Blavatsky on the Theosophy of Dr N.I. Pirogov

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 27 pages

Twenty-seven pages with a full abstract and train of thoughts, each point carrying its page number, and a preface by Blavatsky. The subject is Nikolai Ivanovich Pirogov, the great Russian surgeon, whose posthumously published diary she read as unconscious theosophy — *so the file is at once a book review, a memorial and a piece of psychology*.

The governing distinction is between the false I or personality and the true Individuality or Higher Ego, the thoughts of the first being mere shadows of the second. From that follow the claims the file is most often cited for. The records of past events and passing thoughts, even the most trifling, are impressed on the imperishable waves of the Astral Light and not in the brain alone. Intuition is divine but faith is human, and much trouble comes from misapplying inner intuition. Personality, being the illusion of separateness, is named the root cause of all selfishness and evil, and has to be conquered and crushed before the lower is united with its higher counterpart. The most striking section is on insanity, and it is put in mechanical terms: loss of mind is attributed to the paralysis of the higher functions in Kama-Manas, the physical mind, and in cases of incurable insanity to the severance of the lower self from the Higher Self during a person's lifetime, which prevents the reunion of the two. A parallel account is given of moral rather than mental collapse — when one falls into love of self and of the world with its pleasures, losing the divine love of God and of the neighbour, he falls from the illusory life into real death, the higher principles which constituted the essential elements of his humanity being withdrawn, so that he lives on the lower plane of his faculties. Psychic and noetic action are then compared and contrasted, which is the technical heart of the file. A later section turns to physics, arguing that the atoms of science are not of this earth but belong to a quite different plane, and that the atomic theory is on a par only with the undulatory theory of light.

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