Eastern Light Shines on Western Minds

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 13 pages

Thirteen pages opened by a short numbered abstract, which is unusually clear about the scope of the claim being made and worth reading on its own.

Eastern psychology, it says, has given the West a clue to certain mysteries previously baffling, and it names three departments rather than claiming everything. The first is mesmerism and hypnotism. The second is the supposed posthumous relations of the disincarnate entity with the living. The third is the nature and relations of force and matter — and here the claim is made testable, since it is said to be capable of practical verification by whoever will learn and follow out the experimental methods of the Oriental schools of occult science. Eastern occult science and its complementary philosophy are then said to throw light on some of the deepest problems of man and nature, followed by the sentence that qualifies everything before it: occultism is colourless, cosmopolitan, unsectarian, sexless, unworldly and altruistic — that is, it is not the property of the East any more than of the West. The body of the file is built around epigraphs and quotations rather than a continuous argument, and the choice of them is telling. Johnson is quoted on perseverance — that all the performances of the human heart at which we look with praise or wonder are instances of its resistless force, since it is by this that the quarry becomes a pyramid and distant countries are united by canals, and that operations incessantly continued in time surmount the greatest difficulties, mountains being levelled and oceans bounded by the slender force of human beings. The theme that emerges is patience and method rather than revelation.

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