Knowledge comes in visions, first in dreams and then in pictures presented to the inner eye during meditation. Thus have I been taught the whole system of evolution, the laws of being and all else that I know—the mysteries of life and death, the workings of karma. Not a word was spoken to me of all this in the ordinary way, except, perhaps, by way of confirmation of what was thus given me—nothing taught me in writing. And knowledge so obtained is so clear, so convincing, so indelible in the impression it makes upon the mind, that all other sources of information, all other methods of teaching with which we are familiar dwindle into insignificance in comparison with this. One of the reasons why I hesitate to answer offhand some questions put to me is the difficulty of expressing in sufficiently accurate language things given to me in pictures, and comprehended by me by the pure Reason, as Kant would call it.
Theirs is a synthetic method of teaching: the most general outlines are given first, then an insight into the method of working, next the broad principles and notions are brought into view, and lastly begins the revelation of the minuter points.
[Editor’s Note: This fragment was first published posthumously in The Theosophist, March, 1910, p. 685, without any indication of its date, occasion, or manuscript source. In reproducing it, Boris de Zirkoff therefore cautiously described it as “a fragment from the pen of H.P.B.; at least it is attributed to her” (Collected Writings, XIII, p. 285). No earlier copy or autograph manuscript has yet been identified. Nevertheless, the substance of the passage is very closely paralleled in several authenticated or independently transmitted letters of Blavatsky, written many years before its publication.
While writing Isis Unveiled, Blavatsky described to her sister Vera a “charmed world of pictures” in which “century after century, image after image” passed before her “as if in a magic panorama”; forgotten information, she said, could be made to reappear before her eyes, sometimes as whole tables of figures or sequences of events. She attributed this process to her higher Ego acting with the assistance of her Teacher. (The Letters of H. P. Blavatsky, Vol. I, Letter 62, to Vera de Zhelihovsky, late 1875 or early 1876, pp. 214–15; also The Path, Jan, 1895.) In another letter to Vera, written shortly after the publication of Isis, she was still more explicit: “it is the Master who is explaining and showing all this to me. . . . Pictures, ancient manuscripts, and dates pass before me; I am merely copying them.” (Letters, Vol. I, Letter 103, late 1877, pp. 393–94.)
Blavatsky gave closely similar accounts while composing The Secret Doctrine. Writing to A. P. Sinnett from Würzburg in late 1885, she remarked that “The thing at N.Y. is repeated—only far clearer and better,” immediately adding: “Such pictures, panoramas, scenes antediluvian dramas with all that!” (The Letters of H. P. Blavatsky to A. P. Sinnett, Letter 116, late November or early December 1885, p. 244.) On March 3, 1886, she explained the process at greater length: because consciously looking into the “astral light” for the Secret Doctrine had become too difficult, she was being “made to see all I have to as though in my dream”; she saw long rolls containing written material, and various correspondences and symbols were “given me to see.” In the same letter she complained that, although she possessed “facts for 20 Volumes like Isis,” it was “the language, the cleverness for compiling them” that she lacked—an especially close parallel to the present fragment’s statement concerning the difficulty of expressing accurately in words what had been received pictorially. (Letters of H. P. Blavatsky to A. P. Sinnett, Letter 80, March 3, 1886, pp. 194–95.)
The closing description of the Masters’ “synthetic method of teaching”—in which general principles are apprehended before their minuter details—also has a striking antecedent in the Mahatma correspondence. In a letter received by Sinnett in January 1882, Mahatma M. writes: “In our doctrine, you will find necessary the synthetic method,” explaining that the student must first “embrace the whole”—uniting macrocosm and microcosm—before studying and analyzing its separate parts. (The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett, Letter 44 [13 in Barker numbering], “Cosmological Notes and Queries,” received mid- to late January 1882.)
These parallels do not establish the textual authenticity of the 1910 fragment, whose immediate provenance remains unknown; nor has its wording been found verbatim in any presently known letter of Blavatsky. They do, however, show that its principal ideas—and in several places its characteristic imagery—closely agree with Blavatsky’s own descriptions, extending from the writing of Isis Unveiled in the 1870s to that of The Secret Doctrine in the 1880s. The passage may therefore be regarded as uncertain in textual provenance but strongly corroborated in substance by her independently preserved correspondence.]