Blavatsky on Mahatmas and Their Bodies

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · The Masters Speak Series · 12 pages

Twelve pages with a contents page and key concepts at the front, each claim given with its page number.

The starting point is the same power described elsewhere in this section — that Mahatmas can travel in the inner or astral body, keep full command of their intelligence while doing so, and condense the phantom form into visibility or dissolve it at will. What this file adds is the limits. They are not accident-proof, for the plain reason that they are living men in living bodies; their Māyāvi-rūpa is said to be furnished by the auric egg; and at death their apparitional or astral body becomes as solid and tangible as the physical body was. The central section sets out three conditions in sequence: when the body of an adept is entirely at the command of the inner man; when the spiritual Self is completely reunited with its seventh principle even during the lifetime of the personality; and when the astral or personal self has been so purified that it has assimilated all the qualities of the middle nature, Buddhi and Manas in their terrestrial aspect. Only when all three hold, it says, does the material lower self substitute itself for the spiritual higher Self and become capable of living an independent life on earth. From that follows the strangest claim in the file: that Mahatmas are able to desert their bodies, which then live on until the day of the body's death entirely devoid of a soul — with the reassurance that the adept's influence on the atoms of that form is such that no evil influence can enter it, and the life it leads is harmless and often actively good. The closing pages distinguish two kinds of voluntary and conscious incarnation, those of the Nirmānakāyas and those undertaken by probationary chelas on trial.

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