Theosophy Is the Pearl Within Every Religion's Shell

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 8 pages

Eight pages, first published in The Theosophist volume III number 11, August 1882, page 272, and republished in the Collected Writings volume IV as "Questions about Esoteric Theosophy Answered". *It is a reply to one correspondent's worry*, and the worry is a fair one that many readers will have had.

The correspondent, having read the pamphlet Hints on Esoteric Theosophy, asked what the consequences would be if all the world turned ascetics and chelas and trained for adeptship. Her answer begins by declining the premise, briskly: he need not trouble himself, since there are enough realities in this life to look into without concocting wild contingencies to vex ourselves with. The reason follows and is offered as a plain observation about human beings rather than as doctrine — there never was a time, nor ever will be while this human race lasts, when anything more than a small minority would devote themselves to the mighty task of self-conquest and spiritual evolution. The adept, she says, is as rare as the flower of the Vogay tree, which a Tamil proverb calls most difficult to see. What the pamphlet described was therefore the ideal man, the living and most necessary type of human perfectibility — and the value of such a type is not that many will reach it but that the mere certainty that such powers and such moral grandeur are within human reach gives dignity to our common nature and a worthy model to look up to and in some degree pattern after. A neat argument from biology closes the passage: the organs of our body were not given to us at all, if modern science may be credited; they developed as occasion required, and when disused they gradually diminish and disappear — which they would not do if they had been given. As for what man's mission on earth would be if all were good, she says that is more than anyone can say.

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