A Lay Chela on the Secret Doctrine

A Lay Chela · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 10 pages

Ten pages from Five Years of Theosophy, London: Reeves and Turner, 1885, pages 473 to 481, by the same anonymous Lay Chela as the companion piece on occult study. The frontispiece is The Gordian Knot by Martin-Georg Oscity, which suits the subject.

The subject is one of the standing grievances of the movement's early years: what shall, and what shall not, be revealed to the outer world. Few experiences about the threshold of occult studies, the writer says, are more perplexing and tormenting than those which have to do with the policy of the Brothers on that question — and only students at once tenacious and patient can endure what looks at first sight like a grudging and miserly policy. He states the case against his own side fairly, which is what makes the piece worth reading. Critics regard the teachers as keeping guard over their intellectual possessions and saying, in effect, that they won won this knowledge with strenuous effort and at the cost of sacrifice and suffering and will not make a present of it to luxurious idlers who have done nothing to deserve it. Most critics of the Theosophical Society, he acknowledges, have fastened on that idea and denounced the policy as selfish and unreasonable — granting, at most, that occult powers must be withheld from unconscientious people who would do mischief, but insisting that no such motive can justify reserving occult philosophical truth. The essay exists to answer that distinction with considerations he believes have generally been overlooked, and he says he is putting them forward now because a considerable body of occult philosophical teaching is at last before the world, and because it is precisely those who value it most who protest most emphatically at the tardiness with which it has been served out.

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