Helena Blavatsky

“ The hand of Karma guides the wheel; the revolutions mark the beatings of the Karmic heart.
True knowledge is the flour, false learning is the husk. If thou would'st eat the bread of Wisdom, thy flour thou hast to knead with Amrita's* clear waters. But if thou kneadest husks with Mâyâ's dew, thou canst create but food for the black doves of death, the birds of birth, decay and sorrow.
[*Immortality.]
If thou art told that to become Arhan thou hast to cease to love all beings — tell them they lie.
If thou art told that to gain liberation thou hast to hate thy mother and disregard thy son ”

“ Those who, like the Christians, had to discredit a dangerous rival, talk of Helena as being a beautiful and actual woman, whom Simon had met in a house of ill-fame at Tyre, and who was, according to those who wrote his life, the reincarnation of Helen of Troy. How, then, was she “Divine Thought”? The lower angels, Simon is made to say in Philosophumena, or the third Æons, being so material, had more badness in them than all the others. Poor man, created or emanated from them, had the vice of his origin. ”

“ The sincerity of a man like W. T. Stead, [Pg xiv] well known and respected on both sides of the Atlantic, cannot be doubted, so that his article on Photographing Invisible Beings will have unusual weight. Hereward Carrington, author of various books on psychic subjects, and considered an authority in his field, gives in The Phantom Armies Seen in France a report of occult phenomena widely believed in during the war.
Helena Blavatsky, author of A Witch's Den, will be remembered as the sensational medium who mystified experimenters in various lands a few years ago. ”

“ Sow kindly acts and thou shalt reap their fruition. Inaction in a deed of mercy becomes an action in a deadly sin.
Thus saith the Sage.
Shalt thou abstain from action? Not so shall gain thy soul her freedom. To reach Nirvâna one must reach Self-Knowledge, and Self-Knowledge is of loving deeds the child.
Have patience, Candidate, as one who fears no failure, courts no success. Fix thy Soul's gaze upon the star whose ray thou art [17] , the flaming star that shines within the lightless depths of ever-being, the boundless fields of the Unknown. ”

“ No Arhan, O Lanoo, becomes one in that birth when for the first the Soul begins to long for final liberation. Yet, O thou anxious one, no warrior volunteering fight in the fierce strife between the living and the dead [32] , not one recruit can ever be refused the right to enter on the Path that leads toward the field of Battle.
For, either he shall win, or he shall fall.
Yea, if he conquers, Nirvâna shall be his. Before he casts his shadow off his mortal coil, that pregnant cause of anguish and illimitable pain — in him will men a great and holy Buddha honour. ”

“ The more thou dost advance, the more thy feet pitfalls will meet. The path that leadeth on, is lighted by one fire — the light of daring, burning in the heart. The more one dares, the more he shall obtain. ”

“ He knoweth that the more his feet will bleed, the whiter will himself be washed. He knoweth well that after seven short and fleeting births Nirvâna will be his. . . .
Such is the Dhyâna Path, the haven of the Yogi, the blessed goal that Srotâpattis crave.
Not so when he hath crossed and won the Aryahata Path.*
[*From the Sanskrit Arhat or Arhan.] There Kleśa [29] is destroyed for ever, Tanhâ's [30] roots torn out. But stay, Disciple . . . Yet, one word. Canst thou destroy divine COMPASSION? Compassion is no attribute. It is the LAW of LAWS — eternal Harmony, Alaya's SELF ”

“ And if he falls, e'en then he does not fall in vain; the enemies he slew in the last battle will not return to life in the next birth that will be his.
But if thou would'st Nirvâna reach, or cast the prize away [33] , let not the fruit of action and inaction be thy motive, thou of dauntless heart.
Know that the Bodhisattva who liberation changes for Renunciation to don the miseries of "Secret Life," [34] is called, "thrice Honoured," O thou candidate for woe throughout the cycles. ”

“ They are designed by the great [Pg 54] architect Lutyens, whose wife, Lady Emily, is an ardent theosophist. I am glad that I have lived to see these doctrines take firm root in the West, and grow so amazingly that in all cities they are now held by vast numbers, and even in cases where they have not been finally adopted they are acknowledged to be the only logical conclusion for those who desire to possess a rational belief. I am glad that I can look back with love and profound gratitude to Helena P. Blavatsky, the woman who grafted on the West the wisdom of the ages. ”

“ Help Nature and work on with her; and Nature will regard thee as one of her creators and make obeisance.
And she will open wide before thee the portals of her secret chambers, lay bare before thy gaze the treasures hidden in the very depths of her pure virgin bosom. ”

“ Before the soul can see, the Harmony within must be attained, and fleshly eyes be rendered blind to all illusion. ”

“ The shock is so violent that the red rug flies open and we behold the face of a young woman tinged with dark green, who quickly disappears in the river. Further on another group; an old man and two young women. One of them, a little girl of ten, small, thin, hardly fully developed, sobs bitterly. She is the mother of a stillborn child, whose body is to be thrown in the river. Her weak voice monotonously resounds over the shore, and her trembling hands are not strong enough to lift the poor little corpse that is more like a tiny brown kitten than a human being. ”

“ But she does not think of catching the measure of his music; she rushes, she flies forward. Staring with her expressionless, motionless orbs at something before her, at something that is not visible to our mortal eyes, she hardly glances at her worshippers; then her look becomes full of fire; and whoever she looks at feels burned through to the marrow of his bones. At every glance she throws a few grains of rice. The small handful seems inexhaustible, as if the wrinkled palm contained the bottomless bag of Prince Fortunatus. ”

“ Born in Russia in 1831 as Helen Petrovna, daughter of Colonel Hahn, of the Russian army, she was married at the age of seventeen to an elderly gentleman, M. Blavatsky. She is described in girlhood as a person of passionate temper and wilful and erratic disposition. She separated or escaped from her husband after a few months of married life and entered upon an extended period of travel and adventure, in which ‘psychic’ experiences and the search for unusual persons and beliefs were prominent. She absorbed Hindu wisdom from the adepts of India ”

“ He knows also that he was, the night before, King Lear, the transformation in his turn of the Othello of a still earlier preceding night. And though the outer, visible character is supposed to be ignorant of the fact, and in actual life that ignorance is, unfortunately, but too real, nevertheless, the permanent Individuality is fully aware of it, and it is through the atrophy of the “spiritual” Eye in the physical body, that that knowledge is unable to impress itself on the consciousness of the false Personality. ”

“ The Higher Ego is, as it were, a globe of pure divine light, a Unit from a higher plane, on which is no differentiation. Descending to a plane of differentiation it emanates a Ray, which it can only manifest through the personality which is already differentiated. A portion of this Ray, the Lower Manas, during life, may so crystallize itself and become one with Kâma that it will remain assimilated with Matter. That portion which retains its purity forms Antahkarana. The whole fate of an incarnation depends on whether Antahkarana will be able to restrain the Kâma-Manas or not. ”

“ The “Father” and “Mother” are the male and female principles in Root-Nature, the opposite poles that manifest in all things on every plane of Kosmos—or Spirit and Substance, in a less allegorical aspect, the resultant of which is the Universe, or the “Son.” They are “once more one,” when in the Night of Brahmâ, during Pralaya, all in the objective Universe has returned to its one primal and eternal cause, to [pg 073] reäppear at the following Dawn—as it does periodically. Kârana—Eternal Cause—was alone. ”

“ He was so near the abyss that the least incautious movement would expose him to great danger. But the granite goddess, Bhavani herself, could not be more immovable. The light of the moon before him was so strong that the black shadow under the rock which sheltered him was doubly impenetrable, shrouding his face in absolute darkness. From time to time the flame of the sinking fires leaping up shed its hot reflection on the dark bronze face, enabling me to distinguish its sphinx-like lineaments and its shining eyes, as unmoving as the rest of the features. ”

“ When all this is done, the female element puts itself out of the way, and the patriarch comes again upon the stage. He treacherously puts a ration of rice before the goat, and as soon as the victim becomes innocently absorbed in gratifying his appetite, the old man chops his head off with a single stroke of his sword, and bathes the goddess in the smoking blood coming from the head of the animal, which he holds in his right arm, over the idol. The women sing in chorus, and the ceremony of betrothal is over. ”

“ After death the higher light (Antahkarana) which bears the impressions and memory of all good and noble aspirations, assimilates itself with the Higher Ego, the bad is dissociated in space, and comes back as bad Karma awaiting the personality.
The feeling of responsibility is the beginning of Wisdom, a proof that Ahankâra is beginning to fade out, the beginning of losing the sense of separateness.
Kâma Rûpa. The Kâma Rûpa eventually breaks up and goes into animals. All red-blooded animals come from man. The cold-blooded are from the matter of the past. The blood is the Kâma Rûpa. ”

“ This nature can make no impression on this plane, nor receive any: an Archangel, having no experience, would be senseless on this plane, and could neither give nor receive impressions. So the Lower Manas clothes itself with the essence of the Astral Light; this astral envelope shuts it out from its Parent, except through the Antahkarana which is its only salvation. Break this and you become an animal.
Kâma. Kâma is life, it is the essence of the blood. When this leaves the blood the latter congeals. Prâna is universal on this plane; it is in us the vital principle, Prânic, rather than Prâna. ”

“ The company were greatly affected, and encomiums upon the behavior of the loving nephew in honoring the memory of his uncle and benefactor were freely circulating in whispers, when suddenly the voice of Nicolas became choked, his eyes started from their sockets, and with a suppressed groan, he staggered back. Every eye in the crowd followed with curiosity his haggard look, as it fell and remained riveted upon a weazened little face, that peeped from behind the back of the Hungarian.
“Where do you come from? Who brought you here, child?” gasped out Nicolas, as pale as death. ”

“ Pramlochâ is the Hindû Lilith of the Âryan Adam; and Mârishâ, the daughter born of the perspiration from her pores, is the “Sweat-born,” and stands as a symbol for the Second Race of mankind.
It is not Indra, who in this case figures in the Purânas, but Kâmadeva, the God of love and desire, who sends Pramlochâ on Earth. Logic, as well as the Esoteric Doctrine, shows that it must be so. For Kâma is the king and lord of the Apsarases, of whom Pramlochâ is one ”

“ The Silent Watcher is on the Fourth Kosmic Plane.
The higher Mind directs the Will: the lower turns it into selfish Desire.
The head should not be covered in meditation. It is covered in Samâdhi.
The Dhyân Chohans are passionless, pure and mindless. They have no struggle, no passions to crush.
The Dhyân Chohans are made to pass through the School of Life. “God goes to School.”
The best of us in the future will be Mânasaputras; the lowest will be Pitris. ”

“ Light, however, on our plane, is Darkness in the higher spheres.
“Man and woman ... on the side of the Father” (Spirit) refers to Primary Creation; and on the side of the Mother (Matter) , to the Secondary. The two-fold Man is Adam Kadmon, the male and female abstract prototype and the differentiated Elohim. Man proceeds from the Dhyân Chohan, and is a “Fallen Angel,” a God in exile, as will be shown. ”

“ An Avatâra is a descent of a God into an illusive form; a Jîvanmukta, who may have passed through numberless incarnations and may have accumulated merit in them, certainly does not become a Nirvânî because of that merit, but only because of the Karma generated by it, which leads and guides him in the direction of the Guru who will initiate him into the mystery of Nirvâna and who alone can help him to reach this abode. ”

“ The Higher Manas cannot reflect itself, but when the Green passes upward it becomes a mirror for the Higher; it is then no more Green, having passed from its associations. The Psyche then becomes spiritual, the Ternary is reflected in the Fourth, and the Tetraktys is formed. So long as you are not dead, there must be something to reflect the Higher Triad; for there must be something to bring back to the waking consciousness the experiences passed through on the higher plane. The Lower Manas is as a tablet which retains the impressions made on it during trance. ”