Madame Blavatsky on Occult Development

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 7 pages

From Lucifer of November 1889, and unusual in form: A.F. Tindall, an investigator of the occult for some sixteen years, related his experiences and the teachings he had received from various occult agencies, and Blavatsky appended footnotes to a number of his statements. The file prints her notes preceded by the sentences they answer, so the exchange can be followed.

Her first concession is generous — to Tindall's feeling that the agencies of the Adepts are not confined to the Theosophical Society, she replies that this was never claimed. What follows is the substantive teaching: the doctrine of the Nirmanakayas, brought forward in The Voice of the Silence, who are the Bodhisattvas or late Adepts that, having reached Nirvana and liberation from rebirth, renounce it voluntarily to remain invisibly amid the world and help ignorant humanity within the lines Karma permits. These, she writes, are the real spirits of disembodied men and she recognises no others — the rest being either Devachanis, to whose plane a living medium's spirit must ascend and who can never descend to ours, or spooks of the first water. The limit she sets on their help is severe: no Nirmanakaya influences a man for his own weal or saves him from anything but death, and then only if the man's life is useful, since units are as leaves to them and they look to benefit the trunk.

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