Masonic, Occult and Esoteric Online Library
H.P. Blavatsky The Light-Bringer
By GEOFFREY A. BARBORKA
Writing By Dictation
IT MAY appear strange to have one of the classifications of Mme. Blavatsky's writings listed as Writing by Dictation. Nevertheless, it is used because of what she herself wrote in one of the last, if not the very last, article she penned. It is dated April 27, 1891, eleven days before she died—and is entitled "My Books". The work she refers to in the opening sentence is her earliest one, Isis Unveiled:
Every word of information found in this work or in my later writings comes from the teachings of our Eastern Masters; and that many a passage in these works has been written by me under their dictation. In saying this no supernatural claim is urged, for no miracle is performed by such a dictation...Space and distance do not exist for thought; and if two persons are in perfect mutual psycho-magnetic rapport, and of these two, one is a great Adept in Occult Sciences, then thought-transference and dictation of whole pages become as easy and as comprehensible at the distance of ten thousand miles as the transference of two words across a room.
The explanation of the method used by the Mahatmas in thus 'dictating' to Mme. Blavatsky, was described in a letter to A. P. Sinnett, in response to one he had written hoping that he could have direct communications with the Mahatma :
I must tell you now that for opening 'direct communication' the only possible means would be : (1) For each of us to meet in our own physical bodies. I being where I am, and you in your own quarters, there is a material impediment for me. (2) For both to meet in our astral form—which would necessitate your 'getting out' of yours, as well as my leaving my body. The spiritual impediment to this is on your part. (3) To make you hear my voice either within you or near you as 'the old lady' does. This would be feasible in either of two ways : (a) My chiefs have but to give me permission to set up the conditions—and this for the present they refuse; or (b) for you to hear my voice, i.e., my natural voice without any psycho-physiological tamasha being employed by me (again as we often do among ourselves). But then, to do this, not only have one's spiritual senses to be abnormally opened, but one must himself have mastered the great secret —yet undiscovered by science—of, so to say, abolishing all the impediments of space; of neutralising for the time being the natural obstacle of intermediary particles of air and forcing the waves to strike your ear in reflected sounds or echo.
One of the most important articles by Mme. Blavatsky was written from dictation. It was very long and was published in The Theosophist, the journal which she founded soon after inaugurating the work of The Theosophical Society in India. Col. Olcott was aware of the significance of this article, because he refers to it in this manner :
On August 22, 1883 I joined Mme. Blavatsky at Ootacamund, the summer resort in the Nilgiri Hills. While there part of her work was the taking from dictation from her invisible teacher of the 'Replies to an English F.T.S.'...That she was taking down from dictation was fully apparent to one who was familiar with her ways.*
Here is a portion of one of these 'replies' :
The gradual development of man's seven principles and physical senses has to be coincident and on parallel lines with Rounds and Root-races. Our fifth race has so far developed but its five senses. Now, if the Kama or lOW-principIe of the 'Fourthrounders' has already reached that stage of its evolution when the automatic acts, the unmotivated instincts and impulses of its childhood and youth, instead of following external stimuli, will have become acts of will framed constantly in conjunction with the mind {Manas), thus making of every man on earth of that race a free agent, a fully responsible being—the Kama of our hardly adult fifth race is only slowly approaching it. As to the sixth sense of this, our race, it has hardly sprouted above the soil of its materiality. It is highly unreasonable, therefore, to expect for the men of the fifth to sense the nature and essence of that which will be fully sensed and perceived but by the sixth—let alone the seventh race—i.e., to enjoy the legitimate outgrowth of the evolution and endowments of the future races with only the help of our present limited senses. The exceptions to this quasi universal rule have been hitherto found only in some rare cases of constitutional, abnormally precocious individual evolutions; or, in such, where by early training and special methods, reaching the stage of the fifth rounders, some men in addition to the natural gift of the latter have fully developed (by certain occult methods) their sixth, and in still rarer cases their seventh, sense. As an instance of the former class may be cited the Seeress of Prevorst; a creature born out of time, a rare precocious growth, ill adapted to the uncongenial atmosphere that surrounded her, hence a martyr ever ailing and sickly. As an example of t he other, the Count St. Germain may be mentioned. Apace with the anthropological and physiological development of man runs his spiritual evolution. To the latter, purely intellectual growth is often more an impediment than a help.
