What we may consider an “official”
version of Mrs. Bailey’s life appears in the afore-mentioned article in Fate
for June 1963, by Paul M. Vest, an ardent devotee, and printed in a manner
equivalent to an endorsement by Fate.
From the context the most important
matters in her life in this connection rest solely on her own narrative. Here,
incidentally, we have the interesting revelation, not apparent in the previous
material, that the “World Servers” have no organization on the physical plane
but consist of spiritually liberated people from all countries working on the
“astral plane.” The article, entitled
“Alice Bailey and the Master K.H.” is suitably decorated with a portrait of the
Mahatma M. Evidently Mr. Vest doesn’t know the difference and perhaps Mrs.
Bailey didn’t either.
According to this narrative, this
movement began when Mrs. Bailey, nee Trobe-Bateman, married Foster Bailey, then
National Secretary to the Theosophical Society, in 1919.
She was brought up as a strict
Anglican, loved Holy Communion but couldn’t take the more narrow dogmas. Her religious devotion, it is stated, went to
attending church every day for weeks or months at a time. (This sort of
emotional and devotional youthful affinity could be predicted to have just such
results as we have been discussing.)
It was in the midst of this struggle
that the “Master” appeared, in the form of a well-tailored Oriental who entered
unannounced, and seating himself “with quiet dignity” – uninvited – began to
explain her future mission for the Mahatmas. She thought at first that she
might be insane, but after thinking it all over began to conceive of herself as
a modern Joan of Arc. This youthful and colorful self-dramatization, she says,
in time wore off. (It wore off into something much bigger; the sainted Joan never
claimed intimate personal acquaintance with the problems of Jesus, or the
status of the sole agent through whom he might be able to return to earth).
Mrs.
Bailey says she at first thought that the mysterious visitor might be Jesus,
but did not know his real identity as K.H. until she saw his picture in the
Theosophical headquarters. (This picture of M. which is printed with the
article?) Fate
volunteers a footnote to the effect that “his visage as well as his name is
remarkably well known.” Evidently not very well known to Fate.
Each time, it is said, that the
Master visited her, he gave her evidence in some way of his “extra-dimensional”
nature. (Gad, how tired we get of that trite phrase of spiritualistic
ignorance, “extra-dimensional” or “other-dimensional!”)
The famous Djwual Khul started her
on her literary career, as a voice in the air. She states that all her writing
consisted of taking down the thoughts dropped one by one into her brain, and
that automatic writing has nothing to do with it. She is alleged to have been
quite a puzzle to the psychologists, including Jung, who thought it might all
be from her subconscious mind, but was puzzled by some of the features. She, it
is said, was amused by the scientific speculations, because she could show
visitors gifts mailed to her by K.H. from India. (Did she show them the
wrappings and postmarks?)
Now we have here something, the
explanation of which can proceed along two branches. First of all, the
subconscious. One thing this writer does know, and that is the nature of
psychics of this type; and some of his knowledge has been painfully acquired.
It is a breed with which the
differentiations between fact and fancy simply disappear. Their minds have come
unanchored. There is no criterion of reality; their memories are ever shifting
sands in which real happenings are drifted over by winds or daydreams,
emotional vicissitudes, and pseudo-memories resulting from wishful thinking,
though these are quite often centered on some principal fixed idea. Psychiatrists
have quite a time with them. They are quite capable of imagining a visit such
as that of “K.H.,” and of coming up later with a “Djwual Khul” – after learning
both these names through Theosophical associations – to continue the internal
drama; and the whole mess which she
made of esoteric philosophy is perfectly in line with an attempted subconscious
fusion of her early pathological, religious fervor and her interest in the new
ideas furnished by Theosophical literature.
Such people are known to write
themselves letters from imagined lovers or great personages, and there is
nothing to prevent one of them with an Oriental complex from doing the same
thing with “gifts from India.” (Are her
followers willing to subject these “gifts” and other manifestations to the same
critical sort of scrutiny to which the Theosophists willingly submitted
H.P.B.’s Adyar phenomena?)
The Editor of Fate twice
takes occasion in notes on this article to remind readers that H.P.B. was found
guilty of fraud in these matters. Elsewhere we are exposing, in spades, the
“competence” as well as the honesty of Hodgson in that frame-up.
There is a
gulf as wide as the world between the presentation by H.P.B. and that of
Bailey, in the matter of mode alone. H.P.B.’s was accompanied by voluminous
evidence from many sources, the strongest of which lies in the field of
material science. Nothing of this appears in the Bailey output; that field
might as well never have existed so far as she is concerned. We repeat what
Cleather and Crump said – the entire structure rests on her ipse dixit alone.
One thing is certain: whatever her “K.H.” and “Djwual Khul” may
have been, they were not the mentors of H.P.B. That much is as surely proven by
the texts as anything could be. If not her own subconscious, then what
were they? Let us then examine the implications made by Cleather and Crump,
which suggest the agency of the “dugpas”, “redcaps”, “Shammars”, “Brothers of
the Shadow”, “Black Lodge”, etc., etc., all names for the same thing – the
Mahatmas’ opposite numbers.
This is the teaching that there is a
black or evil line of occultism as well as a white and benevolent, and it is a
very hot potato to handle. Theosophists are about equally divided between those
who don’t really believe it and those who believe it too much – and talk too
blooming much about it, especially when hinting that some opposed school of
thought in their own ranks is under the “influence”.
Of course the tenet belongs to what
any official psychologist would call the “paranoid” conception of things; and
certainly the woods are full of people who fancy themselves persecuted by
invisible evil beings. (Most of these people are of such personal caliber that
it is quite a puzzle why anyone visible or invisible would take the trouble to
persecute them at all and they are usually pretty vague as to why it is being
done.)
But let us examine it rationally.
The possibility is inherent in the existence of paranormal powers, and belief
in such powers is becoming quite respectable these days. There is no divine
ordinance to the effect that only benevolent beings can obtain such powers, any
more than there is one forbidding evil people from developing atomic energy.
Hence nobody, whether Theosophist, Baileyits, or outside investigator of the psychic
who is convinced that there are such powers at all can logically deny the
proposition outright. Moreover, there is a sprinkle of non-occult writers of
quite respectable caliber who claim to have witnessed manifestations of such
powers in Africa, Haiti, and for that matter, Tibet and India.
Hence Madame Blavatsky and the
Mahatma Letters have pretty substantial logical support in describing the
machinations of these characters in considerable detail. Of course, this is
pretty strong stuff. We have actually observed individuals, upon first
introduction to the idea, badly shaken and actually frightened by it. Hence
part of the reticence about it in some quarters.
What sort of powers?
The ones which come into the
question here are of telepathic suggestion and even telepathic hypnosis.
Telepathy is now a respectable subject and so is hypnosis. The combination is
even beginning to be discussed as a possibility outside the occult ranks.
Granted the possibility, we have a
serious issue to face. According to H.P.B.
– and the Mahatmas – these people work mainly through religion and religious
superstitions, the obvious and logical reason for this being that mankind is
most easily controlled by these means. Every dogmatic, authoritarian religion,
she says, is the degeneration of a former impulse of the true philosophy; this
philosophy, which is the emancipation of the mind of man from all subservience
to the supernatural, means death to the dugpa cause wherever it is successful.
Hence, aided by the inevitable tendency of the human mind to degrade,
materialize and degenerate to personal ends any supremely high teaching, the
dugpas work as strenuously to abort and frustrate all such movements as the
Mahatmas work to promote them.
Therefore we have here a suggestion
alternative to that of the subconscious, of equal logic and in some ways more
evidential; because there is a dichotomy in Alice Bailey’s writings. In parts
of them appear the psychic, hysterical young girl who never quite grew up, and
who could be expected to see something wonderful even in the emotional doggerel
of that “prayer”. In others, there are flashes of real knowledge, of extreme
cunning of a different order.
One finds a parallel in the writings
of H.P.B., where the natural output of the Blavatsky mind – a whole cycle of
intelligence beyond that of Bailey – is mixed with things which the
temperamental Russian could not possibly have known of herself; and this is
supported by the last message of the Mahatmas regarding The Secret Doctrine
which states that the book is in part her own product and in part theirs, and
that as time goes on it will be increasingly necessary to distinguish between
the two categories.
Of course the direction and trend of the Mahatma teaching is directly the opposite
of that of the Bailey “Master’s”, just as the direction of the Blavatsky mind
is the opposite of the Bailey mind; but the corresponding dichotomy is
there. In other words, whether through
subconscious cerebration or the direction of opposing occult forces, Bailey and
Blavatsky are “opposite numbers”. They represent opposite influences on
humanity, and these influences cannot both be good. This issue seems
inescapable, whichever theory of the motivations you favor.
If we suppose the “dugpa” thesis,
then it would be quite in line for that apparent physical visit of the
“Mahatma” to have been the result of a hypnotic suggestion by telepathy;
possibly preceded by some physical contact; or it could have been a physical
visit by a masquerader, during which she was hypnotically “conditioned” to hear
the “voice” of “Djwual Khul” and his teachings later. Once under control
anything could happen, a hypnotic subject can be made to believe anything can
happen or has happened.
The conditions under which the voice
of “DK” was heard are most significant. A subject is approachable only through
some weakness; pride and vanity are listed as the two greatest obstacles and
the “last citadel” of the personality to fall before spiritual liberation is
obtained.
And what else than overweening vanity could have
caused this woman of such mediocre mind to get the idea that she was the chosen
agent of Christ himself?
Moreover, consider the external situation. This was in 1923, [Note: actually 1919] when the Messianic craze under Besant and Leadbeater
was building up to a frenzy in terms which still make many an older Theosophist
wince when he reads them now in cold blood. And poor Alice Bailey was being
neglected. An order of chosen disciples for the then imminent “Coming of the
Avatar” was being built up along the same lines as the “World Servers”, and
Mrs. Bailey was somehow being left out of the mainstream, in spite of her
enthusiastic services to the Theosophical Society.
(Her followers complain that things would have been different if she had
been properly appreciated.)
Hence the voice of “Djwual Khul’ must have fallen from the sky like manna
from heaven. She was now all on her own, with her own “Coming Christ”;
presented with a greater mission than that of H.P.B., and one which wonderfully
reconciled her childhood devotion to the ideal of Christ and her later
discovered affinity for the occult. A fig for the Society and its ingratitude!
H.P.B. warned that the danger is
never greater than when vanity and wounded pride dress themselves up in the
peacock feathers of altruism. This has usually been applied to another
personage, but it seems to fit here.
(Theosophical
Notes, September 1963, p.39-42)
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