thereof. And he even went so far as to maintain that a man ought to keep all such knowledge secret from his wife. Now the wife of Sankaracharya, whose name was Nandana, ‘she who rejoices,’ was a woman of very profound occult attainments; and when she found that her husband was acquiring knowledges which he did not impart to her, she did not upbraid him, but laboured all the more strenuously in her own sphere of esoteric science, and she even discovered that all esoteric science had a twofold element in it—masculine and feminine—and that all discoveries of occult mysteries engaged in by man alone, were, so to speak, lop-sided, and therefore valueless. So she conveyed herself secretly, by processes familiar to her, away from her husband, and took refuge in this region of Thibet in which we now dwell, and which, with all his knowledges, Sankaracharya was never able to discover, for they were all subjective, and dealt not with the material things of this world. And she associated herself here in the pursuit of knowledge with a learned man called Svasar, ‘he who is friendly,’ who considered secret knowledge merely the means to an end, and even spiritual
progress valuable only in so far as it could be used to help others; and they studied deep mysteries as brother and sister together—and he had been a mahatma or rishi of the highest grade—and, owing to the aid he derived from his female associate, he discovered that the subjective conditions of nirvana and devachan were the result of one-sided male imaginings which had their origin in male selfishness; and this conviction grew in him in the degree in which the Parthivi Mutar, or ‘Earth Mother,’ became incarnated in Nandana. Thus was revealed to him the astounding fact that the whole system of the occult adepts had originated in the natural brains of men who had given themselves up to egotistical transcendental speculation—in fact, I cannot better describe the process than in the words of Mr Sinnett himself, where he alludes to ‘the highly cultivated devotees to be met with occasionally in India, who build up a conception of nature, the universe and God, entirely on a metaphysical basis, and who have evolved their systems by sheer force of transcendental thinking—who will take some established system of philosophy as its groundwork, and
amplify on this to an extent which only an oriental metaphysician could dream of.’
“This, Mr Sinnett chooses to assume, was not the fact with the Thibet Brothers; but, in reality, this was just what they did. The fact that they have outstripped other similar transcendentalists is due to the circumstance that the original founders of the system were men of more powerful will and higher attainments than any who have succeeded them. And on their death they formed a compact spiritual society in the other world, impregnating the wills and imaginations of their disciples still on earth with their fantastic theories, which they still retain there, of a planetary chain, and the spiral advance of the seven rounds, and the septenary law, and all the rest of it. In order for human beings to come into these occult knowledges, it is necessary, as Mr Sinnett admits, for the adepts to go into trance-conditions—in other words, to lose all control of their normal, or as they would probably call them, their objective faculties. While in this condition, they are the sport of any invisible intelligences that choose to play upon them; but fearing lest they may be accused of this, they
erroneously assert that no such intelligences of a high order have cognisance of what happens in this world. The fact that mahatmas have powers which appear supernatural proves nothing, as Mr Sinnett also admits that innumerable fakirs and yojis possess these as well, whose authority on occultism he deems of no account, when he says that ‘careless inquirers are very apt to confound such persons with the great adepts of whom they vaguely hear.’ There can be no better evidence of the falsity of the whole conception than you are yourself. For to prove to you that you were the sport of a delusion, although your own experience as a mahatma in regard to the secret processes of nature, and the sensations attendant upon subjective conditions, exactly corresponded to those of all other mahatmas, you have, under my tutelage, at various times allowed yourself to fall into trance-conditions, when, owing to occult influences which we have brought to bear, a totally different idea concerning ‘nature, man, the origin of the universe, and the destinies toward which its inhabitants are tending,’ was presented to your sixth sense, which appeared ‘absolute
truth’ at the time, and which would have continued to seem so, had I not had the power of intromitting you through trance-conditions into a totally different set of apparent truths on the same subject, which were no more to be relied upon than the other. The fact is, that no seer, be he Hindoo, Buddhist, Christian, or of any other religion, is to be depended upon the moment he throws himself into abnormal organic conditions. We see best, as you have now learnt, into the deepest mysteries with all our senses about us. And the discovery of this great fact was due to woman; and it is for this reason that mahatmas shrink from female chelas—they are afraid of them. According to their philosophy, women play a poor part in the system of the universe, and their chances of reaching the blissful condition of nirvana are practically not to be compared with those of the men.
“There is no such thing as subjectivity apart from objectivity. Mr Sinnett very properly tells you ‘that occult science regards force and matter as identical, and that it contemplates no principle in nature as wholly immaterial. The clue to the mystery
involved,’ he goes on to say, ‘lies in the fact, directly cognisable by occult experts, that matter exists in other states than those which are cognisable by the five senses;’ but it does not become only cognisable subjectively on that account. You know very well, as an old mahatma, that you can cognise matter now with your sixth sense as well as with your five while in a perfectly normal condition, that you could not cognise except in trance-conditions before, and which even then you could only cognise incorrectly. The much-vaunted sixth sense of mahatmas needs sharpening as much as their logic, for you can no more separate subjectivity from objectivity than you can separate mind from matter. Christians, if they desire it, have a right to a heaven of subjective bliss, because they consider that they become immaterial when they go there; but Buddhists, who admit that they are in a sense material while in devachan or nirvana, and deny that their consciousness in that condition is in the same sense objective as well as subjective, talk sheer nonsense.” Ushas used a stronger expression here, but out of consideration for my old mahatma friends, I suppress it.
“‘Devachan’, says our Guru—speaking through his disciple in order to escape from this dilemma—‘will seem as real as the chairs and tables round us; and remember that above all things, to the profound philosophy of occultism, are the chairs and tables, and the whole objective scenery of the world, unreal and merely transitory delusions of sense.’ If, as he admits, they are material, why should they be more unreal than the chairs and tables in devachan, which are also material, since occult science contemplates no principle in nature as wholly immaterial? The fact is, that there is no more unreal and transitory delusion of sense than those ‘states’ known to the adepts as devachan or nirvana; they are mere dreamlands, invented by metaphysicians, and lived in by them after death—which are used by them to encourage a set of dreamers here to evade the practical duties which they owe to their fellow-men in this world. ‘Hence it is possible,’ says our author, ‘for yet living persons to have visions of devachan, though such visions are rare and only one-sided, the entities in devachan, sighted by the earthly clairvoyant, being quite unconscious themselves of undergoing
such observation.’ This is an erroneous and incorrect assumption on the Guru’s part. ‘The spirit of the clairvoyant,’ he goes on, ‘ascends into the condition of devachan in such rare visions, and thus becomes subject to the vivid delusions of that existence.’ Vivid delusions indeed, the fatal consequences of which are, that they separate their votaries from the practical duties of life, and create a class of idle visionaries who, wrapping themselves in their own vain conceits, would stand by and allow their fellow-creatures to starve to death, because, as Mr Sinnett frankly tells us, ‘if spiritual existence, vivid subjective consciousness, really does go on for periods greater than the periods of intellectual physical existence, in the ratio, as we have seen in discussing the devachanic condition, of 80 to 1 at least, then surely man’s subjective existence is more important than his physical existence and intellect in error, when all its efforts are bent on the amelioration of the physical existence.’