consulting The Science of Sacraments once again, we find how Christ is mentioned as being 'in the Father's bosom. (6) We turn here to our Lord Jesus Christ, always realising that He is as one with the Universal Divine Unity.

Clearly, we are now addressing a level that lies beyond the level of the individuality; we are reaching out to the higher Atma. Initially, during phase one, we ask for animation and inspiration to enable us to give our own fortitude to the world and to humanity. But now we are going much further: in all humility we ask for the Lord's Own Power. It is His Presence, His Power and His Love we are asking for in response to our sacrifice. We are in fact, through our sacrifice, trying to rise above the limits of our individuality. We are escaping the limitations of atma-buddhi and reaching for the higher level: the level of the Monad. The descent of Divine Power into Host and Wine is now realised by the Christ in His individualised existence as Monad on the level of the magnificent plane, incomprehensible to mortals, of the Absolute, the indivisible Unity. Our refined, purified and chastened sacrifice is now becoming a channel and vehicle for a Power so great and mighty, that we can only admire this Power and Might in pure and rarefied silence by reciting the Adoro Te, followed by a recognition of His Presence when we jubilantly worship Him with the Adeste Fideles. Our offering has become the vehicle for His Power, His Presence.

Phase 3:
It is a common misunderstanding that the absolute pinnacle of our Holy Eucharist has been reached at the point where the Power of Christ has descended. It seems that the highest and ultimate goal of the Holy Eucharist has been achieved by the mystery of the consecration. The Power and Love of the Son of God has become tangible to us mortals in the Blessed Sacrament. What more can be achieved now? What other mystery could await us? Let us scrutinise the text and we will indeed discover that there remains yet another most exalted Mystery. Something so exalted that it far exceeds all reasoning, all understanding and all human comprehension.

Again, let us pose the questions: What are we doing, what are we saying and what reaction will we induce? The celebrant is now offering the Ultimate Sacrifice, i.e. the consecrated Host and Wine. That which is to us the Most High, most wonderful and most precious gift, we are now offering to the Ultimate Deity. We form a bond with the ancient mystery of the revelation with the words: "...we Thy humble servants, bearing in mind the ineffable sacrifice of Thy Son, do offer unto Thee this, the most precious gift which Thou hast bestowed upon us, in token of our love and of the perfect devotion and sacrifice of our minds and hearts to Thee; ...to be offered by Him Who, as the eternal High Priest, forever offers Himself as the eternal Sacrifice".

These words refer to the hidden mystery of existence. In the Hymns from the Rig Veda we can read about this: "This offer was the navel of the universe" (7).

In H.P. Blavatsky's work we often find described this ultimate mystery of the "eternal High Priest, forever offering Himself as the eternal Sacrifice". She wrote for example: "In the Rig Veda and its hymns, Vishvakarman, a Mystery-God, is the Logos, one of the greatest Gods, and spoken of in two of the hymns as the highest. He is the Omnificent (Vishvakarman), called the 'Great Architect of the Universe', the 'All-seeing God, the father, the generator, who is ... beyond the comprehension of mortals', as is every Mystery-God. He is the personification of the creative manifested Power, and mystically He is the seventh principle in man, in its collectivity. ... In the Rig-Vedaic Hymns, Vishvakarman performs 'the great sacrifice', i.e. sacrifices Himself for the world. Vishvakarman, the all-seeing Father-God, who is beyond the comprehension of mortals, ends, as son of Bhuvana, the Holy Spirit, by sacrificing himself to himself, to save the worlds." (8)

It is marvellous to think that, at this stage in our Holy Eucharist, we actually come into contact with the Divine Originator of all that exists. Our sacrifice indicates the moment in which the indivisible Arch-unity turns into duality and plurality. It is the moment in which the white wheel, symbolising the Absolute, shatters; the moment in which all living power is created. This is why we mention the mystery of the contemporaneous occurrence of transcendence and immanence:

"All these things do we ask, O Father, in the Name and through the mediation of Thy most blessed Son, for we acknowledge and confess with our hearts and lips that by Him were all things made, yea, all things both in heaven and earth; that with Him as the indwelling life do all things exist and in Him, as the transcendent glory, all things live and move and have their being".

In the Rig Veda we read about this: "With the Offer the Gods offered the Offer. This was the first cosmic norm" (9). With this act and with these words we offer the highest offer. We actually admit that we ourselves are unable to bring this Highest Offer. For that reason we ask that it should be done by the eternal High Priest.

What will be the response to this act, which is the highest possible act on this revelatory plane? When the officiating priest lifts the offerings up to eye level, enabling everyone present to identify themselves with the offerings, there is a moment of deepest silence. The celebrant kneels down and prepares himself for the making of the highest sacrifice. For the celebrant who is allowed to execute this act it is a moment for which no words can be found. There is total and absolute silence in the church, in our hearts, in everyone present. In this silence the celebrant prepares himself for an act of incredible, unimaginable symbolic significance. Within this deep silence and profound adoration, the celebrant reaches for the paten, until then hidden under the corporal. Why is this such a momentous act? The paten is here a symbol for our Lady Mary. At this moment we turn to our Lady Mary in her wondrous aspect of veiled matter, origin of all Life, bearer of the Sacred Host. It is remarkable that we cannot find this most profound symbolic meaning in The Science of Sacraments, but only in a book which was written later, The Hidden Side of Christian Festivals. (10) In The Science of Sacraments Bishop Leadbeater does announce his intention to write this book. (11) It is of the utmost importance for us to read what has actually been written on this topic. We can understand from his writings that the paten is in fact a symbol of that which in ancient India used to be called 'Mulaprakriti', the origin of creation, the veiled matter which makes all creation possible. This means that, by lifting the paten during the third phase, we enter into what is sometimes called 'the mystery of Parabrahman and Mulaprakriti'. We should not feel alienated by the use of these Sanskrit terms. On the contrary, when we are prepared to direct our attention towards the inner meaning of these words, we will gradually acquire a greater affinity with them. Through reading, studying and meditation we get into contact in a most profound way with the Reality behind this mystery: timeless, spaceless, incomprehensible, here we discover THAT, the One Origin of all existence. In a way we could have known that something quite extraodinary is taking place here. Is it not here that we give "most high praise" to our Lady Mary? No ordinary praise, no, really the most high praise possible. It is only a brief moment, they are only a few words, but it is an astonishingly beautiful moment. Here we touch upon a mystery for which, as we can read in The Secret Doctrine, even the Archangels, the Dhyani-Chohan, will bow their heads. (12) For those who want to participate fully, heart, mind and soul in our Holy Mass, it is extremely inspiring to read about this in The Secret Doctrine. (13)

We find here an explanation of the principles of our Holy Eucharist. How inspiring it would be to our churchgoers if we were to immerse ourselves in the study of these phenomena. A plethora of original wisdom would be revealed to us, if only we would dedicate ourselves to delving deeper into the mystery of creation, as it is revealed not only in The Secret Doctrine, but also in world literature like the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita! Now it should be clear to us why we, subsequent to the most high praise to our Lady Mary, also offer our praise and thanksgiving to "...all Thy glorious Saints from the beginning of the world, who have been the choice vessels of Thy grace and a shining light unto many generations". These Saints are the Dhyani-Chohan, the Archangels, who are the vessels of his revelatory Power. Rising above the solar system, united with the cosmos, we are then standing in adoration for the Most High, indivisible Unity, in utter adoration for His Love, Light and Blessing. We perform the ancient acts, which have been described so eloquently in the Prologue to the Secret Doctrine: The white wheel of the Absolute is shattered, the totally indivisible Deity becomes plurality. We experience the ancient mystery of the revelation: the One becomes Many and yet remains immutably the One. Are we not involuntarily reminded here of the powerful stanza from the Bhagavad Gita: "Having pervaded this whole universe with a fragment of Myself, I remain." (14)

This is what I have described in my book on Cyrano de Bergerac as reaching the land of the Sun. This is what can be found in world literature (15). The Divine Light pervades our hearts as an Infinite Source of Presence most high. In all our human weakness, we realise we are only then worthy to receive His Presence in us, when we really have become his true disciples. What, normally speaking, man is unable to achieve, is offered to us in the Holy Eucharist in the form of a divine ritual, the Divine Work. By the indescribable miracle of the divine act, man is lifted outside and beyond the restrictions of his individuality and pervaded with the Power and the Blessing from the One Reality. The mystery of the Absolute is revealed in the mystery of man. What else is left to us other than, with the Dhyani-Chohan, to bow for this miracle and to resolve upon becoming true servants in his Service, collaborators in His Divine Work?

Notes:
(6) p. 250

(7) Hymns of the Rig Veda, Vision in deep darkness.

(8) Quoted from H.J. Spierenburg, The Veda Commentaries of H.P. Blavatsky, San Diego, Point Loma Publications, 1996, pp. 52, 53

(9) o.c., "Vision in deep darkness"

(10) C.W. Leadbeater, The Hidden Side of Christian Festivals, St. Alban Press, 1920, pp. 242-244

(11) p. 287

(12) "When Christ, alone-born of the Father, springs forth from His bosom, and looks back upon that which remains, He sees as it were a veil thrown over it -a veil to which the philosophers of ancient India gave the name of Mulaprakriti, the root of matter; not matter as we know it, but the potential essence of matter; not space, but the within of space; that from which all proceeds, the containing element of Deity, of which space is a manifestation. ... For that in speech the philosophers used always the feminine pronoun; they speak of that Great Deep -of the eternal wisdom- as 'she'." The Hidden Side of Christian Festivals, pp. 242-243

(12) H.P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine I, in H.P.B., Collected Writings 1888, Adyar, T.P.H. 1979, p. 330: "That Ego, progressing in an arc of ascending subjectivity, must exhaust the experience of every plane. But not till the Unit is merged in the All, whether on this or any other plane, and Subject and Object alike vanish in the absolute negation of the Nirvanic State, is scaled that peak of Omniscience, the Knowledge of things-in-themselves; and the solution of the yet more awful riddle approached, before which even the highest Dhyani-Chohan must bow in silence and ignorance - the unspeakable mystery of that which is called by the Vedantins, the Parabrahman."

(13) S.D. pp. 325-346 Primordial Substance and divine Thought.

(14) BG. X. 42