Good day, shiny happy people.  I wanted to share a good friend with you… she can be a little rough around the edges, she doesn’t suffer fools gladly but has been instrumental in helping me with my journey.  I was quite surprised to see the animosity that she engenders in people, she seems to be a love em or hate em type of polarizing person. 

In her time, she was a system buster and scholar ahead of her peers, years after her death she is still talked about, thank goodness her works have been preserved in time, when I read this book of hers it was if we were speaking as friends in modern times.  I find it fascinating that her story took place in the eighteen hundreds, yet she is as modern as you and I. 

Helena was born to a wealthy aristocratic family which allowed her the freedom to be educated and to travel, in a period when women had few rights… she had many adventures in the east, and you’ll find her tone of voice in her writing to be wry and witty.  She had many problems in her time dealing with her own “trolls”, who vilified her for her beliefs, somewhat like what lightworkers experience nowadays.  Though in her time it was the spiritual movement which was gaining momentum which was one of her largest combatants… the “knocking” spiritualists with their mediums and séances were not held in high regard by Helena, lol, and she had no problems expressing her disdain of those who talked to disembodied spirits. 

Most theosophists don’t believe in channeling and do not recommend it unless specified by a Master or high level Hierarchy member directly as part of the Divine Plan, for example, when Alice wrote her books, she was mostly shadowed by Master DK, but she did write her own books as well.  They consider most humans to be too flawed to express the higher being's energy.  But, given the state of affairs they needed to get the message out there so they find resonate souls to work with. 

She smoked and drank, had a child out of wedlock, and she probably cursed too, haha… once you get to know her a bit you’ll see why she is so appealing in an age when women were to be seen and not heard, with her vast intelligence and knowledge you can imagine what a threat she was.  She danced to beat of her own drum, or her Masters drum, whichever you prefer.

I don’t agree with everything she has written, this is where discernment comes in, my friends… but she has a great many pieces of the puzzle for those willing to learn. 

There are many fallacies about Theosophy, I hope that this brief introduction will enable the eager chela to find their own answers, don’t take my word for it, seek your own information, put it in the pot- stir it around, and digest slowly… I can only show you the path that I took and hopefully help you to take your own steps towards intellectual and spiritual freedom. 

One very important note needs to be made before studying Theosophy, something that I wasn’t aware of myself until I dug deeper… there are many, many voices of Theosophists out there, many have taken the words of HPB and twisted them, or used them for their own benefit.  After her passing, there were schisms within the Theosophical Society, to the point where people splintered off and made their own separate groups, there was fighting (it got really bad), and harsh criticism about where the direction Theosophy was heading.  In time other spokespeople for the Hierarchy stepped forward such as Alice Bailey, Benjamin Crème, Elisabeth Prophet, Annie Bessant … on and on you can go over the vast amounts of theosophists who have published material or claimed to be the voice of the Hierarchy. 

Lucis Trust is only one publishing company but there are others, certainly there is no shortage of theories and doctrines one can research.  Personally, I’ve learned to separate the work from the person publishing it.  My inner logic tells me whether information is worthy of my time and trust.  For example, I do not care for Annie Besant at all, if I were to meet her in society we would clash, but her theories on the human psyche and the work she did with LW Leadbetter regarding the structure of thoughtforms and light language were very good, once you take her out of the equation the work stands on its own merit. 

And as for the whole Lucis Trust thing being too close to sounding like “Lucifer”, lol, use your intellect, that is what it is for. 

Here are just a few highlights from HP Blatavsky’s The Key to Theosophy, it is in simple format, I would like to include many more tidbits of wisdom she shares or some her jokes, but space is limited so just a few notes will have to suffice.  I highly recommend study on your own, if you are so inclined.  Scribd.com is a wonderful site for the scholars and it is free, you may find all sorts of wonderful material regarding sacred geometry, astrology, the Hierarchy etc. 

The purpose of this book is exactly expressed in its title, The Key to Theosophy, and needs but few words of explanation. It is not a complete or exhaustive textbook of Theosophy, but only a key to unlock the door that leads to the deeper study. It traces the broad outlines of the Wisdom-Religion, and explains its fundamental principles; meeting, at the same time, the various objections raised by the average Western inquirer, and endeavoring to present unfamiliar concepts in a form as simple and in language as clear as possible. That it should succeed in making Theosophy intelligible without mental effort on the part of the reader, would be too much to expect; but it is hoped that the obscurity still left is of the thought and not of the language, is due to depth and not to confusion.

To the mentally lazy or obtuse, Theosophy must remain a riddle; for in the world mental as in the world spiritual each man must progress by his own efforts. The writer cannot do the reader's thinking for him, nor would the latter be any the better off if such vicarious thought were possible. The need for such an exposition as the present has long been felt among those interested in the Theosophical Society and its work, and it is hoped that it will supply information, as free as possible from technicalities, to many whose attention has been awakened, but who, as yet, are merely puzzled and not convinced.  Some care has been taken in disentangling some part of what is true from what is false in Spiritualistic teachings as to the postmortem life, and to showing the true nature of Spiritualistic phenomena. Previous explanations of a similar kind have drawn much wrath upon the writer's devoted head; the Spiritualists, like too many others, preferring to believe what is pleasant rather than what is true, and becoming very angry with anyone who destroys an agreeable delusion. For the past year Theosophy has been the target for every poisoned arrow of Spiritualism, as though the possessors of a half truth felt more antagonism to the possessors of the whole truth than those who had no share to boast of.

The principle of the Brotherhood of Humanity is one of the eternal truths that govern the world's progress on lines which distinguish human nature from brute nature.

What can be more Theosophical than this? But it is not enough. What is also needed is to impress men with the idea that, if the root of mankind is one, then there must also be one truth which finds expression in all the various religions-except in the Jewish, as you do not find it expressed even in the Cabala.

Q. This refers to the common origin of religions, and you may be right there. But how does it apply to practical brotherhood on the physical plane?

A. First, because that which is true on the metaphysical plane must be also true on the physical.  Secondly, because there is no more fertile source of hatred and strife than religious differences. When one party or another thinks himself the sole possessor of absolute truth, it becomes only natural that he should think his neighbor absolutely in the clutches of Error or the Devil. But once you get a man to see that none of them has the whole truth, but that they are mutually complementary, that the complete truth can be found only in the combined views of all, after that which is false in each of them has been sifted out —then true brotherhood in religion will be established. The same applies in the physical world.

Q. Please explain further.

A. Take an instance. A plant consists of a root, a stem, and many shoots and leaves. As humanity, as a whole, is the stem which grows from the spiritual root, so is the stem the unity of the plant. Hurt the stem and it is obvious that every shoot and leaf will suffer. So it is with mankind.

Q. Yes, but if you injure a leaf or a shoot, you do not injure the whole plant.

A:  And therefore you think that by injuring one man you do not injure humanity? But how do you know? Are you aware that even materialistic science teaches that any injury, however, slight, to a plant will affect the whole course of its future growth and development? Therefore, you are mistaken, and the analogy is perfect. If, however, you overlook the fact that a cut in the finger may often make the whole body suffer, and react on the whole nervous system, I must all the more remind you that there may well be other spiritual laws, operating on plants and animals as well as on mankind, although, as you do not recognize their action on plants and animals, you may deny their existence.

Q.What laws do you mean?

A. We call them Karmic laws; but you will not understand the full meaning of the term unless you study Occultism. However, my argument did not rest on the assumption of these laws, but really on the analogy of the plant. Expand the idea, carry it out to a universal application, and you will soon find that in true philosophy every physical action has its moral and everlasting effect. Hurt a man by doing him bodily harm; you may think that his pain and suffering cannot spread by any means to his neighbors, least of all to men of other nations. We affirm that it will, in good time.  Therefore, we say, that unless every man is brought to understand and accept as an axiomatic truth that by having wronged one man we wrong not only ourselves but the whole of humanity in the long run, no brotherly feelings such as preached by all the great Reformers, preeminently by Buddha and Jesus, are possible on earth.

Men have been deceived and deluded long enough; they must break their idols, put away their shams, and go to work for themselves — nay, there is one little word too much or too many, for he who works for himself had better not work at all; rather let him work himself for others, for all. For every flower of love and charity he plants in his neighbor's garden, a loathsome weed will disappear from his own, and so this garden of the gods — Humanity — shall blossom as a rose. In all Bibles, all religions, this is plainly set forth — but designing men have at first misinterpreted and finally emasculated, materialized, besotted them. It does not require a new revelation. Let every man be a revelation unto himself. Let once man's immortal spirit take possession of the temple of his body, drive out the money-changers and every unclean thing, and his own divine humanity will redeem him, for when he is thus at one with himself he will know the “builder of the Temple”.

Q: This is pure Altruism, I confess.

A: It is. And if only one Fellow of the T.S. (Theosophical Society) out of ten would practice it ours would be a body of elect indeed. But there are those among the outsiders who will always refuse to see the essential difference between Theosophy and the Theosophical Society, the idea and its imperfect embodiment. Such would visit every sin and shortcoming of the vehicle, the human body, on the pure spirit which sheds thereon its divine light. Is this just to either? They throw stones at an association that tries to work up to, and for the propagation of, its ideal with most tremendous odds against it. Some vilify the Theosophical Society only because it presumes to attempt to do that in which other systems — Church and State Christianity preeminently — have failed most egregiously; others because they would fain preserve the existing state of things: Pharisees and Sadducees in the seat of Moses, and publicans and sinners reveling in high places, as under the Roman Empire during its decadence. Fair-minded people, at any rate, ought to remember that the man who does all he can, does as much as he who has achieved the most, in this world of relative possibilities. This is a simple truism, an axiom supported for believers in the Gospels by the parable of the talents given by their Master: the servant who doubled his two talents was rewarded as much as that other fellow-servant who had received five. To every man it is given “according to his several ability”.

The Society is a great body of men and women, composed of the most heterogeneous elements.  Theosophy, in its abstract meaning, is Divine Wisdom, or the aggregate of the knowledge and wisdom that underlie the Universe — the homogeneity of eternal good; and in its concrete sense it is the sum total of the same as allotted to man by nature, on this earth, and no more. Some members earnestly endeavor to realize and, so to speak, to objectivize Theosophy in their lives; while others desire only to know of, not to practice it; and others still may have joined the Society merely out of curiosity, or a passing interest, or perhaps, again, because some of their friends belong to it. How, then, can the system be judged by the standard of those who would assume the name without any right to it? Is poetry or its muse to be measured only by those would-be poets who afflict our ears? The Society can be regarded as the embodiment of Theosophy only in its abstract motives; it can never presume to call itself its concrete vehicle so long as human imperfections and weaknesses are all represented in its body; otherwise the Society would be only repeating the great error and the out flowing sacrilege of the so-called Churches of Christ. If Eastern comparisons may be permitted, Theosophy is the shoreless ocean of universal truth, love, and wisdom, reflecting its radiance on the earth, while the Theosophical Society is only a visible bubble on that reflection. Theosophy is divine nature, visible and invisible, and its Society human nature trying to ascend to its divine parent. Theosophy, finally, is the fixed eternal sun, and its Society the evanescent comet trying to settle in an orbit to become a planet, ever revolving within the attraction of the sun of truth. It was formed to assist in showing to men that such a thing as Theosophy exists, and to help them to ascend towards it by studying and assimilating its eternal verities.

Q:   I thought you said you had no tenets or doctrines of your own?

A:   No more we have. The Society has no wisdom of its own to support or teach. It is simply the storehouse of all the truths uttered by the great seers, initiates, and prophets of historic and even prehistoric ages; at least, as many as it can get. Therefore, it is merely the channel through which more or less of truth, found in the accumulated utterances of humanity's great teachers, is poured out into the world.

Q:   But Theosophy, you say, is not a religion?

A:   Most assuredly it is not, since it is the essence of all religion and of absolute truth, a drop of which only underlies every creed. To resort once more to metaphor. Theosophy, on earth, is like the white ray of the spectrum, and every religion only one of the seven prismatic colors. Ignoring all the others, and cursing them as false, every special colored ray claims not only priority, but to be that white ray itself, and anathematizes even its own tints from light to dark, as heresies. Yet, as the sun of truth rises higher and higher on the horizon of man's perception, and each colored ray gradually fades out until it is finally reabsorbed in its turn, humanity will at last be cursed no longer with artificial polarizations, but will find itself bathing in the pure colorless sunlight of eternal truth. And this will be Theosophia.

Q:   I once heard one of your members remarking that Universal Deity, being everywhere, was in vessels of dishonour, as in those of honor, and, therefore, was present in every atom of my cigar ash! Is this not rank blasphemy?

A:  I do not think so, as simple logic can hardly be regarded as blasphemy. Were we to exclude the Omnipresent Principle from one single mathematical point of the universe, or from a particle of matter occupying any conceivable space, could we still regard it as infinite?

http://www.scribd.com/doc/80587374/Helena-Blavatsky-The-Key-to-Theosophy

http://www.scribd.com/doc/7779334/theosophy-thought-forms-by-annie-besant-and-c

http://www.ngsm.org/aabdk/bk/toc.html   --- MOST IMPORTANT DOCUMENT I HAVE EVER READ!!!!!

http://www.scribd.com/doc/14245270/Astrology-and-the-Devas-of-the-Planes#outer_page_19

http://www.alpheus.org/

http://www.esoteric-philosophy.net/index.html#anchor34210

http://www.spiritweb.us/theosophy/theosophy-index.html

http://www.shareintl.org/books/?d=AWT