Mahatma Letter No. 18

This is Letter No. 9 in Barker numbering. See below for Context and background.

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Cover sheet

From K.H., first letter received on return to India, July 8th, 1881, while staying with Madame B. at Bombay for a few days.

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Welcome good friend and brilliant author, welcome back! Your letter at hand, and I am happy to see your personal experience with the "Elect" of London proved so successful. But, I foresee, that more than ever now, you will become an incarnate note of interrogation. Beware! If your questions are found premature by the powers that be, instead of receiving my answers in their pristine purity you may find them transformed into yards of drivel. I am too far gone to feel a hand on my throat whenever trenching on the limits of forbidden topics; not enough to avoid feeling myself — uncomfortably so — like a worm of yesterday before our "Rock of Ages." My Cho-Khan. We must all be blindfolded before we can pass onward; or else, we have to remain outside.

And now, what about the book? Le quart d'heure de Rabelais is striking, and, finds me, if not quite insolvent, yet quasitrembling at the idea that the first instalment offered may be found below the mark; the price claimed — inadequate with my poor resources; myself led pro bono publico to trespass beyond the terrible — "hitherto shalt thou go, and no further," and the angry wave of the Cho-Khan's wrath swamping me blue ink and all! I fondly hope you will not make me lose "my situation."

Quite so. For, I have a dim notion that you will be very impatient with me. I have a very clear notion that you need not be. It is one of the unfortunate necessities of life that imperial needs do sometimes

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force one apparently to ignore the claims of friendship, not to violate one's word, but to put off and lay aside for a while the too impatient expectations of neophytes as of inferior importance. One such need that I call imperial is the need of your future welfare; the realization of the dream dreamt by you in company with S.M. That dream — shall we call it a vision? — was, that you, and Mrs. K. — why forget the Theos. Soc.? — "are all parts of a large plan for the manifestations of occult philosophy to the world." Yes; the time must come, and it is not far — when all of you will comprehend aright the apparently contradictory phases of such manifestations; forced by the evidence to reconcile them. The case not being so at present, meanwhile — remember: it is because we are playing a risky game and the stakes are human souls that I ask you to possess yours in patience. Bearing in mind that I have to look after your "Soul" and mine too, I propose to do so at whatever cost, even at the risk of being misunderstood by you as I was by Mr. Hume. The work is made the more difficult by my being a lonely labourer in the field, and that, as long as I fail to prove to my superiors that you, at least — mean business; that you — are in right good earnest. As I am refused higher help, so will you fail to easily find help in that Society

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in which you move, and which you try to move. Nor will you find, for a certain time much joy in those directly concerned. Our old lady is weak and her nerves are worked to a fiddle string; so is her jaded brain. H.S.O. is far away — in exile — fighting his way back to salvation — compromised more than you imagine by his Simla indiscretions — and establishing theosoph. schools. Mr. Hume — who once promised to become a champion fighter in that Battle of Light against Darkness — now preserves a kind of armed neutrality wondrous to behold. Having made the mirific discovery that we are a body of antidiluvian Jesuits of fossiles — self-crowned with oratorial flourishes, he rested but to accuse us of intercepting his letters to H.P.B.! However, he finds some comfort by thinking "what a jolly argument he shall have elsewhere (Angel Linnean ornithological Society, perhaps) with the entity which is represented by the name "Koothoomi." Verily has our very intellectual, once mutual friend, a flood of words at his command which would suffice to float a troop ship of oratorious fallacies. Nevertheless — I respect him. . . . But who next? C. C. Massey? But then he is the hapless parent of about half a dozen of illegitimate brats. He is a most charming, devoted friend; a profound mystic; a generous, noble minded man, a gentleman — as they say — every inch of him; tried as gold; every requisite for a student of occultism, but none for an adept, my good friend. Be it as it may, his

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secret is his own, and I have no right to divulge it. Dr. Wyld? — a christian to the back bone. Hood? — a sweet nature, as you say; a dreamer, and an idealist in mystic matters, yet — no worker. S. Moses? Ah! here we are. S.M. has nearly upset the theosoph. ark set afloat three years back: and, he will do his level best to do it over again -— our Imperator notwithstanding. You doubt? Listen.

His is a weird, rare nature. His occult psychical energies are tremendous; but they have lain dormant, folded up within him and unknown to himself, when, some eight years or so, Imperator threw his eye upon him and bid his spirit soar. Since then, a new life has been in him, a dual existence, but his nature could not be changed. Brought up as a theological student, his mind was devoured by doubts. Earlier, he betook himself to Mount Athos, where, immuring himself in a monastery, he studied Greek Eastern religion, and it is there that he was first noticed by his "Spirit guide" (!!) Of course, Greek casuistry failed to solve his doubts, and he hurried on to Rome, — popery satisfying him as little. From thence he wandered to Germany with the same negative results. Giving up dry christian theology he did not give up its presumable founder with all that. He needed an ideal and he found it in the latter. For him Jesus is a reality, a once embodied, now a disembodied Spirit, who, "furnished him with an evidence of his personal identity" — he thinks, — in no less a degree than other "Spirits" — Imperator among the rest — have. Nevertheless, neither the religions of Jesus nor yet his words, as recorded in the Bible and believed by S.M. authentic — are fully accepted by that restless Spirit of his. Imperator, on whom the same fate devolved later on, fares no better. His mind is too positive. Once impressed it becomes easier to efface characters engraved upon titanium than impressions made upon his brain.

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Whenever under the influence of Imperator — he is all alive to the realities of Occultism, and the superiority of our Science over Spiritualism. As soon as left alone and under the pernicious guidance of those he firmly believes having identified with disembodied Souls — all becomes confusion again! His mind will yield to no suggestions, no reasonings but his own, and those are all for Spiritualistic theories. When the old theological fetters had dropped off, he imagined himself a free man. Some months later, he became the humble slave and tool of the "Spirits"! It is but when standing face to face with his inner Self that he realizes the truth that there is something higher and nobler than the prittle-prattle of pseudo Spirits. It was at such a moment that he heard for the first the voice of Imperator, and it was, as he himself puts it: "as the voice of God speaking to his inner Self." That voice has made itself familiar to him for years, and yet he very often heeds it not. A simple query: Were Imper. what he believes, nay — knows him to be, he thinks, — would not he have made S.M.'s will completely subservient to his own by this time? Alone the adepts, i.e. the embodied spirits — are forbidden by our wise and intransgressible laws to completely subject to themselves another and a weaker will, — that of free born man. The latter mode of proceeding is the favourite one resorted to by the "Brothers of the Shadow," the Sorcerers, the Elementary Spooks, and, as an isolated exception — by the highest Planetary Spirits, those, who can no longer err. But these appear on Earth but

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at the origin of every new human kind; at the junction of, and close of the two ends of the great cycle. And, they remain with man no longer than the time required for the eternal truths they teach to impress themselves so forcibly upon the plastic minds of the new races as to warrant them from being lost or entirely forgotten in ages hereafter, by the forthcoming generations. The mission of the planetary Spirit is but to strike the KEY NOTE OF TRUTH. Once he has directed the vibration of the latter to run its course uninterruptedly along the catenation of that race and to the end of the cycle — the denizen of the highest inhabited sphere disappears from the surface of our planet — till the following "resurrection of flesh." The vibrations of the Primitive Truth are what your philosophers name "innate ideas."

Imperator, then, had repeatedly told him that "in occultism alone he should seek for, and will find a phase of truth not yet known to him." But that did not prevent S.M. at all from turning his back upon occultism whenever a theory of it clashed with one of his own preconceived Spiritualistic ideas. To him mediumship appeared as the Charter of his Soul's freedom, as resurrection from Spiritual death. He had been allowed to enjoy it only so far as it was necessary for the confirmation of his faith: promised that the abnormal would yield to the normal; ordered to prepare

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for the time when the Self within him will become conscious of its spiritual, independent existence, will act and talk face to face with its Instructor, and will lead its life in Spiritual Spheres normally and without external or internal mediumship at all. And yet once conscious of what he terms "external Spirit action" he recognised no more hallucination from truth, the false from the real: confounding at times Elementals and Elementaries, embodied from disembodied Spirit, though he had been oft enough told of, and warned against "those spirits that hover about the Earth's sphere" — by his "Voice of God." With all that he firmly believes to have invariably acted under Imper's direction, and that such spirits as have come to him came by his "guide's" permission. In such a case H.P.B. was there by Imper's consent? And how do you reconcile the following contradictions. Ever since 1876, acting under direct orders, she tried to awake him to the reality of what was going on around and in him. That she must have acted either according to or against Imper's will — he must know, as in the latter case she might boast of being stronger, more powerful than his "guide" who never yet protested against the intrusion. Now what happens? Writing to her from Isle of Wight, in 1876, of a vision lasting for over 48 consecutive hours he had, and during which he walked about, talked as usual, but did not preserve the slightest remembrance of anything external, he asks her to tell him whether it was

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a vision or a hallucination. Why did he not ask + I-r? "You can tell me for you were there," he says. . . . "You — changed, yet yourself — if you have a Self. . . . I suppose you have, but into that I do not pry." . . . At another time he saw her in his own library looking at him, approaching and giving him some masonic signs of the Lodge he knows. He admits that he "saw her as clearly as he saw Massey — who was there." He saw her on several other occasions, and sometimes knowing it was H.P.B. he could not recognise her. "You seem to me from your appearance as from your letters so different at times, the mental attitudes so various, that it is quite conceivable to me, as I am authoritatively told, that you are a bundle of Entities. . . . I have absolute faith in you." In every letter of his he clamoured for a "living Brother" to her unequivocal statement that there was one already having charge of him, he strongly objected. When helped to get free from his too material body, absent from it for hours and days sometimes his empty machine run during that period from afar and by external, living influence, — as soon as back, he would begin labouring under the irradicable impression of having been all that time the vehicle for another intelligence, a disembodied not embodied Spirit, truth never once flashing across his mind. "Imperator," he wrote to her, "traverses your idea about mediumship.

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He says there should be no real antagonism between the medium and the adept." Had he used the word "Seer" instead of "medium" the idea would have been rendered more correctly, for a man becomes rarely an adept without being born a natural Seer. Then again. In September, 1875, he knew nothing of the Brothers of the Shadow — our greatest, most cruel, and — why not confess — our most potential Enemies. In that year he actually asked the old lady whether Bulwer had been eating underdone pork chops and dreaming when he described "that hideous Dweller of the Threshold." "Make yourself ready," she answered — "in about twelve months more you will have to face and fight with them." In October, 1876, they had begun their work upon him. "I am fighting" — he wrote — "a hand to hand battle with all the legions of the Fiend for the past three weeks. My nights are made hideous with their torments, temptations and foul suggestions. I see them all around, glaring at me, gabbling, howling, grinning! Every form of filthy suggestion, of bewildering doubt, of mad and shuddering fear is upon me . . . I can understand Zanoni's Dweller now . . . I have not wavered yet . . . and their temptations are fainter, the presence less near, the horror less. . . ."

One night she had prostrated herself before her Superior, one of the few they fear, praying

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him to wave his hand across the ocean, lest S.M. should die, and the Theos. Soc. lose its best subject. "He must be tried" was the answer. He imagines that + Imper. had sent the tempters because he S.M. was one of those Thomases who must see; he would not believe that + could not help their coming. Watch over him he did — he could not drive them away unless the victim, the neophyte himself, proved the strongest. But did these human fiends in league with the Elementaries prepare him for a new life as be thought they would? Embodiments of those adverse influences which beset the inner Self struggling to be free and to progress, they would never have returned had he successfully conquered them by asserting his own independent WILL, by giving up his mediumship, his passive will. Yet they did.

You say of + — "Imperator — is certainly not his (S.M.'s) astral soul, and assuredly, also, he is not from a lower World than our own — not an earth-bound Spirit." No one ever said he was anything of the kind. H.P.B. never told you he was S.M.'s astral soul, but that what he often mistook for + was his own higher Self, his divine atman — not linga Sarira or astral Soul, or the Kama rupa the independent doppelganger — again. + cannot contradict himself; + cannot be ignorant of the truth, so often misrepresented by S.M.; + cannot preach the occult Sciences and then defend mediumship, not even in that highest form

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described by his pupil. Mediumship is abnormal. When in further development the abnormal has given way to the natural, the controls are shaken off, and passive obedience is no longer required, then the medium learns to use his will, to exercise his own power, and becomes an adept. The process is one of development and the neophyte has to go to the end. As long as he is subject to occasional trance — he cannot be an adept. S.M. passes the two-thirds of his life in Trance.

To your question — Is Imperator "a Planetary Spirit" and "may a Planetary Spirit have been humanly incarnated," I will first say that there can be no Planetary Spirit that was not once material or what you call human. When our great Buddha — the patron of all the adepts, the reformer and the codifier of the occult system, reached first Nirvana on earth, he became a Planetary Spirit; i.e. — his spirit could at one and the same time rove the interstellar spaces in full consciousness, and continue at will on Earth in his original and individual body. For the divine Self had so completely disfranchised itself from matter that it could create at will an inner substitute for itself, and leaving it in the human form for days, weeks, sometimes years, affect in no wise by the change either the vital principle or the physical mind of its body. By the way, that is the highest form of adeptship man can hope for on our planet. But it is as rare as the Buddhas themselves, the last Khobilgan who reached it being

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Sang-Ko-Pa of Kokonor (XIV Century), the reformer of esoteric as well as of vulgar Lamaism. Many are those who "break through the egg-shell," few who, once out are able to exercise their Nirira namastaka fully, when completely out of the body. Conscious life in Spirit is as difficult for some natures as swimming, is for some bodies. Though the human frame is lighter in its bulk than water, and that every person is born with the faculty, so few develop in themselves the art of treading water that death by drowning is the most frequent of accidents. The planetary Spirit of that kind (the Buddha like) can pass at will into other bodies — of more or less etherialised matter, inhabiting other regions of the Universe. There are many other grades and orders, but there is no separate and eternally constituted order of Planetary Spirits. Whether Imperator is a "planetary" embodied or disembodied, whether he is an adept in flesh or out of it, I am not at liberty to say, any more than he would himself to tell S.M. who I am, or may be, or even who H.P.B. is. If he himself chooses to be silent on that subject S.M. has no right to ask me. But then our friend, S.M. ought to know. Nay: he firmly believes he does. For in his intercourse with that personage there came a time when not satisfied with + assurances, or content to respect his wishes that he, Imperator & Co. should remain impersonal and unknown save by their assumed titles, S.M. wrestled with him, Jacob-like, for months on the point of

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that spirit's identity. He was the Biblical flim-flam all over again. "I pray thee tell me thy name" — and though answered: "Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name?" — what's in a name? — he allowed S.M. to label him like a portmanteau. And so, he is at rest now, for be has "seen God face to face"; who, after wrestling, and seeing that he prevailed not, said "let me go" and was forced to come to the terms offered by Jacob. S. Moses. I strongly advise you for your own information to put that question to your friend. Why should he be "anxiously awaiting" my reply, since he knows all about + ? Did not that "Spirit" tell him a story one day, — a queer story, something what he may not divulge about himself and forbid him ever mentioning it? What more does he want? That fact, that he seeks to learn through me the true nature of +, is a pretty good proof in itself that he is not as sure of his identity as he believes he is, or rather would make believe he is. Or is the question a blind? — which?

I may answer you, what I said to G. H. Fechner one day, when he wanted to know the Hindu view on what he had written — "You are right; . . . 'every diamond, every crystal, every plant and star has its own individual soul, besides man and animal . . .' and, 'there is a hierarchy of souls from the lowest forms of matter up to the World Soul' . . .; but, you are mistaken when adding to the above the assurance that 'the spirits of the

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departed hold direct psychic communication with Souls that are still connected with a human body' — for, they do not." The relative position of the inhabited worlds in our Solar System would alone preclude such a possibility. For I trust you have given up the queer idea — a natural result of early Xtian training — that there can possibly be human intelligences inhabiting purely spiritual regions? You will then as readily understand the fallacy of the christians — who would burn immaterial souls in a material physical hell — as the mistake of the more educated spiritualists, who lullaby themselves with the thought that any other but the denizens of the two worlds immediately interlinked with our own can possibly communicate with them? However etherial and purified of gross matter they may be, the pure Spirits are still subject to the physical and universal laws of matter. They cannot if even they would span the abyss that separates their worlds from ours. They can be visited in Spirit, their Spirit cannot descend and reach us. They attract, they cannot be attracted, their Spiritual polarity being an insuperable difficulty in the way. (By-the-bye you must not trust Isis literally. The book is but a tentative effort to divert the attention of the Spiritualists from their preconceptions to the true state of things. The author was made to hint and point out in the true direction, to say what things are not, not what they are. Proof reader helping, a few real mistakes have crept in as on page 1, chapter 1, volume 1, where divine Essence is made emanating from Adam instead of the reverse.)

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Once fairly started upon that subject, I will endeavour to explain to you still clearer where lies the impossibility. You will thus be answered in regard to both Planetary Spirits and — seance room "Spirits."

The cycle of intelligent existences commences at the highest worlds or planets — the term "highest" meaning here the most spiritually perfect. Evoluting from cosmic matter — which is akasa, the primeval not the secondary plastic medium, or Ether of Science instinctively suspected, unproven as the rest — man first evolutes from this matter in its most sublimated state, appearing at the threshold of Eternity as a perfectly Etherial — not Spiritual Entity, say — a Planetary Spirit. He is but one remove from the universal and Spiritual World Essence — the Anima Mundi of the Greeks, or that which humanity in its spiritual decadence has degraded into a mythical personal God. Hence, at that stage, the Spirit — man is at best an active Power, an immutable, therefore an unthinking Principle (the term "immutable" being again used here but to denote that state for the time being, the immutability applying here but to the inner principle which will vanish and disappear as soon as the speck of the material in him will start on its cyclic work of Evolution and transformation). In his subsequent descent, and in proportion of the increase of matter he will assert more and more his activity. Now, the congeries of the star-worlds (including our own planet) inhabited by intelligent beings may be likened to an orb or rather an epicycloid formed of rings like a chain — worlds inter-linked together, the totality

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