Mahatmas and Chelas

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, et al. · Higher Ethics and Devotion Series · 22 pages

A compendium of six articles across twenty-two pages, listed on a contents page at the front and closing with suggested reading. The opening piece is from Five Years of Theosophy: Mystical, Philosophical, Theosophical, Historical, and Scientific Essays selected from “The Theosophist,” London: Reeves & Turner, 1885, pages 92–95, also in Blavatsky Collected Writings VI pages 239–41.

The arrangement moves from definition to testimony to challenge. Blavatsky opens by defining a Mahatma as a personage who, by special training and education, has evolved the higher faculties and attained the spiritual knowledge that ordinary humanity will acquire only after passing through numberless reincarnations in the course of cosmic evolution — provided they do not in the meanwhile go against the purposes of nature and so bring on their own annihilation. The self-evolution described is explicitly a process extending over many incarnations rather than a status conferred. Four first-hand or reported accounts follow: S. Ramaswamier on how a chela found his guru, D.K. Mavalankar on the Sages of Himavat, M.M. Chatterji asking directly whether the Himalayan Brothers exist, and R.K. Brahmachari's interview with a Mahatma. A sixth piece gives Blavatsky on the experiences of A.F. Tindall. Setting the definition, the narratives and the sceptical question side by side within one file lets a reader weigh the claim against the evidence offered for it, which is evidently why the six were gathered.

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