The Longest Text in the Book “Practical
Occultism” Was Not Penned by H.P. Blavatsky
Carlos Cardoso Aveline
front cover of the Adyar edition
First published in 1948 by the Theosophical Publishing House of the Adyar Society, the little volume “Practical Occultism” presents the name of Helena P. Blavatsky as its author, but the largest of its three articles was not written by her.
The name of its true author is still unknown.
Widely circulating around the word for several decades in different languages and countries, the pocket-size book “Practical Occultism” [1] has 106 pages and one big falsehood.
The article wrongly ascribed to H.P.B. is entitled “Some Practical Suggestions for Daily Life” and goes from page 63 up to the end of the volume. It occupies some 40 per cent of the book.
The first two texts in the volume were indeed penned by H.P.B. Their titles are “Practical Occultism” and “Occultism Versus the Occult Arts”. As to the third and largest text, besides not having been writen by HPB, it contains a number of erroneous ideas which lead students to confusion. Some of these false conceptions deserve an examination. Right at the opening paragraph, for instance, “Some Practical Suggestions for Daily Life” says:
“Rise early, as soon as you are awake, without lying idly in bed, half-waking and half-dreaming. Then earnestly pray that all mankind may be spiritually regenerated, that those who are struggling on the path of truth may be encouraged by your prayers and work more earnestly and successfully and that you may be strengthened and not yield to the seductions of the senses. Picture before your mind the form of your Master as engaged in Samadhi. Fix it before you, fill it in all the details, think of him with reverence, and pray that all mistakes of ommission and commission may be forgiven. This will greatly facilitate concentration, purify your heart, and do much more.” [2]
In theosophy, in fact, students are not taught to pray. H. P. Blavatsky examined the subject at chapter five of her book “The Key to Theosophy”. In the dialogue between the “Enquirer” and the “Theosophist”, it is asked:
“Do you believe in prayer, and do you ever pray?”
And “Theosophist” answers:
“We do not. We act, instead of talking.”
The Enquirer insists:
“You do not offer prayers even to the Absolute Principle?”
To which the answer is quite clear:
“Why should we? Being well-occupied people, we can hardly afford to lose time in addressing verbal prayers to a pure abstraction.”
In the paragraphs following this, H.P.B. explains that in theosophy there is only a WILL-PRAYER, which is “rather an internal command than a petition”. [3]
The discussion goes on for several pages, and HPB clarifies that one of the reasons to reject the practice of prayers as petitions to any external power is that they destroy self-reliance in the consciousness of the student.
By making prayers, a devotee takes a passive attitude before life and tries to convince himself that he can obtain a sort of “karmic irresponsibility”. Denial of the Karma Law through a naive devotion to some “saviour” is one of main forms of illusion in popular spirituality. The truth is that each student must develop his own active and creative Will, and make an effort to sow that which he would like to harvest.
To pray and to ask favours from a god or a guru is therefore but a lack of discernment. In discipleship, it is not acceptable to ask personal help from to a Master, or to pray that a Teacher would remove the consequences of one’s mistakes. One has to learn from the results of one’s actions, instead of wishing they were erased by some super-natural power. The text “Some Practical Suggestions for Daily Life” ascribes to a supposed Master the role played by conventional priests as they hear the “confessions” of devotees and “absolve” them, making them believe that it is possible for a church or a sect to prevent the action of Karma Law.
The aspirant to discipleship must take responsibility for his own actions. He must try to eliminate the consequences of his mistakes, and, above all, he must identify, understand and eliminate their Causes, so that the same wrong actions are not repeated in future. He must not “ask for forgiveness” from a Master as a means to wash his hands as to what he himself has done. He must try and act as correctly as he can, so that his own conscience gives him its approval. The duty of a Master is not to distribute absolutions. It is to give the student elements of information so that he can work with autonomy and altruism towards self-liberation through self-knowledge, and then self-forgetfulness.
One must know oneself in order to be able to forget oneself.
It is useful to warn theosophical readers about this article falsely ascribed to H.P. Blavatsky, in order to avoid as much as possible that present and future students of esoteric philosophy get misled by it.
Once one’s critical viewpoint is duly awakened, it is enough to take a look at “Some Practical Suggestions for Daily Life” to see that it is but a compilation of paragraphs taken from various books and articles, and that it couldn’t have been penned by H.P.B.
The text was analyzed by a few theosophists. In the second semester of 2005, unpublished annotations made by Canadian researchers Ernest Pelletier and Ted G. Davy, and individual commentaries written by North-American theosophist Dallas TenBroeck were kindly sent to the author of the present article.[4]
Pelletier and Davy give emphasis to the fact that these transcriptions are not even correctly done. The would-be quotations include ideas not present in the original texts, and distort some of them, thus having no value even as transcriptions.
Mr. Dallas TenBroeck, an associate of the United Lodge of Theosophists, examined many of the paragraphs in the text, showing that their content is erroneous from a theosophical point of view.
NOTES:
[1] “Practical Occultism”, H. P. Blavatsky, The Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar, Madras (Chennai), India ; Wheaton , Ill. , USA ; London , England Adyar , India
[2] “Practical Occultism”, pp. 67-68.
[3] “The Key to Theosophy”, Theosophy Co., Los Angeles
[4] Jerome Wheeler, an ULT associate in Los Angeles
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The above article was first published in November 2010.
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