She Brought Ancient Wisdom to the West—and We Tried to Destroy Her {Philosophy}

The life, vision, and vilification of Helena Blavatsky—and why her story still matters.

“You will learn by reading, but you will understand with love.”

– Rumi

The Price of Genius: Society’s Resistance to Revolutionary Truths

Ordinary society cannot accept the extraordinary. This has been revealed ad nauseam throughout history. People tortured, burned, imprisoned, exiled, ostracized, or at best, ridiculed, for attempting to expand and evolve upon the conventional knowledge of the time. We can’t seem to stop this behavior. I just finished watching the first season of the series Genius, which is about the life of Albert Einstein. Einstein is now synonymous with genius, but the ways in which he was ignored, his brilliant ideas rejected, during his early writing period, again reveals our deep resistance to change.

His theories were too revolutionary, or they must obviously be mistaken, as they were written by a patent clerk, or wrong simply because they were created by a Jew. A few brave scientists saw through to the truth of what he was propounding; the others were fully dismissive of any theory questioning the assumptions of the current scientific cabal. Luckily for us, we have Einstein and his advocates’ tenacity, bravery, and love of truth to thank for our advancement beyond the clutches of Newtonian physics.

In fact, before the discoveries of Einstein, Max Planck, and the quantum physicists who followed, scientists in the late 1800s were convinced that they had already discovered, or were close to discovering, most of the facts about our universe. This hubris may seem astonishing to us now, but this attitude hasn’t truly been jettisoned. Most scientists still hold on to the older theories in action, if not in thought. The weirdness of quantum physics and relativity is too much to incorporate into their “real” world, and so they’ve basically left it aside as anomalies, swept under the rug for now. For most scientists, we still live in a world of billiard ball causation, and not the world of entangled particles, curved space, “things” that are both particles and waves, and twins who age at different rates according to their speed.

If we cannot incorporate these strange aspects of our universe into our understanding, it’s no wonder that we disallow the existence of phenomena like ESP, telekinesis, mediumship, and channeled knowledge. To get a glimpse into the way someone who purportedly exhibited these abilities was treated during that era, we can turn our gaze to an enigmatic and extremely influential woman, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who was born in Russia in 1831.

The Mystic as Messenger: Helena Blavatsky and the Inner Path to Knowledge

Image: oraedes.fr

Madame Blavatsky, or HPB, as she preferred to be referred to, almost single-handedly brought the wisdom traditions of the East to the West, and she did this as a single woman, through extreme hardship, traveling to Tibet, India, and Egypt in search of wisdom at a time when almost nobody did. She was also known to have remarkable abilities that defied the current scientific understanding of reality. She could read minds, talk to the dead, materialize objects, have visions that later became real, and telepathically communicate with Hindu spiritual leaders.

Reading about her life, one thing that is so painful to discover is the vitriol with which some people undermined her integrity, claiming that she fabricated everything, including her trips to these exotic locales, and her unusual abilities, even though many witnesses claimed to have been privy to them. Even the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) attempted to reveal her as a fraud. Later, they ended up recanting the damning portrayals they wrote about her abilities. In some ways, she was another Einstein. Someone who had access to incredible knowledge that the rest of us don’t have access to, who tried to disseminate that knowledge, and who met with extremely harsh treatment. It took 100 years for the SPR to formally take responsibility for and acknowledge their false claims about her.

I think it’s safe to say that the more remarkable the person is, the more likely they are to be vilified. Why couldn’t people accept that HPB did what she claimed? This requires some delving into her highly unusual life. From a young age, HPB was different. Born into an aristocratic family, she rejected the requirements of normal high society. As a young girl, she was strongly drawn to the esoteric works in her great-grandfather’s library and felt most at home amongst the tomes she found there.

These were works on alchemy, magic, kabbalah, astrology, numerology, divination, mystical philosophy, neoplatonism, eastern philosophy, mystical Christianity, and classical and esoteric science, including magnetism, electricity, and early evolutionary theory. To say that her interest in these books as a young girl is unusual is a vast understatement. While the rest of us were playing with friends and goofing around, she was poring over books that are incomprehensible to most adults. She said, “I was born into the world with a veil already half-lifted”. The other half was removed by a more unconventional method of obtaining knowledge, through channeled information from those she called the “adepts” or the “masters.”

While the idea of channeled information may seem an unlikely source for most of us to understand and accept, it was natural for HPB. As a young teenager, she experienced a vivid and life-altering vision. One night, she saw a tall, majestic figure, a man in a white turban, who appeared to her with great presence and power. She didn’t know who he was, but his image left a permanent impression on her. She referred to him later as her “guardian” and felt his influence guiding and protecting her throughout her life, especially in moments of danger or difficulty.

Incredibly, years later, in London at the age of 20, she was walking down the street when she saw the man, the same turbaned figure from her vision. Stunned, she followed him. He turned and greeted her calmly, as if he had been expecting her. This man was Master Morya, one of the Mahatmas, or holy people, who would later become central to HPB’s growth in wisdom and knowledge and to the founding of the Theosophical Society, an organization that still exists and is dedicated to the understanding of the esoteric (hidden) truths that lie within every spiritual tradition.

According to Blavatsky, this meeting marked the beginning of her conscious connection with the Masters of Wisdom, advanced spiritual beings who guided her mission. Under their direction, she would go on to travel extensively (including through India and Tibet), undergo occult training, and eventually be tasked with bringing those esoteric teachings to the West through her writings, especially The Secret Doctrine, her most influential work.

This text is brimming with deep, complex wisdom, and it is impossible for me to fully grasp, let alone expound upon what lies within its bounds. But sitting with it and attempting to dive into its secrets has become a sacred task to me and has opened up a new door to what is possible with respect to obtaining access to truth about the nature of reality through one’s own internal perception. Encountering a work like The Secret Doctrine, I realized that it is not a book to be understood through the intellect, but maybe through the “eyes of love.”

Beyond the Intellect: Love as the Gateway to Deeper Understanding

Image: elmistico.org

This is what HPB wants for all of us. She possessed a rare and profound inner wisdom, an intuitive knowing that did not depend solely on book learning or sensory experience. She claimed that her teachings were often received through direct communication with advanced spiritual beings operating from higher planes of existence. This form of knowledge transmission flowed into her through an inner faculty, which she referred to as the “Eye of Dangma.”

In line with ancient teachings like those found in the Upanishads, Blavatsky held that the entire macrocosm, the cosmos, with all its laws and realities, is mirrored within the human microcosm. By turning inward, she accessed the same universal wisdom that governs the universe. To her, true knowledge was not about acquiring information from outside ourselves, but about realizing that the most profound truths of the universe already live within us. This is reminiscent of so many mystics.

As Rumi’s teacher Sharmz of Tabriz said, “You must burn your books now, for the truth cannot be found in books.” For every mystic, it is direct experience that ultimately leads to truth. After the books have been read and the mind has been stilled, the link to true wisdom can be created within each of us.