Blavatsky H.P. Life before and after death Blavatsky on the soul after death

Helena Blavatsky:

life before and after death

Gradually it dawned on me that this woman, whose brilliant achievements and remarkable traits of character, no less than her position in society, arouse deep respect for her, is one of the most remarkable mediums in the world.

G. Olcott

Blavatsky Helena - absent from the TSB.

Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891) was born in Yekaterinoslav, now Dnepropetrovsk, and comes from a well-born Russian-German family. Her maternal ancestors belong to the Dolgoruky family, which goes back to Rurik himself, the legendary Viking, the founder of the Kyiv princely throne. Elena's mother was the famous writer von Hahn, whom Belinsky once called the "Russian Georges Sand"; Helen herself is now called the founder of the modern theosophical movement. “She lost her mother very early; Therefore, she was brought up by her grandmother, Elena Pavlovna Fadeeva, a very educated woman and extremely fond of the natural sciences. By the way, Cranston's book cannot be completely trusted: it connects Blavatsky with Peter the Great, the place of her birth, but the city of Dnepropetrovsk is named after the dictator of Ukraine, the Bolshevik Petrovsky, and has nothing to do with Peter. Helena Blavatsky, having received a brilliant home education and upbringing, was quite ready for secular life, that is, she knew foreign languages, played the piano, and wrote poetry. But she chose a different path. To gain independence, she married the old man Nicephorus Blavatsky at the age of seventeen, but soon divorced and went abroad. There she was attracted not by Paris and fashionable resorts, but mainly by Eastern countries, their religion and psychology.

“Her first journey began from Constantinople, then she went to the Far East. She spent ten years there, of which about two years - in Tibet. In 1860 Elena returned to Russia, but not for long. After spending two years with her relatives in the Caucasus, she set off again: Italy, Greece, Egypt, and finally New York. She arrived there in 1873. It was then that her literary activity began. She publishes articles in American newspapers, confidently enters into controversy with the Jesuits. Her descriptions of the Caucasus date back to the same time. She also sends materials for publication to Russian journals.

Elena visited India many times and lived there for several years, studying Indian religion and way of thinking. She herself refers to them as the main source of her ideas about the world.

She became an admirer of spiritualism, which challenged both basic modern scientific concepts and all religious dogmas. For example, as a child, when she arrived in Petersburg, she saw Pushkin on the street, that is, of course, the ghost of Pushkin, who had long since died by that time. Spiritualism, according to A. Conan Doyle (and the creator of Sherlock Holmes was also a sympathetic historian of this trend in public life), “with all its incongruities and manifestations of fanaticism, captured all countries in a surprisingly short time. Emperor Napoleon III and Empress Eugenie, Czar Alexander, German Emperor Wilhelm I, and the kings of Bavaria and Württemberg were all convinced of his exceptional strength.

Many greeted Blavatsky's revelations with skepticism (remember L. Tolstoy's play "The Fruits of Enlightenment"), but there were quite a few (mostly outside of Russia) who were ready to gawk at the appearance of dead people "from the other world" and listen to her argumentation of their presence. The theosophical movement appeared in the 19th century and now has a very large number of supporters, if you count all its many ramifications and small groups. But the essence of this teaching, as it is stated in Blavatsky's book The Secret Doctrine, is as follows.

The universe is based on three fundamental principles:

1) There is one unchanging reality in the world, which overlaps even the concept of God.

2) Everything in nature obeys the law of periodicity, which has the character of a universal scientific postulate. In accordance with this law, the birth of a being, maturation, the onset of maturity and death occur.

3) In the universe there is a universal "oversoul", identical to all souls. After death, the transmigration of souls occurs, which includes many cycles and is the embodiment of the religious principle of the immortality of the soul, without which no mass religion is inconceivable.

According to Blavatsky, this world order was known to Christ, Buddha and the Hindu Mahatmas, but they kept this knowledge to themselves. Finally, one of them became Elena's guru and passed this information on to her, and she began to disseminate it in human society. In 1875, together with H. Olcott and W. Judge, she founded the Theosophical Society in the USA, which immediately gained many adherents.

The aims of the Theosophical Society were:

1. To constitute the beginning of the universal brotherhood of mankind without distinction of faiths, races and origins; all members should strive for self-improvement and mutual assistance, both moral and material.

2. To spread the study of Oriental languages, literatures and philosophical and religious teachings, in order to prove that the same truth is hidden in all.

3. To make research in the field of the unknown laws of nature and to develop the supersensible powers of man.

This program followed from what Blavatsky studied during her wanderings in the East, in particular from the teachings of the famous yogi Arulprakazy Vallalar. He argued that the mysterious meaning of the sacred books of the East would be revealed by the keepers of secrets - mahatmas - to foreigners who would accept it with joy. He further said that the use of animal food would gradually come to naught; distinctions between races and castes will disappear and in time the principle of Universal Brotherhood will prevail (in India); what people call "God" is in fact Universal Love, which generates and maintains perfect Harmony and Balance in all nature; people, once believing in the divine power hidden in them, will acquire such extraordinary abilities that they can change the operation of the law of gravity, etc.

In the second half of his life, the yogi repeatedly exclaimed, addressing his students: “You do not listen to me. You are not following my teachings. It seems that you have decided not to part with your former beliefs. Nevertheless, the time is not far off when people from Russia, America and other states will come to India and preach to you the same principles of universal Brotherhood ... Soon you will know that brothers living far in the north will do many amazing deeds in India for the benefit of your countries".

This evidence is cited in his writings by a member of the Theosophical Society, Tholuvar Velayudham Mudeljar. He also comes to the conclusion that the arrival of Blavatsky from Russia, as well as Colonel Olcott from America, was the very event that the great teacher predicted.

The range of Blavatsky's interests is quite wide and complex. For example, her interpretation of what we call "transmigration of souls" is interesting. She argues that each personality leaves its own - highly spiritual - "imprints" on the divine Ego, whose consciousness returns at a certain stage of its development, even in an extremely vicious soul, which in the end is doomed to destruction. There is no such human soul, no matter how criminal and devoid of glimpses of spirituality, which would be born completely corrupted. This or that karma the human person accumulates in his youth, and it is this karma that is preserved and forms the basis of the future. No man, whatever his inclinations, becomes immediately immoral. He always has time to develop karma. Blavatsky also believes that, according to the Law of Retribution, appropriate measures are taken so that events that have not been realized in this life have taken place in another incarnation. That is, since each new attempt of nature to create something is always more successful than the previous one, then each new incarnation is always better, more successful than the previous one.

Lodges of the Society have been established in every major city in America and abroad. Some of them still exist today. Under her editorship, publications of the society began to appear, in which questions of theosophy were interpreted.

Theosophy is democratic in the sense that it does not allow any privileges or indulgences, everything is achieved by personal merits and merit of the individual.

The transmigration of souls is a very old theory, which is already represented in ancient Greek philosophy by the so-called "Pythagorean school". According to this theory, the soul can leave the body and move to another body or to an individual of a different species, and even to an inanimate object. According to the Upanishads, the Hindu spiritual book, the soul passes from body to body in a continuous cycle of birth and death.

The conditions of existence are determined by the behavior of souls during previous births, which form the karma of a given soul. At the same time, all the sorrows and joys of life are a retribution for previous sins and good deeds committed during previous births. The soul, on whose account there is a lot of good, falls into the universal ocean of souls, called Brahman.

Elena was a rather modest, even shy and silent woman who felt uncomfortable in the center of everyone's attention. Blavatsky's whole life was filled with work, which, according to Professor Corson, who knew Blavatsky well, proceeded as follows:

“She constantly filled me with wonder and curiosity – what else would she come up with? She had extensive knowledge in all areas, but her way of working was unusual. She usually wrote in bed from nine o'clock in the morning, smoking countless cigarettes. She quoted long paragraphs from dozens and dozens of books that I knew for certain did not exist in America, easily translating from several languages. Sometimes she would call me from my office to ask me how to translate into good English some idiom from the Old World, for by this point she had not yet reached the level of language that distinguishes her "Secret Doctrine". She told me that she sees pages of books with quotes and simply translates them into English. To many people of ordinary ability, this fact seems like a miracle.”

Blavatsky always carried out her experiments in a narrow circle, no more than six or eight people, since even in the purest experiments, she explained, there is a place for skepticism, which she tried to avoid. But this select circle included a large number of people who left their memories.

There are many testimonies about objects moved without touching - bottles, spoons, letters. The spoon overcame two walls, the letter ended up in the hands of Blavatsky, having got to her from another room, then in her hands was an exact copy of this letter. But all this served only as an introduction to the main miraculous operation of the materialization of the spirits of the dead. There were people whom those present sometimes did not know during their lifetime. For example, a Georgian often appeared - Elena's servant, who spoke with a characteristic accent. Nevertheless, comparing their impressions, people established the identity of the observed ghosts. And most importantly - everyone heard a sign of materialization - a soft tapping.

It must be said that already by the middle of the century there were many cases of exposing the fraud committed by mediums during the materialization of spirits. Mediums showed spirits and charged naive spectators for this display. So, by the time Blavatsky arrived in New York, there was published an exposure of a certain Edda, who spoke with public spiritualistic experiments. Therefore, Blavatsky had to agree to the binding of hands and feet and a number of other actions to prevent fraud. But she was never caught in it.

Blavatsky's life was not easy. They remember that in 1873 in New York, when her father stopped helping her, and travel cost a lot of money, she earned money by making artificial flowers and leather goods. She admitted that not everything in the structure of the afterlife was clear to her. In particular, contradictions appeared in her due to the fact that the spirits of not only the dead, but also living people appeared, who, in theory, should not have left the body.

“In 1875, Blavatsky went to India with Olcott, established the headquarters of the Theosophical Society in Bombay, and began publishing the newspaper The Theosophist in English. Then, already in 1882, she moved the apartment to Madras, on the outskirts of Adiar. Here Blavatsky amazed visitors with various miracles: at the wave of her hand, a bell rang and mysterious sounds were heard, roses fell from the ceiling, fireballs flew, it was not clear where the letters of the mahatmas - Tibetan brothers - appeared, which she read without opening.

In 1883 Blavatsky moved to Europe, to Paris. Her students and assistants followed her there: Olcott, Judge, the Brahmin Moshni, the Duchess de Pomar and others.

In 1886 she moved again, this time to London, where she founded the main branch of the Theosophical Society.

Blavatsky spent her whole life traveling, having visited almost all corners of Europe, India, the Middle and Far East, and Central Asia. She also visited Russia, where she also had many adherents, but Russia was not too favorable to her, and after five years of living in the United States she became an American citizen. At the same time, it should be taken into account that the conditions of those travels were far from ideal.

Until the very death of Helena, her authority in the Theosophical movement was indisputable. She repeatedly proved that she had no other interests than the tasks of the movement. When Blavatsky was once accused of having an extramarital affair with a man, she underwent an authoritative medical examination which determined that she was a virgin. Many respected and influential people became members of the movement because they were not satisfied with the official religious dogma. In particular, the famous inventor Thomas Edison became an active participant in the theosophical seminar.

However, after the death of Helena, it was not easy to establish who the main Theosophist of the planet was, and the movement broke up into a number of competing groups. In particular, Dr. Steiner was followed by "anthroposophists", who sought to highlight in the movement not the religious, but the human side. Another activist of the movement, Anna Bezan, fell into atheism and socialism, while defending the ideas of the national liberation movement of the Hindus - in fact, it turned out unhealthy: the bearers of universal truth were under the colonial oppression of the British.

But Helena Blavatsky continues to be the highest authority for spiritualists, mainly in spiritualistic practice. She continues to be called upon in all cases where there is doubt about the behavior of mediums and summoned spirits. And if someone is interested in the author's opinion on this matter, then they will have to turn to some other publication: here something else is more important for us - the undoubted success that Blavatsky had in the USA in her chosen field of activity.

Note.

In fairness, it should be noted that, despite her fame and undoubted authority, Blavatsky had enough opponents. According to the information given in the Great Encyclopedia (St. Petersburg, printing house of the Enlightenment partnership, 1903), already during Blavatsky’s stay in Paris in 1883, a number of revelations appeared in the missionary magazine Madras Christian College Magasine, mainly revealing the secrets of her "phenomena" and the Madras apartment. The editors of the magazine claimed that the purpose of all the "phenomena" and letters of the "Mahatmas" was to swindle money from gullible people, allegedly for the needs of the Theosophical Society. Almost simultaneously with the article in this journal, revelations appeared from the London Society for Psychical Investigation, which sent its member, Mr. Hodgson, to India to check the activities of Blavatsky. Godgson came to the conclusion that all the "phenomena" of Blavatsky are nothing but fraudulent tricks.

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USA, 1878. In his many years of practice, Dr. Robert Heriot saw this for the first time. He was called to treat the sick, but the woman lying in front of him on the bed was dead. To make sure of this, he felt the pulse on her hand and did not feel the beating, put a mirror to her lips - the glass did not fog up. Only one thing confused the doctor - the woman's look was meaningful. She stared straight ahead, like real people. And yet, by all formal indications, Helena Blavatsky was dead. The doctor picked up the phone and started calling the morgue to order a hearse. But as soon as he uttered the first words, someone's hand snatched the receiver from him.

The patient, to whom the doctor was called, was an unusual woman. All over the world knew her name - Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Tens of thousands of people believed that she was able to work miracles. And the American doctor Robert Heriot believed only in the power of science and his own mind. He was convinced that miracles have a place in the pages of children's books, but not in real life. However, that day he had to reconsider his views. Colonel Henry Olcott snatched the tube from the doctor's hand. He introduced himself as a friend of the patient. “I asked you to raise her to her feet, and not take her to the morgue,” the colonel shouted, “Elena is alive, she simply could not die!”

The doctor tried to argue with the enraged colonel, but Olcott stood his ground. Robert Hariot served as the county's health inspector. He was obliged to take the dead body from the apartment building. But before the doctor could take a step towards Blavatsky's bed, he suddenly felt a cold blade on his neck. “I’ll cut you down…” the colonel hissed. Dr. Hariot forgot about the call of duty and thought only about how to quickly get out of this crazy house. Men did not even notice what was happening behind them. Finally, the colonel turned around and saw that Elena was sitting on the couch and calmly drinking tea.

This miracle forever turned the life of Robert Heriot. He gave up medical practice and instead of medicine began to study the occult sciences. The doctor soon realized that at that time Blavatsky was not dying, but plunged into a deep trance, and her open eyes saw other worlds. The American doctor was not the first and not the last person whose life was turned upside down by the meeting with Helena Blavatsky. By the end of the 19th century, she had tens of thousands of followers.

And today, more than a hundred years later, Blavatsky's books are published in huge numbers, and the Theosophical Movement she founded attracts hundreds of new followers every year. Theosophy first revealed to the inhabitants of the Western countries the secret wisdom of the East. The most surprising thing was that at the origins of Theosophy was not a man with a university education, but a Russian woman who had not even graduated from a gymnasium.

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was born on August 12, 1831 in the city of Yekaterinoslav in the family of officer Peter Alekseevich von Hahn. Her father belonged to a well-known aristocratic family. Mother came from the ancient Russian family of Rurikovich. The mother of Helena Blavatsky, a famous writer, died very early, and her last words were: “Maybe it’s for the best that I’m dying. You don't have to see Elena's bitter fate. I am sure that her fate will not be female, she will have to suffer a lot ... ”.

The prophecy came true, Elena really had to suffer a lot. But her childhood was happy. Grandmother, Elena Pavlovna Dolgorukova, brought her up in the best traditions of aristocratic families. Elena was an unusual child. Kind, smart, with strong intuition, sometimes bordering on clairvoyance. Once she was found in the attic with pigeons. And all the pigeons were in some kind of cataplexy state and did not fly anywhere. Elena said that she was putting them to bed according to Solomon's recipes. People were afraid of her sincerity, she always spoke only the truth. And in a decent society, this was considered a sign of bad taste. Indeed, how many people in the world are capable of telling only the truth? Even fewer are those who are able to perceive the truth.

The most original trick of the young lady was her marriage. In 1848, a 17-year-old girl told her family that she was marrying 40-year-old Nicephorus Blavatsky, who had been appointed vice-governor. Elena moved to Tiflis. She confessed to her relatives - she married Blavatsky in order to get rid of the control of her relatives. The girls of that time simply had no other option to leave the family. The marriage remained fictitious, but all attempts to divorce were unsuccessful and she runs away from her husband.

On horseback, Elena escapes from Tiflis, crosses the Russian-Turkish border and "hare" on the ship gets to Constantinople. She forever left Russia and loved ones. For eight whole years after the escape, she did not let anyone know about herself - she was afraid that her husband would track her down. I only trusted my father. He realized that she would not return to her husband and reconciled. Thus began a new free life. Elena gave music lessons, performed as a pianist, wrote books and articles. The young aristocrat risked everything. And for what? It is clear that some higher power led her. Many years later, she confessed that a certain mysterious friend, a spiritual teacher, was always invisibly present next to her.

The appearance of the teacher never changed - a bright face, long black hair, white clothes. He taught her in her sleep and, as a child, saved her life more than once. And the relatives were amazed, what miracle saved their child? Much later she wrote: “I have always had a second life, incomprehensible even to myself. Until I met my mysterious teacher."

This happened in 1851 at the first world exhibition in London. Among the Indian delegation, she suddenly saw the one who had been appearing to her in a dream for a long time. Elena was shocked, her teacher is a real person. She had a conversation with him, in which he explained which way she should go further, about the matter related to the transfer of knowledge to mankind.

He told her that she had an important job ahead of her. But first, she must prepare for it and spend three years in Tibet. Blavatsky is only twenty years old and she understood what future was prepared for her - the path of discipleship and service to the truth. Elena knew that the task set before her by the teacher - to penetrate into Tibet - was extremely difficult. Of course, she completed the task, but it took her 17 years to do this.

During this time, she makes two unsuccessful attempts to enter Tibet and makes two trips around the world. She faces deadly dangers, but every time someone helps her, protects her and, most importantly, teaches her. She described two trips to India in the most interesting book "From the caves and wilds of Hindustan." Several times Blavatsky falls seriously ill and, without outside help, is miraculously healed. With each illness, her supernatural powers grow.

What abilities did Blavatsky possess? According to eyewitnesses, she predicted the future, freely read sealed letters, answered questions that were asked to her mentally. She could move seals and drawings from one sheet to another, and, at the request of people, she could communicate with their deceased relatives. She was able to evoke wonderful music with a wave of her hand, which literally poured from heaven. In her presence, things began to move, and for some this caused delight, and for others, fear. She always saw the dead on the day of their death, saw how it would happen. She wrote to relatives about what awaits them, and accurately guessed this date.

The amazing skills of Blavatsky made a lot of noise in Pskov, where she returned to her family after ten years of absence. After living in Pskov for a year, Blavatsky left for Tiflis. On the way, she met His Grace Isidore, Exarch of Georgia, later Metropolitan of St. Petersburg and Novgorod. His Grace questioned her, asked questions mentally and, having received sensible answers to them, was amazed. At parting, he blessed her and admonished her with the words: “There is no strength except from God. You never know the unknown forces in nature. It is not given to man to know all the forces, but he is not forbidden to recognize them. God bless you for all the good and kind."

Blavatsky lived in the Caucasus for another four years. In order not to depend on anyone, she tried to earn money herself. A great craftsman in needlework, she made artificial flowers. At one time she had a whole workshop, and it went very well. She even came up with a cheap way to get ink and subsequently sold it. But the main business of life was ahead, and she knew it.

1868, Blavatsky is 37 years old. One of the most mysterious periods in her life begins - studying in Tibet. She spoke little about it, but in her letters there are such lines: “Those to whom we wish to open ourselves will meet us at the border. The rest of us will not find us, even if they moved to Lhasa with a whole army. In these words there is a clue why no one can still find the country of great teachers - Shambhala. It is only open to a select few. The rest have no access.

Now a great number of magicians and initiates have bred. But it is not at all difficult to distinguish them from the disciples of Shambhala. The truly initiated will never talk about it. Initiates have no titles, they are simple in their lives and never boast of their knowledge. The truly initiated are under the influence of high rays of energy, and this happens only when their consciousness is ready to receive them. The old truth always remains unshakable - the teacher comes when the student is ready.

Blavatsky never talked about the three years of her life spent in Tibet, and only once wrote: “There are several pages from the history of my life. I would rather die than open them. They are too secret…” It is reliably known that she lived near the residence of the Tashi Lama and became a student of two teachers. Much later, Blavatsky wrote: “Teachers appear among people at turning points in history and bring new knowledge to the world. Such teachers were Krishna, Zoroaster, Buddha and Jesus. Jesus descended to earth without the consent of others, driven by a desire to help humanity. He was warned that he chose not the best time. But he still went and was executed because of the intrigues of the priests.

Blavatsky also wrote: “Beyond the Himalayas there is a core of adepts of different nationalities. They work together, but their essence remains unknown to ordinary lamas, who are mostly ignorant.” No one knows how Blavatsky was trained. She kept a secret, because secret knowledge can be used for selfish purposes.

Three years have passed, the training is over. Blavatsky leaves Tibet and begins her service to humanity. Teachers set an important task for her - to reveal to people the secret teachings about the structure of the Universe, about nature and man. Eternal human values ​​must resist materialism, cruelty and hatred.

In 1873, following the instructions of her teachers, she went to New York. There is a meeting with a future friend, student and colleague, Colonel Henry Olcott. This well-known lawyer, journalist, highly educated and spiritual person, became her support for the rest of her life. On November 11, 1875, the Theosophical Society was organized by Elena Petrovna and Colonel Olcott. It set itself three goals: 1) brotherhood without distinction of religions, races and nationalities; 2) comparative study of religions, science and philosophy; 3) the study of the unknown laws of nature and the latent abilities of man.

A great spiritual movement within a few years quickly spread throughout the world and made a real revolution in the minds of people. In India and what was then Ceylon, the Theosophical Society contributed to the revival of Buddhism. Mahatma Gandhi fully shared the idea of ​​society, and it had a great influence on the Indian independence movement. The activities of the society significantly influenced the pragmatic Western culture.

In Russia, Blavatsky's ideas were brilliantly continued by the Roerich couple and Russian cosmic scientists Tsiolkovsky, Chizhevsky, Vernadsky. Members of the Theosophical Society became many people of various nationalities and religions. After all, faith should not divide people.

What is a god? Blavatsky wrote that God is the mystery of cosmic laws, he cannot belong to only one people. Buddha, Christ, Mohammed are the great teachers of mankind. Religious wars are the gravest crime against the laws of the cosmos and against all people. Remission of sins is impossible, they can only be expiated by merciful deeds. Blavatsky's first work, Isis Unveiled, written in 1877, was a resounding success.

Since 1878, Blavatsky and Colonel Henry Olcott have been living and working in India. In the city of Adyar they found the world-famous headquarters of the Theosophical Society. It still remains the center of philosophers all over the world. But it was in India that the persecution of Blavatsky began. It was deployed by Christian missionaries, whom Elena Petrovna criticized more than once.

Blavatsky suffered from this, she was constantly ill and more than once was close to death. But Elena Petrovna was not afraid of death - she had not yet done everything for which she was sent to Earth. “There is no death,” Blavatsky wrote, “man continues to be the same. After death, the soul plunges into sleep, and then, waking up, goes either to the world of the living, if it is still attracted there, or to other, more developed worlds ... ".

Blavatsky is declared the swindler of the century. This is due to the verdict issued by the London Society for Psychical Research, published in 1885. Blavatsky was accused of being a complete fabrication of her great teachers. They were accused of many other, equally ridiculous sins. Upon learning of all this, the Indians bombarded her with letters. There was also a message from Indian scientists with seventy signatures: “We are surprised to read the report of the London Society. We dare to say that the existence of the Mahatmas is unthinkable. Our great-great-grandfathers, who lived long before the birth of Madame Blavatsky, communicated with them. And now there are people in India who are in constant contact with the teachers. Society has made a gross mistake by blaming "Madame Blavatsky".

But it took a whole hundred years for this mistake to be corrected. It was not until 1986 that a report was published by the London Society for Psychical Research on Blavatsky's activities. It began with the words: "According to the latest research, Madame Blavatsky was condemned unjustly ...". However, for a hundred years there have been enough fabrications on the subject of Blavatsky. Surprisingly, her Russian opponents did their best. It even got to the point that she was accused of murder, witchcraft and deviation from the foundations of Christianity.

She left India in 1884. Morally tired and terminally ill. She found her final resting place in England. Here in London, Blavatsky completes the main work of her life, The Secret Doctrine. This book gives such a synthesis of the teachings of different peoples, presents such a scope of knowledge that scientists of that time did not possess. Amazingly, two huge volumes of The Secret Doctrine were written within two years. Only a large team of researchers can do such work, and these books were written by a woman who did not even have a special education.

Published in 1888, The Secret Doctrine became the reference book of the most progressive scientists. Students and faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States and professors at the New York Harvard Club have been researching The Secret Doctrine for decades. The fact is that in this book Blavatsky predicted many discoveries in astronomy, astrophysics and many other sciences. Here is an example of a confirmed revelation: “The sun contracts as rhythmically as the human heart. It takes 11 years for this solar blood alone.” In the 20th century, this solar pulse was discovered by Alexander Chizhevsky.

Blavatsky's popularity in Russia, unfortunately, is not great. Although in America and Europe she is much more respected. Her works were studied by Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison and many other scientists. Blavatsky explains the riddle of humanoid aliens and their mysterious appearances and disappearances as follows: “There are millions and millions of worlds invisible to us. They are with us, inside our own world. Their inhabitants can pass through us as you pass through empty space. Their dwellings and countries are intertwined with ours, and thus however, do not interfere with our vision.

“No great truth has ever been accepted by contemporaries, and it usually takes a century, or even two, before it is accepted by scientists. So my work will be justified in part or in whole in the 20th century ... ”, Blavatsky wrote prophetically in the second volume of The Secret Doctrine. Indeed, what Blavatsky wrote about found understanding a hundred years later. Elena Petrovna died in England in 1891, having almost completed work on The Secret Doctrine. This extraordinary woman fulfilled her mission. She conveyed the great ideas of Shambhala to the pragmatic consciousness of man.

E.P. Blavatsky

In a very old letter from the Master, written many years ago and addressed to a member of the Theosophical Society, we find the following instructive lines concerning the mental state of a dying man:

At the last moment, all life is reflected in our memory: from all the forgotten corners and nooks and crannies, picture after picture emerges, one event after another. The dying brain drives the memory out of its lair with a powerful, irresistible impulse, and the memory conscientiously reproduces every impression given to it for storage during the active activity of the brain. That impression and thought which proves to be the strongest naturally becomes the most vivid and overshadows, so to speak, all the others, which disappear, only to reappear in Devachan. No man dies in a state of madness or unconsciousness, contrary to the claims of some physiologists. Even an insane person or one who is seized with a delirium tremens attack has his moment of clearing his consciousness at the moment of death, he is simply not able to tell others about it. Often a person only seems to be dead. But even between the last pulsation of the blood, the last beat of the heart, and the moment when the last spark of animal warmth leaves the body, the brain thinks and the ego relives its whole life in those short seconds. Speak in a whisper - you who are present at the deathbed, for you are present at the solemn appearance of death. You should be especially calm immediately after Death seizes the body with his cold hand.

Speak in a whisper, I repeat, so as not to disturb the calm flow of thought and prevent the active work of the Past, projecting its shadow on the screen of the Future ...

Against the above opinion, materialists have repeatedly come out with active protests. Biology and (scientific) psychology insisted on rejecting this idea; and if the latter (psychology) did not have any proven facts to support its own hypotheses, then the former (biology) simply dismissed it as an empty "superstition". But progress does not bypass even biology; and this is what her latest discoveries testify to. Not so long ago, Dr. Ferret presented to the Biological Society of Paris a most curious report on the mental state of the dying, brilliantly confirming everything that was said in the above quotation. For Dr. Ferre draws the attention of biologists precisely to the amazing phenomenon of memories of a life lived and the collapse of the blank walls of memory that for a long time hid the long-forgotten "nooks and crannies" that are now emerging "picture after picture".

It is enough for us to mention only two examples that this scholar gives in his report to prove how scientifically sound are the teachings that we receive from our Eastern Masters.

The first example is connected with a man who died of consumption. His illness was exacerbated by a spinal injury. He had already passed out, but with two successive injections of a gram of ether, he was brought back to life. The sick man slightly raised his head and spoke quickly in Flemish, a language that neither those present nor the dying man himself understood. And when he was offered a pencil and a piece of cardboard, he sketched out a few words in the same language with amazing speed, and, as it turned out later, without a single mistake. When the inscription was finally translated, it turned out that its meaning was very prosaic. The dying man suddenly remembered that since 1868, that is, for more than twenty years, he owed fifteen francs to a certain person, and asked that they be returned to him.

But why did he write his last will in Flemish? The deceased was a native of Antwerp, but as a child he changed both the city and the country, without having time to really learn the local language. All his later life he lived in Paris and could speak and write only in French. It is quite obvious that the memories that returned to him - the last flash of consciousness that unfolded before him, like a retrospective panorama, his whole life, down to a trifling episode concerning a few francs borrowed from a friend twenty years ago, did not come only from the physical brain, but mainly from his spiritual memory - from the memory of the higher Ego (Manas, or reincarnating individuality). And the fact that he began to speak and write in Flemish - a language that he could hear in his life only when he himself could hardly speak - serves as additional confirmation of our correctness. In its immortal nature, the Ego knows almost everything.. For matter is nothing but "the last stage and shadow of existence," as Ravesson of the French Institute tells us.

Let's move on to the second example.

Another patient was dying of pulmonary tuberculosis and in the same way was brought back to consciousness before death by an injection of ether. He turned his head, looked at his wife and quickly said to her: "You will not find this pin now, since then all floors have been changed." The phrase referred to a scarf pin that had been lost eighteen years earlier, an event so insignificant that he could hardly remember it. Even such a trifle did not fail to flash in the last vision of the dying man, who managed to comment on what he saw in words before his breath stopped. Thus, it can be assumed that all the countless thousands of everyday events and incidents of a long human life flash before the fading consciousness at the very last and decisive moment of disappearance. In a single second, a person re-lives his entire previous life!

A third example can be mentioned, which convincingly proves the correctness of occultism, which raises all such memories to the thinking ability of the individual, and not to the personal (lower) ego. One young girl, who walked in her sleep until almost the age of twenty-two, was able to perform, while in a state of somnambulistic sleep, a wide variety of household chores, which she could not remember anything about after waking up.

Among the psychic dispositions which she exhibited during sleep was a marked secretiveness, quite uncharacteristic of her in the waking state. When she was awake, she was quite open and sociable, and cared little for her property. But in a somnambulistic state, she used to hide her own and things that simply fell into her hand, and she did this with great ingenuity. Her relatives and friends knew about this habit, and even two servants specially hired to look after her during her nightly walks. They did this work for years and knew that the girl never created serious problems: only trifling things disappeared, which were then easy to return to their place. But one hot night, the maid dozed off, and the girl, getting out of bed, went to her father's office. The latter was a well-known notary and had a habit of working late. Just at that moment, he was absent for a short while, and the somnambulist, entering the room, deliberately stole from his desktop the will lying on it and a rather large sum of money, several thousand, in banknotes and bonds. She hid the stolen things in the library inside two hollow columns stylized as solid oak trunks, returned to her room before her father returned and went to bed without disturbing the maid dozing in the chair.

And as a result, the maid stubbornly denied that her young mistress had ever left her room at night, and the suspicion was removed from the real culprit, and the money could not be returned. In addition, the loss of the will, which was supposed to appear in court, practically ruined her father and deprived him of his good name, thereby plunging the entire family into real poverty. Approximately nine years later, the girl, who by that time had been rid of the habit of walking in her sleep for seven years, caught consumption, from which she eventually died. And on her deathbed, when the veil that previously hid her somnambulistic experiences from physical memory finally fell off, divine intuition awakened, and the pictures of her life lived in a swift stream poured before her inner vision, she saw, among others, the scene of her somnambulistic theft. At the same time, she woke up from an oblivion in which she had been staying for several hours in a row, her face was distorted by a grimace of terrible emotional experience, and she screamed: “What have I done?! It was I who took the will and the money... Look at the empty columns in the library; it's me...” She never finished the sentence, as the very outburst of emotion ended her life. However, the search was still made, and inside the oak columns - where she said, a will and money were found. This case seems even more strange due to the fact that the mentioned columns were so high that, even standing on a chair and having much more time left than the few seconds that the sleeping kidnapper had, she still could not reach them. tops to lower the stolen into their inner emptiness. In this connection, it can be noted that people who are in a state of ecstasy or frenzy seem to have anomalous abilities (See: Convulsionnaires de St. Medard et de Morzine) - can climb even sheer walls and jump even to the tops of trees.

If all these facts are accepted as they are, do they not convince that the lunatic has a mind and memory of his own, separate from the physical memory of the waking lower Entity, and that it is the former that are responsible for the memories in articulo mortis, since the body and the physical senses in this case, they gradually fade away, ceasing to function, the mind is steadily moving away along the psychic path, and it is the spiritual consciousness that lasts the longest of all? Why not? After all, even materialistic science is beginning to recognize many psychological facts that vainly demanded attention some twenty years ago. "True existence," says Ravesson, "life, before which all other life seems only a dim outline and a faint reflection, is the life of the Soul."

What the public usually calls "soul" we call "reborn ego". “To be is to live, and to live is to think and exercise will,” says this French scientist. But if the physical brain is really only a limited space, a sphere serving to capture the impetuous flashes of unlimited and infinite thought, then neither will nor thinking can be said to originate inside the brain, even from the point of view of materialistic science (remember the unbridgeable abyss between matter and mind, the existence of which was recognized by Tyndall and many others). And the thing is that the human brain is just a channel connecting two levels, psycho-spiritual and material; and through this channel all abstract and metaphysical ideas seep from the level of Manas into the lower human consciousness. Consequently, no idea of ​​the infinite and the absolute does not enter and cannot enter our brain, because it exceeds its capacity. These categories can truly reflect only our spiritual consciousness, which then transfers their more or less distorted and dimmed projections to the tablets of our perceptions of the physical level. So, even memories of important events in our life often fall out of memory, but all of them, including the most insignificant trifles, are stored in the memory of the “soul”, because for it there is no memory at all, but only an ever-present reality at a level that surpasses ours. ideas about space and time. “Man is the measure of all things,” said Aristotle; and, of course, by this he did not mean the external form of a person, molded from flesh, bones and muscles!

Of all the great thinkers, Edgar Quinet - the author of "La Creation" - expresses this idea most clearly. Speaking of a person full of feelings and thoughts, which he himself does not even suspect or only vaguely perceives as some kind of fuzzy and incomprehensible motivating impulses, Kine argues that a person is aware of only a very small part of his own moral being. “Thoughts that come to our minds, but do not receive due recognition and formalization, once rejected, find refuge in the very foundations of our being ...” And when they are driven away by the persistent efforts of our will, “they retreat even further and even deeper - God knows in what fibers to reign there and gradually influence us, unconsciously for ourselves ... "

Yes, these thoughts become as imperceptible and inaccessible to us as the vibrations of sound and light, when they go beyond the range available to us. Invisible and avoiding our attention, they nevertheless continue to work, laying the foundation for our future thoughts and actions and gradually establishing their control over us, although we ourselves may not think about them at all and not even suspect their existence and presence. And it seems that Kine, this great connoisseur of Nature, in his observations was never closer to the truth than when, speaking of the secrets surrounding us on all sides, he made the following thoughtful conclusion, which is the most important thing for us: These are not the secrets of heaven or earth, but those that are hidden in the depths of our soul, in our brain cells, our nerves and fibers. There is no need, he adds, in search of the unknown to delve into the star worlds, while right here - next to us and in us - much remains inaccessible ... As our world consists mainly of invisible beings who are true builders its continents, so is man."

It is true, as soon as a person is a mixture of unconscious and incomprehensible perceptions, vague feelings and emotions that come from nowhere, eternally unreliable memory and knowledge, which on the surface of his level turns into ignorance. But if the memory of a living and healthy person often turns out to be not up to par, since one fact in it is superimposed on another, suppressing and displacing the first, then at the moment of the great change that people call death, what we consider "memory" seems to return to us in all its power and fullness.

And how else can this be explained, if not by the simple fact that both our memories (or rather, two of its states corresponding to the higher and lower states of consciousness) merge together - at least for a few seconds, forming a single whole, and that the dying person is moving to a level where there is neither past nor future, but only one all-encompassing present? Memory, as we all know, is strengthened by earlier associations, and therefore becomes stronger with age than, say, in infancy; and it is more connected with the soul than with the body. But if memory is a part of our soul, then, as Thackeray once rightly noted, it must of necessity be eternal. Scientists deny it, but we Theosophists affirm it. In support of their theories, they can only give negative arguments, but we have countless facts in our arsenal, like the three that we described above as an example. The chain of cause and effect that determines the action of the mind still remains and will always remain terra incognita for the materialist. For if they are so unshakably sure that, following Pope's expression:

Our thoughts, closed in the cells of the brain, rest;

But invisible chains always connect them...

- however, to this day they cannot find these chains in any way, then how can they hope to unravel the secrets of the higher, Spiritual Mind!

Footnotes

1. ...In a very old letter from the Master, written many years ago and addressed to a member of the Theosophical Society...– H.P.B. refers to a letter from Master Koot Hoomi received by A.P. Sinnett around October 1882 while he was in Simla, India. This is a very detailed letter containing answers to the questions that Sinnett addressed to the Master. These questions and answers from the Master are printed in Mahatma Letters to AP Sinnett. Sinnett asks:

   “16) You say: “Remember that we create ourselves – our Devachan and our Avichi, and for the most part – during the last days and even moments of our sensual lives.”

   17) Does it mean that the thoughts that come to a person at the last moment are necessarily connected with the prevailing direction of the life he has lived? For, otherwise, the character of a personal Devachan or Avichi may be determined by the whim of chance, unjustly bringing some extraneous thought as the last?

   To this the Teacher replies:

   “16) It is widely believed among all Hindus that the future state of a person before a new birth and birth itself are determined by his last desire experienced at the time of death. But this dying desire, they add, necessarily depends on the images that a person has given to his desires, passions, etc., during his past life. For this very reason, namely, that our last desire does not harm our future progress, we must watch our actions and control our passions and desires all the time of our earthly life.

   17) It simply cannot be otherwise. The experience of dying people who drowned or experienced some other accident, but were brought back to life, confirms our doctrine in almost all cases. Such thoughts are involuntary, and we have no more power to prevent them than to prevent the retina from perceiving the color that most actively affects it. (See Letters of the Mahatmas to Sinnett. - Samara: Agni, 1998.)

2. 2. ...See: Convulsionnaires de St. Medard et de Morline...– It is possible that this French reference refers to de Mirville's "Des Esprits, etc." in that part of it which is dedicated to the possessed; however, this assumption has not yet been confirmed for certain.
3. 3. Rapport sur la Philosophic en France au XlXme Steele.
4. 4 Vol. II, r. 377-78.

The time is not far off when the Russians will understand all the greatness of the Teaching that E.P. Blavatsky, and give due respect to this martyr for the idea. (From a letter from E.I. Roerich, 02.06.34)

TRUTH BEARER
(instead of preface)

Helena Blavatsky is almost a legendary figure. The Russian patriot, who devoted all her energy to the study of ancient sciences and religions, became the founder of theosophical teachings. Having lived for many years in India, visiting Tibet, she recreated the most ancient teachings of the world. Exceptional authority and popularity in all countries did not free her from forced oblivion in our country.

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky - this name, after many years of oblivion, attacks and reproach, again sounded in full force on the pages of our press. Conferences, symposiums and seminars are held in her honor, the centennial date of her death was widely celebrated.

In the 19th century, when E.P. Blavatsky, science was gaining strength, materialism was also gaining strength. But she was not afraid to speak out against him - with the preaching of spirituality and idealism. She believed that materialism and atheism are the moral ulcers of humanity. Irreligion breeds lack of spirituality, Blavatsky believed. An extraordinary, titanic person, endowed with extraordinary properties, could do such a thing. E.P. Blavatsky was such a person. Her sister, V.P. Zhelikhovskaya, wrote that Blavatsky made many educated people of her time believe that the world is inhabited by thinking beings, superior to us in mind. She had performed a miracle, her sister thought.

E.P. Blavatsky possessed extraordinary abilities of suggestion, penetration into the unknown areas of human possibilities - foreboding and foresight. But she was not the only one with such abilities. From time to time, extraordinary people appear who again and again try to prove to humanity that the world is not so simple and unambiguous and that behind its visible part there is also an invisible one that we cannot know with the help of five senses. In this sense, Blavatsky is among such personalities as Nostradamus, Saint-Germain, H.I. Roerich and others.

Her properties went so far beyond the usual level that they were too alien to the vast majority. Even her closest employee and assistant, Colonel Olcott, admits in his diary that, despite many years of living together, he could not fully answer the question often asked to himself: who was Elena Petrovna? But in some definitions everyone who knew her agrees.

Everyone claims that she possessed extraordinary spiritual strength, subjugating everything around her, that she was capable of incredible work and superhuman patience when it came to serving the idea, about fulfilling the will of the Teacher; and everyone also unanimously agrees that she possessed an amazing sincerity that knew no bounds. This sincerity is reflected in every manifestation of her fiery soul, which never stopped before what they would think of her, how they would react to her words and deeds, it is reflected in the thoughtless expressions of her letters, it shows through in every detail of her stormy, long-suffering life.

Her characteristic feature, which for close people represented an unusual attraction, but at the same time could greatly harm her, was her well-aimed, brilliant humor, mostly good-natured, but sometimes hurting petty vanities. She loved to joke, to tease, to cause a stir. Her niece, Nadezhda Vladimirovna Zhelikhovskaya, reports: “My aunt had an amazing trait: for the sake of a joke and a red word, she could make up anything for herself. We sometimes laughed hysterically when she talked with reporters and interviewers in London. Mom stopped her: “Why Are you composing all this?" "Well, they, after all, they are all erratic, let them earn milk for the kids!" And sometimes she told her Theosophists she knew, just for laughter, various unheard-of stories. Then we laughed, but with human stupidity who does not understand jokes, a lot of confusion and “troubles” have arisen from this.Not only “troubles”, but it is quite possible that of those who do not understand jokes, there were those who were offended by her jokes, and they went over to the camp of her enemies.

She had many followers and even more enemies, both among the Christian orthodox and among the atheists. The first took up arms against her because she reproached them for misinterpreting the Bible and other sacred books. The latter could not forgive her mysticism, calling her a charlatan and a blackmailer. E.I. Roerich wrote: "H.P. Blavatsky was a great martyr in the full sense of the word. Envy, slander and persecution of ignorance killed her..." Russia, her name will be placed on the proper height of reverence. H. P. Blavatsky is truly our national pride... Eternal glory to her."

The phenomenon of E.P. Blavatsky manifested itself in the 19th century, in the era of the development of science and technology, the so-called external forms of life. Blavatsky, on the other hand, was focused on studying the ancient esoteric knowledge of different peoples, their religious concepts, ancient rituals, symbols, and magic. She became the organizer and founder of the Theosophical Society, which united people of different faiths, origins and social status. Members of the society cared about moral self-improvement and spiritual help to their neighbors. Mahatma Gandhi admired her activities, he said: "I would be more than satisfied if I could touch the edge of Madame Blavatsky's clothes."

E.P. Blavatsky left behind a huge literary legacy. The unfinished collection of her works includes 14 solid volumes published in America. This heritage consists of works of art and literature, travel notes, and fantastic stories. But the main works that won her world fame were the works of a philosophical and religious nature. The first work in this direction was "Isis Unveiled", a solid two-volume book, which provides a deep analysis and comparison of various religious teachings with the data of modern science and the methods of magic in different parts of the world. But her main work, as if summing up her career, is the two-volume "Secret Doctrine". Already one subtitle of this book speaks for itself - "Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy".

E.P. Blavatsky freely enters into polemics with famous religious scholars and philosophers, citing excerpts from various ancient writings to prove her arguments. In her works such a synthesis of the ancient teachings of different peoples, ancient symbolism is given, such a scope of knowledge is presented that rarely anyone possessed even among scientists. This work of Blavatsky has no analogues in the world science of this direction. And what is amazing - two huge volumes of "The Secret Doctrine" were written within two years. Only in order to rewrite them, perhaps, this time would hardly be enough - after all, they contain 1853 pages. Such a work, perhaps, is within the power of a large team of researchers, and it was written by a woman who did not even have a special education.

What E.P. wrote about Blavatsky in the last century, which undermined many scientific foundations, has now become the property of science. Many of her predictions over the past hundred years have been confirmed by the research of astronomers, archaeologists and other specialists.

In his writings, E.P. Blavatsky uses ancient texts that she came across during her trips to India and Tibet. There she met with the abbots of ancient monasteries and temples, who owned the oldest manuscripts. These treasures were kept in underground bookstores and caves. Blavatsky writes that all the ancient temples and monasteries of the East have underground passages through which they communicate. Only initiates can get into these dungeons - those who understand the meaning of the texts, who are involved in ancient knowledge and wisdom.

N.K. also speaks about ancient monasteries and manuscripts. and Yu.N. The Roerichs in their diary entries during the Central Asian expedition. The famous Russian traveler N.M. Przhevalsky tells about the ruins of the ancient cities and monasteries of Central Asia, covered with sand. Unfortunately, writes E.P. Blavatsky, many works of antiquity are irretrievably lost: the manuscripts of the burnt library of Alexandria, the works of Lao Tzu, numerous volumes of Kanjur and Tanjur. But not everything is lost, and the materials that Blavatsky cites in her books, especially in The Secret Doctrine, indicate that ancient knowledge was available to her. Here is one example: speaking of the Great Pyramid at Giza with reference to ancient texts, H.P. Blavatsky points out that there is an iron chamber under the Sphinx. Our science did not know this. And only in 1986 there was a message that archaeologists discovered a metal pillow under the Sphinx, the purpose of which is still unknown.

In the "Secret Doctrine" H.P. Blavatsky refers to the texts (stanzas) of the ancient manuscript "Dzyan", written in the ancient language "senzar", which was considered the "language of the gods" and disappeared long ago. The texts of this ancient manuscript, according to Blavatsky, have something in common with the ancient Indian texts of the Vedas, Puranas, Upanishads, as well as with the Babylonian Book of Numbers, the Bible, etc. She believes that in these ancient books many texts are encrypted and their deep meaning is understood by very few. It was available only to priests and initiates. In these texts, the secrets of nature are encrypted, the disclosure of which by unreasonable people could bring great harm. Therefore, the keys to the ancient texts were strictly guarded. Only the most zealous explorers of the East managed to penetrate the secret knowledge. E.P. Blavatsky was among them, here are the proofs of that.

In the first volume of The Secret Doctrine, entitled "Cosmogenesis", the appearance and disappearance of the universe is depicted in the ancient texts as the "Inhalation of the Great Breath", or "Divine Breath". This phrase in ancient texts sounds like this: "The Deity exhales the Thought, which becomes the Cosmos." In a figurative, symbolic form, ancient texts say that Universes can arise and disappear. It turns out that in ancient times people spoke freely about the Cosmos and that there were many Universes, that they arose and disappeared. This testifies to the breadth of their knowledge, which was later firmly forgotten. Modern science comes close to this issue.

One can only be surprised at the knowledge possessed by the ancient sages. But the question arises where this knowledge came from, because, according to our ideas, they did not have telescopes.

In the first stanzas of "Cosmogenesis" it is indicated that before the appearance of the Universe and life there was nothing in it: neither time, nor space, nor matter - only a single darkness. This state was called by the ancients Pralaya, or the Night of Brahma. And here is what A. Einstein writes about this: “If matter disappeared, space and time would disappear along with it. be time." How converge these two concepts - ancient and modern!

The ancients attached great importance to the Dragon-Snake; according to their ideas. The Serpent Dragon emerged from the depths of the great dark waters. Why did the ancients attach such great importance to the Serpent-Dragon?

E.P. Blavatsky gives the following explanation.

Before our Earth became egg-shaped like the Universe, a long tail of cosmic dust, a fiery mist, moved and wriggled like a Serpent in space. The Spirit of God, hovering over Chaos, was depicted by the ancients in the form of the Fire Serpent, exhaling fire and light on the eternal waters. The fact that cosmic matter has the annular shape of a snake biting its tail symbolizes not only eternity and infinity, but also the spherical shape of all bodies formed within the Universe from this fiery fog. The universe, like the earth and man, periodically sheds its old skin, like a snake, in order to put on a new one, after a certain period of rest. That is why the Serpent was a symbol of wisdom among many peoples of the world.

Naturally, the question arises: how did the ancients learn the secrets of the cosmos, which cannot be seen? The conclusion suggests itself as follows: this knowledge is not of earthly origin.

And here is how, according to Blavatsky, the formation of the Universe is described in ancient texts: one tissue spreads when the breath of Fire (the Father) is above it. It contracts when the Mother's breath (mother's root) touches it. Then the Sons (elements) separate and disperse to return to the Mother's womb at the end of the great day, to reunite with her.

E.P. Blavatsky comments on this thesis as follows: the spread and contraction of the "tissue", that is, the world's substance, or atoms, here expresses the pulse of movement. At present, it seems to us that this thesis can be explained by the theory of the expanding and contracting Universe. It turns out, oddly enough, that both points of view - ancient and modern - coincide. The modern theory of the formation of the Universe also speaks of an expanding and contracting Universe. Even at the beginning of our century, V.I. Vernadsky said that Indian philosophy turned out to be unexpectedly close to new scientific concepts.

So how did the ancients know all this? In their sacramental texts it is said that knowledge was brought to Earth by "divine beings" or "creators" and transferred to dedicated, wise people, priests. It must be said that the Bible repeatedly mentions the deeds of the "sons of God" who taught people. They were also called "angels", which means "messengers", or "messengers of God".

"Shining beings", which the ancient prophet Zoroaster saw, gave him a "good intention", and he expounded in his gathas the most ancient religious teaching. There are many such examples. In almost every ancient writing, especially of a religious nature, there are divine messengers.

No less surprising are the thoughts expressed in ancient texts about the origin of the planets of the solar system and their movement. The data is presented in symbolic form. From the cosmic womb of Mother-Space - Aditi - all the celestial bodies of our solar system were born. Eight sons were born from the body of Aditi. She approached the seven gods, but rejected the eighth - Martanda, our Sun. Seven sons - cosmically and astronomically there are seven planets. This suggests that in ancient times they knew about the seventh planet, without calling it Uranus. This is how it is described in the ancient texts.

"Eight houses were built for eight divine sons: four large and four smaller. Eight brilliant Suns, according to their age and dignity. Baln-lu (Martanda) was dissatisfied, although his house was the largest. He began to work, as huge elephants do "He breathed (drawn) into his womb the vital breaths of his brothers. He tried to absorb them. The four large ones were far away - at the extreme limit of their kingdom. They were not robbed (affected) and laughed: - "Do with us what you can . Lord, you cannot reach us." But the lesser ones cried. They complained to their mother. She exiled Baln-lu to the center of her kingdom, from where he could not move, Since then he has only guarded and threatened. He pursues them, slowly turning around himself , they quickly turn away from him, and from afar he follows the direction in which his brothers are moving along the path that surrounds their dwellings.

This is how the movement of the planets of the solar system is described in a simple and accessible form for people.

And the structure of the Universe and substance, matter is also figuratively stated in ancient texts. Atoms are depicted as "wheels", around which cosmic energy grows, becoming spheroidal. "Wheels" are the prototype of atoms, each of which shows an increasing tendency to rotate. The "God" becomes a "whirlwind", the "whirlwind" gives rise to a spiral movement. From time immemorial, the Universe has been symbolically expressed as a spiral, that is, a vortex motion.

The law of the spiral motion of primary matter is the most ancient idea not only of the Indians, but also of Greek philosophy. The Greek sages, according to E.P. Blavatsky, almost all were initiated. They also received this knowledge from the Egyptians, and the latter from the Chaldeans, who were students of the Brahmins of the esoteric school.

E.P. Blavatsky illuminates the question of karma, the doctrine of which is accepted by all followers of the ancient religions of the East. Their main philosophy is that every being, every creature on earth, no matter how small and insignificant it is, is an immortal particle of immortal matter. Matter for them has a completely different meaning than for a Christian or a materialist, each being is subject to karma. Replace the word "God" with karma, writes Blavatsky, and it becomes an Eastern axiom.

"Our fate is written in the stars - an ancient saying. But man is a free agent during his stay on Earth. He cannot escape fate, but he has a choice of two paths that lead him in this direction, and he can reach the limit of happiness or the limit misfortune, if it is intended for him, either in the clean clothes of the righteous, or in clothes stained on the path of evil, for there are internal and external conditions that affect our decisions and actions.So whoever believes in karma must believe in fate, which from birth to death, each person weaves thread after thread around him, like a spider his yarn. Fate is directed either by the heavenly voice of an invisible prototype outside of us, or by our, closer, astral, or inner person.

According to E.P. Blavatsky, the single command of karma is absolute harmony, as it exists in the world of the spirit. Therefore, it is not karma that rewards or punishes, but we ourselves reward or punish ourselves, according to whether we work with nature or through nature. Whether we obey the laws on which this harmony depends, or whether we break them.

Here it will be appropriate to consider the question of the spatial force mentioned in ancient sources under the name "vril". Blavatsky insists that the force itself was known to the Atlanteans and was called by them "mash-mak". She points out that perhaps the name of this force was different, but the very fact of its existence in the distant past is undeniable. This force, if directed against an army from an agni-ratha mounted on a flying ship, according to the instructions found in Astra Vidya, would reduce to ashes one hundred thousand people and elephants, like one rat. This power is presented in the form of an allegory in the Ramayana and the Vishnu Purana, as well as in other ancient Indian writings.

In addition, E.P. Blavatsky cites another legend about such a terrible weapon of the ancients, based on the action of the spatial force "vril". We are talking about the sage "Kapila," whose gaze turned the sixty thousand sons of Sagar into a mountain of ashes ". H. P. Blavatsky says that this power is explained in esoteric writings and is called" kapilaksha "or" Eye of Kapida ". Blavatsky wrote about this a hundred years ago, when nothing was known about atomic energy and the terrible destructive effect of the atomic bomb, now we know what this power is hidden in the smallest particle - the atom.

More E.P. Blavatsky cites ancient texts about a weapon unknown to us - Agniastra. It was "made of seven elements". Some Orientalists have thought about the rocket, Blavatsky skeptically remarks that this is only what lies within the limits of their knowledge, or rather, the knowledge of the late nineteenth century. But the weapon, in addition to "bringing down fire from the sky", could cause rain, storm, and also paralyze the enemy or plunge his feelings into a deep sleep. Apparently, humanity is now only on the outskirts of this type of weapon.

E.P. Blavatsky had the good fortune to touch the great knowledge of the ancients. She anticipated the possibilities of the future based on the facts described in ancient texts, which she believed to be real. And then she predicted that "uncomfortable truths" would not be accepted by her century and she was ready for the denial of these teachings by her contemporaries. Blavatsky wrote that they would be ridiculed and rejected in her century, but only in it. For in the twentieth century, scholars will begin to recognize that the "Secret Doctrine" was not made up. And he adds that this is not a claim to prophecy, but simply an assertion based on knowledge of the facts.

Indeed, in our time we discover ancient knowledge similar to modern knowledge in half-forgotten or completely forgotten and newly "discovered" works of the ancients. Proceedings of E.P. Blavatsky is helped to discover this knowledge and harmonize it with modernity. And what we used to consider the purest legends and myths, not based on facts, now becomes the deepest truth for us.

Her whole life can be divided into three clearly demarcated periods. Childhood and youth from the day of birth in 1831 to marriage in 1848 constitute the first period; the second - the mysterious years, about which there is almost no definite data, which lasted, with a four-year break when she came to her relatives in Russia, for more than 20 years, from 1848 to 1872, and the third period from 1872 until her death held in America, India, and for the last six years in Europe, among numerous witnesses who knew Elena Petrovna closely. Regarding this last period, there are many biographical sketches and articles written by people who knew her closely.

CHILDHOOD

Regarding the external conditions of Elena Petrovna's childhood, we can get a fairly clear idea from two books by her sister V.P. Zhelikhovskaya - "How I Was Little" and "My Adolescence", in which she describes her family, but from them almost no idea about the character and experiences of Elena Petrovna herself in childhood can be taken out. This is partly explained by the fact that Vera Petrovna was four years younger and could not consciously observe her sister, who, judging by her own stories, as the eldest, lived a completely separate life; moreover, in the thirties of the last century, when the childhood of both sisters proceeded, the supernormal psychic powers of the child had to be looked upon as something very undesirable, and they had to be carefully concealed from outsiders and from other children of the same family. Another source, Sinnett's book Incidents from the Life of Madame Blavatsky, gives some very interesting details, but the author wrote his book based on the random stories of Helena Petrovna, and how correctly he remembered and accurately conveyed her words is difficult to verify.

As for the youth of E.P. until her early marriage in 1848, little is known of this period of her life.

Of Elena Petrovna's peers, her own aunt, Nadezhda Andreevna Fadeeva, who is only three years older than Elena Petrovna and lived with her in the most intimate proximity when both were still children; confirms the extraordinary phenomena that surrounded Elena Petrovna in her childhood: “The phenomena produced by the mediumistic forces of my niece Elena are extremely remarkable, true miracles, but they are not the only ones. I have heard and read many times in books related to spiritualism, both sacred and secular, amazing reports of phenomena similar to those described by you, but these were isolated cases.But so many forces concentrated in one person, the combination of the most extraordinary manifestations coming from the same source, like hers, this, of course, is an unprecedented case, it is possible and I have long known that she has the greatest mediumistic powers, but when she was with us, these powers did not reach the degree they have now. My niece Elena is a very special being and cannot be compared with anyone. As a child, as a young girl, as a woman, she was always so superior to her environment that she could never be appreciated. ana like a girl from a good family, but there was not even a word about learning. But the extraordinary wealth of her mental abilities, the subtlety and speed of her thought, the amazing ease with which she understood, grasped and assimilated the most difficult subjects, an unusually developed mind, combined with a chivalrous character, direct, energetic and open - that is what lifted her so high. above the level of ordinary human society and could not but attract general attention to it, and hence the envy and enmity of all those who, in their insignificance, could not stand the brilliance and gifts of this truly amazing nature.

The genealogy of Elena Petrovna is interesting in the sense that among her immediate ancestors were representatives of the historical families of France, Germany and Russia. On her father's side, she descended from the sovereign Mecklenburg princes Gan von Rottenstein-Gan. On the mother’s side, Elena Petrovna’s great-grandmother was nee Bandre-du-Plessis, the granddaughter of a Huguenot emigrant who was forced to leave France due to religious persecution. She married in 1787 Prince Pavel Vasilyevich Dolgoruky, and their daughter, Princess Elena Pavlovna Dolgorukaya, married to Andrei Mikhailovich Fadeev, was Elena Petrovna's own grandmother and raised her granddaughters who were orphaned early. She left behind the memory of a remarkable and deeply educated woman, of extraordinary kindness and scholarship, completely exceptional for that time; she corresponded with many scientists, among other things with the president of the London Geographical Society, Murchison, with famous botanists and mineralogists, one of whom (Homer de Gel) named the fossil shell he found Venus-Fadeeff after her. She spoke five foreign languages, drew beautifully and was an outstanding woman in every respect. She brought up her daughter Elena Andreevna, the mother of Elena Petrovna, who died early, and gave her her talented nature; Elena Andreevna wrote stories and novels under the pseudonym Zinaida R. and was very popular in the early forties; her early death aroused universal regret, and Belinsky devoted several laudatory pages to her, calling her "the Russian George Sand."

According to M.G. Yermolova, young Elena Petrovna was a brilliant girl, but extremely headstrong, obeying no one and nothing, and her grandfather's family enjoyed an excellent reputation, and Elena Petrovna's grandmother was placed so highly for her outstanding qualities that "despite the fact that she herself whom she had not been, the whole city came to bow to her. The Fadeevs, in addition to their daughter Elena, mother of Elena Petrovna Blavatsky, who married the artillery officer Gan, and another daughter, married to Witte, also had a daughter Nadezhda Andreevna and a son Rostislav Andreevich Fadeev, whom Elena Petrovna loved so dearly that, in her opinion biographer Olcott, they and her sister Vera Petrovna Zhelikhovskaya with their children were her only affection on earth.

In the family of her grandfather Fadeev, Elena Petrovna, who was orphaned early, spent most of her childhood, first in Saratov, where he was governor, and later in Tiflis. Judging by what has come down to us, her childhood was extremely bright and joyful. For the summer, the whole family moved to the governor's dacha - a large old house surrounded by a garden, with mysterious corners, ponds and a deep ravine, beyond which the forest descending to the Volga darkened. All nature lived a special mysterious life for the ardent girl; often she spoke to the birds, animals, and invisible companions of her games; she spoke very animatedly with them and sometimes began to laugh loudly, amused by them, by no one but her invisible funny tricks, and when winter came, the unusual office of her learned grandmother presented such an interesting world that it was able to ignite even a not so lively imagination. There were many strange things in this office: there were stuffed animals of various animals, the grinning heads of bears and tigers could be seen, on one wall adorable little hummingbirds were full of bright flowers, on the other - as if alive, owls, falcons and hawks sat, and above them, right under the ceiling, a huge eagle spread its wings. But the most terrible of all was the white flamingo, stretching out its long neck just like a living one. When the children came to their grandmother's office, they sat on a stuffed black walrus or a white seal, and at dusk it seemed to them that all these animals began to move, and little Elena Petrovna told many terrible and fascinating stories about them, especially about the white flamingo, wings who appeared to be splattered with blood. Of all the memories of V.P. Zhelikhovskaya about Elena Petrovna's childhood, for us, living in an era when knowledge of the hidden mental nature of man has expanded significantly, it becomes clear that in childhood Elena Petrovna had clairvoyance; the astral world, invisible to ordinary people, was open to her, and she lived in reality a double life: physical, common to all, and visible only to her. In addition, she had to have a strong psychometric abilities, which at that time in the West had no idea. When she, sitting on the back of a white seal and stroking its fur, told the children of her family about his adventures, no one could suspect that this touch of hers was enough to unfold before the astral vision of the girl a whole scroll of pictures of nature, with which life was once associated. this seal.

Everyone thought that she draws these fascinating stories from her imagination, but in reality, pages from the invisible chronicle of nature were opening before her. Confirmation that she possessed this rare gift is given to us by V.P. Zhelikhovskaya. According to her, all nature lived for her a special life, invisible to others. For her, not only the empty space that seemed to us was filled, but all things had their own special voice, and everything that seems dead to us lived for her and told her in her own way about her life. In confirmation, Zhelikhovskaya gives us in her memoirs a wonderful scene that took place during a children's picnic, when a whole group of invited children gathered on a bright summer day on a sandy strip of land that was undoubtedly once part of the sea or lake bottom. It was all strewn with the remains of shells and fish bones, and there were also stones with prints on them of fish and marine plants that no longer exist.

V.P. Zhelikhovskaya remembers little Elena, stretched out on the sand; her elbows are immersed in the sand, her head is supported by the palms of her hands joined under her chin, and she is all ablaze with inspiration, telling what a magical life the seabed lives, what azure waves with a rainbow reflection rolled over the golden sand, what bright corals and stalactite caves there, what extraordinary grasses and delicately colored anemones swayed at the bottom, and various sea monsters chased frisky fish between them. The children, not taking their eyes off her, listened to her enchanted, and it seemed to them that the soft azure waves were caressing their bodies, that they too were surrounded by all the wonders of the seabed. She spoke with such confidence that these fish and these monsters were flying past her, drawing their outlines with her finger on the sand, and the children thought that they saw them too. One day, at the end of such a story, there was a terrible commotion. At the moment when her listeners imagined themselves in the magical world of the sea kingdom, she suddenly spoke in a changed voice that the earth had opened up under them and blue waves were flooding them. She jumped to her feet and her childish face showed first strong surprise, and then delight, and at the same time insane horror, she fell on her face on the sand, screaming at the top of her lungs: here they are, blue waves! The sea... The sea floods us! We are drowning... All the children, terribly frightened, also threw themselves upside down on the sand, screaming with all their might, confident that the sea had swallowed them up.

She often told about various visits, describing persons unknown to us. Most often, the majestic image of the Hindu in a white turban appeared before her, always the same, and she knew him as well as her loved ones, and called her Patron; she claimed that it was he who saved her in moments of danger. One of these cases occurred when she was about 13 years old: the horse on which she rode was frightened and suffered; the girl could not resist and, entangling her foot in the stirrup, hung on it; but instead of breaking, she clearly felt someone's arms around her, which supported her until the horse was stopped. Another incident occurred much earlier, when she was still quite a baby. She longed to look at the picture hanging high on the wall and hung with white cloth. She asked to open the picture, but her request was not respected. Once, left alone in this room, she moved a table against the wall, dragged a small table onto it, and put a chair on the table, and she managed to climb all this; resting one hand on the dusty wall, with the other she grabbed a corner of the curtain and pulled it back, but at that moment she lost her balance, and she no longer remembered anything. When she woke up, she lay completely unharmed on the floor, both tables and a chair were in place, the curtain in front of the picture was drawn, and the only evidence that all this had happened in reality was the mark left by her small hand on the dusty wall, below the picture.

Thus, Elena Petrovna's childhood and youth passed under very happy conditions in an enlightened and, by all indications, very friendly family with humane traditions and an extremely gentle attitude towards people.

Great happiness for her and for all to whom she brought so much light that her extraordinary nature, endowed with such supernormal properties, was protected with such loving and wise care during her childhood. If she got into a harsh and unenlightened environment, her refined, highly sensitive nervous system would not withstand rough treatment, and she would inevitably die.

Wandering

If you take a geographical map and mark on it the movements of Elena Petrovna for the period from 1848 to 1872, you get the following picture:

In December 1858, Elena Petrovna unexpectedly appeared in Russia with her relatives and remained first in Odessa, and then in Tiflis until 1863. In 1864, she finally penetrates into Tibet, from there she leaves for a short time (in 1866) to Italy, then again to India and, through the Kumlun Mountains and Lake Palti, again to Tibet. In 1872, she travels through Egypt and Greece to her relatives in Odessa, and from there in the next 1873 she leaves for America, and this ends the second period of her life.

Peering into this 20-year wandering (if you subtract 4 years spent with relatives) around the globe, completely aimless in appearance, since we are not dealing with a learned prospector, but with a woman who did not have any specific occupation - the only pointer to the real purpose of all these wanderings is the repeated attempts to penetrate into Tibet. Apart from this indication, there is no definite information about this period of her life. Even her dearly beloved relatives - her sister and aunt - with whom she had the most tender friendship, and they did not know anything definite about this era of her life. At one time they were sure that she was no longer alive.

In the memoirs of Maria Grigoryevna Yermolova, who personally knew all the circumstances of Elena Petrovna's girlish life, there is one detail not mentioned anywhere, which could play a big role in her fate. Simultaneously with the Fadeevs, a relative of the then governor of the Caucasus, Prince Golitsyn, lived in Tiflis, who often visited the Fadeevs and was very interested in the original young girl. He was known, according to Yermolova, "either for a freemason, or as a magician or soothsayer."

In his story about the unexpected marriage of E.P. Yermolova connects this event with the departure of Prince Golitsyn from Tiflis. Immediately after his departure, rumors spread around the city that the granddaughter of General Fadeev had disappeared and no one knows where she went. In the higher spheres of Tiflis society, to which the young girl belonged, her disappearance was explained by the fact that she followed Prince Golitsyn and that only this could explain the consent of her family to such an unequal marriage with the elderly Blavatsky, who, from a secular point of view, was in the highest degree unequal.

M.G. Yermolova knew Blavatsky well because he had served as an officer-at-large in the office of her husband, the governor. A modest, no different middle-aged man, was in every way not a match for a young, eighteen-year-old girl from an influential, high-ranking family.

Yermolova, who knew well the conditions in which E.P.'s life proceeded, was convinced that Elena Petrovna's grandfather and grandmother agreed to this marriage of their granddaughter in order to "save the situation" and stop rumors unfavorable for her reputation. Thanks to the connections of General Fadeev, it was not difficult to create a "decent position" for the modest official, and before the wedding he was appointed vice-governor of Erivan. Regarding the escape of E.P. from her parents' home, Mrs. Yermolova thought that this was nothing more than a rash act on her part, the purpose of which was, with the help of Prince Golitsyn, to enter into relations with the mysterious sage of the East, where Prince Golitsyn was heading. If we compare these circumstances and the subsequent flight from her husband's house three months after the marriage, which, according to all data, was fictitious, it can be assumed with a high probability that in conversations with Prince Golitsyn, who was knowledgeable in the field of mediumship and clairvoyance, or at least interested in such phenomena, Elena Petrovna could receive many indications, which influenced her decision to break out of the shy conditions of secular girlish life at all costs. It is highly probable that she told the interested interlocutor about her visions and about her "Patron" and received a number of instructions from him, perhaps the address of that Egyptian Copt, who is mentioned as her first teacher in occultism. This is also confirmed by the fact that, having left Erivan and having reached Kerch with her servants, Elena Petrovna sends them away from the ship under a fictitious pretext and, instead of going to her father, as her relatives and servants assumed, she goes to the East, to Egypt, and travels not alone, but with her friend, Countess Kiseleva. It is possible that their meeting was accidental, but it is possible that there was also a preliminary agreement.

R.A. Fadeev - an artillery general, was a prominent figure in the Slavic lands and a famous military writer of the seventies and eighties. He left behind the memory of a deeply educated, witty and attractive person.

The dates are taken from A. Besant's "H.P. Blavatsky and the Masters of Wisdom", 1907.

Countess Wachtmeister gave an interesting detail of this journey: since foreigners could not penetrate into the country, the Indians who came to Darjeeling after her put her in a wagon, covered her with hay and took her under such a cover.

Vocabulary

SOUL there is ψυχη, or nefesh of the "Bible"; the vital principle or breath of life which every animal, down to the ciliate, has like man. In the translated "Bible" she figures without distinction as life, and as blood, and as soul. "Let us not kill his Nefesh," says the original text; "let us not kill him," the Christians translate (Genesis, XXXVII, 21), and so on.

Source: Blavatsky H.P. - Theosophical Dictionary

Secret Doctrine

Man is not and could never be a complete work of the "Lord God", but he is a child of Elohim, so arbitrarily turned into a single number and masculine principle. The first Dhyanis, who were instructed to "create" a person in their likeness, could only discard their Shadows as a thin sample for processing by the Spirits of Nature - matter. Man, no doubt, was created physically from the dust of the Earth, but his creators and shapers were numerous. Nor can it be said that "God breathed into his nostrils the Breath of Life" unless we identify this God with the "One Life" omnipresent though invisible, and unless such an operation is attributed to "God" in relation to every "Living Soul”, which is the Life-Soul (Nefesh), and not the Divine Spirit (Ruach), which alone provides man with the divine degree of immortality, which no animal, as such, can achieve in this cycle of incarnation.

It is because of these inaccurate distinctions made by the Jews and, now, by our Western metaphysicians, who are unable to understand and therefore accept more than the tripartite man - Spirit, Soul and Body - the "Breath of Life" was mixed with the immortal "Spirit". This applies also directly to the Protestant theologians, who, by translating a well-known verse in the Fourth Gospel, completely distorted its meaning. This corruption reads: "The wind blows where it wants" instead of "the spirit breathes where it wants", as it says in the original, also in the translation of the Greek Eastern Church.

“Nefesh Khia (Living Soul) occurred or arose through the incorporation of the Spirit or Breath of Life into the animated body of a person, and it had to replace and take the place of this Spirit in the thus composed Self, so that the incoming Spirit disappeared from view and was absorbed by the Living Soul ."

The human body, he believes, should be considered as a womb, where and from where the Soul develops, which he places, as it were, above the Spirit. Considered from the side of functions and from the point of view of [247] activity, the Soul undoubtedly stands higher in this finite and conditional world of Illusion. The soul, he says, is "ultimately generated from the animate body of man," thus the author simply identifies "Spirit" (Atma) with the "Breath of Life." Eastern occultists will object to this statement, for it is based on the mistaken notion that Prana and Atma or Jivatma are one and the same.

The soul, whose bodily conductor is the astral, ethereal-substantial shell, could die, and a person could still continue to live on Earth. That is, the Soul could free itself and leave its abode due to various reasons, like insanity, spiritual and physical depravity, etc. The possibility for the Soul - i.e., for the eternal Spiritual Ego - to dwell in the invisible worlds at that time, when her body continues to live on Earth is predominantly an Occult Doctrine, especially in Chinese and Buddhist philosophy. There are many soulless people around us, for such cases are found both among evil materialists and among persons “who, advancing in holiness, never turn back.”

4. Soul - collectively, as the Highest Triad, lives on three planes, except for its fourth, earthly sphere; but she is eternally on the highest of the three.

5. These abodes [of the Soul] are: Earth for the physical man or the Animal Soul; Kama Loka (Hades, Limbo - threshold of hell) for a disembodied person or his Shell; Devachan for the higher Triad.

According to Haeckel, there are also "cells-souls" and "atoms-cells"; "inorganic molecular soul", which has no memory, and "plastidual soul", which has memory. What do our Esoteric Teachings say about this? The divine and human soul, consisting of the seven principles in man, must, of course, turn pale and retreat before such a striking revelation!

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Those who hold the opposite view and regard the existence of the human soul as "a supernatural spiritual phenomenon due to forces quite different from ordinary physical forces," he thinks, ridicule, "because of this, every purely scientific explanation." Apparently, they have no right to assert that "psychology, in part or as a whole, is a spiritual science, but not a physical one." The new discovery made by Haeckel - taught, by the way, for centuries in all Eastern schools, that animals have a soul, will and sensations, and therefore the functions of the soul, leads him to make the science of zoologists out of psychology. The archaic teaching that the "soul" (animal and human soul or Kama and Manas) "has a history of its development" is asserted by Haeckel as his own discovery and innovation on "an unpaved path." [?!] He, Haeckel, will develop a comparative evolution of the soul in man and other animals! The comparative morphology of the organs of the soul and the comparative psychology of the functions of the soul, both based on evolution, thus become the psychological [actually materialistic] problem of the scientist. (“Cells-Souls and Soul-Cells”, pp. 135, 136, 137. "Pedigree of Man").

Isis Unveiled

Philosophers, and especially those who have been initiated into the mysteries, have believed that the astral soul is an intangible duplicate of the gross external form which we call the body. She is what the cardiologists call near-spiritual, and the spiritualists spiritual form. Above this internal duplicate, illuminating it, as a warm ray of the sun illuminates the earth, fertilizing the embryo and causing the properties dormant in it to spiritual revival, the divine spirit hovers. The astral near-spiritual is contained and contained in the physical body, like ether in a bottle or magnetism in magnetized iron. It is the center and power machine, nourished from the energy reserves of the universe, and moved by the same general laws which reign in all nature and produce all cosmic phenomena. The activity inherent in it is the cause of the incessant physical activity of the animal organism, which ultimately leads to the destruction of the latter through wear and tear and to its own disappearance. It is a prisoner of the body, and not a voluntary tenant-tenant. It experiences such a powerful attraction to the external universal force that, after wearing out its shell, it runs away to it. The stronger, rougher, more material the body enveloping him, the longer the term of his imprisonment. Some individuals are born with such a special organization of the body that the door that closes other people's access to communication with the astral world can easily be unlocked and opened, and their souls can look into it, or even pass into that world and return again. Those who consciously and willingly do this are called magicians, hierophants, seers, adepts; those who are forced to do this, either by the mesmerizers with their fluid, or by the "spirits" with their fluid, are "mediums." The astral soul, once the barriers in front of it are opened, is so powerfully drawn into the air and its shell and keeps it suspended in the air until the gravity of matter again restores its supremacy, and the body descends again to the earth.

Pythagoras, Plato, Timaeus of Locri, and the whole Alexandrian school teach that the soul comes from the Universal World Soul; and the latter, according to their own teaching, is ether, something so subtle in its nature that it can only be perceived by our inner vision. Therefore, it cannot be an essence, an essence of Monas or causes, as Anima Mundi there is only a consequence, an objective emanation of the antecedent. Both the human spirit and the soul are pre-existent. But while the former exists as a separate, individualized being, the soul exists as antecedent matter, an unknowing, unthinking part of the rational whole. Both originated from the Eternal Ocean of Light; but, as the Theosophists have expressed it, there is both a visible and an invisible spirit of fire. They find the difference between anime rough and anime sublime. Empedocles firmly believed that all people and animals have two souls; in Aristotle we find that he calls one the rational soul - νοΰς, and the other - the animal soul - φυχή. According to the teachings of these philosophers, the rational soul comes from outside universal soul, and the other from within. This divine and supreme region, in which they placed the invisible supreme deity, was considered by them (by Aristotle himself) as the fifth element, purely spiritual and divine, while in fact Anima Mundi was considered as consisting of a subtle, fiery and ethereal nature, distributed throughout the universe, in short - ether. The Stoics, the greatest materialists of antiquity, excluded the invisible God and the divine Soul (Spirit) from any corporeal nature. Their current commentators and admirers, greedily seizing this opportunity, built on this basis the assumption that the Stoics did not believe in either God or the soul. But Epicurus, whose teaching, directly opposed to the opinion that the Supreme Being and the gods participate in the government of the world, placed him incomparably higher than the Stoics in atheism and materialism, and taught, nevertheless, that the soul consists of fine, tender matter, formed from the smoothest, round and the thinnest atoms, the description of which leads us again to the same sublime ether. Arnobius, Tertullian, Irenaeus and Origen, in spite of their Christianity, believed, just like the modern Spinoza and Hobbes, that the soul is corporeal, although of a very subtle nature.

The doctrine that it is possible for a person to lose his soul, and therefore his individuality, is contrary to the ideal theories and progressive ideas of some spiritualists, although Swedenborg fully accepts it. They will never accept the Kabbalistic doctrine, which teaches us that only by observing the law of harmony can one gain eternal life, and that the more the inner and outer man deviates from the source of harmony that lies in the spirit, the more difficult it is for him to return to the true path.

By the word "soul" neither Democritus nor other philosophers meant nous or pneuma, divine immaterial soul, but implied psyche, or astral body, that is, what Plato always calls the second mortal soul.

And Origen in his Sixth Epistle to the Romans says:

“There is a threefold division of man; body or flesh, the lowest part of our nature, on which the ancient serpent, by means of original sin, wrote the law of sin, through which we are tempted to vile deeds, and as soon as we succumb to these temptations, we strongly bind ourselves to the Devil; the spirit in which or through which we express the likeness of the divine nature, in which the Best Creator; from the prototype of his own mind, engraved with his own finger (i.e., his spirit) the eternal law of honesty - by this we are attached (glued) to God and made one with God, thirdly, the soul mediates between these two, which, as in a republic where the parties have split must join one side or the other; she is free to choose which side to join. If, having renounced the flesh, she joins the party of the spirit, she herself will become spiritual; if it descends to the greeds of the flesh, then it itself will degenerate into the body.

Plato (in Laws, X) defines soul as

"movement that is capable of moving spontaneously." "The soul is the most ancient of all and the beginning of movement." “The soul was born before the body; the body is later and secondary, since, according to nature, the dominant soul rules over it. "The soul that governs everything that is moved in any way, rules the heavens in the same way." “Therefore the soul governs all things in heaven, on earth and in the sea, by means of its movements, the names of which are to want, to think, to care, to consult, to form opinions true and false, to be in a state of joy, sadness, confidence, fear, hatred, love, together with all such primary movements that are associated with these ... being a goddess herself, she always takes NOUS, God, as her allies, and disciplines everything correctly and successfully; but if she is with annoia, but not nous“She does the opposite in everything.”

It [the doctrine of the immortality of the soul] dates back to the time when the soul was objective being; therefore, could hardly herself deny; when humanity was a spiritual race, and death did not exist. By the sunset of the ethereal life cycle spirit man fell into the sweet slumber of temporary unconsciousness in one realm, only to wake up in the still brighter light of a higher realm. But while the spiritual man constantly seeks to rise higher and higher to the source of his existence, passing through the cycles and spheres of individual life, the physical man had to descend with the great cycle of universal creation until he found himself dressed in earthly clothing. . Since then, the soul has been too deeply buried under the physical garment to reassert its existence, except in the case of those more spiritual natures, which become more and more rare with each cycle. And yet, none of the prehistoric peoples ever thought to deny the existence or immortality of the inner man, the real self. Only we must not forget the teachings of the ancient philosophies: only the spirit is immortal - the soul, in itself, is neither eternal nor divine. When connected too closely with the physical brain of its earthly case, it gradually becomes limiting mind, a mere animal and sentient life principle, nefesh Jewish Bible.

Student Instructions

Since the author of Esoteric Buddhism and The Occult World called Manas the Human Soul and Buddhi the Spiritual Soul, I left these terms unchanged in The Voice, given that it was a book intended for the public.

Key to Theosophy

Asking. Then how do you explain that a person is endowed with a spirit or a soul? Where are they from?

Theosophist. From the World Soul. Of course they are not gifted personal God. Where does the jellyfish get the water element from? From the ocean around her, in which she lives, breathes and exists, and where she will return when she dissolves.

Asking. So you deny the teaching that the soul is given or breathed into man by God?

Theosophist. We are obliged to do this. The soul referred to in chapter II of Genesis (verse 7) is, as it is said there, the "living soul" or Nefesh (i.e. vital or animal soul) whom God (we say "nature" or immutable law) endows man, as well as any animal. It is not at all a thinking soul or mind, least of all immortal spirit.

Asking. Okay, let's put it another way: is it God who endows a person with human reasonable soul and immortal spirit?

Theosophist. Putting the question this way, we must again deny it. Since we don't believe in personal God, how can we believe that he endows man with something?

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Asking. What does Buddhism say about the soul?

Theosophist. It depends on whether exoteric, popular Buddhism is meant, or its esoteric teachings. The teaching of the former is revealed in the "Buddhist Catechism" as follows: "The soul is regarded as a name used by the ignorant to express a false idea. If everything is subject to change, then man is no exception, and every material part of him must change. That which is subject to change, impermanent, so that there can be no immortality for a changeable thing." It seems simple and definite. But when we come to the question that the new personality in each successive birth is an aggregate skandha, or accessories old personality, and asking if she is a new being, in which nothing of the old is left, we read: "In one sense it is a new being, in another it is not. During the course of life, the skandhas are constantly changing, and while the forty-year-old man A. B. is considered identical in personality to the eighteen-year-old boy A. B., yet by virtue of the constant destruction and restoration of the body and the change of mind and character, he is already a different being. resulting from his thoughts and actions at all previous stages of his life.So the new being of the new incarnation, being the same individuality that before (but not by the same person), but in a changed form, or with a new sum of skandhas, rightly reaps the consequences of his actions and thoughts in a past existence. "This is a difficult metaphysics to understand, but it does not express in any way directly disbelief In the soul.

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Asking. But have we been clearly told that most Buddhists do not believe in the immortality of the soul?

Theosophist. And so are we, if by soul you mean personal ego, or life soul - nefesh. But every learned Buddhist believes in the individual or divine self. Those who do not believe in him are mistaken in their judgments.

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"Plato and Pythagoras - says Plutarch - divide the soul into two parts - rational (nusic) and irrational (agnoia); the rational part of the human soul is eternal, because although it is not God, it is still the creation of an eternal deity; the same part of the soul who is devoid of reason, dies."