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Dane Rudhyar's Occult Preparations for a New Age. Image Copyright 2004 by Michael R. Meyer.

OCCULT PREPARATIONS
FOR A NEW AGE
by Dane Rudhyar, 1975




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CONTENTS


PART ONE:
A Planetary Approach to Occultism amd Its Source

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To Michael R. Meyer
and Nancy Kleban
In warm appreciation
and friendship.
D.R.

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This title was first published by Quest Books, 1975.

Cover for the online edition copyright © 2004
by Michael R. Meyer.

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CHAPTER THREE
H. P. Blavatsky and the Trans-Himalayan
Occult Brotherhood and the 19th Century - 3

If we are trying objectively to think of the esoteric movements of the last hundred years, it is first of all most important to realize that the release of occult knowledge has always to conform to the nature of the general mentality of the potential students of that knowledge. For this reason, nothing can be transformed except by someone who has been and at least externally remains a part of that which requires transformation. This is why a great Adept who is a member of an Occult Brotherhood cannot directly and publicly operate in a society in need of spiritual transformation, especially one as materialistic and individualistic as our Western society was in the nineteenth century. Someone who to some extent belongs to the two realms of knowledge (occult and cultural) must serve as an intermediary or channel for communication. This must be an individual able to withstand both the downflow of occult power through his organism, and the scorn, indifference, or attacks of individuals and institutions of the society in which he was born, but from which his consciousness and will have emerged in at least relative freedom.

Only such a person can serve as a link between an occult Brotherhood and the collectivity whose time for transformation has come, according to some planetary cycle. Occasionally there are individuals who prematurely attempt to introduce radically new ideas or modes of energy-release into their society. For example, The Secret Doctrine mentions J. W. Keely who, a hundred years ago, tried to commercialize a mysterious force through a most ingenious motor of his invention. But such premature attempts achieve no results because the time has not yet come for what has somehow been discovered. Even if the time had really come, the intermediary could at first usually affect but relatively few people. All natural processes are hierarchical.

What this all means is that, while what the Theosophical Movement released through HPB and a few others should be considered as the direct manifestation of an aspect of the Universal Tradition of Man, it is nevertheless only one aspect, initiated by the trans-Himalayan Brotherhood through a Russian woman whose individual karma, as well as the karma of European nations, inevitably gave a particular character and definite limits to the release. Theosophy and all that has during this century, developed along related lines has therefore necessarily a two-fold nature. It is stamped with the need of the nineteenth century in the Western World, with some of the character of Helena Petrovna von Hahn and (it would seem) of the main sources of her knowledge, the Brothers K.H. and M. But its essential Source is the one occult Tradition whose spiritual origin can be referred back to the coming of the Kumaras, and particularly to that aspect of the Kumaric "descent" to which the name Sanat is given.

H. P. Blavatsky was selected by the trans-Himalayan Brotherhood "after nearly a century of fruitless search" (cf. the quotation on page 32) as "the only opportunity to send out a European body upon European soul to serve as a connecting link between that country and our own" (i.e. the Tibetan Himalayas). She was selected from an ancestral lineage which presumably had genetically developed certain psychic powers.(7) These powers later on had to be brought under conscious training during her stay in Tibet, if not before, because she had first to deal with a society and culture in which the only wide open door to anything beyond physical matter was the spiritualistic movement. Spiritualism had to be used, dangerous as such a use proved to be, because it established a point of contact.

In the background, another point of contact was also available — what remained of the movement started by Anton Mesmer during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The kind of vital energy which Mesmer was trying to reveal to the narrowly rationalistic public (what he called "animal magnetism") had been scorned by an official Commission of learned personages, including Benjamin Franklin, then U.S. ambassador to France, and the scientist Lavoisier. Nevertheless disciples of Mesmer in France and in the United States carried on along the lines of inquiry he had opened. They led not only through Phineas Quinby to Christian Science, but also to the psychological experiments of the Nancy School in France, which started Freud on his career. This "Mesmeric" contact was used in India by Colonel Olcott who became widely known as a magnetic healer.

The Spiritualist movement had opened a door to the "astral" realm, but while some of the phenomena were no doubt genuine, the interpretation given to them was, according to HPB, erroneous. Isis Unveiled was written, at least partly, to disprove the validity of the Spiritualists' claim to be in touch with the real spiritual individuality of departed men and women; and this, as we have already seen, led to tragic misunderstandings and bitter enmity which adversely affected the Theosophical Movement. An interesting and perhaps significant fact is that the Spiritualist movement — which began with the mediumistic phenomena produced in 1848 by the Fox sisters at Hydeville, N.Y. and soon spread wildly throughout the States — has a parallel, almost exactly 100 years later, in the UFO movement which, for a while at least, also gained a vast number of adherents claiming direct experiences.

While in the nineteenth century Spiritualism sought to establish the existence of human minds and soul-entities beyond the borderline of the physical world, the twentieth century UFO movement — which also produced a wide variety of "communications" from "Space-People" — attempts to show that "men" from other planets or solar systems exist. It is maintained that these "Space-People" can break through the barrier that seemingly has isolated our planet and its gravitational field from other cosmic regions, where other kinds of "humanity" live and are able to develop technologies superior to our own. Both movements therefore have a common aim: to break down man's basic sense of isolation and loneliness — Spiritualism in terms of the possibility of communication with physically dead human persons who nevertheless exist in a different realm, and the UFO movement in terms of the possibility of establishing physical and mental contact with other humanities.(8)

Both movements represent an attempt at expanding consciousness and human contacts, and it will be interesting to see whether, after 1975, the occult "messenger" announced by HPB will use the UFO concept to gain public notice, and soon after also show that the usual interpretation given to flying saucers and space-people is not the correct one.(9)

In its most advanced form since the days of Planck and Einstein and the beginning of our present century, Western science has experienced a most basic change of mind. Top physicists, chemists, biologists can hardly any longer be called materialists, yet their training and the pressure of official institutions and academic thinking often make it impossible for them to draw certain kinds of philosophical and even metaphysical conclusions. This is true both from the level of "material" activity which is the subject of their studies and as concerns the essentially symbolic character of the mathematical symbols which they use as a highly complex and actually transcendental language. The basic problem today is that the inertia of past Euro-American sociocultural, economic, and political institutions is obstinately resisting acceptance of the radically new approach to man, and to cosmic, planetary, and biopsychic energies. Such a new approach alone could repolarize the collective consciousness of the directing managerial and intellectual elite, and establish it at a level where it could openly resonate to the universalistic concepts and vibrations of the occult world.

This occult world can now appear in a somewhat different light to the minds of men able to think in planetary all-human terms. As long as man's thinking was conditioned by but a partial and local response to the basic factors in his earthly evolution, the glamour of mythological or transcendent events and personages was necessary to allow the devotees of particular cultures and religious institutions to transcend (literally: to take a step ahead of) their institutionalized consciousness.

However, now that man is at least potentially able to think holistically in terms of the whole of mankind and of the earth as a vast organism with many "globes" or levels of existence, the world of true Occultism need not be thought of in remote, mysterious, and utterly supernatural terms — and even less in terms of the miraculous. In its concrete, external manifestations, it is the world of humanity-as-a-whole beyond all localisms, and beyond (though at the core of) all cultures and organized religions. It is a world of planetary activities dealing with the whole sweep of the cycle of evolution in the solar system. These activities are totally inclusive; they do not select this individual or that particular tribe or race as especially or, even less, exclusively important, except when, at a particular time, it can serve as a focalizing lens through which new energies of a planetary character can be released.

The true Occultist lives, thinks, and essentially acts in a planetary (and at times superplanetary and "heliocosmic") world of forces, which constitute the true "astral" realm — a world of energies guided by the archetypal patterns of the so-called "casual" aspect of the cosmic and planetary Mind. He works for humanity rather than for individuals, save in exceptional cases and for more-than-personal purposes. His work is moved by a deep unfaltering love for mankind. Throughout The Mahatma Letters, and in countless statements made by HPB and William Q. Judge (who was instrumental in the formation of the then Esoteric Section of The Theosophical Society), the basic keynote for entrance upon the path that leads to the true Occultism of the Elder Brothers is sounded forth: consecrated service for humanity in a total surrender of the ego and its lesser goals and narrow possessive loves. In The Mahatma Letters, in a letter from Morya, one reads: "It is he alone who has the love of humanity at heart, who is capable of grasping thoroughly the idea of a regenerating practical Brotherhood who is entitled to the possession of our secrets. He alone, such a man, will never misuse his powers and there will be no fear that he should turn them to selfish ends. A man who places not the good of mankind above his own good is not worthy of becoming even our chela — he is not worthy of becoming brighter in knowledge than his neighbour."(10) This is the acid test of the kind of Occultism of which HPB became the emissary. Any other kind will sooner or later lead to the dark path of the "Brothers of the Shadow."

Let me repeat here what has already been said concerning the Kumaras or Promethean Spirits. In their nature, Love and Knowledge are two poles from whose interaction power is released. If they are eager to break through the inertial Ring of Saturn and the all-too-spiritual glory of King Jupiter so that evolution can forever go on along its essential spiral path, and if they are ready to suffer the nearly inevitable consequences of their compassionate involvement in the development of self-consciousness and responsibility in Man, it is because of their boundless compassion; this compassion encompasses all who are able to resonate to their everlasting Call. This ability to resonate and respond is inherent, though so often undeveloped, in all human beings since the most ancient coming of these exalted beings and the sacrificial grafting of their power of universal Love and occult Knowledge onto the wild animal-like nature of earthbound mankind.

This power is for us all consciously to use at this crucial period of human evolution. It is a time which, at the level of the strictly human consciousness, repeats the great transformation that was induced at an unconscious level in the Earth's biosphere millions of years ago under the impact of the Venusian Host. It is for Man now consciously to choose between the way of spiritual integration through Love and that of slow gradual decay through selfishness, fears, greed, and lust.

We are coming to the turning point. Everything depends on the clarity of our knowing and the purity and compassion of our loving. Knowledge and Love are both essential. Knowledge alone is dark; Love alone is possessively blind. All deep and radical spiritual transformations able to alter the total reality of Man require an illumined mind and an all-encompassing heart.



7. Presumably her paternal line, because her father's daughter from a second marriage after Helena's mother had died, had also in early youth strong psychic powers which disappeared as she grew older (cf. Damodar, p. 541).  Return

8. The astrologer will easily relate these two movements with the character of the two planets, Neptune and Pluto. Spiritualism is Neptunian in its ambiguity and glamour; the UFO concept is Plutonian in all it portends, superphysically and yet concretely.  Return

9. In this connection one would do well to read a quite fascinating article by Jacques Vallee in the February 1974 issue of the excellent magazine PSYCHIC published in San Francisco: "UFO: The Psychic Component."  Return

10. p. 252, 2nd ed.; p. 248, 3rd. ed.  Return



By permission of Leyla Rudhyar Hill
Copyright © 1975 by Dane Rudhyar
All Rights Reserved.






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