Paradox Is the Language of Occultism

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Living the Life Series · 19 pages

A nineteen-page compilation opened by an abstract and train of thoughts with page references. The running head names the subject: the language of occultism.

The first half states the doctrine and is short. The paradoxes of occultism, it says, must be lived and not uttered only — a condition that governs everything after it. The Alpha and Omega of life is named as selflessness, with the claim that only in the profound unconsciousness of self-forgetfulness, when all is silence without as within the inner citadel, can the truth and reality of being reveal itself to the eager heart. Two headings follow, the inner paradox and the outer paradox, distinguishing what the doctrine costs the person from how it appears to everyone else. The second half is quite different in temper: a series of reflections on the contradictory world the writer observed around her, sharp and often sardonic. There is no room in the world, one heading runs, for anyone not prepared to become a full-blown hypocrite. Others note that many newspaper editors show a decided leaning towards the mysteries of the archaic past; that no pagan even of the lower classes believed the soul would return into its old body, though cultured Christians do; that few can have the patience to read fifteen hundred pages of dreary metaphysical twaddle for the sake of a few valuable facts; and that wealth leads to impunity while poverty leads to condemnation even by the law, the impecunious having no means of paying lawyers.

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