The Society Is Not a Nursery for Budding Adepts

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 11 pages

Eleven pages with an abstract and train of thoughts, under a running heading on the prerequisites for spiritual development. *It is a corrective file*, aimed at people who joined for the wrong reasons, and it is unusually practical about what the right ones look like.

It opens on a diagnosis of suffering that has nothing to do with the Society at all: the main cause of pain lies in our perpetually seeking the permanent in the impermanent, and the trouble that comes upon us is always just the one we felt to be the hardest that could possibly happen, the one thing we felt we could not possibly bear. Evil, it adds, is often the result of anxiety in anticipation of recognition and personal reward. From there the argument turns to the Society's purpose: its mission is to rekindle the torch of truth by forming a fraternal union of mankind, the only soil in which the good seed can grow — and then the blunt sentence the title comes from, that to those who are keen to acquire psychic powers for private advantage the Society has nothing whatever to say. A warning follows against quick and easy ways of acquiring psychic gifts. What makes the file unexpectedly concrete is what she proposes instead, and it is worth quoting because it is so far from the mystical: if each branch were able to establish a homeopathic dispensary, with the addition of mesmeric healing, the Society might help put the science of medicine in this country on a sounder basis and be the means of incalculable benefit to the people at large. The closing principle generalises that: good thought alone does not count for much unless it is translated into action, and there is not a single member who is not able to do something to aid the cause of truth and brotherhood — and, in doing it, develop self-reliance and reasoning powers.

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