Category: The Key To Theosophy

"Mr. Old:  What is your distinction, Kingsland, between unconscious cerebration and intuition?   Mr. Kingsland:  Unconscious cerebration is a thing belonging purely to the physical plane, and the other thing is different.   Mr. Old:  So is unconscious thought, then?   Mr. Kingsland:  Take the extreme case of the lad who could solve the most [...]

"Mr. B. Keightley:  Old's identification of the Buddhi's intuition is derived from Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism.   Mme. Blavatsky:  That is certainly not esoteric.   Mr. Kingsland:  You cannot identify Buddhi with intuition, because intuition, after all, is only the intellectual process of the very highest order.   Mr. Old:  I understand there are two facets [...]

"Mr. Old:  I merely wish to show, reasoning by analogy, just as there was the conscious and unconscious action of the physical body, and there were conscious and unconscious systems of nervation and so forth on the physical plane, so there was in every principle this conscious and unconscious, this dark and light side.   [...]

"Mr. Kingsland:  How does it arise that we have certain physical functions? You are simply tracing it back. I say those functions develop through innumerable ages by means of evolution; these things act through the Kama-rupa experience of past action.   Mr. Sargeant:  You don't mean that the past experiences are the very causes that [...]

"Mr. B. Keightley:  Perhaps I might quote the lines of Olcutt" "There's a spirit above, and a spirit below; a spirit of love, and a spirit of woe; the spirit above is the spirit divine; the spirit below is the spirit of wine!"   Mr. Sargeant:  And yet the "spirit of wine" is only an [...]

"Mr. Sargeant:  What about Peter the Hermit (Late eleventh century priest who instigated the People's Crusade that traveled from Germany to Jerusalem), whose fierce preaching stirred up the whole of Europe? Was he a Theosophist?   Mme. Blavatsky:  Not a bit of it. He was an anti-Theosophist. He forced people to make fools of themselves [...]

"Mr. Sargeant:  Then intuition can exist with partial knowledge?   Mr. Old:  I don't think you can call that the inner aspect of Manas or the mind, because, you see, we identify the faculty of intuition with Buddhi, which is a separate principle.   Mme. Blavatsky:  Not quite; it is Manas that you have to [...]

"Mr. B. Keightley:  The thing has to be understood by direct consciousness, the direct contact - your consciousness having been attuned to the universal consciousness. Then you are in direct contact with those hierarchies, and you perceive them or sense them.   Mme. Blavatsky:  Why should not you put yourself as these hierarchies?   Mr. [...]

"Mme. Blavatsky:  Shall I tell you a mistake, gentlemen, that you fall into? It is because you take independently all these causes that you want to call intelligent, that you take them one by one, instead of taking the whole. You cannot come and take this affinity. Let us take the Fohatic hierarchies, which are [...]

"Mr. B. Keightley:  That is what we believe is at the basis, but Kingsland's difficulty is how to think intellectually of the relation between that intelligence and the physical facts that we observe.   Mme. Blavatsky:  To drop entirely your scientific and your inductive methods and become not a physician but a metaphysician, that is [...]