Madame Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891)

Prelude to the Twentieth Century
Presentation 3 of 13

Madame Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891)
Isis Unveiled. The Secret Doctrine. Theosophy as a World Pattern
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, July 19, 1984

Transcript:
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The date is July 19th, 1984. This is a third lecture in a series of lectures on by Roger, where on prelude to the 20th century, tonight's lecture is entitled. Madame Helena Blavatsky who lived 1831 to 1891, ISIS Sundale the secret doctrine, and theosophy has a world pattern.
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Madame Blavatsky was born in 1831 and August the 12th of August. Her father was a military man. And, um, at the beginning of the 19th century, a military man was still someone who had pride of purpose and discipline. They were not enlisted common individuals. They were usually aristocratic or semi aristocratic officers. Her mother who died very early. I think she was 28 when she died was a beautiful woman and was descended for her part from a very aristocratic Russian family. The Dobo roofs Rurik one of the founders of the Russian aristocratic lineage was in the family line. So from her maternal grandmother who raised her from the age of 12 on was an aristocratic Russian as a young child, Helena was a precautious, uh, type of an individual due partly to her own temperament and partly to the quality of experience to what she was susceptible.
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It's difficult for us in this country in this age to appreciate the wide difference in human beings. We are so inured to the Manet's type of personality, that it's not difficult for us to envision the wide differences in human personalities. And so it's difficult for us to appreciate what a weird, real wild card human being is like someone for whom there are no stereotypes. Someone for whom may have the closed doors of this universe are wide open and drafting. And as a youngster, she was tuned in, as we would say to the secret corridors. In fact, as usually happens with personalities this time, they called forth from phenomenal reality conditions, which meet their own interior qualities.
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We're used to thinking that the exterior produces the interior, and we have to give pause to ourselves somewhat. When we run across individuals for whom the interior life is so powerful, then it calls forth. The choreography in time-space appropriate to the unfolding of the drama within there are such beings. There are such types of people they've existed by the hundreds throughout history. There are not so rare as we might think her maiden name was Han. And so little Helena Hahn found the capacity to charm her playmates with stories. And in fact, she would make it stories that would become so captivating to them. And so real to her that she would begin to enter into the tone of the dramatic enfoldment of the story, to the point to where her blue eyes flashing on her feature suddenly becomes still in her voice, rising and shrill pitches, approximating either rage or ecstatic discovery. She would call for a quality of presence, which the other people would you feel the children, she was exposed to the military life in the wilds of the east of Russia. At the time she was the patent an army brat, as we would say from the second world war, she was a pat of the regiment and very often participated in situations that normally little girls do not see.
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And from this combining of her visionary capacity and his exposure to the military regimen of manly life, the peculiar sense of practical self protection occurred to her. And from time to time, whenever she was squeezed a little too hard in the wrong way, psychologically she would recharge dominantly. They hasn't recall a story where a young boy for an early on lessons, probably 13 or 14, who was pulling her perambulator. She was four years old and she was walking with a nurse, had rubbed her the wrong way. And she had turned to him and retarded to him that they were assaulted because we'll get you these water NIMS and had drawing her voice and her styling of presence to such a pitch that they young adolescent feeling the Virgin of what we would call metaphysical fright occurring to him, took the path that the sense of death usually brings to human beings.
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The path of flight and his body was recovered. Several days later, he had drowned. The physician said by accident, the peasant said that this little girl was dangerous. These kinds of occurrences with a psychically gifted child in a situation where the family life was poorly polarized. Her mother wrote nine novels that were best-sellers. She longed to escape to St. Petersburg to the literary circles there. Her father, a military man loved the frontier, loved the fighting. Her sister. Vera was several years younger than her and her brother. It came very late just a year or so before the mother died in 1842.
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So that Helena as a young child gained a very peculiar cast of characters in her appraisal of human capacity. And in fact, when her mother died, she was sent to live with her grandparents. At first, her grandfather, who was in what we would call the political service of czar was in charge. He was a governor general in the forbidding city of ASTA con, where the Volga river fans out and it's Delta several miles wide. And it sluggishly slithers into the Caspian sea Bertrand Russell, once writing of Oster con said, it is the last place on earth. Anyone would voluntarily go up to them. But very soon, the family, the grandparents and young Helena and her sister moved up the Volga to serotonin and there, the governor generals mansion contained many rooms, serving supporters, family rooms, and rooms of state, an enormous spread of complications. But what drew Helen is the imagination and her adventurous spirit was the honeycombing Wunderground of sellers and long corridors and secret passages.
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And it was there that she began to firm up for herself, the strategy, her visionary capacity. Now as a 12 year old 13 year old girl, she would often be found walking at night sleepwalking, and it would search the grounds and search the house. And she was not to be found. And then the trembling servants who would be given the task of going downstairs, Munder ground under the house where men lived to look for the holy terror and there she would be pacing. The corridors stopping every once in a while, whispering to herself long monologues of interior design. And they in gratefulness would lead her upstairs and retire to talk about sure, this kind of an adolescence of course produces a very tough individual. If one is just right, right. First of all, there is the sense of the crassness of humanity. How can they talk of me in this way?
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How dare they look at me behind the rooms and the vegetation to behind the curtains of polite society and talk of me this way. And yet at the same time, yes, Donny realization that the human personality is not a wall, but a napkin. It's a Nat, highly permeable to movements and currents that hardly belong to this world. This became the familiar intelligence of Helen Hahn and all the time that her adolescence was rising to a shape of becoming a young woman. The age of 16, she matched a young army officer who was interested in the alcohol. And in fact, it seemed for her that this was the appointed round in her life. And it was with great pain. When she learned that he had left the vicinity and had gone to another portion of the Russian empire. And this first love was shattered. And three weeks later on the rebound, she married old Colonel old general Blavatsky. Someone had talked to her about the Jilt and it said she was actually not very beautiful. She was very weird. She was precocious. She read all books all the time. No man would be interested in her, not even old general [inaudible] who was about 40 years old at the time. And the young girl's still 16 and just a few days brought about the enticement and the marriage, which lasted three months.
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She couldn't stand. It was an impossible situation. He was very much like her father, a military man rising up. And she was a flower of infinite depth, unfolding pedal bipedal. And there was no room to grow. There was nowhere for her to be. And so she left her husband after three months and returned back to her grandfather's house estate. And there the incomprehensibility of the old grandparents, how could she leave her husband? What kind of a troublesome little girl is this anyway? And so a message was sent to her father who was at that time, uh, at a distant post in Russia to quickly come and take his daughter back. Nothing could be done with such a girl who knows what she could do next.
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There was no railroad line directly leading there. And so a bevy of servants was garnered to a scorch young Helen above ASCII, Joe, a port, where there would be a ship that would take her around to another part from when she could get the train and then be re-established in her father's care. She never reached her father. We don't know exactly how she meant it, but the choreography ran something like this. She managed to secure for herself and escape aboard a smaller ship captain by an Englishman that was eventually headed towards Constantinople. And at the age of 17, she slipped out of the entire world that she had been raised in and threw herself completely upon the entire wide world. And for the next 25 years, she wrote the world not as an adventurous, but as someone for whom the interior flowering had to open up in the largest amphitheater that she could give herself. And that was the enormous entirety of the plan. We have some indications that when she reached Constantinople and that she teamed up with a Countess, a Keswick who was there, but none of the information is sound there just simply no way of telling exactly what was her itinerary.
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We know that she probably spent a little time in Egypt after reaching constants and alcohol. In fact, there are accounts from various, uh, individuals of having, um, met her, uh, in various places in Egypt. We have this kind of a story. This is from Mary nets, personal memories of H people about scape. She talks in here about traveling in upper Egypt and whenever our caravan stopped a young traveler who believed he excelled on the flute, amuse the company by playing the camel drivers and other Arabs and variably checked him and having been several times annoyed by the unexpected appearance of various families of the reptile tribe, which generally shirk and encounter with men. Finally, our caravan met with a party among whom were professional snake charmers. And if written the virtue also was then invited for experiments, say to display his skill. And so all of these snake charmers got their flutes going and pretty soon all the snakes of the place and gathered around, and one enormous spotted character had raised itself and was dancing high on its tail coming closer and closer to the flute player who finally lifted himself up and fled like everyone had to the backs of the camels.
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But one old snake charmer reached into his pouch and brought out a dead looking plant and wave this at the snake that refused to be charmed. And it too very soon, just in time fell under the spell, all of their heads were cut off and they were all thrown into a well, these kinds of stories abound when one is trying to find what did she do in those 25, 5 years? The child of the stories is that she led to the most melodramatic life that she could find not an adventurous though.
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She was exploding inside and she had to find some tapestry against which to, oh wow. The shrapnel of this psychic explosion to project itself, to occur if only to save herself, the most important clue to Madame Blavatsky is yes, the hypnotic color of her, the Azure blue of her eyes, which was captivating and the extreme, almost all of the jaded reporters, critics of her who record having met her in person, all allude to the incredible sense of presence in those eyes, infinite pools of life, something in this woman of indefinite extent. So we know that she moved to Constantinople. She moved down into Egypt. It's most probable that she crossed back over through grace on her way to England. We have some indication that very early on in the 1850s, perhaps in 1850 or 1851 that she crossed over to Canada and then made her way down through the United States, through Texas down to Mexico, we know that she was in Peru, probably sometime 1851 or late 1850 and all the time traveling never going to a destination.
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And that's perhaps the key of it all always moving in a kind of a freelance fashion, following some interior guidance, some sense of becoming acquainted with the elements of a composition. Her itinerary was not geographical. It was, as we would say today, psychical, she was attempting to simply acquaint herself physically with the locations, the people, the sites she had as a youngster read voluminously in all of the alcohol sciences. Now she had put the books aside because she realized that what was unfolding in her was not the mind who was not an intellectual assessment. It was some deep experiential opening. And for this only actual experience, only the sense and quality of personal presence would do. And so she had given up educating herself in the traditional way, through the mind and had gone in the primitive quest to simply expose herself graphically and immediately on a worldwide scale to whatever mysteries actually occurred in the quality of the ruins left in the quality of the descendants of the people left in the qualities of the actual presence that could be evoked by her being there.
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And so for a quarter of a century, she tutored her inner-self. She exposed her inner self to the qualities of the planet, and then roving. She made her way several times through Asia. She records in fact, in 1856 that she was in India and got out of India just before the mutiny of 1887. The quality of her descriptions of India are very interesting. We have some examples from the volume. I think the best readable introduction to Madame Blavatsky, her book called from the caves and jungles of Hindustan. Here's an example. It is a remarkable coincidence that almost all the cave temples of India are dug from conical cliffs and mountains as though the ancient builders looked for such natural pyramids purposely. I have already noted this peculiar and unusual shape in describing our trip to Carly. One of the large cave complexes in India, Southern India, and do not remember seeing it anywhere, but in India, is it a miracle coincidence, or is it one of the rules of the religious architecture of those remote times and who are the imitators, the builders of the Egyptian pyramids or the unknown architects of the underground temples of India in pyramids, as well as in cave, temples, everything seems to be calculated with geometrical exactitude.
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And I'm the, just as in the case of pyramids, the entrances into the cave temples are not at the foot, but at a certain distance from the base of the hill note, the quality here of exposing herself prime origin to the experiences, whatever they are, wherever they are, let them occur, but always with the imposition, like a montage in the film of a template of understanding that somewhere here as a structure is an order. And all that we have to go on are the kinds of parallel arcs of discovery, which are available.
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Why not go to the bucks because of the conviction that's human beings given as we are, are governable and easily do. One could tell any amount of stories in sway, any number of people. She was peculiarly and almost ironically aware of this flaw in this fall. So she constantly guarded herself against having her own self fall into this kind of a track. And in order to do this like a masterful juggler, she was always keeping in practice with others, always keeping the sense of liveliness of possibilities of renditions and versions alive. And this is why those 25 years why that quarter of a century is impossible to find a, an itinerary, which one could down with one could log or math, because she was learning exactly how to juggle the reality behind itineraries to acclimate herself to a flow of pattern, which is based on experience of unity and not upon portioned out sequencing.
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She was tuning herself to a grand cord rather than learning to hum notes that might lead one to understand chords. So she was circum navigating the world to get a shortcut to interior development, again from the K's and jungles of Hindu staff, just the quality of, uh, of her writing. Now, daily, we wandered across rivers and jungles passing villages and ruins of ancient fortresses over local country roads between nastiness and Juul, poor traveling by day and Bullock carts sometimes and elephants or on horseback. And at times being carried, carried and plank wins. And that night fall frequently pitching our tent. Wherever we might be. These days offered us an opportunity to convince ourselves of the fact that man is able to surmount dangerous and almost fatal conditions of climate by mere force of habit, almost unconsciously indications, again of a grand interior design. One last reading from this while she was exposing herself to this kind of a development one develops the sense, almost like a, someone who has traveled with a circus for a very long time, or has traveled with any kind of a road show.
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One develops the ability to become a rock on tour of life, power excellence. So here she is a Persian inscription on the base of a white marble octagon reveals that the cost 100,000 rupees by day, based in the hot rays of the sun, it's tall minaret, like outline stands out like a pyramid of ice against the cloudless Azure of the sky by night in that peculiar phosphorescent Moonlight, proper to India, which has enthused all travelers and artists. It is still more dazzling and poetical its summit looks as if it were covered with light freshly fallen, snow, raising it slender profile above the dark green background of the shrubbery. It suggests some pure midnight apparition soaring over the silent abode of destruction in death lamenting the past that will never return captivating stories. The ability to have on-call thousands of vignettes of actual experience at the same time that these actual vignettes of experience have risen within a fertile ground of some strategic glance, main change with varying constancy over the 25 year period. And as she matured at this, she realized that there was some guiding light within her that allowed her to do this. She was not swayed by the swirl of life. There was something inside of her that gave it shape and form. There was in fact the sense increasingly of guidance, the sense of some lunch being there. And of course, having come from the background that she did, she was very ready to believe that it might not be herself at all.
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We have it time to go into the doctrine of icons, which forms a very strong part of the Greek Orthodox Russian mind. Simple to say that there he has an indelible belief handed down through the Byzantine empire, still penetrating the Russian mind and still very much alive in the Eastern Orthodox church, that there are portions of our phenomenal world that become charged and trans substantiated and become transparent as it were to the spiritual force behind all things. It began to occur to hell in a basket by the time she was in her twenties, that she herself might become an icon for these forces in the person of some masterful presence expressing itself through her associate began to record more and more the sense that she was given direction by the master Doug master, who later became known as Moria. And in fact, as this began to occur to her through the 1850s, by the time 1856 came around, she was convinced that in her motion around the world, she had found traces everywhere. She had found traces Peru and south America that that men had come from an ancient Atlantean civilization. She found traces in Egypt that somehow the builders of the pyramids had been related and that all of this relation pointed towards some areas still vibrant upon the planet to where she had not carried herself. And that mysterious geographical location was Tibet and more and more loomed to her as the final secret, the talisman for her, she must go to Tibet.
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She brought herself in 1856 to the very verge of the Tibetan frontier. She went, uh, north from Kashmir and up into ley, L E H in the Ladakh area, then known as little Tibet. And this was a very forbidding terrain, perhaps. Uh, the most difficult, uh, entrance into the Tibetan region would be from the little dock region later on. Um, how about, uh, 50 years? As a matter of fact, after Madame Blavatsky tried to enter into Tibet through LA doc online, a lot of his return journeys are all Stein coming back from central Asia made his way down through those passes. Uh, several hundreds of miles of steep passes and remark that this was probably not the most used trail. That one would much rather go all the way around by Afghanistan, up through the premiers and come down through Kashkar and a Yar camp in that region rather than kind of cross what seems like a shortcut on the map.
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So this young woman, 24 years old twenty-five years old, he exposed herself to one of the most difficult terrains in the world, not as an adventurous, but as someone for whom there was an increasing sacred responsibility to unfold that whatever it was had to come out and had to come out in terms of the actual quality of the world and the actual quality of the world then became more and more transparent to her. And it kind of a cosmic history began to unfold itself in the penetrating gaze that she began to notice in herself, looking through time, looking through conditions, beginning to sense their incredible integrity, how they origins are still there, how all the processes of forming are still how some gifted medium who might touch an object would record the psychic history of that object through some time flow or through some space planning.
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And she began to acclimate herself to realizing that perhaps the entire world was becoming a crystal ball for her through which she could see all things in all times, there was no time really for others. There were the friends that she kept in correspondence with, but it was a lonely journey. And by 1860, she found herself back in Russia, but in the Southern most part, the Caucasian Georgian area of Russia, the city of, uh, um, Kith was one of the large cities, just south of the Caucasian range. She'd been there several times as a youngster. And so she stayed in templates for awhile, trying to recognize her herself, thinking to herself that there must be some way in which to pattern this event, the event being the unfolding of a world self through her, it occurred to her in tip lists that life for her had become something utterly different than it was to anyone else that she was able to meet.
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We find here and Mary Neff said first, no memoirs and met him. Love ASCII general Nicola. Describe the Titlist home of the FID dates, who are the grandparents of Helen in his reminiscences of prince [inaudible] as follows. They were living in those years in the ancient mansion of prince. [inaudible] the great building itself, carrying the imprint of something weird or peculiar about it. A long lofty and gloomy hall was hung with the family portraits of the FID dates and the princess Dogo, Rooskie farther on with a drawing room its walls covered with Gobelins tapestry, a present from the emperor, Catherine and near at hand was the apartment of Mademoiselle on a buggy in itself. One of the most remarkable of private museums, they were brought together arms and weapons from all the countries of the world, ancient crockery cups and goblets archaic tensiles utensils, Chinese and Japanese idols, mosaics and images of the business, gene, epic, Persian, and Turkish carpets and fabrics worked with gold and silver statues, pictures, paintings, petrified fossils, and finally a very rare and most precious library. And in fact, her maternal grandmother was very famous as a botanist in the 19th century and had a collection of exotic plants from all over the world. So that the home that she went to and TIF lists was like a collection, a skimming of the cream of history and of the world in its vegetative aspect. And in its cultural aspect, in the fossilized mineral aspect, all of the worlds were brought together and the house itself wasn't attraction. There were no museums of natural history at this time, all anywhere in the world, really.
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So she found herself in shiftless in this kind of a home just when she was beginning to realize that the opening up of the interior flower had made the entire world in its history, transparent to her. And it was then that the call of the master came strongest and she realized that she would have to penetrate into Tibet. She would have to find where he was, that there was an ashram somewhere in Tibet where he actually existed physically existed as a presence, which she could experience. And so she moved herself again on her travels by 1864, Madame Blavatsky finally penetrated into Tibet. There were not many Europeans who had ever gone into Tibet at that time. They old Adrianna tradition guarded itself very strongly against interlopers against any incursions. In fact, up until the 1930s, there were just a handful of individuals that were actually welcome by the Tibetans theocracy.
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We have some wonderful accounts yesterday, DAS in the 18, late 1890s went in disguise to Lhasa and his book, uh, still in print in a reprint, gives the sense of the eeriness of Tibet, even in the late 1890s for an experienced a man of the world. DAS was a diplomat and the soldier of fortune and a great scholar, even in the world war one period when, uh, Francis young husband and, um, uh, surcharge bell managed to go into and later on, when Evans once managed to get into Dravet, the sense all the way through is that the eeriness the strangeness of the place, the forbidding us, even when I agree he could go, vendetta went, uh, in the second world war era, there was the sense that this was almost untracked. So you can imagine in 1864, someone peculiarly grown and ranged and evolved and visionary like Helena Boulevard, ski had a trading entity, but with the conviction that there was the center of the case, galactic flower unfolding in her, and she found it.
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There are stories that she spent seven years, again, the ashram, which she denied several times later on, she would always in her writings, try to keep a balance between the overall strategical ethical impetus behind her life as a purpose, as a plan and a tactical sense of keeping off guard, all peoples who would try to do pur or become interlopers or become critics. And so in this balance, the stories would come out and be denied and changed and reoccur in different versions until almost nothing could be determined. She writes, I did not come back from India in one of those early steamers, November of 1869. Well maybe for all I know or remember, we did not land. All I know is that it was the year of the opening of the canal by that she means the opening of the Suez canal, which was in November of 1869.
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All I know is that it was the year of the opening of the canal soon after. And when the emphasis of France was there, whether she had been there some months before was there, then I could not tell my remembrance is hanging on the fuss, made about it on board and constant constant conversations. And that either our steamer or one going with it was the third that crossed it. Cause you didn't quality here. Hidden quality is that of someone whose inner psychic memory has been trained. The old classic artists memory was in Cicero, odd, horrendous is at [inaudible] that a place and a focus needs to be structured within a context. And as long as one, Bill's an architectonic series of conditions, contextual conditions, one can literally expand the memory indefinitely. There is no final finite range to mountains memory.
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She recalls in classic art of memory style, a poignant feeling toned event, which keyed and thus queued in this [inaudible] structure. And that's what's being given here. So by 1869, by the end of 1869, she had in fact been highly trained. This is not something that someone just develops and runs across this. In fact, as a condition, which is taught one, knowing the India in the Tibet, all of the late 19th century, very often when I'm in the traditions, one would be teaching a near flight, uh, memory training along with developing the set of matrixes. One would also present to them a number of objects, which would be quickly taken away. And one would then be called upon to recount what was there. And so this game, this exercise I'll parading objects very, very quickly, and then taking them away, forcing the individual then to develop what we call today. Nively the photographic
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Memory. Simply what it is, is allowing the occurrence of that time space to occur just as it is. Then if one has a memory matrix training built up, it records indelibly. It also opens up the capacities of the resonance of the senses, which then integrate on the transcendental level and allow for an almost infinitesimal microscopic or telescopic, uh, analyzing of the moment. One can learn how the single moment a single grain of dust could tell you it entertained, uh, incentive. This capacity is evidently in place in mountain blocky by the turn of 1870. And in fact, we find her going back, going back with an idea, finally, of setting up some kind of a society. And in fact, the first place that she tried was in Cairo in Egypt. And she was there for several years and it wouldn't take, it wouldn't happen. It wouldn't grow by this time, she was sure of herself.
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She was sure of her capacities sure. Of the mission given to her. It had to be in Cairo across from the great pyramids, where else in history would it be? And yet it was not there and became apparent to her that she needed to open herself up more for guidance. Where was the new power? Where was the new center where the pyramids of energy on the planet we're coming together in 1874, she finally decided upon New York city, this was the place of upcoming energy in the world where the focus would be strongest. And so she took herself to New York city and found herself for the first time in her life, probably completely cut off poor and panelists. She lived in a little room and there is in fact, okay, number of, uh, recalls of her life at this time. He people at this time, Madame was greatly troubled about money, right?
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It's very narrow the income, what she had received regularly from her father and Russia had stopped. And she was almost painless. The condition incidentally was that her father had died and the estate was in a kind of a probationary period. And so there were no funds coming to her. She had some idea that this condition was caused by the machinations of some person or persons in touch with her father. And she expressed herself about these persons with customary vigor. Still some of the more conservative people in our house suggested that she was after all an adventurous and the want of money was only what one might have expected. But my friend Ms. Parker, whom she took with her to the Russian council and assured me that she really was a Russian counters that the council knew of her family. And it promised to do all he could to get in touch with them and find out what was the difficulty.
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The owner of our house was a Mr Ronaldo who personally collected his rents. And so it became acquainted with our people like everyone else who became interested in HPB and introduced two young friends of his, to her. They came very often to see her and were a practical aid to her and suggesting and giving her work that let her design picture advertising cards for themselves and others. She did many odd jobs, as we would say. She wants at a factory for making artificial flowers in Teslas. And at one time in New York, she actually went into a street pocking, a little artificial just to carry her through and tighter. So she was tough. She was a survivor. She had somebody who she had been through the most difficult terrains on the planet in the most difficult, psychological way to go through them. And so she was tough.
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She was a campaigner, but then it occurred to her that there was a point of destiny that does occur in lives and in history. And she found herself drawn to Vermont, to a meeting at the Eddy house with two Eddy brothers, not Mary Baker, Eddy. And it was there in one fell swoop and a series of seances that Madame Blavatsky penetrated the historical phenomenal world and became the high priestess of the occult is one writer said almost overnight. And we'll get to that after our break, take a break. Now forgive me if I leave out favorite parts or favorite stories, but I actually always have, um, four or five times more information than I have time for. And, uh, I don't, I don't write out notes and I don't write out lectures anymore. And I realized the ethical responsibility of creating shear. And now what is being said, because that's the only way that it's real.
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Um, I have to trained in intelligence and I know too many different traditions where I can organize something that would pass beautifully into your minds and not be real. We have to have something that's, nutrition's something which has its laws and it's unraveling. And so you can pick away at it and not be baffled by it, but take it and use it in your own way. I don't know what anybody does with these talks. They've been going on now for four years and we've been tracing the history of neon and in a strange way, we've been doing it person by person because that's the only way to keep ourselves off the hot plate of ideational constructions, which are grand and great for people that don't have them. But for people like ourselves that have too many of them, we've got to steer clear of them for awhile.
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So I'm trying to present spontaneously, whatever seems appropriate in a shape that can be heard in an hour and a half. So if I leave out some things is because all of these individuals that we're talking about are too fabulous. For words, you can't have an hour and a half capture them. There's no way you can't even present them. So I'm just trying to give some sort of a glimpse and hope that for yourself, that you're led or driven or charmed back to these people back to their works. These people actually existed. They are real. What other people have made out of them is what is effective. We have to have a diet of actual experience before we can have any real sense of what we are about.
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So 1874 meeting Colonel Allcon. I had hoped to have some slides. I don't sell. Don't have slides. We think of CHRO old Cod as the old white girded man. He was actually very handsome American army officer, very forthright looking individual kind of individual that builds something that lasts seven monks from Sri Lanka told me that the only statue of an American in Asia, in a public place, in a major city, Colonel old con Colombo, right in downtown Columbia, he revised the educational system of Sri Lanka. He made it possible for those people to recover their own heritage. We think that the treasures of Asia have always been there.
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They've just come back in our own time. Deanna Eureka, Donna Paula had to take a broom when he went to Bodh Gaya to sweep out the dust of centuries. The place of the Buddha's enlightenment was in total neglect for centuries was filthy. It's only in our own time that all the treasures have been brought back out. It's our task to Polish them up, set them out in the sun. Again, you know, the Western tradition began with the sacredness of holding rights of purification and the pure air, whether it's the groves of the ancient Celts or the groves of the ancient Greeks, the pure air. And that's what we're we're doing here is we're just opening ourselves up to the roofless temple of personal experience. When Madame Blavatsky got together finally with Colonel Todd, who was a newspaper man also, and at this time she realized that he was the right man to not, just to be a front man to advertise it to PR, but somebody who had integrity, he did and still stands for in tech.
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And so she to collect around her very, very quickly, a number of talented individuals and they got together and they formed the theosophical society is what she always wanted, what she always wanted to do. And as soon as that society was formed and place, she like an artist sense that the canvas was there. And that's when she produced her first really great extended work, ISIS unveiled. She painted this picture on the tapestry of the philosophical society, 1875 to 1877. It's called vices unveiled in a world of materialistic masculinity. She was saying the truth of life is something you've never seen. She's been veiled for you. And if you'd like to see life naked, well, the entrance to her temple is through a kind of a self purification. They recollecting of the own of your own fragment and
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Life. And then this
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Recollecting of oneself [inaudible] disembodied month having been chopped up by false experience. Now recollected into that new birth symbolized by the eye of Horus, the eye that sees transparently into the sun, the quality of presence, that one, yes, this individual may see ISIS unveiled. That individual is then self initiated into this temple. And when we open ISIS unveiled and we find tremendous imagery of what everywhere, it's true that if you look with a scholarly eye or a learned eye today, but you could crumble a lot of the pages up and throw them away in terms of factual meat, but that's not what's going on here. What's going on here is a very courageous woman balancing herself on a planet, which has become completely transparent to all the time and space like an Acrobat, trying to present the exploitation of that light pattern, not energy as some dead continuum, existing as forest, but some goddess whose veils be drawn aside, life herself can be seen.
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There's a point at image, the end of page one 10, about the Virgin Mary. She writes to think for one moment that any of the pulps Cardinals or other high dignitaries were not aware from the first of the last, all the external meanings of their symbols is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellianism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty, which can be skirted by the employment of Wediko artifacts. The policy of complacent conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Salem, who according to the Abbe, Dubai certainly alerted and competent authority conducted the images of the Virgin and savior on triumphal cars, imitated from the origins of jocker Knauf and introduced the dancers from the Brum Monaco rights into the ceremony, ceremonial of the church. Let us at least thank these black frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car at jogger.
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Now upon which the wicked he's in conveyed the lingam of Shiva to have used this car to carry in its term. The Romesh representative of the female principle and nature is to show discrimination. And it thorough knowledge of the oldest mythological conceptions ISIS unveil contains a lot of tough talk, a lot of hard language because Madame Blavatsky, like many of the Sears of the 19th century saw the storm coming. The 20th century is such an app normal event that it was perceptible years, decades, centuries, before, correct. She fought in Italy, but the forest is for Garibaldi. She knew how to use a gun.
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She recounts several stories where certain shop were thinking of taking advantage of this nice woman who's alone, and suddenly looked up from their designs to see the cool blue eyes and the steadily pointed guns. She was troubled very much in her travels, not because she was, um, mythical survivor, because she knew as they say in Hollywood, how to put your toe on the instep of your opponent before he realizes what you're about. You know, he says, Annville we find all of this imagery coming together. She takes us on a grand tour of what the world looks like when it's as a charity. History is viewed all at once. And ISIS unveiled is this.
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And in
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One of the chapters secret ciphers exposed, she brings out a number of, uh, secret writing capacities, which were probably never before this time reveal
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In a, okay,
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Another part of ISIS unveil. She talks about an add up soul in an infant body about how some praise to it scoffed about these heathens, talking about reincarnation and especially about the Lamas who were in search of, um, small children or babies, where the reincarnation of personages that they had known and how this one was scoffer had, uh, finally been brought to a juncture where he was going to interrogate a baby in a pram emulator. I think it was and bent down to look into the eyes of the baby and found some, one looking at him and speaking out of the baby's mouth and telling him certain aspects of the situation and the man rising trembling. And then looking back and seeing that the baby was crying for a change of its diapers. All within a minute of time, she saying this world is peculiar. It's kaleidoscopic. It doesn't occur is some drab sequence of mental logic. It actually occurs all at once. Like the Fantasma Radia that it is, it is in fact only because we filter it out, that we think we plan what we see, how foolish she talks about an evocation of the souls of flowers.
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Why Carrie, about this bunch of dead plants inquired one of the big CUNYs, that's a female BQ and initiated tall, an elderly woman pointing to a large nose, gay of beautiful, fresh and flight fragrant flowers in the writer's hands dead. We asked him partnering Lee, why they have just been gathered in the garden and yet they are dead. She gravely answered to be born in this world. Is this not death? See how these herbs look when alive in the world of eternal light and the gardens of the, bless it throughout all of this, what comes to the surface again? And again, is that there as a single universal truth, there is in fact a truth which expresses itself in the very Fantasma radio of the world and throughout writing ISIS and veil again and again, we find Madame Blavatsky writing to the effect because men do not perfectly imagine and believe the result is that the arts are uncertain when they might be perfectly certain that it's the question of our watery belief, our incapacity to believe and recognize that this flower of existence is about from one sound, one flow, one tone, we chop it up and we think in the chopping of it, that there must then be some reality in our minds, which eventually the world will conform to.
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But the invisible structure in ISIS unveiled becomes more and more visible until finally with the publication of it, we find her completely misunderstood the charges of Charlotte aneurysm, the charges of being, um, a con person raged incessantly for years. But the topical society struggled and grow branches were founded all over the world. And then it began to occur to her by 1884 that she had not really delivered the message she had delivered the fantastical radio of the world. She had delivered the kind of full forest experience that the world seen transparently would be delivered in ISIS on Vail, but she did not feel confident that she had delivered the invisible pattern behind it.
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And that was now what she felt incumbent upon herself. Not simply to show the carnival, but to show the agenda behind it, that this is some movement with purpose. And so she began to move to herself, redoing completely ISIS unveiled by taking it apart and by adding to every aspect of it to branch out a completely new work with excerpts throughout it from ISIS on Vail. And so it was advertised and this new work was to be called the secret doctrine. There was a special notice. And in fact, the notice the announcement I'll be oncoming publication of the secret doctrine was printed in January of 1884. The supplement to the theosophy, this new version of ISIS unveiled yet read numerous and urgent requests to come from all parts of India to adopt some plan for bringing the matter contained and ISIS unveiled within the reach of those who could not afford to purchase so expensive a work at one time. On the other hand, many finding the outlines of the doctrine, given to hazy clamored for more light and necessarily misunderstanding the teaching, have erroneously supposed to be contradictory to later revelations, which in not a few cases have been entirely misconceived very often when ISIS is unveiled to keep in the metaphorical colloquium, it's misunderstood in just the way in which the designation pantheism for a sense of reality is a misappropriation of intelligence.
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What would pantheism be? Oh
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Yes. Theism. There is nothing profane. What is the perception of that? That the universe is a single Juul, a synchronous scintillating moving. We reflections it's facets of light. What else could it be? But the profane perversion is to consider that this just must be one more theory or one more called Barre, one more philosophy. And so it's misappropriated, and this is what Gauld Madame Blavatsky, what calls forth her sense of redoing it, of amending and changing the focus from the external, from the evidence that is there and ruins and monuments from the evidence that is there and religions and philosophies and science for all time to implode all of that information into the structure to talk about what this is from an inner as a Terek standpoint, the inner circle, the Pythagorean Mathematica. And in this concern, the secret doctrine started to be mooted issue after issue throughout 1884 of the theosophy theosophist advertised the eminent publication of the secret doctrine and it didn't come out. It didn't come out.
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And then the society for psychical research in London launched a massive investigation into Madame Blavatsky. And after several drilling, trying models came to the conclusion that she was the most interesting charlatan in history. And she couldn't right. And the advertisements went on making excuses. She was ill, she was busy. She was traveling. She couldn't find the location. And so characteristic to a world class sear like this, who has learned the art of moving and hermetic patterns began to move herself to find that location on the planet where she could write. And she found it in that place in Germany, which the old hermetic tradition still needs to raise a little monument to the good habits who made it sacred. It was the site. In fact of the first Christian Church in Europe, that's where the old Celtic missionaries went from Ireland in the early years of the seventh century made it holy none.
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About 900 years later, it was reconsecrated by that great father CR and [inaudible] went to Westberg in Germany and sat there. He had a very peculiar situation, began to open herself up and the secret doctrine began to come out massively. The first three weeks, she wrote 200 pages. She sat herself down to a regiment. And in fact, it's very peculiar because there are some individuals who were in contact with her. There, there was a Countess walk. My sister who was present during much of the time, there was also a friend of hers, a German friend named, uh, Dr. William, who B Shneidman shall I done it? In fact, he used to sleep in the study by the couch next to the desk where she wrote. And when he would go to sleep at night, there would be the manuscript there from the days, writing it in the morning when he would wake, the manuscript would be covered with blue pencil, writing, annotating and correcting what had done the day before he claimed he was a light sleeper. How did it happen? How does it happen?
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The secret doctrine when I came out, came out from a genius who balanced herself between this personality in this phenomenal time space and an inner personality for home time space was just so much chiffon and paper machete and balancing a day and night regimen. The secret doctrine came out full that mystical interior. It's not just a pen moving automatically by itself. It's not just asleep walking one and taking up pen and correcting what she had done during the day. All of this is gross. It's a misunderstanding of the process of what a full hermetic process actually is, what occurs. It draws forth the conditionals and the energies from the phenomenal realm that it needs to affect its manifestation. And it does it as a unity. It doesn't parcel itself out portion itself out. And so the secret doctrine has a peculiar flavor to it that ISIS unveiled does not have. I used this unveiled as a flamboyant tour to force all of the exterior world of Matt and all of the dysentery complications. But the secret doctrine is like one of those mandelic rosettes from an inner, not from a Tiki standpoint, designing out they radiant rods of me, assuming that one's experience will flesh out the circumference of this work.
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It turned out that most of the beginnings of the secret doctrine, probably the first volume and a half were written and worth square. There were difficulties to overcome, of course. And by October of 18 86, 1 of the closest associates with Madame Blavatsky, an Indian named T Silva RO was becoming a little uneasy. He read the hundreds of pages that were coming out in this process, and he began to feel a little skiddish. These were really secret revelations, perhaps they shouldn't be made public. Not only that they were coming from a woman and a European woman, no less. All of these concerns began to rise this beautiful little booklet by Boris Deezer cough. The rebirth of the on-call tradition, the cords, the attitude of Tisa burrow was becoming very, very unfavorable. He was rather moody at times. And with this Brahm Monaco upbringing was influencing all of his skittishness to a considerable extent.
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He was finally against the disclosure of any higher teachings. That should be as a Terrick. His distrust of occidentals became acute. He never fully accepted the fact that on-call teachings could be given out so freely and by a woman, but these were the peculiarities. And so Madame Blavatsky worked with a lot of high attention energy in this. Hi, she finally ended up in London and most of the secret doctrine was completed there. At least the two volumes that are out. We have testimony my friend of hers, Dr. Archibald nightly in London, and he writes this very soon after arriving, I was handed a part of the manuscript with her request to emanate excise, alter the English punctuate. In fact, to treat it as my own privilege, I naturally did not avail myself of the manuscript was then in detached sections, similar to those included under the heads of symbolism and dependencies in the published volumes.
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What I saw was a massive manuscripts with no definite arrangement, much of which had been patiently. Industriously copied by the countless walk Meister. The idea then was to keep one copy in Europe while the other was sent to India for correction by various native collaborators, the greater part did go with a later date, but some cause prevented the collaboration. What struck me most in the part I was able to read during my short stay with the enormous number of quotations from various authors. I knew that there was no library to consult and could see that HPB his own books did not amount to more than 30 and all of which several were dictionary [inaudible]
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In the writing of the secret doctrine. She opened herself wide to a structural inner Tom, which called for us not only what she had learned, exoteric play in her wanderings and then her life. But they car relatives in the production on an interior level all the way through this. There seem to be the sense to her that she was given guidance from without or from within, without that there must be in fact act, not only her master Moria and the great Mahatma [inaudible] working through her, but she recorded in a letter that even if this were never to be proved, then she herself would accept the responsibility being the Mahatma she had planned. In fact, all along to make four volumes, only the first two volumes were ever published. What became a volumes three and four is problematical three, especially as a problem because there is testimony that volume three had even reached the position of being set in type a position, which was argued by James Morgan priced in a number of other individuals later on pricing.
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So that was fund or the Gnostics society here in Los Angeles. A certain old individual had said that he himself had seen the volume three in tight face, but that it had been ordered destroyed by Madame Blavatsky just a few months before she died. She passed away on May 8th, 1891. It celebrated, I believe his white low to stay even till this date, but the impression almost, yeah, larger than life aspect of the secret document, which I was hoping to get through in something was, or for you, what is presented here is a geometrical experiential level that is extendable. If someone personally enters into it, it's a sense of the terrain as it were enough. So that if one way were to acclimate oneself to this terrain, you could then discover and uncover for yourself. The rest of it, there is really no need for volume three or volume four to the secret doctor.
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There is only really the need for a holding on comparative harmony. What is presented in ISIS unveiled and its exterior quality and what is presented in the secret doctrine. It's an interior architectural quality and the two, you have enough of the line of development that one could complete, even in the Euclidean universe, the geometry of understanding those there, Madame Blavatsky is one of the great figures of the 19th century. She presents in fact, a marked contrast to those figures that we've had so far Turkey guard and Nicha, and even the last lecture from the 19th century series on Schopenhauer Schopenhauer is mentioned a very prominently in the secret doctrine. There are great passages in there where she acclaimed Schopenhauer his view of the universe and his doctrine of inner revelation has use of the Upanishad. And then a way Madame Blavatsky is a step up and beyond Schopenhauer in her criticism of the way in which the existing institutions, deadened man spirit she's even a step up beyond karaoke, Gar.
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She has somewhat of Nietzsche's. I kind of clastic breaking of all forms and molds in order to disclose a sense of unity, which cannot be doled out or portioned out, but it must be taken in is wholesome. Total. Next week, we'll see a fellow Russian who lived about the same time that she did one in 1828, died in 1910, who was one of the real grandfathers of the 20th century count. Leo Tolstoy will discover for himself almost the reverse of what Madame Blavatsky discovered. He will write very early in his life, the great works, and then discover that he has to make an inner journey, not even being the world's greatest novelists is not even sufficient to begin to write a single page of truth about reality. So we'll discover that next week with Tosta [inaudible].

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