Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
- “On reading “La Vie de Mme Blavatsky”, I had the impression that there is nothing but vital occultism in her. Her life and work are concerned mostly with the supraphysical worlds and spirits and miraculous powers and Mahatmas.
(Sri Aurobindo:) You are quite right. She was an occultist, not a spiritual personality. What spiritual teachings she gave, seemed to be based on intellectual knowledge, not on realisation. Her attitude was Tibetan Buddhistic. She did not believe in God, but in Nirvana, miraculous powers and the Mahatmas.”[1]
(Automatic writing by Sri Aurobindo:)
“Kutthumi and Maurya [the Mahatmas] are merely names and forms, true only as a psychic symbol or an instrumental representation, of the two main powers that are behind them, one governing their thought, the other influencing their action. In Madame Blavatsky they found a sufficient instrument who could as it were incarnate and harmonise both their forces. Her successors have not been able to do that, but have only responded to partial indications of one or the other; that is why there have been so many divisions and so much confused and uncertain action in the movement.
Kutthumi represents a Deva, not a Jnana Deva, but a certain kind of thought deva who responds with a limited light but a great abundance of curious thought formations to the greater Idea that comes from the supramental level.
Maurya represents an Asura who has stopped short on the way to Devahood, a being of aggressive thought force and great vital vehemence, but of a very limited power in the true sense of the word, who has associated himself with Kutthumi and is tolerated by him, because otherwise Kutthumi would not be able to exercise an influence of practical action on the human world.”[2]
(Automatic writing by Sri Aurobindo:)
“The Maurya influence is a despotic power which does not want any interference with its control or any dissolvent action on the frame of thought and organised movement it has stamped on the society.”[3]
(Sri Aurobindo:) “Theosophy was not born with Madame Blavatsky, nor invented by the Mahatmas in the latter end of the nineteenth century. It is an ancient and venerable branch of knowledge, which unfortunately has never, in historical times, been brought out into the open and subjected to clear, firm and luminous tests. The imaginations of the cultured and the superstitions of the vulgar played havoc with its truths and vitiated its practice. It degenerated into the extravagances of the Gnostics & Rosicrucians and the charlatanism of magic and sorcery. The Theosophical Society was the first body of inquirers which started with the set & clear profession of bringing out this great mass of ancient truth into public notice and establishing it in public belief. The profession has not been sustained in practice. Instead of bringing them out into public notice they have withdrawn them into the shrouded secrecy of the Esoteric society; instead of establishing them to public belief, they have hampered the true development of Theosophy & injured its credit by allowing promise to dwarf performance and by a readiness to assert which was far beyond their power to verify. I do not deny that the Theosophical Society increases in its numbers, but it increases as a mystic sect and not in the strength of its true calling.”[4]
“The age has its own demands, and it is becoming imperatively necessary that Indian knowledge should reveal in the Western way its scientific foundations. For if we do not do it ourselves, the Europeans will do it for us and do it badly, discrediting the knowledge in the process. The phenomenon of the Theosophical Society is a warning to us of a pressing urgency. It will never do to allow the science of Indian knowledge to be represented to the West through this strange & distorting medium. For this society of European & European-led inquirers arose from an impulse on which the Time-Spirit itself insists; their object, vaguely grasped at by them, was at bottom the systematic coordination, explanation & practice of Oriental religion & Oriental mental & spiritual discipline. Unfortunately, as always happens to a great effort in unfit hands, it stumbled at the outset & went into strange bypaths. It fell into the mediaeval snare of Gnostic mysticism, Masonic secrecy & Rosicrucian jargon. The little science it attempted has been rightly stigmatised as pseudo-science. A vain attempt to thrust in modern physical science into the explanation of psychical movements, — to explain for instance pranayam in the terms of oxygen & hydrogen! — to accept uncritically every experience & every random idea about an experience as it occurred to the mind & set it up as a revealed truth & almost a semi-divine communication, to make a hopeless amalgam & jumble of science, religion & philosophy all expressed in the terms of the imagination — this has been the scientific method of Theosophy. The result is that it lays its hands on truth & muddles it so badly that it comes out to the world as an untruth. And there now abound other misstatements of Indian truth, less elaborate but almost as wild & wide as Theosophy's. From this growing confusion we must deliver the future of humanity.”[5]
- ↑ Letters on Himself and the Ashram, p.183
- ↑ Record of Yoga, p.1427
- ↑ Ibid., p.1428
- ↑ Essays Divine and Human, p.72, “Science & Religion in Theosophy”
- ↑ Ibid., p.66, “The Psychology of Yoga”
See also