Blavatsky on the Acquisition of Knowledge

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 2 pages

Two pages opening with a passage from Plato on the light and spirit of the Divinity as the wings of the soul, and then giving a short fragment attributed to Blavatsky in The Theosophist for March 1910 under the heading "True knowledge comes in visions."

The Plato epigraph sets the frame: the soul raised to communion with the gods above an earth the spirit of man is too ready to soil itself with, becoming like the gods meaning to become holy, just and wise — and that being the end for which man was created and what ought to be his aim in acquiring knowledge. The fragment that follows describes how the writer says she came by what she knows: knowledge arriving in visions, first in dreams and then in pictures presented to the inner eye during meditation, and by that route the whole system of evolution, the laws of being, the mysteries of life and death and the workings of karma. Not a word, she says, was spoken in the ordinary way except by way of confirmation, and nothing was taught in writing. Knowledge so obtained is called so clear, so convincing and so indelible in its impression that other sources of information dwindle into insignificance beside it. The practical consequence given is a limitation rather than a boast: one reason she hesitates to answer some questions offhand is the difficulty of expressing in sufficiently accurate language things given in pictures and comprehended by pure Reason, as Kant would call it. A closing paragraph describes the teaching method as synthetic — general outlines first, then the method of working, then the broad principles, and only last the minuter points.

Read the full text (PDF, 0.3 MB, 2 pages)