Theos-Talk Archives (February 2005 Message tt00042)

Re: Steve Stubbs: "Damodar....was writing some of the mahama 
letters...."

Steve,

You wrote:

===========================================
Blavatsky said that the mahatmas did not
write the mahatma letters and that they
were written by "chelas" (using the plural
to show that there were more than one but not
naming them.) It is apparent that Blavatsky
herself was one of the "chelas" and Hodgson
identified Damodar as the other one. That
this is true can be seen from the Shannon
letter in which Blavatsky is identified as
the only chela since 1885, which was the year
Damodar left the theosophical scene. I don't
see how any reasonable person can examine
all the evidence and deny the truth. One would
have to be a fundamentalist to do that.
=============================================

It would be interesting to see what particular
statements by Blavatsky you have in mind.

But readers should remember that when
Blavatsky says chelas wrote the letters, one
should ask exactly what is meant by "writing
the letter."

There are numerous instances where the testimony
is that the physical writing on the physical
paper was not put on the paper by physically
writing with pen or pencil but "materialized
or precipitated." Now you may contend that
this is not possible or is only a "fundamentalist"
point of view but I simply cite the testimony
as given. Even Blavatsky testifies to this mode
of "writing". Of course, this time you may NOT
choose to take her word at face value.

Judge wrote:

==================================================
I was one day, about four o'clock, reading a book by P. B. Randolph,
that had just been brought in by a friend of Colonel Olcott. I was
sitting some six feet distant from H. P. Blavatsky, who was busy
writing. I had carefully read the title-page of the book, but had
forgotten the exact title. But I knew that there was not one word of
writing upon it. As I began to read the first paragraph, I heard a
bell sound in the air, and looking, saw that Mme. Blavatsky was
intently regarding me.

"'What book do you read?" said she.

Turning back to the title-page, I was about to read aloud the name,
when my eye was arrested by a message written in ink across the top
of the page which, a few minutes before, I had looked at, and found
clear. It was a message in about seven lines, and the fluid had not
yet quite dried on the page - its contents were a warning about the
book. I am positive that when I took the volume in my hand not one
word was written in it.
=================================================

Notice the ink "was not yet quite dried on the page."

In Old Diary Leaves (I, 40-42), Henry Olcott writes about
the following phenomenon performed in 1875:

=====================================================

An experiment [was] made by HPB, with myself
as a passive agent after my coming to her house
in Philadelphia. She was tipping tables for me,
with and without the contact between her hands
and the table, making loud and tiny raps—sometimes
while holding her hand six inches above the
wood and sometimes while resting her hand upon
mine as it lay flat upon the table—and spelling
out messages to me from the pretended John King,
which, as rapped out by the alphabet, I recorded
on scraps of paper. At last some of these messages
relating to third parties seemed worth keeping, so
one day, on my way home, I bought a reporter's
notebook, and, on getting to the house, showed it
to her and explained its intended use. She was
seated at the time and I standing. Without touching
the book or making any mystical pass or sign, she
told me to put it in my bosom. I did so, and after a moment's pause
she bade me take it out and look within. This is what I found inside
the first cover, written and drawn on the white lining paper in lead
pencil:

JOHN KING,
HENRY DE MORGAN,
his book.
4th of the Fourth month in A.D. 1875.

Underneath this, the drawing of a Rosicrucian jewel; over the arch of
the jeweled crown, the word FATE; beneath which is her name, "Helen,"
followed by what looks like 99, something smudged out, and then a
simple + [etc.]. I have the book on my table as I write, and my
description is taken from the drawing itself. One striking feature of
this example of psycho-dynamics is the fact that no one but myself
had touched the book after it was purchased; I had had it in my
pocket until it was shown to HPB, from the distance of two or three
feet, had myself held it in my bosom, removed it a moment later when
bidden, and the precipitation of the lead-pencil writing and drawing
had been done while the book was inside my waistcoat. Now the writing
inside the cover of the book is very peculiar. It is a quaint and
quite individual handwriting, not like HPB's, but identical with that
in all the written messages I had from first to last from "John
King." HPB having, then, the power of precipitation, must have
transferred from her mind to the paper the images of words traced in
this special style of script; or, if not she, but some other expert
in this art did it, then that other person must have done it in that
same way—i.e., have first pictured to himself mentally the images
of those words and that drawing, and then precipitated, that is, made
them visible on the paper, as though written with a lead pencil.

=========================================================

A. P. Sinnett wrote:

============================================

October 20, 1880, Simla, India, OCCULT WORLD, 108–113

Accompanied by our guests [Madame Blavatsky, Colonel Olcott, and
Alice Gordon], we went to have lunch one day on the top of a
neighboring hill. The night before, I had had reason to think that my
correspondent, Koot Hoomi, had been in what I may call subjective
communication with me. After discussing the subject in the morning, I
found on the hall table a note from Koot Hoomi, in which he promised
to give me something on the hill which should be a token of his
(astral) presence near me the previous night.

We went to our destination, camped down on the top of the hill, and
were engaged on our lunch, when Madame Blavatsky said Koot Hoomi was
asking where we would like to find the object he was going to send
me. Up to this momentthere had been no conversation in regard to the
phenomenon I was expecting. The usual suggestion will, perhaps, be
made that Madame Blavatsky "led up" to the choice I actually made.
The fact of the matter was simply that in the midst of altogether
other talk Madame Blavatsky pricked up her ears on hearing her occult
voice—at once told me what was the question asked, anddid not
contribute to the selection made by one single remark on the subject.
In fact, there was no general discussion, and it was by an absolutely
spontaneous choice of my own that I said, after a little
reflection, "insidethat cushion," pointing to one against which one
of the ladies present wasleaning. I had no sooner uttered the words
than my wife cried out, "Oh no,let it be inside mine,"
or words to that effect. I said, "Very well, inside my wife's
cushion"; Madame Blavatsky asked the Mahatma by her own methods if
that would do, and received an affirmative reply. My liberty of
choice as regards the place where the object should be found was thus
absolute and unfettered by conditions. The most natural choice for me
to have made under the circumstances, andhaving regard to our
previous experiences, would have been up some particular tree, or
buried in a particular spot of the ground; but the inside of asewn-up
cushion, fortuitously chosen on the spur of a moment, struck me, as
my eye happened to fall upon the cushion I mentioned first, as a
particularly good place; and when I had started the idea of a
cushion, my wife's amendment to the original proposal was really
an
improvement, for the particular cushion then selected had never been
for a moment out of her own possession all the morning. It was her
usual jampan cushion; she had been leaning against it all the way
from home, and leaning against it still, as her jampan had been
carried right up to the top of the hill, and she had continued to
occupy it. The cushion itself was very firmly made of worsted work
and velvet, and had been inour possession for years. It always
remained, when we were at home, in thedrawing room, in a conspicuous
corner of a certain sofa, whence, when my wife went out, it would be
taken to her jampan and again brought in on her return.

When the cushion was agreed to, my wife was told to put it under her
rug, and she did this with her own hands, inside her jampan. It may
have been there about a minute, when Madame Blavatsky said we could
set to work to cut it open. I did this with a penknife, and it was a
work of some time, as the cushion was very securely sewn all round,
and very strongly, so that it hadto be cut open almost stitch by
stitch, and no tearing was possible. When one side of the cover was
completely ripped up, we found that the feathers of the cushion were
enclosed in a separate inner case, also sewn round all the edges.
There was nothing to be found between the inner cushion and the outer
case; so we proceeded to rip up the inner cushion; and this done, my
wife searched among the feathers.

The first thing she found was a little three-cornered note, addressed
to mein the now familiar handwriting of my occult correspondent. It
ran as follows:
My "Dear Brother,"

This brooch No. 2—is placed in this very strange place simply to
show
to you how very easily a real phenomenon is produced and how still
easier it is to suspect its genuineness.

The difficulty you spoke of last night with respect to the
interchange of our letters I will try to remove. An address will be
sent to you which you can always use; unless, indeed, you really
would prefer corresponding through—pillows.

—Koot' Hoomi Lal Sing.

While I was reading this note, my wife discovered, by further search
among the feathers, the brooch referred to, one of her own, a very
old and very familiar brooch which she generally left on her dressing
table when it was not in use. The whole force and significance to us
of the brooch thus returned, hinged onto my subjective impressions of
the previous night. The reasonfor selecting the brooch as a thing to
give us dated no earlier than then.On the hypothesis, therefore, that
the cushion must have been got at by Madame Blavatsky, it must have
been got at since I spoke of my impressions that morning, shortly
after breakfast; but from the time of getting up that morning, Madame
Blavatsky had hardly been out of our sight, and had been sitting with
my wife in the drawing room. She had been doing this, by the by,
against the grain, for she had writing which she wanted to do in her
own room, but she had been told by her voices to go and sit in the
drawing room with my wife that
morning, and had done so, grumbling at the interruption of her work,
and wholly unable to discern any motive for the order. The motive was
afterwardsclear enough, and had reference to the intended phenomenon.
It was desirable that we should have no arriere pensee [after
thought, mental reservation, suspicion] in our minds as to what
Madame Blavatsky might possibly have been doing during the morning,
in the event of the incident taking such a turn as to make that a
factor in determining its genuineness. Of course, if the selection of
the pillow could have been foreseen, it would have been unnecessary
to victimize our "old Lady," as we generally called her. The presence
of the famous pillow itself, with my wife all the morning in the
drawing room, would have been enough. But perfect liberty of choice
was to be left to me in selecting a cache for the brooch; and the
pillow can have been in nobody's mind, any more than in my own,
beforehand.

---------------------------------

So who physically took pen in hand and wrote that note???

KH writes:

===============================================================

I have to think it over, to photograph every word and
sentence carefully in my brain before it can be repeated
by `precipitation.' As the fixing on chemically prepared
surfaces of the images formed by the camera requires a previous
arrangement within the focus of the object to be represented,
for otherwise––as often found in bad photographs—the legs of
the
sitter might appear out of all proportion with the head, and so on,
so we have to first arrange our sentences and impress every
letter to appear on paper in our minds before it becomes fit to be
read. KH in THE MAHATMA LETTERS

===========================================================


In H.P. Blavatsky's COLLECTED WRITINGS, we find the following:

==============================================================

"PRECIPITATION"

[The Theosophist, Vol. V, Nos. 3-4(51-52), December-January,
1883-1884, p. 64]

Of all phenomena produced by occult agency in connection
with our Society, none have been witnessed by a more extended
circle of spectators or more widely known and commented on through
recent Theosophical publications than the mysterious production of
letters. The phenomenon itself has been so well described
in The Occult World and elsewhere, that it would be useless
to repeat the description here. Our present purpose is more
connected with the process than the phenomenon of the mysterious
formation of letters....

...the Masters have been pleased to permit the veil to be
drawn aside a little more, and the modus operandi can thus
be explained now more fully to the outsider....

When the Master wants a letter to be written in this way,
he draws the attention of the chela, whom he selects for
the task, by causing an astral bell (heard by so many of our Fellows
and others) to be rung near him just as the despatching telegraph
office signals to the receiving office before wiring the message. The
thoughts arising in the mind of the Mahatma are then clothed in word,
pronounced mentally, and forced along the astral currents he sends
towards the pupil to impinge on the brain of the latter. Thence they
are borne by the nerve-currents to the palms of his hand and the tips
of his finger, which rest on a piece of magnetically prepared paper.
As the thought-waves are thus impressed on the tissue, materials are
drawn to it from the ocean of âkas (permeating every atom of the
sensuous universe), by an occult process, out of place here to
describe, and permanent marks are left.

===============================================================

Please reread the very last sentence:

=============================================================

As the thought-waves are thus impressed on the tissue, materials are
drawn to it from the ocean of âkas (permeating every atom of the
sensuous universe), by an occult process, out of place here to
describe, and permanent marks are left.

=================================================================

>From the Akas, materials are drawn and materialized to the physical
and PERMANENT MARKS are left on the paper.

And Master KH confirms the above in Letter No. 93(in the first three
editions of THE MAHATMA LETTERS) when he writes to Sinnett about

"the precipitation by the chela of the transferred
thought upon (or rather, INTO) paper."

Vernon Harrison observed this "INTO the paper" phenomenon
in his study of the Mahatma Letters available from Theosophical
University Press.

Mentioning the colors of the ink found in the letter, Koot
Hoomi further says that the colors are "drawn from that exhaustless
store-house of pigments (as of everything else) the Akasa."

Notice ALSO what K.H. writes about the precipitation process when he
refers to the

"process used by us when we write inside your closed letters and
uncut pages of books and pamphlets in transit." p. 263 in first
three editions of THE MAHATMA LETTERS.

More quotes from HPB and KH:

================================================================

. . . your last note. . . was received in my room about half a
minute after the [akasic] currents for the production of the pillow
dak had been set ready and in full play. KH

I have to burn the letter with a stone I have (matches and common
fire would never do), and the ashes caught by the current become more
minute than atoms would be, and are re-materialized at any distance
where Master was..... HPB

Think only (a case with Solovioff at Elberfeld) I sick
in my bed; a letter of his, an old letter of his received in
London and torn by me, rematerialised in my own sight,
I looking at the thing; five or six times in the Russian language,
in Mahatma K.H.'s handwriting in blue , the words taken from my head,
the letter old and crumpled travelling slowly alone (even I could not
see the astral hand of the chela performing the operation) across the
bedroom, then slipping into and among Solovioff's papers who was
writing in the little drawing-room, correcting my manuscripts;
Olcott standing closely by him and having just handled the papers
looking over them with Solovioff. The latter finding it,
and like I flash I see in his head in Russian the thought:
"The old impostor (meaning Olcott) must have put it there!".... HPB

Suppose a chela receives an order from his Master to precipitate a
letter....Paper and envelope are materialized before him, and he has
only to form and shape the ideas into his English and precipitate
them.
HPB

=================================================================

I could cite more sources but I hope this throws
additional light on the subject.

Daniel Caldwell
http://hpb.cc
http://theosophy.info