Masonic, Occult and Esoteric Online Library
H.P. Blavatsky The Light-Bringer
By GEOFFREY A. BARBORKA
Writing By Directive Clairvoyance
THE TERM Directive Clairvoyance is used to indicate a specific method Mme. Blavatsky employed, signifying a particular kind of clairvoyance. She explained that she had been taught how to use this faculty by her Teachers during the period she was undergoing training in Tibet. Before giving her explanation of how she used this Siddhi, let us note the special capacity needed for it: The ability to select a book on a specific theme. Then, although never having seen the volume before, from any page in the work, choose a selected, appropriate passage on a predetermined subject. Having selected a citation, the ability to copy it verbatim, and give its correct page. Continuing the process : in order to support this citation by quoting another author, an extract from a further book would be required—and it would be forthcoming in the same manner. In either case there would be no need to see the book itself, nor to handle it, nor to search through its pages. It would be a matter solely of visualizing the page from which the desired extract was to be copied.
Proficiency in this process would dispense with any need of extraneous assistance, such as a special chair or particular paper. There would be no necessity for a list of books on the subject; no book, no reference to hunt up, no authority to consult; not even an encyclopaedia or an index. It hardly seems necessary to state that H. P. Blavatsky had no books on her desk; likewise she had no access to a library. Here are her words on her method of procedure :
Well, you see, what I do is this. I make what I can only describe as a sort of vacuum in the air before me, and fix my sight and my will upon it, and soon scene after scene passes before me like the successive pictures of a diorama, or, if I need a reference or information from some book, I fix my mind intently, and the astral counterpart of- the book appears, and from it I take what I need. The more perfectly my mind is freed from distractions and mortifications, the more energy and intentness it possesses, the more easily I can do this.
Countess Wachtmeister, who was Mme. Blavatsky's companion while The Secret Doctrine was being written, describes watching the author at work :
ork : I saw her write down sentences as if she were copying them from something before her, where, however, I saw nothing. 1 did not pay much attention to the manner of her work from the standpoint of a hunter of phenomena, and did not control it for that purpose; but I know that I saw a good deal of the wellknown blue K.H. handwriting as corrections and annotations on her manuscripts as well as in books that lay occasionally on her desk. And I noticed this principally in the morning before she had commenced to work.*
There was another method which II.-P. Blavatsky was able to use. to which the term Directive Clairvoyance would be applicable, although her visioning this time would not be from books, it would be in the form of pictures, somewhat similar to that of a television screen. She also employed this process in writing her major works. She described it in a letter from New York to her sister Vera :
Well, Vera, whether you believe me or not, something miraculous is happening to me. You cannot imagine in what a charmed world of pictures and visions I live. I am writing Isis; not writing, rather copying out and drawing that which She personally shows to me. Upon my word, sometimes it seems to me that the ancient Goddess of Beauty in person leads me through all the countries of past centuries which I have to describe. I sit with my eyes open and to all appearances see and hear everything real and actual around me, and yet at the same time I see and hear that which I write. I feel short of breath; I am afraid to make the slightest movement for fear the spell might be broken. Slowly century after century, image after image, float out of the distance and pass before me as if in a magic panorama; and meanwhile I put them together in my mind, fitting in epochs and dates, and know for sure that there can be no mistake. Races and nations, countries and cities, which have for long disappeared in the darkness of the pre-historic past, emerge and then vanish, giving place to others; and then I am told the consecutive dates. Hoary antiquity makes way for historical periods; myths are explained to me with events and people who have really existed, and every event which is at all remarkable, every newly-turned page of this many coloured book of life, impresses itself on my brain with photographic exactitude. My own reckonings and calculations appear to me later on as separate coloured pieces of different shapes in the game which is called casse-tete (puzzles). I gather them together and try to match them one after the other and at the end there always comes out a geometrical whole,
An example of the faculty of Directive Clairvoyance is shown on the opening pages of The Secret Doctrine :
An Archaic Manuscript—a collection of palm leaves made impermeable to water, fire and air, by some specific unknown process—is before the writer's eye. On the first page is an immaculate white disk within a dull black ground. On the following page, the same disk, but with a central point. The first, the student knows to represent Kosmos in Eternity, before the reawakening of still slumbering Energy, the emanation of the Word in later systems. The point in the hitherto immaculate Disk, Space and Eternity in Pralaya, denotes the dawn of differentiation. It is the Point in the Mundane Egg, the germ within the latter which will become the Universe, the ALL, the boundless, periodical Kosmos, this germ being latent and active, periodically and by turns. The one circle is divine Unity, from which all proceeds, whither all returns. Its circumference—a forcibly limited symbol, in view of the limitation of the human mind— indicates the abstract, ever incognisable Presence, and its plane, the Universal Soul, although the two are one. Only the face of the Disk being white and the ground all around black, shows clearly that its plane is the only knowledge, dim and hazy though it still is, that is attainable by man. It is on this plane that the Manvantaric manifestations begin; for it is in this SOUL that slumbers, during the Pralaya, the Divine Thought, wherein lies concealed the plan of every future Cosmogony and Theogony.
It is the ONE LIFE, eternal, invisible, yet Omnipresent, without beginning or end, yet periodical in its regular manifestations, between which periods reigns the dark mystery of non-Being; unconscious, yet absolute Consciousness; unrealisable, yet the one self-existing reality; truly, 'a chaos to the sense, a Kosmos to the reason.' Its one absolute attribute, which is ITSELF, e ternal, ceaseless Motion, is called in esoteric parlance the 'Great Breath,' which is the perpetual motion of the universe, in the sense of limitless, ever-present SPACE. That which is motionless cannot be Divine. But then there is nothing in fact and reality absolutely motionless within the universal soul.
