Theos-Talk Archives (February 2002 Message tt00082)

I guess that you are saying that because she could write with a
certain knowledge _about_ herbal substances, therefore she was a
habitual user of such substances.??

Carrying that a bit further, I long felt that since you seem obsessed
with all this drug and herbal usage, that you yourself MUST be a
habitual user of those same substances. If we were to conduct a poll
of those readers of this thread about "Who is Stoned", I personally
would feel that more probably You and Frank were "stoned", than HPB
and Olcott.

I have heard it said that "It takes One to know One."

----- Original Message -----
From: bri_mue <bri_mue@yahoo.com>
To: <theos-talk@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, February 03, 2002 1:56 PM
Subject: Theos-World Re: HPB, the Masters, and drugs.


> In an interview with the "New York World",April 2, 1877,"Why a
> Russian Countess Firmly Believes in Magic," Blavatsky later stated
> publicly that "the chief of the gurus showed me things wich I
> demonstrated to be truth. For instance he made me look at a bright
> tin plate and fix my toughts on something I wished to see."He made
> passes over her and made her drink a potion "the ingredients of wich
> I know but will not tell"
>
> In "Erroneous Ideas Concerning the Doctrines of the
> Theosophists,"published in 1879, she declared that proof of doctrine
> of conditional immortality was only given the neophyte "durring the
> Great Mysteries, when a sacred beverage enabled him to leave his
body
> and, soaring in the infinity of worlds, observe and look for
> himself."
>
>
> Blavatsky writes; "The women of Thessaly and Epirus, the female
> heirophants of the rites of Sabazius, did not carry their secrets
> away with the downfall of their sanctuaries. They are still
> preserved, and those who are aware of the nature of soma (a plant
> whose juices induce a hypnotic trance-like state) know the
properties
> of other plants as well." ( Isis Unveiled)
>
> In the "Religio-Philosophical Journal 22/20, May 19, 1877:p. 4,
> Blavatsky wrote that the separation of soul and body is "one of the
> last and very highest achievements of magic."
>
> Related to this in Blavatsky's schema was the sacred "Sleep of *** "
> an obvious reference to the Sleep of Sialam, a term used by
> P.B.Randolph in his Rosicrucian novel Ravalette (1863) for the
> highest, drug induced vision state. It was taken up in Isis Unveiled
> where it relates to a drug- induced, prophetic "sublime lethargy" in
> wich the uncounscious subject is made the "temporary receptacle of
> the brightness of the immortal Augoeides."
>
> P.Deveney in "Astral Projection or Liberating of the Double and the
> Work of the Theosophical Society"( wites: Later the "Sleep of
> Sialam" came to mean the soma-induced trance during wich the new
> initiate- both in the Orient and in the ancient Mysteries-comprhends
> the ultimate mysteries after undergoing the tests of Initiation.
> ("The Esoteric Character of the Gospels, "Lucifer, November 1887)
>
> Deveney ads that :"I do not think that drugs can be ruled out as a
> possibility in seeking practical techniques in the TS.- and would
> appear to be related to the degree structure or sections adopted by
> the Society at least as early as 1878 and which G.H.Felt , as we
> shall see, says were adopted from the verry beginning." (Deveney
> gives then more evidence as he goos on, and this is indeed one of
the
> books that is recomended reading if one wants to study this subject
> further, see: Deveney, "Astral Projection and the early TS")