Theos-Talk Archives (April 2004 Message tt00658)

Friday, April 23, 2004

Dear Friends:

Re: exoteric/esoteric -- WHO IS H P B ?

"Just being" is a curious phrase. 

I have also seen in recent posts that H P B is trivialized with some
modern pseudo psychological labeling. But the one who advances this
label has evidently NOT STUDIED Theosophy. For if he / she had, then we
would be reading some evaluation of the philosophy and not be having to
read an immature view and evaluation of "H P B" as a thinker.

Consider this:


H. P. BLAVATSKY died May 8, 1891. Or, 115 years ago.

To some, as a person, she ceased to be on that date. 

All that survives is a name, a memory, one of countless other names and
memories, the remains of a generation almost extinguished and fast
fading into the indistinguishable monument we call the past. 

She is now a mere episode in written and unwritten History -- the
occidental term for the Skandhas of the human race and the personal
human being. As a body, as a mind, as an actor, she has played her part,
passed from the stage and been replaced. 

But the play goes on. The great drama of life and death, of good and
evil fortune, is not of yesterday and to-day only but of all time, and
each new person, each incoming generation must perforce become both
spectator and actor in the Mysteries. 

Like many another, H. P. Blavatsky was one who purported to speak from
behind the screen of time, to bear witness and to teach of things hidden
from mortal sight, even that of the wisest among us. 

What are the credentials of H. P. Blavatsky, Messenger of the Masters of
Wisdom, Elder Brothers of the human race, to us Their younger brothers
in the School of Life?


Nearest to us of all such Messengers, the claims or credentials of H. P.
B are of vital moment to all searchers for truth and are more readily
and searchingly possible of examination. 

To determine between claims and credentials is the prime necessity of
the student of life and action. As matters stand from generation to
generation the average searcher for truth is bewildered by the cloud of
witnesses, by the apparently hopeless contradictions in their testimony,
by his own inability to distinguish the true from the false in witnesses
and in their testimony. 

The experience of the race is that of a continual alteration and
alternation of opinion. 

We reach a decision one day, one generation, only to reverse it the
next, though all men are aware that the essential facts of life never
vary, that Truth must be in its own nature changeless. 

Unless we are prepared to admit, and to ourselves act upon the
admission, not only that Truth exists but that we are capable of
discerning the truth in all things, we but stultify our Self in giving
any attention at all to the search for Truth as reflected in such mighty
subjects as philosophy, religion, ethics, science. 

If we contradict the terms of our own inmost Being, if we render our
Self foolish, incompetent to prove all things and to hold fast to that
which is true, if we allege our Self insane and incapable of determining
Truth, who or what can validate the Truth to us, can make us reasonable?


But, granting that we are "open to reason," it must follow that we are
bewildered, that we err and wander in our search for Truth, not because
credentials and evidences are lacking to us, but because we do not
examine them in the light of reason and experience.

The all-inclusive credential of H.P.B. as messenger and witness is that
she addressed herself exclusively to the intelligence of mankind -- that
is to say, to the universal experience, the common sense, the innate
reason of all men, therefore of every man. Her teachings were put
forward as in no sense a revelation. 

She appealed to the Truth in us, to the truth as known to us, to our
capacity to assimilate additional truth -- to what the Masters have in
common with us, to what all men have in common with the Masters, as the
bridge of progress, the Antaskarana -thread- of spiritual, as of all
other evolution. 

What she knew (that is to us unknown), she put forward as a theory, as a
working hypothesis which everyone is invited to examine, test, verify,
step by step, proceeding from the known to the unknown. 

Compare and contrast this credential with those submitted by the
revealers, the prophets, the priests of every religion and of every
sect. 

Always it is a revelation of one sort or another from a higher to a
lower being -- a revelation which demands belief, which in its very
nature is impossible of proof or disproof by the ones to whom it is
offered, and which promises rewards, or threatens penalties, to those
who do or do not accept it out of hand on the ipse dixit of the
revealer. 

Compare and contrast the credential of H.P.B. with the "working
hypotheses" so freely offered and accepted in modern "exact" science --
working hypotheses which do not "work," and of which there is not a
single one submitted by any scientist that other equally eminent
scientists have not exposed as faulty, incomplete, contradicted by known
facts. 

Not a theory or hypothesis propounded by H. P. B. has ever been upset
philosophically, logically, historically or evidentially. 

Hundreds and thousands have tried it, as invited first and foremost by
H.P.B. herself. The most that any have achieved has been a : "Not
proven." 

This is an admission of her impregnability; a confession of their own
inability to impeach her testimony after rigid cross-examination. 

Invariably the religious or scientific investigator of the credential of
H.P.B. has tested her theories in the light of his own. If her
propositions agreed with his, well and good; if not, they must be false
or erroneous, "not proved," -- that is, "not approved." 

Assume for one moment that her theories are true, and the inverted logic
of these investigators is instantly self-evident. They did not, and they
do not, compare and contrast theory with theory, hypothesis with
hypothesis, for relative consistency and synthesis, for relative accord
with known facts. 

It stands to-day as from the beginning; no known fact conflicts with or
discredits a single theorem advanced by H.P.B., while her propositions
do shed the light of reason on all the problems of life, all the missing
links in science and religion; do bring into order and relation, into
ethical and moral purposiveness, all the otherwise bewildering and
confused mass of the facts which constitute the experience of the race
and the individual; do point out the causes of those failures and
miseries which our religions and our sciences seek in vain to explain or
alleviate. 

The individual and personal credential of H. P. B. to every sincere
searcher for truth is the spiritual fact that her mission is educative. 

She was and is a Teacher of truth. 

It is through the Hall of Learning alone that we can hope to arrive at
Wisdom on our own account. 

No miracle, no prayer, no revelation, not even the usually blind
devotion of implicit faith can ever bring any of us one step nearer to
the Masters of Wisdom, to Their real Knowledge of Nature, and, to their
Historical account of our past.. 

Her life, her labor, her writings, constitute a School of Life, into
which may enter whosoever will to acquire instruction in the mysteries
of Self; instruction in Self-knowledge, Self-discipline, Self-control --
and prove out to himself and for himself the same credential of The
Wisdom. [So wrote a student in THEOSOPHY, many years ago}.


One of her contemporaries wrote:

"...in 1875 she told me that she was then embarking on a work that would
draw upon her unmerited slander, implacable malice, uninterrupted
misunderstanding, constant work, and no worldly reward. Yet in the face
of this her lion heart carried her on...

Much has been said of her "phenomena," some denying them, others
alleging trick and device. Knowing her for so many years so well, and
having seen at her hands in private the production of more and more
varied phenomena that it has been the good fortune of all others of her
friends put together to seem I know for myself that she had control of
hidden powerful laws of nature not known to our science, and I also know
that she never boasted of her powers, never advertised their possession,
never publicly advised anyone to attempt their acquirement, but always
turned the eyes of those who could understand her to a life of altruism
based on a knowledge of true philosophy.

If the world thinks that her days were spent in deluding her followers
by pretended phenomena, it is solely because her injudicious friends,
against her expressed wish, gave out wonderful stories of her "miracles"
which can not be proved to a skeptical public and which are not the aim
of the Society nor were ever more than mere incidents in the life of
H.P.Blavatsky.

Her aim was to elevate the race. 

Her method was to deal with the mind of the century as she found it, by
trying to lead it on step by step; to seek out and educate a few who,
appreciating the majesty of the Secret Science and devoted to "the great
orphan Humanity," could carry on her work with zeal and wisdom; to found
a Society whose efforts--however small itself might be--would inject
into the thought of the day the ideas, the doctrines, the nomenclature
of the Wisdom Religion, so that when the next century shall have seen
its 75th years the new messenger coming again into the world would find
the Society still at work, the ideas sown broadcast, the nomenclature
ready to give expression and body to the immutable truth, and thus to
make easy the task which for her since 1875 was so difficult and so
encompassed with obstacles in the very paucity of the
language--obstacles harder than all else to work against." [So wrote H
P B's colleague and friend : W. Q. Judge in his article: "H.P.B.--A
Lion-hearted Colleague Passes" ]


Again he wrote:


"In 1875, in the city of New York, I first met H.P.B. in this life...It
was her eye that attracted me, the eye of one whom I must have known in
lives long passed away. 

She looked at me in recognition at that first hour, and never since has
that look changed...Not as a questioner of philosophies did I come
before her...but as one, wandering many periods through the corridors of
life, was seeking the friends who could show where the designs for the
work had been hidden. And true to the call she responded, revealing the
plans once again, and speaking no words to explain, simply pointed then
out and went on with the task. It was as if but the evening before we
had parted, leaving yet to be done some detail of a task taken up with
one common end; it was teacher and pupil, elder brother and younger,
both bent on the one single end, but she with the power and the
knowledge that belong but to lions and sages.

Others I know have looked with suspicion on an appearance they could not
fathom, and though it is true they adduce many proofs which hugged to
the breast, would damn sages and gods, yet it is only through blindness
they failed to see the lion's glance, the diamond heart of H.P.B...she
was laying down the lines of force all over the land...

The explanation has been offered by some too anxious friends that the
earlier phenomena were mistakes in judgment, attempted to be rectified
in later years by confining their area and limiting their number,
but...I shall hold to her own explanation made in advance and never
changed. That I have given above. For it is easier to take refuge
behind a charge of bad judgment than to understand the strange and
powerful laws which control in matters such as these.

Amid all the turmoil of her life, above all the din produced by those
who charged her with deceit and fraud and others who defended, while
month after month, and year after year, witnessed men and women entering
the theosophical movement only to leave it soon with malignant phrases
for H.P.B., there stands a fact we all might consider--devotion absolute
to her Master. "It was He," she writes, "who told me to devote myself
to this, and I will never disobey and never turn back."...

Willing in the service of the cause to offer up hope, money, reputation,
life itself, provided the Society might be saved from every hurt,
whether small or great. And thus bound body and soul to this entity
called the T. S., bound to protect it at all hazards, and in the face of
every loss, she often incurred the resentment of many who became her
friends but would not always care for the infant organization as she had
sworn to do. And when they acted as it opposed to the Society, her
instant opposition seemed to them to nullify professions of friendship.
Thus she had but few friends, for it required a keen insight, untinged
with personal feeling, to see even a small part of the real
H.P.Blavatsky...

She worked under directors who, operating from behind the scene, knew
that the T. S. was, and was to be, the nucleus from which help might be
spread to all the people of the day, without thanks and without
acknowledgment...I asked her what was the chance of drawing people into
the Society...she said:--"When you consider those days in 1875 and
after, in which you could not find any people interested in your
thoughts, and now look at the wide-spreading influence of theosophical
ideas--however labeled--it is not so bad. We are not working that
people may call themselves Theosophists, but that the doctrines we
cherish may affect and leaven the whole mind of this century. This
alone can be accomplished by a small earnest band of workers, who work
for no human reward, no earthly recognition, but who, supported and
sustained by a belief in that Universal Brotherhood of which our Masters
are a part, work steadily, faithfully, in understanding and putting
forth for consideration the doctrines of life and duty that have come
down to us from immemorial time. Falter not so long as a few devoted
ones will work to keep the nucleus existing. You were not directed to
found and realise a Universal Brotherhood, but to form the nucleus for
one; for it is only when the nucleus it formed that the accumulations
can begin that will end in future years, however far, in the formation
of that body which we have in view."

H.P.B. had a lion heart, and on the work traced out for her she had a
lion's grasp, let us...sustain ourselves in carrying out the designs
laid down on the trestle-board, by the memory of her devotion and the
consciousness that behind her task stood, and still remain, those Elder
Brothers who, above the clatter and the din of our battle, ever see the
end and direct the forces distributed in array for the salvation of
"that great orphan--Humanity."	
[W. Q. Judge	-- "Yours till Death and After, H.P.B..." ]


To close students of Theosophy and to students and friends of H P B, Mr.
Judge wrote:

"The case I wish to deal with...is this: H.P.B. and her relations to
the Masters and to us; her books and teachings; the general question
of disciples and chelas...Chelas and disciples are of many grades, and
some of the Adepts are themselves the chelas of higher Adepts...[they
are those who have] devoted himself or herself to the service of mankind
and the pursuit of knowledge of the Self...[Some] have gained through
knowledge and discipline those powers over mind, matter, space, and time
which to us are the glittering prizes of the future...So much being laid
down, we may next ask how we are to look at H.P.B..

But taking her own sayings, she was a chela or disciple of the Masters,
and therefore stood in relation to them as one who might be chided or
corrected or reproved. She called them her Masters, and asseverated a
devotion to their behests and a respect and confidence in and for their
utterances which the chelas has always for one who is high enough to be
his Master.

But looking at her powers exhibited to the world, and as to which one of
her Masters wrote that they had puzzled and astonished the brightest
minds of the age, we see that compared with ourselves she was an
Adept...are in fact some of the great Rishis and Sages of the past, and
people have been too much in the habit of lowering them to the petty
standard of this age." But with this reverence for her teachers she had
for them at the same time a love and friendship not often found on
earth. All this indicates her chelaship to Them, but in no way lowers
her to us or warrants us in deciding that we are right in a hurried or
modern judgment of her.

Now some Theosophist ask if there are other letters extant from her
Masters in which she is called to account, is called their chela, and is
chided now and then, besides those published. Perhaps yes. And what of
it ? Let them be published by all means, and let us have the full and
complete record of all letters sent during her life; those put forward
as dated after her death will count for naught...since the Masters do
not indulge in any criticisms on the disciples who have gone from earth.
As she has herself published letters and parts of letters from the
Masters to her in which she is called a chela and is chided, it
certainly matte if we know of others of the same sort.

For over against all such we have common sense, and also the
declarations of her Masters that she was the sole instrument possible
for the work to be done, that They sent her to do it, and that They
approved in general all she did. And she was the first direct channel to
and from the Lodge, and the only one to date through which came the
objective presence of the Adepts. 

We cannot ignore the messenger, take the message, and laugh at or give
scorn to the one who brought it to us. There is nothing new in the idea
that letters are still unpublished wherein the Masters put her below
them, and there is no cause for any apprehension. But it certainly is
true that not a single such letter has anything in it putting her below
us; she must ever remain the greatest of the chelas...

There only remains...the position taken by some and without a knowledge
of the rules governing these matters, that chelas sometimes write
messages claimed to be from the Masters when they are not. this is an
artificial position not supportable by law or rule. 

It is due to ignorance of what is and is not chelaship, and also to
confusion between grades in discipleship. It has been used as to H.P.B.
The false conclusion has first been made that an accepted chela of high
grade may become accustomed to dictation by the Master and then may fall
into the false pretense of giving something from himself and pretending
it is from the Master. It is impossible. The bond in her case was not
of such a character to be dealt with thus. One instance of it would
destroy the possibility of any more communication from the teacher. It
may be quite true that probationers now and then have imagined
themselves as ordered to say so and so, but that is not the case of an
accepted and high chela who is irrevocably pledged...This idea, then,
ought to be abandoned; it is absurd, contrary to law, to rule, and to
what must be the case when such relations are established as existed
between H.P.B. and her Masters."	[W. Q. Judge --
"Masters, Adepts, Teachers and Disciples" ]


A fragment concerning her life and relations with the THEOSOPHICAL
SOCIETY reads:


".....in 1875, in New York, she started the Theosophical Society, aided
by Col. H. S. Olcott and others, declaring its objects to be the making
of a nucleus for a universal brotherhood, the study of ancient and other
religions and sciences, and the investigation of the psychical and
recondite laws affecting man and nature. 

There certainly was no selfish object in this, nor any desire to raise
money. She was in receipt of funds from sources in Russia and other
places until they were cut off by reason of her becoming an American
citizen, and also because her unremunerated labors for the society
prevented her doing literary work on Russian magazines, where all her
writings would be taken eagerly. 

As soon as the Theosophical Society was started she said to the writer
that a book had to be written for its use. Isis Unveiled was then begun,
and unremittingly she worked at it night and day until the moment when a
publisher was secured for it.

Meanwhile crowds of visitors were constantly calling at her rooms in
Irving Place, later in Thirty-fourth street, and last in Forty-seventh
street and Eighth avenue. The newspapers were full of her supposed
powers or of laughter at the possibilities in man that she and her
society asserted. 

A prominent New York daily wrote of her thus:

"A woman of as remarkable characteristics as Cagliostro himself, and one
who is every day as differently judged by different people as the
renowned Count was in his day. By those who know her slightly she is
called a charlatan; better acquaintance made you think she was learned;
and those who were intimate with her were either carried away with
belief in her power or completely puzzled." 

ISIS UNVEILED attracted wide attention, and all the New York papers
reviewed it, each saying that it exhibited immense research. 

The strange part of this is, as I and many others can testify as
eyewitnesses to the production of the book, that the writer had no
library in which to make researches and possessed no notes of
investigation or reading previously done. 

All was written straight out of hand. And yet it is full of references
to books in the British Museum and other great libraries, and every
reference is correct. Either, then, we have, as to that book, a woman
who was capable of storing in her memory a mass of facts, dates,
numbers, titles, and subjects such as no other human being ever was
capable of, or her claim to help from unseen beings is just.

In 1878, ISIS UNVEILED having been published, Mme. Blavatsky informed
her friends that she must go to India and start there the same movement
of the Theosophical Society. 

So in December of that year she and Col. Olcott and two more went out to
India, stopping at London for a while. Arriving in Bombay, they found
three or four Hindoos to meet them who had heard from afar of the
matter. A place was hired in the native part of the town, and soon she
and Col. Olcott started the THEOSOPHIST, a magazine that became at once
well known there and was widely bought in the West.

There in Bombay and later in Adyar, Madras, Mme. Blavatsky worked day
after day in all seasons, editing her magazine and carrying on an
immense correspondence with people in every part of the world interested
in theosophy, and also daily disputing and discussing with learned
Hindoos who constantly called. 

Phenomena occurred there also very often, and later the society for
discovering nothing about the psychic world investigated these, and came
to the conclusion that this woman of no fortune, who was never before
publicly heard of in India, had managed, in some way they could not
explain, to get up a vast conspiracy that ramified all over India,
including men of all ranks, by means of which she was enabled to produce
pretended phenomena. 

I give this conclusion as one adopted by many. For any one who knew her
and who knows India, with its hundreds of different languages, none of
which she knew, the conclusion is absurd. The Hindoos believed in her,
said always that she could explain to them their own scriptures and
philosophies where the Brahmins had lost or concealed the key, and that
by her efforts and the work of the society founded through her, India's
young men were being saved from the blank materialism which is the only
religion the West can ever give a Hindoo.

In 1887 Mme. Blavatsky returned to England, and there started another
theosophical magazine, called LUCIFER, and immediately stirred up the
movement in Europe. 

Day and night there, as in New York and India, she wrote and spoke,
incessantly corresponding with people everywhere, editing LUCIFER, and
making more books for her beloved society, and never possessed of means,
never getting from the world at large anything save abuse wholly
undeserved. 

THE KEY TO THEOSOPHY was written in London, and also THE SECRET
DOCTRINE, which is the great text book for Theosophists. 

THE VOICE OF THE SILENCE was written there too, and is meant for
devotional Theosophists. 

Writing, writing, writing from morn till night was her fate here. Yet,
although scandalized and abused here as elsewhere, she made many devoted
friends, for there never was anything half way in her history. Those who
met her or heard of her were always either staunch friends or bitter
enemies.

THE SECRET DOCTRINE led to the coming into the society of Mrs. Annie
Besant, and then Mme. Blavatsky began to say that her labors were coming
to an end, for here was a woman who had the courage of the ancient
reformers and who would help carry on the movement in England
unflinchingly. The Secret Doctrine was sent to Mr. Stead of the Pall
Mall Gazette to review, but none of his usual reviewers felt equal to it
and he asked Mrs. Besant if she could review it. She accepted the task,
reviewed, and then wanted an introduction to the writer. Soon after that
she joined the society, first fully investigating Mme. Blavatsky's
character, and threw in her entire forces with the Theosophists. Then a
permanent London headquarters was started and still exists. And there
Mme. Blavatsky passed away, with the knowledge that the society she had
striven so hard for at any cost was at last an entity able to struggle
for itself.

In her dying moment she showed that her life had been spent for an idea,
with full consciousness that in the eyes of the world it was Utopian,
but in her own necessary for the race. 

She implored her friends not to allow her then ending incarnation to
become a failure by the failure of the movement started and carried on
with so much of suffering. 

She never in all her life made money or asked for it. Venal writers and
spiteful men and women have said she strove to get money from so-called
dupes, but all her intimate friends know that over and over again she
has refused money; that always she has had friends who would give her
all they had if she would take it, but she never took any nor asked it.
On the other hand, her philosophy and her high ideals have caused others
to try to help all those in need. Impelled by such incentive, one rich
Theosophist gave her $5,000 to found a working girls' club at Bow, in
London, and one day, after Mrs. Besant had made the arrangements for the
house and the rest, Mme. Blavatsky, although sick and old, went down
there herself and opened the club in the name of the society.

The aim and object of her life were to strike off the shackles forged by
priestcraft for the mind of man. 

She wished all men to know that they are God in fact, and that as men
they must bear the burden of their own sins, for no one else can do it. 

Hence she brought forward to the West the old Eastern doctrines of karma
and reincarnation. 

Under the first, the law of justice, she said each must answer for
himself, and under the second make answer on the earth where all his
acts were done. 

She also desired that science should be brought back to the true ground
where life and intelligence are admitted to be within and acting on and
through every atom in the universe. Hence her object was to make
religion scientific and science religious, so that the dogmatism of each
might disappear.

Her life since 1875 was spent in the unremitting endeavor to draw within
the Theosophical Society those who could work unselfishly to propagate
an ethics and philosophy tending to realize the brotherhood of man by
showing the real unity and essential non-separateness of every being.
And her books were written with the declared object of furnishing the
material for intellectual and scientific progress on those lines. 

The theory of man's origin, powers, and destiny brought forward by her,
drawn from ancient Indian sources, places us upon a higher pedestal that
that given by either religion or science, for it gives to each the
possibility of developing the godlike powers within and of at last
becoming a co-worker with nature.

As every one must die at last, we will not say that her demise was a
loss; but if she had not lived and done what she did humanity would not
have had the impulse and the ideas toward the good which it was her
mission to give and to proclaim. And there are today scores, nay,
hundreds, of devout, earnest men and women intent on purifying their own
lives and sweetening the lives of others, who trace their hopes and
aspirations to the wisdom-religion revived in the West through her
efforts, and who gratefully avow that their dearest possessions are the
result of her toilsome and self-sacrificing life. If they, in turn, live
aright and do good, they will be but illustrating the doctrine which she
daily taught and hourly practised.
[ by WILLIAM Q. JUDGE]

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