Blavatsky on Karma and Reincarnation

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's Second Proposition Series · 12 pages

Twelve pages from "Thoughts on Karma and Reincarnation," first published in Lucifer in April 1889 and republished in Blavatsky Collected Writings volume XI. The epigraph is from the Upanishads, on arteries thin as a hair split a thousand times, in which the ethereal frame of the astral body is lodged and to which the residues of former incarnations adhere, accompanying it from body to body.

The article begins not with the doctrine but with the people who ask about it, and the opening is characteristically sharp. Voltaire's advice to judge a man by his questions rather than his answers is quoted and then said to stop halfway: to cover the ground one must also ascertain the motive prompting the questioner. A man may ask from a sincere impulse to learn; another asks endless questions with no better motive than cavilling and proving his opponent wrong. Those introducing themselves as enquirers into theosophy are then sorted into kinds — materialists and spiritualists, agnostics and Christians among them. Some, though rarely, are genuinely open to conviction; a few, thinking with Cicero that no truth-seeking man should be charged with unsteadiness for changing his opinions, become converted. But the majority, it says, are carpers rather than enquirers: whether from narrowness of mind or foolhardiness, they entrench themselves behind preconceived and often shallow opinions and will not budge, which makes such a seeker hopeless because his desire to investigate is not real. Having drawn that distinction, the remainder of the article sets out the twin doctrines for readers of the first sort.

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