Does Your Mind Elate with Self-Adoration and Self-Aggrandizement?

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Black versus White Magic Series · 67 pages

The longest study in this batch at sixty-seven pages, and the most systematic. Its subject is selfishness, and its opening move is to insist that the many words for it name one thing: Ahamkara and I-am-ness, Ego and Egoism, Individualism and Capitalism, I-ness and Me-ness, Luxury and Lust, Mind and Mentality, Persona and Personality, Self and Self-interest — all, on this account, the same, and the chief cause of sin and suffering in the world.

The definition offered is precise enough to be useful: selfishness is love misdirected, kept jealously for one's little self at the expense of the Spiritual Self and of all other selves, which are themselves transient rays of one Universal Self. From that the study works outward to what it names as mankind's deadliest curses — selfishness, envy, revenge and malice — and traces each through the doctrine. The placing of the piece in the Black versus White Magic series rather than among the ethical writings is deliberate: on the argument this collection makes, self-adoration is not merely a fault of character but the precise condition under which magic turns black.

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