Copy of a Letter received in one from H.P.B. postmarked May 10th, 1887

(The Path 1935, p. 232)

[The following is from a copy which is held in the archives of the Theosophical Headquarters at Point Loma (now Pasadena) and together with the heading is reproduced verbatim et literatim.]


You say you are a "sad case" and yet you have in your heart so great a love for humanity and for the individual members of the race that you are haunted day and night by thoughts of their suffering, ignorance and pain. It is such as you who hold the human race from falling into that bottomless pit of emptiness where despair is forgotten and where effort is unknown.

My dear friend, for that you are, being truly the friend of all who are looking for the light, do not forget that you are living in a very dark and sad Maya of intensely physical life. The whole busy continent of America is eaten up by materialism and when an effort is made towards psychic life it results only in dragging that psychic life into matter where it dies as a volatile gas escapes in the hands of one who is not expert. The sadness of this fact colors your letter. You know that any school founded amongst you would at once become a school of practical magic working in order to produce results in matter. This is quite true. The reason is that even those who are most in earnest among you have no true psychic aspirations. Remedy this in yourself and endeavor to remedy it in others by word and example.

Desire no results which are forms of power. Desire only, in your efforts, to reach nearer to the center of life (which is the same in the Universe and in yourself) which makes you careless whether you are strong or weak, learned or unlearned. It is your divinity; it is the divinity we all share. But its existence is not credited by those who look only for money or power or success in material effort. (I include intellect in matter.)

Lean I pray you in thought and feeling away from these external problems which you have written down in your letter; draw on the breath of the great life throbbing in us all and let faith (which is unlearned knowledge) carry you through your life as a bird flies in the air -- undoubtingly. Only remember one thing -- when once you fling yourself on the great life of Nature, the force that keeps the world in motion and our pulses beating and which has within it, in its heart, a supreme and awful power - once having done that, you can never again claim back your life. You must let yourself swing with the motions of the spheres. You must live for other men and with them; not for yourself. You will do this, I am sure. -- H. P. Blavatsky