Selfishness Is the Hallmark of Fakirs, Hermits, and Yogins

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Black versus White Magic Series · 10 pages

A short, sharp argument against a form of religious life that most traditions honour. Solitary ascetics, Blavatsky writes, are symbols of the most cowardly egotism — and the reasoning is practical rather than doctrinal. No one escapes the workings of Karma by adopting masterly inactivity; and how, she asks, can a hermit practise either charity or industry if he has run away from the people among whom both would have to be exercised?

The counter-example she offers is the Buddha, who retreated from society only for the first six years of his ascetic life and spent the remainder in it. The greatest ascetics and saints of the present day, on her account, are not those who withdraw to inaccessible places: they live in the midst of us, unremarked. Self-culture, in the sense the cloistered yogin means it, is dismissed as an occupation for those living apart from the society of their fellows — which is to say, as a refined form of the selfishness the rest of this series treats as the root of black magic. It sits naturally beside 'Does Your Mind Elate with Self-Adoration' in the same section.

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