The Student's Approach to The Secret Doctrine

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and B.P. Wadia · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 7 pages

Seven pages, and the shortest useful thing in this section for anyone intending to open the Secret Doctrine. It has two parts. The first was dictated by Blavatsky to Robert Bowen in answer to his question about how the book should be approached, first published by Theosophy in Ireland in 1932 and known ever since as the Bowen Notes. The second is B.P. Wadia's essay on preparation and subjects for study, one of forty-two published in Los Angeles between 1922 and 1925 — written, the editor thinks, without knowledge of the Bowen Notes.

The two arrive at much the same advice from different directions, which is what makes the pairing worth having. The document is explicitly an abridgement: the full version of the same commended material is published separately in this series as All-Important Pages from the Secret Doctrine, and the prefatory note points the reader there. The Series Editor's framing gives the reason for the exercise — that once the origin of sentient life and the universal laws governing Cosmos and Man are grasped by the intellect and upheld by the highest perceptions, they quicken what he calls the perennial tree of Altruism.

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