the key to theosophy…

“A Lady:  What do colour-blind people feel, a psychic influence?

 
Mme. Blavatsky:  No. It happens to be a colour which is of a planet which is perfectly contrary to theirs.

 
Mr. Old:  They would feel it on a psychic plane.

 
Mr. B. Keightley:  All that colour-blind means is that there is something wrong with the physically registering apparatus. A man cannot be occultly colour-blind.

 
Mme. Blavatsky:  This is the keynote of Occultism, to know the true relation of sounds, colours, and numbers. There are so many. There are seven rays, but what are they? They have got seventy-seven thousand times seven, all kinds of combinations; it takes a lifetime to learn them, and you cannot do it by registering all these in your physical memory. It is a perfect impossibility. You have to use your intuition, and your psychic memory, the memory of your ego, of the astral. You have to register it on your astral form.

 
Mr. Cross:  It appears to me the books you circulate on astrology are rather written above the heads of the people. As an outsider, I can tell you that really, the people who want to know about Theosophy want to know the first steps, rather than these advanced theories. These are very well for your own Society; but, if these books which come out from time to time are supposed to spread the doctrine, I don’t think, speaking from experience, that they really do so much good. They come out along with the others.

 
Countess Wachtmeister:  Could not you give us a series of questions, such as outsiders ask themselves?

 
Mr. Cross:  I should like to know why the person who so very clearly answers the questions so clearly is called a mystic.

 
Mme. Blavatsky:  There you are. Mr. Keightley wanted “Mystic”. I said put “Q” and “A”. I wanted to put “Theosophist”, but that is such a name which is arrogant.

 
Mr. Kingsland:  Put “Teacher”.

 
Mme. Blavatsky:  No! No! No! It is worse, yet.

 
Mr. Cross:  This is really the objection that outsiders have, that it is vague. Does not the use of the word “Mystic” go to build up that idea?

 
Mr. B. Keightley:  You are perfectly correct.

 
Mme. Blavatsky:  What name would you suggest?

 
Mr. Cross:  Why won’t you put your own name?

 
Mme. Blavatsky:  “H. P. B.” stinks in the nostrils already.

 
Mr. Cross:  But people look to you as the kind of oracle of the movement.

 
Mme. Blavatsky:  There is my name there already; everyone would know I have written this. But I would like throughout the book not to put so many times my name. I know that “Mystic” was not good. Now please give me some good advice.”

 
H. P. Blavatsky