Blavatsky Archives is the link for these titles, most of them by the Founder Helena Blavatsky.

http://www.blavatskyarchives.com/articleshpbtheosophy.htm

This is the TS site, with most of the major (and many minor) Theosophical books & articles by Blavatsky, Judge, Tingley, de Purucker et al. Also writings of the Adept Brothers who were the inspiration for the TS are available.

http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/tup-onl.htm

To Light a Thousand Lamps, A Theosophic Vision by Grace Knoche is an excellent, short introduction to Theosophy. It is available online to purchase as a book or to read online.

To Light a Thousand Lamps

Here is a short text titled Elementary Theosophy:

http://www.theosophy-nw.org/theosnw/ktmanu...t-theos.htm#ch1

Another good short introduction, What is Theosophy? by Charles Ryan:

http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/gdpman...hp.htm#section1

And of course, HPB's own Key to Theosophy:

Key to Theosophy

A useful glossary of theosophical terms:

http://www.theosophy-nw.org/theosnw/ctg/ctg-hp.htm

A booklet, Echoes from the Orient, by William Quan Judge, one of the original founders of the TS.

http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/echoes/echoes-h.htm

His Ocean of Theosophy is still a good introduction to the teachings of HPB & her gurus.

Ocean of Theosophy

The Essence of H. P. Blavatsky's Message

We speak of rendering homage. There are various ways of so doing. There is the homage of words, and there is the homage of the heart which leads to emulation. The homage of words is good when the heart is behind it; but the homage imitating grand action is finer and higher still.

I think the best homage we can render to H. P. Blavatsky, outside of the words with which we express our deep gratitude, is by copying her, copying her life and her work for mankind: being as like unto the example she gave to us as it is possible for us to be. She indeed said the same in regard to her relation to her own teachers: they teach, I follow. My message is not my own, but of those who sent me.

In the theosophical world since her passing there has been no small amount of talk about the successors of H. P. B.; and all this has seemed to me to be so perfectly trivial, a trifling with words and with the most sacred instincts and impulses of the human heart. For every true theosophist is a successor of H. P. B. and should be glad of it and proud of it. We are all successors of H. P. B., every one of us without exception whatsoever. And the least is often the greatest amongst us. Here is a case where it is not conceit or arrogance but the impulse of a loving and grateful heart to come to the front and serve, and dedicate one's service to the cause which our teachers have served and which they still serve. What is grander than this? Actually it is the abdication, the rejection, of the low and the personal. It is the forgetting of the personal and the sinking of the self into the immensely greater self of the universe. When we forget ourselves, then something supremely grand is born in us; for the spiritual then, of which we humans are such feeble examples, has a chance to come forth in us, to speak and to work in and through us, because then it begins to find its channel in and through the human heart and mind.

It has always seemed to me that H. P. Blavatsky's great work was to ensoul men -- words which are profound and very meaningful; to give men and women a philosophy-religion-science which should so mightily persuade both mind and heart that they would come to realize that the universe is alive and conscious, and that we, her children, perforce and from that fact, are alive and conscious also, and are coeternal, coeval with the universe, from which we come, in which we live, and into the spiritual parts of which we shall again return.

When you get this simple thought in your heads and in your hearts so that it amounts to a conviction within, you are already becoming reensouled. The soul, nay rather, the spirit within you, is beginning to take command of you, and from that moment your lives will be changed. New and grand vistas will open to your vision, vistas which your intellect and your intuition will show you are realities, and you will begin to govern your life in accordance with the living, flaming thoughts that will thereafter make their shrine in your hearts. You will begin then really to live. You will no longer be what Pythagoras called the "living dead" -- those alive in their bodies and relatively unconscious in their souls. You will then actually be imbodied souls.

This to me has always been one of the loftiest and most beautiful parts of H. P. Blavatsky's work that she came to inaugurate: to ensoul men so that they might live anew with the vision glorious and with eternal hope.

No man will act against the dominating impulse within him. Let him change that dominating impulse from self-seeking interests to altruistic service for all, and life will take on a grandeur that up to that moment he had never seen or understood. Such a man is becoming truly ensouled. He sees the reason for his life. He sees the reason for the universe around him. He sees the reason for his own thoughts. He understands causal relations and effectual consequences. He sees vast and utterly grandiose visions opening before his mind's eye; and he knows that all he has to do in order to attain still greater vistas, and to be of greater service, is to put the strength of his intellect in these intuitions and lofty feelings, center his power of action upon them and thus grow in ever enlarging stages of inner grandeur and inner understanding. His life will then have changed because he will have changed. He will have been awakened; and he will then so rule his life and coordinate it to the life of the universe around him and to the lives of his fellow human beings, that universal brotherhood will be his first instinct and the controlling impulse in both his thought and action. This to me is the essence of the message of H. P. Blavatsky.

By Gd Purucker, from his Wind of the Spirit:

http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/wind/ws-hp.htm

The ULT discussion group always emphasizes that we are pilgrims on the Path. I feel this fits the idea of "becoming ensouled".

The idea of the "living dead" is also a fascinating concept.

Here is an excellent overview, with many links, by the late Geoffrey Farthing:

http://blavatskyarchives.com/2scope.htm

The novelist Talbot Mundy became a Theosophist at Point Loma in the 1920's. Here is how Theosophy affected him:
================

A Beginner's Concept of Theosophy

By Talbot Mundy

(from The Theosophical Path May 1925)

I remember the occasion when I first began to learn to swim. There was a deep end and a shallow end. The deeper looked more satisfying, so I jumped in while the teacher was not looking. The indignity of having to be fished out was humiliating, but the worst part was the distaste that it gave me for the whole business of swimming, with the result that younger boys, who had approached the problem reasonably, left me far behind and it was several years before I began to acquire much confidence in the water or any genuine liking for it.

Then there was school. We studied Shakespeare in the English class; but not once, during four years of instruction, were we encouraged to enjoy the poet's plays or to appreciate their beauty. We were set to parsing and analysis, to definition of the obsolete and rare words, and to memorizing drily written footnotes -- with the consequence that poetry, particularly Shakespeare's poetry, became a synonym for drudgery. I believe I was thirty years old before it ever really occurred to me that poetry was something that a man might blend into his life and breathe into his efforts, thus ennobling any task he touched.

The simplest means opponents of Theosophy could use in order to delay and to obscure its message to humanity, would be to encourage all beginners to plunge into it heads foremost at the deeper end and swamp their intellects with Sanskrit definitions. If they could be kept thereafter struggling to possess Theosophy in a bewilderment of words, Theosophy would die out from beneath as certainly as poetry has vanished from the schools, since there would be no natural responsiveness in which the love of it could flourish.

Love is the life of the Ancient Wisdom, and unless we love it ardently -- unless it comforts and convinces by the flow of confidence outwelling from within -- we may be sure we are but grasping at, or arguing against, the printed word; its spirit has escaped us. We cannot absorb Theosophy like patent medicine, and the attempt to masticate it all and crowd it into one gray brain is madness. It is infinite, with no beginning and no end. It would be easier to swallow all earth's air and drink up all the rivers than to possess Theosophy, in the sense that we possess degrees from universities or stock certificates.

A hundred years before the birth of Christianity Shu Kuang wrote: "The genius of men who possess is stunted by possession. Wealth only aggravates the imbecility of fools." (From Gems of Chinese Literature, translated by H. A. Giles.) No wiser summary of the futility of all possession ever dripped from a satiric pen, and if the epigram were printed on the front page of all text-books and engraved on every dollar-bill in circulation there might be some hope of civilizing earth within a hundred years. It is an axiom for all beginners in Theosophy.

Meanwhile, we struggle to possess, beginners just as keenly as the older hands who have accumulated what are euphemistically termed resources. Public education is designed to cultivate a memory for facts, as if a crowded brain were an essential to living. And a number of us, having been so educated, try to 'cram' Theosophy as if we had to pass examinations in it and be judged according to an arbitrary scale of marks.

It is true indeed that we must pass examinations in it, but their incidence is hourly. We receive marks, and are judged. But the impersonal Judge, Karma, utterly ignores the feats of memory and all unproved claims, examining the progress of the heart's integrity as demonstrated by experience. Examination questions are the incidents of daily life. We act and react, do and leave undone, think and refuse to think, stand firm or are seduced, while Karma -- incorruptible and inescapable -- inscribes our spiritual progress on the rolls of destiny.

"The moving finger writes and, having writ, moves on."

I write as one who has but recently become a member of the Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society: that is, as a beginner, who had never seen a copy of The Secret Doctrine until about three years ago, nor ever read a copy of The Theosophical Path or any of the Theosophical Manuals until the magic of Blavatsky's pen stirred in me something deeper and more challenging than I had known was there and capable of being stirred. And I remember the bewilderment of all the knowledge crowded into her immortal book; and what thoughts first occurred to me when I had laughed a while (for there is humor in all logic, and the logic of the Law of Karma is complete).

For days on end I wrestled with the Sanskrit technicalities and tried to memorize them, caught in the enthusiasm of the universal theme but blinded by the habit of attributing all knowledge to the brain-mind. I would master this magnificent philosophy and make it mine! Then, failing to remember more than half-a-dozen Sanskrit words or to recall, for more than half-a-day, to which Root-race and Sub-race I belong, I scrambled out of that deep water and proposed to myself to try the shallow end. It looked, and was, much easier, but there was mystery enough.

I studied the significance of Karma, as applied to me, and found it not so easy or amusing as the thought of its retributive effect on others. There was too much justice in it. I began to be aware that there were incidents which, had I known of Karma at the time, might not have happened; and it irked me to discover that a more or less meticulous observance of convention during forty years or so, a reasonably decent reputation, and a habit of avoiding what is known as lawlessness, were not masks that could affect the final outcome. Theoretically, having had parents who hired somebody to teach me morals, I had never quite forgotten the necessity to play safe with a watchful Providence; but there was something in the Catechism I remembered about the forgiveness of sins, and it came as something of a shock to realize that all that I had done, for good or evil, must produce inevitable consequences, for me or against me, as the case might be.

I daresay all beginners, when they think a while, face that predicament.

It seemed, to state it mildly, not quite just that a man should have to face the consequences of an act he did in ignorance of the Law of Retribution. Nevertheless, exactly like a landlord pocketing his rents, I felt the justice of receiving compensation for investments on the side of virtue, whether made in this life and in ignorance of Karma, or in past lives utterly forgotten. We enjoy our income. It is outgo that obliges us to think.

Reincarnation, logical though it might be, began to lose that roseate, romantic lure that first appealed to my inquiring mind. I started there and then to reconsider it, and much more critically.

But that was where a little understanding entered in. I had been looking forward to possess Theosophy -- to make of it a tool with which to tickle self-esteem and cut a nice wide swath along contenting aeons of eternity. The first glimpse makes the brain reel! It was the humor of my own imagination that upset that view of things. Some spark of Theosophical illumination made me wonder just how long the universe would last if each of us might manage his own destiny unguided by experience and by Intelligences higher than our own?

That thought began to lead me somewhere. Who, or what, is this that shall be guided by experience? Our bodies? Possibly, to some extent; but the experience of past lives hardly could be said to educate a body that developed from an embryo in this one; neither could a body destined to be burned to ashes be supposed to have much influence on future lives. Though atoms, or the subdivisions of which atoms are composed, are indestructible; and though our bodies are an aggregate of atoms, purposely assembled in accordance with a law beyond our comprehension; though the atoms so assembled undergo a change and are dispersed for other uses -- so that you, or I, or anyone may have the dust of Alexander in our veins and Caesar's clay may stop a bung-hole; nevertheless, the education of those atoms comes a long way short of answering the riddle of the universe.

The brain? Another congeries of atoms, grouped within a section of a skull and destined to disperse at death. The brain of Socrates, of Plato, and of Shakespeare was returned into the common storehouse of disintegrated matter when the change took place that we call death. And unimaginable though it may be that the particles of matter they employed to clothe their bones were not affected by the thinking that they did, and not enriched by the association, none the less those scattered particles are not, and never can have been, the man.

Who is the man? What is he? We all identify ourselves with blood and bones, and we undoubtedly provide our blood and bones with mixed experience. The most conservative of scientists admit that evolution seems to be a fact in nature, and that all things are in process of becoming something else. The brain-chambers of skulls discovered in the prehistoric drifts are differently shaped from those we humans use today, which would suggest, at any rate, that men knew other limitations than our own when those skulls had employment. Yet, the owners of the skulls could think -- if not exactly as we think, still thoughtfully and to a purpose.

Has all the thinking that they did died with them? Were the atoms of their vanished flesh the only beneficiaries of the lives they lived? Who were they? Is this all of them, or even the important part of them, that lies in a museum-case or in the gravel of a prehistoric river-bed?

Theosophy does not withhold the answer, though the brain-mind may reject it and keep on rejecting it, until it has exhausted all the arguments of habit, all its prejudices, and the stored-up miscellany of remembered speciocity acquired at second-hand.

The brain-mind clings to what it thinks it knows, and dreads enlightenment. I know mine did, and does, and I believe myself not different, except in relatively unimportant details, from the rank and file of ordinary men. As we identify ourselves with flesh and blood, that flesh and blood in turn identifies itself with us and it grows very difficult, in consequence, at times to differentiate. But surely it is evident, that if we are that flesh and blood and bone and brain that, at our death, is buried and decays, then there is not much hope for us as individuals and such experiences as we suffer or enjoy can be, at best, a school for atoms.

And we know, though we are clothed in atoms , that ourselves are something vastly more. The very atheist, who says he disbelieves in anything but what his senses indicate, himself is proof upstanding of Intelligence so subtil and pervading that the atoms he assures us are himself took shape and grew into the thing he thinks he is.

Theosophy unfolds to us two natures, spiritual and material, the one immortal and the other governed by the alternating law of life and death. That stuff that we discard, and that they burn or bury (brain and all), when we have "shuffled off this mortal coil," has been subjected to the alchemy of use and we have changed its nature -- possibly not much, but we have changed it for the better or the worse. Who then are we?

It dawns after a while; and all the words in all the bibles and the dictionaries ever written lack ability to tell the wonder of it when it wakes into the consciousness. That knowledge comes to us in silence, though the world may yell with passion, and there rises in us from within a dignity beyond all measure -- hope that is whole and deathless -- an illimitable patience -- and, like gentle rain on dry earth, the assurance of our own essential divinity.

Then, actually for the first time, we begin to understand the teachings of Blavatsky and appreciate why, with the alternative of wealth at her disposal, she preferred a life of hardship and the task of bringing the Masters' message of the Ancient Wisdom to humanity.

To understand that message is impossible, unless we do as she did: that is, let the lures of selfish ambition go. The love of reputation and of easy short cuts to a brain-mind Utopia, just as surely as resentment of injustice, and as subtilly as contempt for others' seemingly less spiritual efforts, lead astray.

There must be thousands who have read The Secret Doctrine and have leaped to the conclusion that the simplest, surest way to follow in its author's footsteps is to make the desperately toilsome journey into Tibet and there learn the doctrines from the Great Teachers, just as she did. There are some who have rejected the whole teaching of Theosophy because, to them, that journey is impossible. And there are others who, for other reasons, have assailed the mountain-passes and by dint of almost superhuman energy have reached what maps declare to be the heart of the forbidden land and then, returning, have announced in lectures and on printed page that Tibet is the home of superstition, so engrossed in ritual and devil-worship as to harbor no conceivable philosophy worth study.

Notwithstanding which, there is no doubt even in the minds of her most prejudiced accusers, who, for the sake of organized opinions that are tottering, and for their own emoluments that must cease when the world wakes up and thinks, would leap at another chance to vilify her -- there is no doubt, even in the minds of those men, who have done their utmost to destroy her and her work, that H. P. Blavatsky did receive her teaching in the land, so inaccessible, that lies beyond the Himalayan range.

There lies exposed the inconsistence of human argument. The man who fights his way against the wind and snow across the passes into Tibet may be -- we may say undoubtedly he is -- a marvel of endurance. He may be a good geographer, a linguist, an intelligent observer of barometers, and an exact recorder of the things he sees. But he is no more likely to unearth Tibetan secrets, or to recognise a Master if he met one face to face, than is a memorizer of The Secret Doctrine likely to become a true Theosophist without, in every deed of daily life, expressing -- living -- what he learns.

It will be time enough to meet the Great Teachers when we know enough to make it possible to understand them; and there is no way of attaining to that state except by putting into practice daily, hourly, and with vigilance, such rudiments of wisdom as we now know, taught to us in elementary Theosophy. It is not book-learning only, it is deed-doing, that establishes Theosophy in human hearts. And no deed may be measured by the clamor that it makes, or by the number of the men who see it done, or by the market-price of its immediate result. Dimensions, weight, and price all vanish in the scales of Karma, leaving nothing to be judged but quality.

The consciousness of our essential divinity includes a sense of the indignity of work not nobly done, no matter what the work is. There are no ranks in Theosophy, and no soft sinecures; who works well finds more work to do; our Leader is the busiest of us all.

Now, as I said before, I write as a beginner, with the first impressions of Theosophy still easily remembered. I am sure of this: that we are all beginners, always. If we vigilantly guard ourselves against the idiotic thought that we are separate from others, favored more than others, capable of being or becoming greater than others; if we keep in mind that any virtue, any knowledge that we have, however individual it may seem to ourselves, is something we receive in trust for others' use and cannot be of benefit to us until we use it in behalf of others; and if, above all, we refuse to be deluded by the dream of occult powers that shall make us privileged magicians with authority to govern others by expedients unknown to them: then I am confident that each advancing step of spiritual evolution will reveal to us horizons that expand precisely in proportion to our merit, and the more we know from having done, not talked, the more there will appear for us to learn. And there is only one school actual experience.

Thus the apparent paradox resolves itself into a plain fact: personality -- the flesh and bones and intellect in which we temporarily appear on life's stage is, of itself, the least important part of us, being hardly more than mask and buskins; yet, that personality is all important in the sense that we must govern it, and that by our use or misuse of it we are judged.

New dignity is thrust on us the moment we begin to let Theosophy emerge into our minds. As we identify ourselves with what is spiritual in us -- with the incarnating ego, rather than with that in which it clothes itself for one appearance on the stage of evolution -- we assume responsibility and are ennobled. No more whining at the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune"! No more crawling on our knees to an imagined God to beg for favors or implore forgiveness! The remission of our sins becomes our own affair! We wipe them out, henceforth, by standing up and facing consequences, proving, by the way we meet those consequences, that a portion of life's lesson has been learned.

So, less and ever less resentment; less unwillingness to bear our own blame for our own shortcomings. More sympathy for others (since we know the sting of criticism); greater, and forever greater tolerance. No more regret than is enough to help us recognise our own remissness; courage then, and faith, and hope, with now and then a little laughter at our own mistakes (since humor is the music of enlightenment).

The means of the pursuit of happiness is changed. Wealth, fame, amusement, appetite, by gradual, unnoticed stages lose their charm, and boredom ceases because minutes become laden with new interest, new views of life. Reviving energy attacks life's problems in a new direction. Poetry and music -- all the arts -- assume new values; and the knowledge that the quality of work done is the measure of its value elevates into an art the very sweeping of a work-room floor.

The grandeur that Theosophy reveals is like the sunrise. Shadows fade, and change, and cease, until a golden light gleams on a world worth working in. And at our feet -- exactly at our feet -- the Path lies, leading straight ahead. There is no need to look too far ahead. Each step rich with opportunity to think thoughts and to do deeds that shall lessen the sum total of earth's agony and add to the increasing harmony of nature.

Silence is the best way to learn courage of conviction. It is easy to bewilder the beginner with confusing argument. Debate is best avoided. But I know this: once Theosophy has dawned into the consciousness, although a man's own weakness may betray him into lapses from the Path, and though he wreck himself beyond recovery in one earth-life; though cowardice should cause him to deny his faith, and death should find him neither brave nor ready, nothing -- "neither death nor life nor angels, nor principalities nor powers" can deprive him of the knowledge that he has another chance awaiting him, and that the sins of this life may be faced again, and overcome, and used as stepping-stones to progress in the lives that follow.

There is nothing purposeless, nor any set of circumstances that cannot be turned into enlightening experience. And death, that most religions have regarded as an enemy to be endured with dread, to the Theosophist becomes the friend that draws the curtain after one act of life's royal drama, while we rest a while in preparation for the next.

Once again pointing you all to my own website, where I have a section with introductory articles on theosophy: introduction to theosophy http://www.katinkahesselink.net/other/intro.htm

Article in The Theosophist of December 1994

THEOSOPHY DEFINED
by Geoffrey A. Farthing

Can Theosophy be defined?

For answer, let us hear the words of H.P. Blavatsky, the chosen instrument of Adept Instructors for the restoration of the Wisdom tradition to the western world.

At the formation of the Theosophical Society in 1875, no mention was made of Theosophy in its Constitution, and the aim of the Society was expressed simply as ‘to collect and diffuse a knowledge of the laws which govern the universe’. In 1878 a fuller statement of the Society’s Objects included the first mention of a Brotherhood of Humanity, the establishment of which was clearly the intention of the Mahatmas, according to their repeated statements in the Letters. However, no official document from the Society’s founders or later administrators has yet attempted to define Theosophy.

The first exposition of theosophical ideas came with the publication in 1877 of the two volumes of Isis Unveiled. This vast compilation, whose production engaged the assistance of six or more of H.P.B.’s Teachers, includes references to some thirteen hundred other works. It explores the esoteric or occult side of the world’s religions, philosophies and fields of scientific knowledge. Indeed, according to its Dedication, such exploration was the purpose of the Society’s formation two years earlier. As yet, however, the name of Theosophy had not been applied to ‘the fundamental principles of a the oriental philosophy’ summarised in the final chapter of the work.

Since the middle years of the nineteenth century, interest in spiritualism had spread rapidly, and now H.P.B. was presenting explanations of phenomena from the occult point of view which were quite at variance with the then accepted ideas. By the time the founders arrived in India, misconceptions about the nature of Theosophy were already so prevalent that ‘a journal devoted to an exposition of the world’s Theosophy’ had become a necessity (C.W. II, pp 87 et seq.) The Theosophist was launched in October 1879. In its first issue, H.P.B. expressly addresses the question ‘What is Theosophy?’ Here, after referring to various esoteric systems in which, before the Christian era, the theosophical principles were taught in Egypt, India and Greece, she introduces several definitions, elaborating them to show the doctrines they embraced:

And in a later article in The Theosophist, she insists:

The conditions under which ‘the great Knowledge’ - as the Mahatma K.H. calls it - was acquired and transmitted are clearly stated in a long article on ‘Theosophy and Spiritism’ published in the Société Scientifique d’Études Psychologiques in Paris. Referring to the difference between the knowledge of an Initiate or Adept and that obtained from ‘spirits’ at séances, H.P.B. asserts that the Initiates have the great advantage of not needing to avail themselves of ‘discarnate spirits or their “shells”’. For the Adepts, she says,

.

In 1880 there had begun the exchange of letters between the English journalist A.P. Sinnett and A.O. Hume, a senior government official, and the two Mahatmas known by the initials K.H. and M. The correspondence, which was to last for four years in the case of Sinnett but for only one year with his friend, developed from questions by the two Englishmen on different aspects of the occult philosophy. From the answers he received, Sinnett put together, in The Occult World, an account of the phenomena that surrounded H.P.B. in the early years of the Society, together with an initial outline of the theosophical system. Then in Esoteric Buddhism he presented a fuller account of the teachings he had received in the letters of the Mahatmas.

Meanwhile, through articles in The Theosophist and other magazines, H.P.B. was continuing to elucidate the teachings embraced by the term Theosophy. She calls attention to the ethical preparation that alone can fit one to approach its eternal verities, for ‘purity of deed and thought can alone raise us to an intercourse “with the gods” and attain for us the goal we desire.’ (Collected Writings of H.P.Blavatsky, Volume II, page 96) The widespread confusion that associated Theosophy with sectarian religion aroused her vigorous protest and led her once more to attempt a definition. In a long article in Lucifer in 1888, under the title ‘Is Theosophy a Religion?’, she explores the meaning of both words:

When this article appeared, The Secret Doctrine had just been published. In its Introductory section, we find some twenty or so terms used as synonymous with Theosophy. These include the term used as the title of H.P.B.’s great work itself - the Secret Doctrine - and such others as the Wisdom-Religion, Archaic Science, Occult Philosophy and a dozen more. The sub-title of the work, ‘The Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy’, shows clearly how she identified Theosophy with the Secret Doctrine as doctrine, that is, as a distinctive body of teaching, as is further borne out in the text: ‘The Secret Doctrine teaches ...’, ‘Esoteric Philosophy teaches ...’, ‘The Doctrine teaches ..’, ‘The Occultists assert that ...’

In the Summing Up at the end of the first part of The Secret Doctrine, she informs the reader that

The grand definition that follows repeats with important additions the assertions made in the French article quoted above concerning the conditions under which the Adepts acquired their knowledge:

It was to study and disseminate these teachings that the Theosophical Society was founded. That is how H.P.B. saw its purpose when she dedicated the volumes of Isis Unveiled

To the Theosophical Society to study the subjects on which they treat.

A similar view is expressed in her last work, The Key to Theosophy, where she says that the Society

Throughout this exploration of the question ‘Can Theosophy be defined?, the attentive reader will have noted not only H.P.B.’s several definitions but also her use of such words as knowledge, wisdom, science, doctrine, which must preclude as untenable the unfortunately widespread misconception, even within the Theosophical Society, that Theosophy cannot be defined or that it is more or less what one likes to think it is, a matter for speculation, belief or personal opinion. Our study shows that the eternal verities embraced in the word Theosophy relate to the origins of everything, including ourselves, the cyclic law observable in the operations of Nature, the occult constitution of man and the cosmos and consequently the facts concerning death and the future evolution of mankind.

The student who discovers something of what Theosophy is may recognize that it must include all that is in the Society’s Objects. He may even see the desirability of adding a Fourth Object.,

To encourage the study of Theosophy and to disseminate a knowledge of it throughout the world.

After all, is not this implied in H.P.B.’s Dedication to The Key to Theosophy?

From Blavatsky Net:

Checklist of Some Principles of Theosophy

ANCIENT WISDOM knew - and continues to know - deep and vast knowledge about ourselves, our purpose in life, nature, the universe, the highest god-like principles, and man's long pre-history on this earth. Theosophy is the portion of that ancient knowledge brought to us by H. P. Blavatsky toward the end of the 19th century, as taught to her by her Teachers in Tibet.

Some of its principles are:

Everything in the universe originates from one boundless, eternal, unknowable source. After a period of manifested existence the universe returns to that source.
The universe itself is an organic whole, alive, intelligent, conscious, and divine.
The laws of nature are the result of intelligent forces.
The law of karma holds throughout the universe. It operates at all levels, ensuring justice, harmony, and balance.
We reincarnate into successive lives. Once we have reached the human level we do not regress back into animal forms.
The law of karma acts over our successive lives to ensure justice. (We don't get away with it.) We are the cause of every joy and pain in our own life.
A law of cycles provides fundamental structure at all levels. Two examples are our pattern of reincarnation, and the continuing "lives" of the universe as it appears, then returns to its source.
Analogy and correspondence provide fundamental structure for the universe. This is a broad statement of the Hermetic axiom - "As above, so below".
Evolution applies on a grand scale to all of life.
Soul gets involved in this world of matter. It experiences and learns. Soul then works its way back in a long pilgrimage to its primal source. This again follows a cyclic pattern.
This evolution achieves experience, self-awareness, and ever increasing perfection. Evolution occurs on the physical, mental, and spiritual planes.
"Survival of the fittest" along with gradual accumulation of small beneficial changes does not explain the "origin of the species". The origin of the species is due to intelligent design.
Humanity has experienced significant evolution in long periods on the continents (not islands) of Atlantis and Lemuria.
There is a seven fold constitution of man ranging from the physical plane to the purely spiritual plane.
Thoughts are tangible objects on higher planes. Every thought and action has its effect on us and on our surroundings and has a karmic consequence.
The three higher planes of this constitution form the "higher self" and that is what reincarnates from life to life and accumulates the experience, the lessons, the virtues. The lower planes form the "lower self" and are the vehicle used by the higher self while it is living in this active testing ground of incarnate life.
At the moment of death we have a review of our life just past - as we cast off this physical frame. After a short period, that varies greatly between individuals, we cast off other lower aspects of our constitution and the reincarnating self begins a long period of merciful, earned, rest before the next birth.
Often during this life, our spiritual nature is obscured in our self-centered daily lives as we cater to our immediate needs and desires. But the spiritual self is always there to guide us if we seek it with strong earnest desire.
We can strive to reach our higher self by:
Listening to our still small voice of conscience.
Noting the dreams from the higher self.
Developing our intuition.
Meditating.
Studying principles of the Wisdom Religion.
Aligning ourselves with Nature.
Engaging in action for the greater good.
Carefully reading the events of our daily life.
Brotherhood is a fact in nature. We are ONE at the highest spiritual component of our nature. We are sparks from one flame. We are the fingers on one hand. We are ONE at other levels as well.
We should:
Understand we are not separate from humanity or the world.
Emphasize brotherhood, altruism, and compassion in our daily lives.
Strive to know our higher self.
As a guiding rule - act for and as the Self of All.
The religions of the world are branches on the tree whose trunk is the one ancient - once universal - wisdom religion. The religions are the tributaries of one great river. (But they borrow from each other to make the actual details much more complex.)
Mythology often transmits some of this knowledge in symbolic form.
Periodically, great teachers come amongst us to help us in this evolutionary path. They may create another branch on the tree.
Humanity's potential is infinite and every being has a contribution to make toward a grander world. We are all in it together. We are one.

SPIRITUAL ILLUMINATION vs. PSYCHIC ILLUSIONS

Spiritual and astral forces are at work continuously, and have been so from the very earliest ages of the earth. But there come certain times in human history when the doors between our physical world and the inner realms are partly open so that men become more receptive to these subtle influences. We are leaving an era of materialistic life and thought and are entering a more spiritual one. At the same time, the world is full of evidences of an outbreak of psychical influences, and these are always deceptive, always dangerous, because the astral realms belong to a lower range of material existence, filled with evil emanations, human and other.

Such indeed is the present period, one wherein not so much the spiritual and astral energies are quickened as that we are at the junction of two great cycles, the ending of one and the beginning of another; and, concordantly with this transition of cyclic periods, the minds of men are rapidly changing, becoming more psychically sensitive. There is great danger in this, but there is also a larger chance more quickly to progress, if man's consciousness is turned towards higher things, for this accelerated movement of change is especially potent in so far as spiritual forces are concerned.

There is nothing unique about this; it has taken place in the past. An immense effort was made at the time of the downfall of the Atlantean race -- an effort which culminated in the establishment of the Mystery schools which long ages afterwards found expression in the various mystical, religious and philosophical centers of the ancient world. When we examine the world's sacred literatures, we find the oldest of them containing the fullest measure of the archaic esoteric teachings. The reason for this is that from about the time of the submersion of the last island of the Atlantean continental system -- recorded by Plato as having occurred some 9000 years before his day -- there has been a steady increase of materiality in the world, and a consequent and equal recession of spiritual impulses. But this cycle, as indicated, has recently come to an end. The one we are entering is a very unusual one, in that it does not belong to the so-called Messianic era which is 2,160 years long, but covers a time span of some ten to twelve thousand years.

Great events are in the making, for the entire civilized world is approaching a critical point in its history. There is literally a battle proceeding between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, and it is a matter of very delicate balance as to which side of the dividing line between spiritual safety and spiritual retrogression the scales of destiny will fall.

In a letter written shortly before her death, H. P. Blavatsky warned:

Unfortunately, as is always the case in an age which has lost touch with spirituality, people today yearn for powers, for the development of suspected but scarcely accepted higher faculties; and in their blindness they search outside of themselves. Their hearts are hungry for answers to the enigmas of life, and so they take what they can from self-advertised teachers about how to gain and use psychical powers, and such 'teachings' are always baited with personal benefit. It is difficult to speak of these things without hurting many trusting souls who, not knowing the truth, follow what seem to them to be glimpses of a greater life than that which they have; and this accounts for the many so-called psychical and quasi-mystical movements (3) presently existing which, in many cases, are leading people away instead of toward the light emanating from their own inner god. We have to be ever watchful in these matters. The waves of the astral light are exceedingly unreliable, and thousands and thousands follow the will-o'-the-wisps of psychic light instead of the steady burning splendor of the divinity within.

The plain fact is that the West is being misled by psychical teachings which in themselves have nothing permanent in them. And those who follow these practices are, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, people of untrained spiritual and psychical fabric of character who are thus easily caught by the maya of psychism. This does not mean that such faculties and powers are evil or are not natural parts of the human constitution; nor that they are useless. The meaning is that they are very hazardous to one without spiritual vision and the power of intellect and spiritual will to guide and control the psychical nature in which these faculties inhere.

Dangerous also are the hatha-yoga practices of a psycho-astral type, usually connected with physical posturing, etc., to which certain individuals are addicted in their attempt to gain for themselves powers of a lower kind. These practices not only can affect the mind and even dislodge it from its normal seat, thus producing insanity, but also can interfere with the proper pranic circulations of the body. Religious fanatics often go insane; and in certain sensitive instances become the so-called ecstatics, believed by the ignorant to be exemplars of a holy life merely because their skin may bleed, and their hands or feet show wounds supposed to represent the nails of the Cross. The same may be said of the fakirs and lower type of yogis of the Orient. Results can be produced which endanger both the mind and the health, as well as the life itself. In all these practices there is not a breath of spirituality.

He who enters the path with the hope of gaining powers of any kind, regarding them as something of paramount importance, is destined to failure. Indeed, he is embarking upon a very hazardous and questionable road, which at worst could lead to sorcery and black magic, and at best will bring to him only the Dead Sea fruit of disappointment. Powers as such, whether spiritual, intellectual, or psychic, will develop in due course and in a perfectly natural way as we progress, provided that we have the unflinching determination to achieve, and, above all, that our heart is forever brightened and filled with compassionate love, a love that is even now a distinguishing characteristic of the spiritual soul within.

There is immense hope and spiritual beauty in the teachings of the esoteric tradition. In them is the path along which we may evolve, but it depends upon the individual whether or not he ascends along the ray which is living and working within him. While it is true that fully to understand the deeper reaches of the philosophy requires high intellectual power and a spiritual vision, it is often very simple natures who see a great light. Light passes everywhere. We have but to open the closed doors of our personality and the light of itself will come in, and we shall then understand instinctively the most recondite secrets of nature.

Jesus the avatara, so ill understood in the Occident, taught the same truths. Seek first the treasures of the spirit, of the kingdom of heaven, and all other things will be added -- all the psychical powers and energies and faculties will fall into place naturally and safely, enlightened and guided by the spiritual sun within.

Now what are these treasures of the spirit? None other than those spiritual and intellectual faculties and energies which make us godlike in thought and deed: will power, vision, intuition, instant sympathy with all that lives. There is no reason why we human beings should not begin to use our heritage. All powers and qualities and attributes are in us, even now, but they are latent for the most part, because we have not yet learned to bring them forth. In reality, it is we ourselves in our ordinary lower mind and feelings who are 'sleeping,' whereas our higher nature is not dormant at all, but intensely active.

For instance, when the spiritual will is evoked and active in a man, he becomes supreme over himself so that he has absolute self-command, and not even the denizens of the astral world can in any wise control him. Will in action is a current of energy, which means a current of substance, precisely as electricity is both force and matter. Back of will lies desire. If the desire be pure, the will is pure. If the desire be evil, the will is evil. Back of desire lies consciousness. Therefore will originates in consciousness through desire. We desire, and instantly will awakens intelligence which directs this will, and we act -- or refrain from acting, which sometimes is nobler still.

There is divine desire (4) which in men is called aspiration, and also its material reflection. How many of us allow our will to be directed by the egoistic and selfish impulses of the lower aspect of our desire-nature, the kama principle! Consequently, as the human will is rooted in buddhi-manas, it is the intuition and the higher manasic principle which should guide our human will to the nobler acts which it is in our province to do: deeds of brotherhood and of impersonal service; and this is the very nature and characteristic of the spiritual ego, the buddhi-manasic principle in man.

Intuition expresses itself as instant vision, instant knowledge. But there is a great difference between wisdom and knowledge. Wisdom may be called the knowledge of the higher ego, the spiritual soul, and knowledge the wisdom of the personality. In each case it is a storing up in the treasury of experience of what has been learned and unlearned -- a treasury that is not a chamber, small or vast, but ourself. Each experience is a modification of the understanding self; and the repository of memory is filled with the record of the ages, precisely as the personality is stamped and impressed with the karmic record of all the personalities preceding it which made it.

Wisdom, knowledge, inner power, all are faculties of the spirit, signifying the fruits of evolutionary unfolding of the inherent power of the spirit-soul. Intuition per se is spiritual wisdom and garnered knowledge, gathered in the treasure house of the spirit-soul in past lives. Instinct, on the other hand, may be called the passive side of intuition, which is the energic, the will-side, the alert and active aspect. Instinct expresses itself all through natural being: the atoms move and sing by instinct, even as man using his consciousness and will, may do likewise; but the song and movement of intuition are incomparably loftier than the song and movement of instinct. Both are functions of the consciousness, the one vegetative, automatic; the other, energic, awake.

The spirit is all-permeant, living and moving everywhere for it is universal. Spiritual clairvoyance, of which the psychical clairvoyance is but a dancing shadow, enables one to see behind all veils of illusion, to see what is transpiring on some distant star in the fields of space. It is the power to perceive the truth of things at a glance, and to know the hearts of men and understand their minds. It is the faculty of visioning with the inner eye, not so much a seeing of forms as a getting of knowledge, and because this acquiring of knowledge comes in a way that closely parallels the way of seeing with the physical eye, it is called direct vision. (5)

So it is with spiritual clairaudience, which is not the power of hearing with the physical ear (or of seeing, for sometimes sounds are seen and colors heard, there being an interrelation between sense and sense), but of listening with the ear of the spirit. The sounds that are heard with the ear of the spirit are heard in the silence and with the repose of all the senses. Such spiritual clairaudience will enable one to hear the movements of the atoms as they sing their individual hymns; to hear the growing of the grass, the unfolding of the rose -- to hear it all as a symphony.

Socrates used to say to those around him that his daimon, his inner monitor, never told him what to do, but always what not to do. (6) This daimon was the 'voice' of the higher ego, which in great men is often very strong in its energy; and in some hypersensitive constitutions may be heard as a 'voice.' It is not really a voice (although that is its effect at times on the physical brain), but rather is an urge from within, manifesting also, perhaps, as flashes of light and inner vision.

We cannot understand ourselves and others unless we have evolved the understanding heart. The key is sympathy, and the method is to look to the divine being within. As we aspire to become more like it in every moment of our lives, light will come and we shall know truth when we find it. We shall become compassionate and strong -- qualities that are the true insignia of the self-illumined man. The first lesson, then, is to seek the light of our own inner god, and trust it alone. When we follow this light and are warmed by its sublime and life-giving rays, then we shall see the same god-light in others.

By going to the fountainhead we find the clearest water, so why drink from the muddy waters hundreds of miles from the spring? If a man would know himself and the wondrous powers and faculties that are his, let him see himself in the universe around him, and study that universe as being himself. An epigram, possibly, but a true master key to wisdom, and containing the essence not only of all initiation, but of all future growth.


FOOTNOTES:

2. From a letter dated London, April 15, 1891 to the Fifth Annual Convention of the Theosophical Society, American Section, held at Boston, Mass., on April 26-27.

3. With a three times 'very' few exceptions, all these bodies more or less hunger after the lower siddhis which H.P.B., using the Pali term iddhis, speaks of in The Voice of the Silence (p. 73). In India they are represented by the different schools of yoga practice.

Siddhi, from the Sanskrit verbal root sidh, to be fulfilled, to attain an object, means 'perfect attainment.' There are two classes of siddhis: those pertaining to the lower psychic and mental energies, and those pertaining to the intellectual, spiritual, and divine powers, both types of which are possessed by the spiritual initiate, who uses them only for the benefit of mankind and never for self. The personal name of Gautama the Buddha, Siddhartha, means 'one who has achieved his objective.'

4. The saying in the old Veda: "Desire (kama) first arose in IT" and then the world sprang into being means that Brahman, sleeping in its aeon-long pralaya, first felt stirring within, the seeds of divine desire to become. Consciousness was behind the desire; desire arose in it and brought will into being, and will acted on the sleeping atoms and produced the worlds.

5. In regard to normal vision, W. Q. Judge in his Preface to Patanjali's Yoga Aphorisms speaks of the mind issuing through the eye and adopting the form and the qualities of the object seen. On its return, it reflects the information acquired to the soul. This is the ancient explanation, which was also propounded by Plato, among others. The theory was that a force issues from the eye which we may call the 'visual ray,' this force or ray being a projection of the consciousness or the mind; that normally its rate of projection or travel is very high, which rate actually can be increased by the will or by thought; that the ray or force darts forth from the eye, meets the object concerning which knowledge is desired, and returns accompanied with light; and when this combination re-enters the eyeball, the message that it carries is transmitted to the brain and thence into the receiving mind or consciousness.

Now when a study of a very distant object, such as a star or a planet, is required, this visual ray, which is akasic in essence, leaves the eye and darts with the speed of thought to the object, and all its conditions of travel and return, of impressions and of reception, are governed by the known laws of optics as well as by other laws at present unknown. It is not at all the mind which projects a tentacle of itself; though curiously enough this notion, wrong as it is, is an intuition of what the organ of vision was in earliest humanity. Then it was not an eye, but was actually more like a tentacle, and received its sensory impressions by touch; and through innumerable millions of instances of this kind of sensory experience the eye was gradually evolved, increasing in power and delicacy of function, until actual physical contact was no longer required.

(As a matter of fact, practically all the senses that we now have originated in a similar way; and the student of biology can gain many hints of how they began in the first, second and early third root-races from studying some of the strange sense-apparatuses of the lower beings.)

It is precisely this visual ray leaving the eye -- which ray in normal function is of electromagnetic character -- that also carries with it the man's magnetic atmosphere when the will is behind and propelling the personal auric magnetism; and it is also thus that in the cases of psychologization, commonly called hypnotism, a subject is held and fascinated so frequently by the eye. Allusion here to the question of hypnotism is not an approval of the practice, but an explanation of it and of the danger one incurs in allowing oneself to be subjected to another's will. Looking a person straight in the eye is always admired, and justly so, because it signifies a certain amount of character and poise; perhaps in this there is an unconscious understanding of the battle of magnetisms, friendly or unfriendly, as the case may be.

6. There is an interesting reason why these intimations rarely are of a positive type, being almost invariably urgings to pause, to reflect, or to not do thus and so. When a man is in a state of indecision, his mind makes pictures which are transmitted by sympathetic vibration into the inner consciousness; and because the inner consciousness has this contact with the brain-mind, if the pictured action be wrong, the answer comes back, No.

[Excerpted from Path of Compassion by G de Purucker]

I see this thread’s Post on “Spiritualism vs. Psychic Illusions” is taking a one-sided point of view. As no one has taken it up in the weeks that it has been up, perhaps I can offer some additional insight to enhance the reach of the Thread.

Curious choice of material for the introductory section of Theosophy. Of course, the last post representing the views of Blavatsky and Judge put forth solely one school of thought. Many Theosophists take a different view based on extensive experience and study in these areas specifically. I would like to suggest there are other theosophical perspectives, and I shall put forth reference in short time from C.W. Leadbeater’s, “The Hidden Side of Things.”

First, however, I would offer for consideration the precept that Blavatsky was most likely a failed Medium, and would thusly make a poor choice of reference for the matters of psychism, mediumship and elementals. With all due respect to this great lady, whom I greatly respect, these areas are not demonstrably her strong points. Although quite learned from book study, and perhaps teaching point-of-view, she does not demonstrate practiced expertise in psychism, medimship and elementals. I offer by way of proofs her fall from grace when her claims to physical-mediumship, astral travel and spiritual connections to the Mahatmas came under attack. It was disastrous for the Theosophical Society.

I could, as well, point out that physical mediumship is considered a low form of the craft, as it tends to draw from the position of elementeries, and the lower elementals, and therefore, NOT from within. Such does not demonstrate a raising of consciousness commensurate with the various planes of consciousness that true mental mediumship or inspirational mediumship does; both would necessitate a raising of personal consciousness to the “Mental Plane.” Blavatsky conveys activity consistent with connection to the lower Astral, and would not be a suggested course of action for anyone. The resultant associations would be the lower elemental, elementeries or artificial elementals that she often confuses with nature-spirit, who would be of the Ætheric sub-planes of this, our Physical plane. What she does exhibit, however, is good telepathy, a probable means of communication from the Mahatmas. Such means, by the way, is the same mechanism used by Elementals of all classes.

In her defense, the process ascribed to the Mahatmas themselves seem similarly indicative of low-mediumship. They would be entirely possible for one who’s consciousness was by its very nature above the Buddhic. However, it is my understanding that such was not achieved until after their active withdrawal from the society. Regardless, I would be willing to concede this point if it can be established that they were, in the early days of the Movement, beyond the need of incarnation.

Mr. Judge, to my understanding, similarly suffered credibility due to his falsification of papers and “connection” with the Mahatmas. Therefore, there was no demonstration of genuine psychic or mediumship ability. Ergo, Judge would not either be a good source of reference on the occult subjects pointed out in this Thread. It could be added here that Judge’s egoistic manner should play against any effectiveness at reaching the Mental Plane. Beyond this, consider that Judge obtained his greatest degree of training from Madame Blavatsky, whom was a failed medium.

As proffered in other posts in this “community” facility, low-mediumshp ability would only connect one with the lowest of energies. To that end, and if one understands that such was the level of Blavatsky’s experience, she did not connect with higher consciousness as such would necessitate her vibration level to be in the “Mental,” which we all know does not harbor low-consciousness. Nor does her experience represent the intelligent “Nature Spirits,” which, by the way, would be on THIS plane, the Physical; and, therefore, does NOT require either psychic or mediumship proficiency to reach; simply trained eyes and an unfettered mind.

From The Hidden Side of Things, by C. W. Leadbeater, one of the Theosophical Society's most prolific writers on Theosophy, and the occult matters pertaining to this Thread:

ON OCCULTISM:




(1)
The term occultism is one that has been much misunderstood. In the mind of the ignorant it was, even recently, synonymous with magic, and its students were supposed to be practitioners of the black art, veiled in flowing robes of scarlet covered with cabalistic signs, sitting amidst uncanny surroundings with a black cat as a familiar, compounding unholy decoctions by the aid of satanic evocations.

(2)
Even now, and among those whom education has raised above such superstition as this, there remains a good deal of misapprehension. For them its derivation from the Latin word occultus ought to explain at once that it is the science of the hidden. But they often regard it contemptuously as nonsensical and unpractical, as connected with dreams and fortune-telling, with hysteria and necromancy, with the search for the elixir of life and the philosopher's stone. Students, who should know better, perpetually speak as though the hidden side of things were intentionally concealed; as though knowledge with regard to it ought to be in the hands of all men, but was being deliberately withheld by the caprice or selfishness of a few. Whereas the fact is that nothing is or can be hidden from us except by our own limitations, and that for every man as he evolves, the world grows wider and wider, because he is able to see more and more of its grandeur and its loveliness.

(3)
As an objection against this statement may be cited, the well-known fact that, at each of the great Initiations which mark the advance of the neophyte along the path of the higher progress, a definite new block of knowledge is given to him. That is quite true, but the knowledge can be given only because the recipient has evolved to the point at which he can grasp it. It is no more being withheld from ordinary humanity than the knowledge of conic sections is being withheld from the child who is still struggling with the multiplication table. When that child reaches the level at which he can comprehend quadratic equations, the teacher is ready to explain to him the rules that govern them. In exactly the same way, when a man has qualified himself for the reception of the information given at a certain Initiation, he is forthwith initiated. But the only way to attain the capacity to imbibe that higher knowledge is to begin by trying to understand our present conditions, and to order our lives intelligently in view of the facts which we find.

(4)
Occultism, then, is the study of the hidden side of nature. Rather, it is the study of the whole of nature, instead of only that small part of it, which comes under the investigation of modern science. At the present stage of our development, by far the greater part of nature is entirely unknown to the majority of mankind, because they have as yet unfolded only a minute proportion of the faculties which they possess. The ordinary man, therefore, is basing his philosophy (as far as he has any) upon entirely inadequate grounds. His actions are molded more or less in accordance with the few laws of nature that he knows, and consequently both his theory of life and his daily practice are necessarily inaccurate. The occultist adopts a far more comprehensive view. He takes into account those forces of the higher worlds whose action is hidden from the materialist, and so he moulds his life in obedience to the entire code of Nature¡¯s laws, instead of only by occasional reference to a minute fragment of it.

(5)
It is difficult for the man who knows nothing of the occult to realize how great, how serious and how all pervading are his own limitations. The only way in which we can adequately symbolize them is to suppose some form of consciousness still more limited than our own, and to think in what directions it would differ from ours. Suppose it were possible that a consciousness could exist capable of appreciating only solid matter ¡ª the liquid and gaseous forms of matter being to it as entirely non-existent as are the ¨¡theric and astral and mental forms to the ordinary man. We can readily see how for such a consciousness any adequate conception of the world in which we live would be impossible. Solid matter, which alone could be perceived by it, would constantly be found to be undergoing serious modifications, about which no rational theory could be formed.

(6)
For example, whenever a shower of rain took place, the solid matter of the earth would undergo change. It would in many cases become both softer and heavier when charged with moisture, but the reason of such a change would necessarily be wholly incomprehensible to the consciousness that we are supposing. The wind might lift clouds of sand and transfer them from one place to another. However, such motion of solid matter would be entirely inexplicable to one who had no conception of the existence of the air. Without considering more examples of what is already so obvious, we see clearly how hopelessly inadequate would be such an idea of the world as would be attainable by this consciousness limited to solid matter. What we do not realize so readily, however, is that our present consciousness falls just as far short of that of the developed man as this supposed consciousness would fall short of that which we now possess.

(7)
Theosophical students are at least theoretically acquainted with the idea that to everything there is a hidden side; and they know that in the great majority of cases this unseen side is of far greater importance than that which is visible to the physical eye.

(8)
To put the same idea from another point of view, the senses, by means of which we obtain all our information about external objects, are as yet imperfectly developed; therefore the information obtained is partial. What we see in the world about us is by no means all that there is to see, and a man who will take the trouble to cultivate his senses will find that, in proportion as he succeeds, life will become fuller and richer for him. For the lover of nature, of art, of music, a vast field of incredibly intensified and exalted pleasure lies close at hand, if he will fit himself to enter upon it. Above all, for the lover of his fellow man there is the possibility of far more intimate comprehension and therefore far wider usefulness.

(9)
We are only halfway up the ladder of evolution at present, and so our senses are only half-evolved. However, it is possible for us to hurry up that ladder ¡ª possible, by hard work, to make our senses now what all men¡¯s senses will be in the distant future. The man who has succeeded in doing this is often called a seer or a clairvoyant.

(10)
A fine word that -- clairvoyant. It means "one who sees clearly". However, it has been horribly misused and degraded, so that people associate it with all sorts of trickery and imposture -- with gypsies who for sixpence will tell a maid-servant what is the color of the hair of the duke who is coming to marry her, or with establishments in Bond Street where for a guinea fee the veil of the future is supposed to be lifted for more aristocratic clients.

(11)
All this is irregular and unscientific. In many cases, it is mere charlatanry and barefaced robbery. However, not always; to foresee the future up to a certain point is a possibility. It can be done, and it has been done, scores of times. Some of these irregular practitioners unquestionably do at times possess flashes of higher vision, though usually they cannot depend upon having them when they want them.

(12)
However, behind all this vagueness there is bedrock of fact, something that can be approached rationally and studied scientifically. It is as the result of many years of such study and experiment that I state emphatically what I have above written. It is possible for men to develop their senses until they can see much more of this wonderful and beautiful world in which we live than is ever suspected by the untrained average man, who lives contentedly in the midst of Cimmerian darkness and calls it light.

(13)
Two thousand and five hundred years ago, the greatest of Indian teachers, Gautama the BUDDHA, said to His disciples, "Do not complain and cry and pray, but open your eyes and see. The truth is all about you, if you will only take the bandage from your eyes and look; and it is so wonderful, so beautiful, so far beyond anything that men have ever dreamt of or prayed for, and it is for ever and for ever."

(14)
He assuredly meant far more than this of which I am writing now, but this is a step on the way towards that glorious goal of perfect realization. If it does not yet tell us quite all the truth, at any rate it gives us a good deal of it. It removes for us a host of common misconceptions, and clears up for us many points that are considered as mysteries or problems by those who are yet uninstructed in this lore. It shows that all these things were mysteries and problems to us only because heretofore we saw so small a part of the facts, because we were looking at the various matters from below, and as isolated and unconnected fragments, instead of rising above them to a standpoint whence they are comprehensible as parts of a mighty whole. It settles in a moment many questions that have been much-disputed ¡ª such, for example, as that of the continued existence of man after death. It explains many of the strange things that the Churches tell us; it dispels our ignorance and removes our fear of the unknown by supplying us with a rational and orderly scheme.

(15)
Besides all this, it opens up a new world to us about our every-day life ¡ª a new world that is yet a part of the old. It shows us that, as I began by saying, there is a hidden side to everything, and that our most ordinary actions often produce results of which without this study we should never have known. By it we understand the rationale of what is commonly called telepathy, for we see that just as there are waves of heat or light or electricity, so there are waves produced by thought, though they are in a finer type of matter than the others, and therefore not perceptible to our physical senses. By studying these vibrations we see how thought acts, and we learn that it is a tremendous power for good or for ill ¡ª a power which we are all of us unconsciously wielding to some extent ¡ª which we can use a hundredfold more effectively when we comprehend its workings. Further investigation reveals to us the method of formation of what are called ¡°thought-forms,¡± and indicates how these can be usefully employed both for ourselves and for others in a dozen different ways.

(16)
The occultist studies carefully all these unseen affects. Consequently knows much more fully than other men the result of what he is doing. He has more information about life than others have, and he exercises his common sense by modifying his life in accordance with what he knows. In many ways we live differently now from our forefathers in mediaeval times, because we know more than they did. We have discovered certain laws of hygiene; wise men live according to that knowledge, and therefore the average length of life is decidedly greater now than it was in the middle Ages. There are still some who are foolish or ignorant, who either do not know the laws of health or are careless about keeping them; they think that because disease-germs are invisible to them, they are therefore of no importance; they don't believe in new ideas. Those people suffer first when an epidemic disease arrives, or some unusual strain is put upon the community. They suffer unnecessarily, because they are behind the times. However, they injure not only themselves by their neglect; the conditions caused by their ignorance or carelessness often bring infection into a district which might otherwise be free from it.



(17)
All this is irregular and unscientific. In many cases, it is mere charlatanry and barefaced robbery. However, not always; to foresee the future up to a certain point is a possibility. It can be done, and it has been done, scores of times. Some of these irregular practitioners unquestionably do at times possess flashes of higher vision, though usually they cannot depend upon having them when they want them.

(18)
However, behind all this vagueness there is bedrock of fact, something that can be approached rationally and studied scientifically. It is as the result of many years of such study and experiment that I state emphatically what I have above written. It is possible for men to develop their senses until they can see much more of this wonderful and beautiful world in which we live than is ever suspected by the untrained average man, who lives contentedly in the midst of Cimmerian darkness and calls it light.

(19)
Two thousand and five hundred years ago, the greatest of Indian teachers, Gautama the BUDDHA, said to His disciples, "Do not complain and cry and pray, but open your eyes and see. The truth is all about you, if you will only take the bandage from your eyes and look; and it is so wonderful, so beautiful, so far beyond anything that men have ever dreamt of or prayed for, and it is for ever and for ever."

(20)
He assuredly meant far more than this of which I am writing now, but this is a step on the way towards that glorious goal of perfect realization. If it does not yet tell us quite all the truth, at any rate it gives us a good deal of it. It removes for us a host of common misconceptions, and clears up for us many points that are considered as mysteries or problems by those who are yet uninstructed in this lore. It shows that all these things were mysteries and problems to us only because heretofore we saw so small a part of the facts, because we were looking at the various matters from below, and as isolated and unconnected fragments, instead of rising above them to a standpoint whence they are comprehensible as parts of a mighty whole. It settles in a moment many questions that have been much-disputed ¡ª such, for example, as that of the continued existence of man after death. It explains many of the strange things that the Churches tell us; it dispels our ignorance and removes our fear of the unknown by supplying us with a rational and orderly scheme.

(21)
Besides all this, it opens up a new world to us about our every-day life ¡ª a new world that is yet a part of the old. It shows us that, as I began by saying, there is a hidden side to everything, and that our most ordinary actions often produce results of which without this study we should never have known. By it we understand the rationale of what is commonly called telepathy, for we see that just as there are waves of heat or light or electricity, so there are waves produced by thought, though they are in a finer type of matter than the others, and therefore not perceptible to our physical senses. By studying these vibrations we see how thought acts, and we learn that it is a tremendous power for good or for ill ¡ª a power which we are all of us unconsciously wielding to some extent ¡ª which we can use a hundredfold more effectively when we comprehend its workings. Further investigation reveals to us the method of formation of what are called ¡°thought-forms,¡± and indicates how these can be usefully employed both for ourselves and for others in a dozen different ways.

(22)
The occultist studies carefully all these unseen affects. Consequently knows much more fully than other men the result of what he is doing. He has more information about life than others have, and he exercises his common sense by modifying his life in accordance with what he knows. In many ways we live differently now from our forefathers in mediaeval times, because we know more than they did. We have discovered certain laws of hygiene; wise men live according to that knowledge, and therefore the average length of life is decidedly greater now than it was in the middle Ages. There are still some who are foolish or ignorant, who either do not know the laws of health or are careless about keeping them; they think that because disease-germs are invisible to them, they are therefore of no importance; they don't believe in new ideas. Those people suffer first when an epidemic disease arrives, or some unusual strain is put upon the community. They suffer unnecessarily, because they are behind the times. However, they injure not only themselves by their neglect; the conditions caused by their ignorance or carelessness often bring infection into a district which might otherwise be free from it.

(23)
The matter of which I am writing is precisely the same thing at a different level. The microscope revealed disease-germs; the intelligent man profited by the discovery, and rearranged his life, while the unintelligent man paid no attention, but went on as before. Clairvoyance reveals thought-force and many other previously unsuspected powers; once more, the intelligent man profits by this discovery, and rearranges his life accordingly. Once more also, the unintelligent man takes no heed of the new discoveries; once more he thinks that what he cannot see can have no importance for him; once more, he continues to suffer quite unnecessarily, because he is behind the times.

(24)
Not only does he often suffer positive pain, but he also misses so much of the pleasure of life. To painting, to music, to poetry, to literature, to religious ceremonies, to the beauties of nature there is always a hidden side ¡ª fullness, a completeness beyond the mere physical. The man who can see or sense this has at his command a wealth of enjoyment far beyond the comprehension of the man who passes through it all with unopened perceptions.

(25)
The perceptions exist in every human being, though yet undeveloped in most. To unfold them means generally a good deal of time and hard work, but it is exceedingly well worthwhile. Only let no man undertake the effort unless his motives are absolutely pure and unselfish, for he who seeks wider faculty for any but the most exalted purposes will bring upon him a curse and not a blessing.

(26)
However, the man of affairs, who has no time to spare for a sustained effort to evolve nascent powers within him, is not thereby debarred from sharing in some at least of the benefits derived from occult study, any more than the man who possesses no microscope is thereby prevented from living hygienically. The latter has not seen the disease-germs, but from the testimony of the specialist, he knows that they exist, and he knows how to guard himself from them. Just in the same way, a man who has yet no dawning of clairvoyant vision may study the writings of those who have gained it and in this way profit by the results of their labor. True, he cannot yet see all the glory and the beauty that are hidden from us by the imperfection of our senses; but he can readily learn how to avoid the unseen evil, and how to set in motion the unseen forces of good. Therefore, long before he actually sees them, he can conclusively prove to himself their existence. Just as the man who drives an electric motor proves to himself the existence of electricity, though he has never seen it and does not in the least know what it is.

(27)
We must try to understand as much as we can of the world in which we live. We must not fall behind in the march of evolution; we must not let ourselves be anachronisms, for lack of interest in these new discoveries, which yet are only the presentation from a new point of view of the most archaic wisdom. "Knowledge is power" in this case as in every other; in this case, as in every other, to secure the best results, the glorious trinity of power, wisdom and love must ever go hand in hand.

(28)
There is a difference, however, between theoretical acquaintance and actual realization. I have thought that it might help students somewhat towards the grasp of the realities to have a description of the unseen side of some of the simple transactions of every day life as they appear to clairvoyant vision; to one, let us say who has developed within himself the power of perception through the astral, mental and causal bodies. Their appearance as seen by means of the intuitional vehicle is infinitely grander and more effective still. However, so entirely inexpressible that it seems useless to say anything about it; for on that level all experience is within the man instead of without, and the glory and the beauty of it are no longer something that he watches with interest, but something that he feels in his inmost heart, because it is part of him.

From The Hidden Side of Things, by C. W. Leadbeater, one of the Theosophical Society's most prolific writers on Theosophy, and the occult matters pertaining to this Thread:

ON THE FOURTH DIMENSION:


The Fourth Dimension

(39) The extension spoken of under the first head has often been called the fourth dimension. Many writers have scoffed at this and denied its existence, yet for all that it remains a fact that our physical world is in truth a world of many dimensions, and that every object in it has an extension, however minute, in a direction which is unthinkable to us at our present stage of mental evolution. When we develop astral senses, we are brought so much more directly into contact with extension that our minds are more or less forced into recognition of it. The more intelligent gradually grow to understand it. However, there are those of less intellectual growth who, even after death and in the astral world, cling desperately to their accustomed limitations and adopt most extraordinary and irrational hypotheses to avoid admitting the existence of the higher life that they so greatly fear.

(40)
Because the easiest way for most people to arrive at a realization of the fourth dimension of space is to develop within them the power of astral sight, many persons have come to suppose that the fourth dimension is an exclusive appanage of the astral world. A little thought will show that this cannot be so. Fundamentally, there is only one kind of matter existing in the universe, although we call it physical, astral or mental according to the extent of its subdivision and the rapidity of its vibration. Consequently the dimensions of space ¡ª if they exist at all ¡ª exist independently of the matter which lies within them; and whether that space has three dimensions or four or more, all the matter within it exists subject to those conditions, whether we are able to appreciate them or not.

(41)
It may perhaps help us a little in trying to understand this matter if we realize that what we call space is a limitation of consciousness, and that there is a higher level at which a sufficiently developed consciousness is entirely free from this. We may invest this higher consciousness with the power of expression in any number of directions, and may then assume that each descent into a denser world of matter imposes upon it an additional limitation, and shuts off the perception of one of these directions. We may suppose that by the time the consciousness has descended as far as the mental world only five of these directions remain to it. That, when it descends or moves outward once more to the astral level, it loses yet one more of its powers, and so is limited to the conception of four dimensions. Then the further descent or outward movement which brings it into the physical world cuts off from it the possibility of grasping even that fourth dimension, and so we find ourselves confined to the three with which we are familiar.

.

(42) Modern physicists tell us that matter is interpenetrated by AEther a hypothetical substance that they endow with many apparently contradictory qualities. The occultist knows that there are many varieties of this finer interpenetrative matter, and that some of the qualities attributed to it by the scientific men belong not to it at all, but to the primordial substance of which it is the negation. I do not wish here to turn aside from the object of this book to give a lengthy disquisition upon the qualities of AEther; those who wish to study this subject may be referred to the book upon Occult Chemistry , p. 93 . Here it must suffice to say that the true ¨¡ther of space exists, just as scientific men have supposed, and possesses most of the curious contradictory qualities ascribed to it. It is not, however, of that ¨¡ther itself, but of matter built up out of the bubbles in it, that the inner worlds of finer matter are built, of which we have spoken just now. That with which we are concerned at the moment is the fact that all the matter visible to us is interpenetrated not only by AEther, but also by various kinds of finer matter, and that of this finer matter there are many degrees.

(43)

To the type which is nearest to the physical world occult students have given the name astral matter; the kind next above that has been called mental, because out of its texture is built that mechanism of consciousness which is commonly called the mind in man; and there are other types finer still, with which for the moment we are not concerned. Every portion of space with which we have to do must be thought of as containing all these different kinds of matter. It is practically a scientific postulate that even in the densest forms of matter no two particles ever touch one another, but each floats alone in its field of AEther, like a sun in space. Just in the same way each particle of the physical ¨¡ther floats in a sea of astral matter, and each astral particle in turn floats in a mental ocean; so that all these additional worlds need no more space than does this fragment that we know, for in truth they are all parts of one and the same world.

(44)
Man has within himself matter of these finer grades, and by learning to focus his consciousness in it, instead of only in his physical brain, he may become cognizant of these inner and higher parts of the world, and acquire much knowledge of the deepest interest and value. The nature of this unseen world, its scenery, its inhabitants, its possibilities, are described in the works above mentioned. It is the existence of these higher realms of nature that makes occultism possible; and few indeed are the departments of life in which their influence has not to be considered. From the cradle to the grave we are in close relation with them during what we call our waking life; during sleep and after we are even more intimately connected with them, for our existence is then almost confined to them.

From The Hidden Side of Things, by C. W. Leadbeater, one of the Theosophical Society's most prolific writers on Theosophy, and the occult matters pertaining to this Thread:

ON THE DEITY OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM:



(56)
Occult students regard the entire solar system in all its vast complexity as a partial manifestation of one great living being, and all its parts as expressing aspects of Him. Many names have been given to Him; in our Theosophical literature He has often been described under the Gnostic title of the Logos ¡ª the Word that was in the beginning with God, and was God; but now we usually speak of Him as the Solar Deity. All the physical constituents of the solar system ¡ª the sun with its wonderful corona, all the planets with their satellites, their oceans, their atmospheres and the various ¨¡thers surrounding them ¡ª all these are collectively His physical body, the expression of Him in the physical realm.

(57)
In the same way the collective astral worlds -- not only the astral worlds belonging to each of the physical planets, but also the purely astral planets of all the chains of the system (such, for example, as planets B and F of our chain) -- make up His astral body, and the collective worlds of the mental realm are His mental body ¡ª the vehicle through which He manifests Himself upon that particular level. Every atom of every world is a centre through which He is conscious, so that not only is it true that God is omnipresent, but also that whatever is, is God.


(58)
Thus we see that the old pantheistic conception was quite true, yet it is only a part of the truth, because while all nature in all its worlds is nothing but His garment, yet He Himself exists outside of and above all this in a stupendous life of which we can know nothing -- a life among other Rulers of other systems. Just as all our lives are lived literally within Him and are in truth a part of His, so His life and that of the Solar Deities of countless other systems are a part of a still greater life of the Deity of the visible universe; and if there be in the depths of space yet other universes invisible to us, all of their Deities in turn must in the same way form part of One Great Consciousness which includes the whole.

From The Hidden Side of Things, by C. W. Leadbeater, one of the Theosophical Society's most prolific writers on Theosophy, and the occult matters pertaining to this Thread:

ON THE TYPES OF MATTER:


(59)
In these bodies of the Solar Deity on their various levels there are certain different classes or types of matter, which are fairly equally distributed over the whole system. I am not speaking here of our usual division of the worlds and their subsections -- a division which is made according to the density of the matter, so that in the physical world, for example, we have the solid, liquid, gaseous, AEtheric, super-AEtheric, sub-atomic and atomic conditions of matter -- all of them physical, but differing in density. The types which I mean constitute a totally distinct series of cross-divisions, each of which contains matter in all its different conditions, so that if we denote the various types by numbers, we shall find solid, liquid and gaseous matter of the first type, solid, liquid and gaseous matter of the second type, and so on all the way through.


(60)
These types of matter are as thoroughly intermingled, as are the constituents of our atmosphere. Conceive a room filled with air; any decided vibration communicated to the air, such as a sound, for example, would be perceptible in every part of the room. Suppose that it were possible to produce some kind of undulation that should affect the oxygen alone without disturbing the nitrogen, that undulation would still be felt in every part of the room. If we allow that, for a moment, the proportion of oxygen might be greater in one part of the room than another, then the oscillation, though perceptible everywhere, would be strongest in that part. Just as the air in a room is composed (principally) of oxygen and nitrogen, so is the matter of the solar system composed of these different types; and just as a wave (if there could be such a thing) which affected only the oxygen or only the nitrogen would nevertheless be felt in all parts of the room, so a movement or modification which affects only one of these types produces an effect throughout the entire solar system, though it may be stronger in one part than in another.


(61)
This statement is true of all worlds, but for the sake of clearness let us for the moment confine our thought to one world only. Perhaps the idea is easiest to follow with regard to the astral. It has often been explained that in the astral body of man, matter belonging to each of the astral sub-sections is to be found, and that the proportion between the denser and the finer kinds shows how far that body is capable of responding to coarse or refined desires, and so is to some extent an indication of the degree to which the man has evolved himself. Similarly in each astral body there is matter of each of these types, and in this case the proportion between them will show the disposition of the man ¡ª whether he is devotional or philosophic, artistic or scientific, pragmatic or mystic.

From “The Hidden Side of Things,” by C. W. Leadbeater, one of the Theosophical Society’s most prolific writers on Theosophy, and the occult matters pertaining to this Thread:

ON THE LIVING CENTRES:



(69) ¯¯
Now each of these types of matter in the astral body of the Solar Deity is to some extent a separate vehicle, and may be thought of as also the astral body of a subsidiary Deity or Minister, who is at the same time an aspect of the Deity of the system, a kind of ganglion or force-centre in Him. Indeed, if these types differ among themselves, it is because the matter composing them originally came forth through these different living Centres, and the matter of each type is still the special vehicle and expression of the subsidiary Deity through whom it came, so that the slightest thought, movement or alteration of any kind in Him is instantly reflected in some way or other in all the matter of the corresponding type. Naturally each such type of matter has its own special affinities, and is capable of vibrating under influences which may probably evoke no response from the other types.

(70) ¯¯
Since every man has within himself matter of all these types, it is obvious that any modification in or action of any one of these great living Centres must to some degree affect all beings in the system. The extent to which any particular person is so affected depends upon the proportion of the type of matter acted upon which he happens to have in his astral body. Consequently, we find different types of men as of matter, and by reason of their constitution, by the very composition of their astral bodies, some of them are more susceptible to one influence, some to another.


(71) ¯¯
The types are seven, and astrologers have often given to them the names of certain of the planets. Each type is divided into seven sub-types, because each ` planet' may be either practically uninfluenced, or it may be affected predominantly by any one of the other six. In addition to the forty-nine definite sub-types thus obtained, there are any number of possible permutations and combinations of influences, often so complicated that it is no easy matter to follow them. Nevertheless, this gives us a certain system of classification, according to which we can arrange not only human beings, but also the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms, and the elemental essence that precedes them in evolution.

From The Hidden Side of Things, by C. W. Leadbeater, one of the Theosophical Society's most prolific writers on Theosophy, and the occult matters pertaining to this Thread:

ON THE ABSORPTION OF VITALITY:


(105)
The physical body has a certain blind, instinctive consciousness of its own, corresponding in the physical world to the desire-elemental of the astral body; and this consciousness seeks always to protect it from danger, or to procure for it whatever may be necessary. This is entirely apart from the consciousness of the man himself, and it works equally well during the absence of the ego from the physical body during sleep. All our instinctive movements are due to it, and it is through its activity that the working of the sympathetic system is carried on ceaselessly without any thought or knowledge on our part.


(106)
While we are what we call awake, this physical elemental is perpetually occupied in self-defense; he is in a condition of constant vigilance, and he keeps the nerves and muscles always tense. During the night or at any time when we sleep he lets the nerves and muscles relax, and devotes himself specially to the assimilation of vitality, and the recuperation of the physical body. He works at this most successfully during the early part of the night, because then there is plenty of vitality, whereas immediately before the dawn the vitality which has been left behind by the sunlight is almost completely exhausted. This is the reason for the feeling of limpness and deadness associated with the small hours of the morning; this is also the reason why sick men so frequently die at that particular time. The same idea is embodied in the old proverb that: "An hour's sleep before midnight is worth two after it." The work of this physical elemental accounts for the strong recuperative influence of sleep, which is often observable even when it is a mere momentary nap.


(107)
This vitality is indeed the food of the AEtheric double, and is just as necessary to it as is sustenance to the grosser part of the physical body. Hence when the body is unable for any reason (as through sickness, fatigue or extreme old age) to prepare vitality for the nourishment of its cells, this physical elemental endeavors to draw in for his own use vitality which has already been prepared in the bodies of others; and thus it happens that we often find ourselves weak and exhausted after sitting for a while with a person who is depleted of vitality, because he has drawn away from us by suction the rose-colored atoms before we were able to extract their energy.

From “The Hidden Side of Things,” by C. W. Leadbeater, one of the Theosophical Society’s most prolific writers on Theosophy, and the occult matters pertaining to this Thread:

ON THE WEATHER:



(127) ¯¯
It cannot be questioned that men are much and variously affected by the weather. There is a general consensus of opinion that gloomy weather is depressing; but this is mainly due to the fact that in the absence of sunlight there is, as has already been explained, a lack of vitality. Some people, however, take an actual delight in rain or snow or high wind. There is in these disturbances something that produces a distinct pleasurable sensation that quickens their vibrations and harmonizes with the keynote of their nature. It is probable that this is not entirely or even chiefly due to the physical disturbance; it is rather that the subtle change in the aura of the spirit of the earth (which produces or coincides with this phenomenon) is one with which their spirits are in sympathy. A still more decided instance of this is the effect of a thunderstorm. There are many people in whom it produces a curious sense of overwhelming fear entirely out of proportion to any physical danger that it can be supposed to bring. In others, on the contrary, the electrical storm produces wild exultation. The influence of electricity on the physical nerves no doubt plays a part in producing these unusual sensations, but their true cause lies deeper than that.


(128) ¯¯
The effect produced upon people by these various manifestations depends upon the preponderance in their temperament of certain types of elemental essence, which because of this sympathetic vibration, used to be called by mediaeval enquirers earthy, watery, airy or fiery. Exactly in the same way, the effect of the various sections of our surroundings will be greater or less upon men according as they have more or less of one or other of these constituents in their composition. To the man who responds most readily to earth influences, the nature of the soil upon which his house is built is of primary importance, but it matters comparatively little to him whether it is or is not in the neighborhood of water; whereas the man who responds most readily to the radiations of water would care little about the soil so long as he had the ocean or a lake within sight and within easy reach.

From “The Hidden Side of Things,” by C. W. Leadbeater, one of the Theosophical Society’s most prolific writers on Theosophy, and the occult matters pertaining to this Thread:

ON ROCKS:


(129) ¯¯
Influence is perpetually radiated upon us by all objects of nature, even by the very earth upon which we tread. Each type of rock or soil has its own special variety, and the differences between them are great, so that their effect is by no means to be neglected. In the production of this effect, three factors bear their part ¯ the life of the rock itself, the kind of elemental essence appropriate to its astral counterpart, and the kind of nature-spirits which it attracts. The life of the rock is simply the life of the Second Great Outpouring that has arrived at the stage of ensouling the mineral kingdom, and the elemental essence is a later wave of that same divine Life which is one chain-period behind the other, and has yet in its descent into matter reached only the astral world. The nature-spirit belongs to a different evolution altogether, to which we shall refer in due course.

From The Hidden Side of Things, by C. W. Leadbeater, one of the Theosophical Society's most prolific writers on Theosophy, and the occult matters pertaining to this Thread:

ON TREES:


(132)
Strong influences are radiated by the vegetable kingdom also, and the different kinds of plants and trees vary greatly in their effect. Those who have not specially studied the subject invariably under-rate the strength, capacity and intelligence shown in vegetable life. I have already written upon this in The Christian Creed, p. 51 (2nd edition), so I will not repeat myself here, but will rather draw attention to the fact that trees -- especially old trees -- have a strong and definite individuality, well worthy the name of a soul. This soul, though temporary, in the sense that it is not yet a reincarnating entity, is nevertheless possessed of considerable power and intelligence along its own lines.


(133)
It has decided likes and dislikes, and to clairvoyant sight it shows quite clearly by a vivid rosy flush an emphatic enjoyment of the sunlight and the rain, and distinct pleasure also in the presence of those whom it has learnt to like, or with whom it has sympathetic vibrations. Emerson appears to have realized this, for he is quoted in Hutton's Reminiscences as saying of his trees: "I am sure they miss me; they seem to droop when I go away, and I know they brighten and bloom when I go back to them and shake hands with their lower branches."


(134)
An old forest tree is a high development of vegetable life, and when it is transferred from that kingdom it does not pass into the lowest form of animal life. In some cases, its individuality is even sufficiently distinct to allow it to manifest itself temporarily outside its physical form, and when that is so it often takes the human shape. Matters may be otherwise arranged in other solar systems for aught we know, but in ours the Deity has chosen the human form to enshrine the highest intelligence, to be carried on to the utmost perfection as His scheme develops: and because that is so, there is always a tendency among lower kinds of life to reach upwards towards that form, and in their primitive way to imagine themselves as possessing it.


(135)
Thus, it happens that such creatures as gnomes or elves, whose bodies are of fluidic nature, of astral or AEtheric matter which is plastic under the influence of the will, habitually adopts some approximation to the appearance of humanity. Thus also when it is possible for the soul of a tree to externalize itself and become visible, it is almost always in human shape that it is seen. Doubtless these were the dryads of classical times; and the occasional appearance of such figures may account for the widely-spread custom of tree-worship. Omne ignotum pro magnifico; and if primitive man saw a huge, grave human form come forth from a tree, he was likely enough in his ignorance to set up an altar there and worship it, not in the least understanding that he himself stood far higher in evolution than it did, and that its very assumption of his image was an acknowledgment of that fact.

From The Hidden Side of Things, by C. W. Leadbeater, one of the Theosophical Society's most prolific writers on Theosophy, and the occult matters pertaining to this Thread:

ON EVOLUTION APART:

(164)
Another factor that exercises great influence under certain restrictions is the nature-spirit. We may regard the nature-spirits of the land as in a sense the original inhabitants of the country, driven away from some parts of it by the invasion of man, much as the wild animals have been. Just like wild animals, the nature-spirits avoid altogether the great cities and all places where men most do congregate, so that in those their effect is a negligible quantity. But in all quiet country places, among the woods and fields, upon the mountains or out at sea, nature-spirits are constantly present, and though they rarely show themselves, their influence is powerful and all-pervading, just as the scent of the violets fills the air though they are hidden modestly among the leaves.


(165)
The nature-spirits constitute an evolution apart, quite distinct at this stage from that of humanity. We are familiar with the course taken by the Second Outpouring through the three elemental kingdoms, down to the mineral and upward through the vegetable and animal, to the attainment of individuality at the human level. We know that, after that individuality has been attained, the unfolding of humanity carries us gradually to the steps of the Path, and then onward and upward to Adeptship and to the glorious possibilities which lie beyond.


(166)
This is our line of development, but we must not make the mistake of thinking of it as the only line. Even in this world of ours the divine life is pressing upwards through several streams, of which ours is but one, and numerically by no means the most important. It may help us to realize this if we remember that while humanity in its physical manifestation occupies only quite a small part of the surface of the earth, entities at a corresponding level on other lines of evolution not only crowd the earth far more thickly than man, but at the same time populate the enormous plains of the sea and the fields of the air.



(172)
Taking as they do bodies of AEtheric matter only, it will be seen that the entities following these lines of development miss altogether the vegetable and animal kingdoms as well the human. There are, however, other types of nature-spirits that enter into both these kingdoms before they begin to diverge. In the ocean, for example, there is a stream of life which, after leaving the mineral level, touches the vegetable kingdom in the form of seaweeds, and then passes on, through the corals and the sponges and the huge cephalopods of the middle deeps, up into the great family of the fishes, and only after that joins the ranks of water-spirits.



(177)
However, there is quite another kind of little creature which is very frequently seen playing about with flowers, and this time it is a real nature-spirit. There are many varieties of these also. One of the commonest forms is, as I have said, something very much like a tiny humming-bird, and it may often be seen buzzing round the flowers much in the same way as a humming-bird or a bee does. These beautiful little creatures will never become human, because they are not in the same line of evolution as we are. The life which is now animating them has come up through grasses and cereals, such as wheat and oats, when it was in the vegetable kingdom, and afterwards through ants and bees when it was in the animal kingdom. Now it has reached the level of these tiny nature-spirits, and its next stage will be to ensoul some of the beautiful fairies with AEtheric bodies who live upon the surface of the earth. Later on they will become salamanders or fire-spirits, and later still they will become sylphs, or air-spirits, having only astral bodies instead of AEtheric. Later still they will pass through the different stages of the great kingdom of the angels.

From The Hidden Side of Things, by C. W. Leadbeater, one of the Theosophical Society's most prolific writers on Theosophy, and the occult matters pertaining to this Thread:

ON OVERLAPPING:

(182)
It is on joining the angel kingdom that the nature-spirit receives the divine Spark of the Third Outpouring, and thus attains individuality, just as the animal does when he passes into the human kingdom; and a further point of similarity is that just as the animal gains individualization only through contact wit