Students of Theosophy Have a Choice of Two Paths

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 9 pages

Nine pages from the Collected Writings volume XII, pages 236 to 237, published there as "Mistaken Notions in the Secret Doctrine". The frontispiece is by Sonya Chasey. *It sets out a fork in two lines* and then spends the rest of its length on what has gone wrong with the second road.

There are several ways of acquiring knowledge, she says, and lists two: accepting blindly the dicta of the church or of modern science, or rejecting both and starting to find the truth for oneself. The first method is easy and leads to social respectability and the praise of men; the other is difficult and requires more than ordinary devotion to truth, a disregard for direct personal benefit, and unwavering perseverance. So it was in the days of old and so it is now — except, she adds, that such devotion has been rarer in her own day than of yore. Her complaint is then aimed even-handedly at both hemispheres: the modern Eastern student's unwillingness to think for himself is now as great as Western exactions and criticism of other people's thoughts. The image that follows is the reason to read the file, and it has not dated at all. The student demands and expects that his Path shall be engineered with all the selfish craft of modern comfort — macadamized, laid out with swift railways and telegraphs, and even telescopes, through which he may survey the works of others while sitting at his ease. Written in the 1880s about railways and telegraphs, it describes exactly the expectation a reader might bring to a website full of free books, which is a useful thing to meet on the way in.

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