Toward the Brotherhood of Man

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Higher Ethics and Devotion Series · 9 pages

A nine-page compilation opened by an abstract and train of thoughts, built around questions raised by Barbara Moskvitinoff with Blavatsky's editorial responses. The running head names the subject: smoothing the path of spiritual progress.

The governing claim is stated twice, at the opening and again in the middle, which is a fair indication of how much weight it carries: that no spiritual progress at all is possible except by and through humanity at large, when all sense of separateness, all selfishness and all feeling of personal interest and desire has been merged in a wider consciousness of unity. The consequence drawn is unusually strict — that only when the whole of humanity has attained happiness can the individual hope to become permanently happy, since the individual is an inseparable part of the whole. The replies to the correspondent develop the same point in terms of illusion rather than duty: that the sense of separateness of one's self from one's other selves is delusionary, breeding the desire to satisfy self in matter at everyone else's expense, and that what men call self is the illusory reflection of the One Universal Self in the heaving waters of earth. The closing section, headed aliment for the soul and a warning, is the most practical and the least comfortable. Whoever is thoroughly imbued with altruistic feeling, willing to forget self and ready to help his neighbour carry the burden of life, is told plainly to expect ridicule, slander and vilification — and that learning to disdain is among the most difficult yet necessary things in life, disdain being described as something that both protects and crushes.

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