In the Beginning
1875 - 1884
In the mid to late 19th century there was burgeoning interest in matters paranormal. Séances, psychic phenomena, telepathy, thought transference and clairvoyance were subjects of heated discussion. Masonic, Rosicrucian and Cabalistic groups of generations earlier flourished.
“What is important in meditation is the quality of the mind and the heart. It is not what you achieve, or what you say you attain, but rather the quality of a mind that is innocent and vulnerable. Through negation there is the positive state. Merely to gather, or to live in, experience, denies the purity of meditation.”
J. Krishnamurti
The industrial revolution in full swing
Ulysses Grant president of the U.S.
Carl Jung and Albert Schweitzer born
Theosophical Society founded in
New York by Blavatsky and Olcott
Bizet composes Carmen
Mary Baker Eddy writes
Science and Health with
Key to the Scriptures
Bhagavad Gita translated
into English
In the mid to late 19th century there was burgeoning interest in matters paranormal. Séances, psychic phenomena, telepathy, thought transference and clairvoyance were subjects of heated discussion. Masonic, Rosicrucian and Cabalistic groups of generations earlier flourished.
Potato Famine causes Irish immigration to U.S.
Custer’s last stand, at Little Bighorn
Serbia at war with Turkey
Wagner’s “The Ring of the Nibelungen”
for the first time at Bayreuth
Korea becomes independent
Into this ambiance the Russian Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, H.P.B. as she was called, found her way to New York where she became the first Russian-born woman to become a U.S. citizen.
Queen Victoria becomes
Empress of India
Edison invents phonograph
Wimbledon: First All England
Lawn Tennis Championship
Besant and Bradlaugh prosecuted
for publishing book on
contraception by Knowlton
Blavatsky writes Isis Unveiled
Dancer Isadora Duncan born
Born in Ekaterinoslav in 1831 and of noble heritage of the Dolgorukov and von Hahn families, she married, at age 17, General Nikifor Blavatsky. Shortly thereafter she left him to travel alone through Russia, Europe and the East in pursuit of arcane knowledge and the esoteric brotherhood of Hidden Masters. She was at once exotic and notorious, not the preferred image of the 19th century woman.
Her massive volumes Isis Unveiled in 1877 and The Secret Doctrine in 1888 attracted many artists and intellectuals to the Society, including poet W. B. Yeats, artist Kandinsky, composer Scriabin and George Bernard Shaw.
Her meeting with Henry Steel Olcott seemed fated. He served in the American Civil War and been part of a three man investigatory body looking into the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. As they strolled the grounds of the Eddy farmhouse in Chittenden, Vermont, she with ever present cigarette, he with his pipe, they formed a lasting friendship. Together they examined the unusual events taking place in the farmhouse. Sightings of ‘spooks and ghosts’ were creating a stir in the American press.
Alexander Graham Bell
invents telephone
Greece declares war on Turkey
Salvation Army founded
Gilbert and Sullivan: “H.M.S. Pinafore”
Stalin and Trotsky born
Blavatsky and Olcott leave for India
Questioner: You have been leading a crusade against blind belief, superstition and organized religion. Would I be wrong if I say that in spite of your verbal denunciation of the Theosophical tenets, you are fulfilling the central fact in Theosophy? You are preaching real Theosophy. There is no real contradiction between your position and the position of the Theosophical Society whose great President first introduced you to the world.
Krishnamurti: …in discussing the Theosophical Society – of course, you understand, I am not concerned with it, I am out of it completely. You want to know if what I am saying, teaching, and the central fact of Theosophy and the Theosophical Society, are the same. I say obviously they are not. You would like to patch it up and say we have produced you and therefore you are a part of us, as a baby is part of the father and mother. That is a very convenient argument, but actually the boy is entirely different from the father when he grows a little older.
Surely, Sir, when you are becoming more and more, spiritually climbing the ladder, you are denying truth, are you not? Truth is not at the top of the ladder; truth is where you are, in what you are doing, thinking, feeling, when you kiss and hug, when you exploit – you must see the truth of all that, not a truth at the end of innumerable cycles of life. To think that you may be a Buddha some day is but another self-projected aggrandizement. It is immature thinking, unworthy of people who are alive, deeply thoughtful, affectionate. If you think that you will be something in the future, you are not it now. What matters is now, not tomorrow. If you are not brotherly now, you will never be brotherly tomorrow, because tomorrow is also the now.
Krishnamurti – Talk 3, Rajghat, 06 February 1949
British/Zulu War
Besant studies for
science degree
Blavatsky and Olcott reorganize
Theosophical Society in India
Albert Einstein is born
Prehistoric cave paintings found
in Ailtamira, Spain
The Theosophical Society
France annexes Tahiti
H.S. Olcott to Ceylon, aids
Buddhists against missionaries
Rodin: “The Thinker”
Dostoevsky: The Brothers
Karamazov
Art Nouveau movement
begins, 1880-1890
From that initial meeting and their shared interest in the occult forming a strong bond, they went on to found the Theosophical Society in New York, 1875. Its principles were:
1. To seek truth in the ancient religions of the East
2. To investigate the unexplained laws of nature
3. To promote the brotherhood of man without regard to race, creed, sex or caste.
Picasso born in Malaga, Spain
Billy the Kid shot
First Pogrom against Russian Jews
James A. Garfield, 20th U.S.
president, assassinated
Kemal Ataturk born
Flogging abolished in
British army and navy
So attractive were these ideals that by 1881 the Society had become a worldwide institution with over 100,000 enthusiastic members.
Edison electrifies lower Manhattan
The French seize Hanoi, Vietnam
Charles Darwin dies
Major Russian Jewish
immigration to U.S.
80,000 Scandinavians
immigrate to U.S.
First modern Olympic games, Paris
Married women in Britain allowed
to own property
Karl Marx and Richard Wagner die
Mussolini born
Nietzsche: Also Sprach Zarathustra
Leadbeater joins Theosophical Society
Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler
separately build automobiles
Gaudi: Church of the Holy
Family, Barcelona
You have come together as a Society, and you ask me if you and I meet. I say we do not. You can make us ‘meet,’ you can twist anything to suit your convenience. You can pretend that white is black; but a mind that is not straight, that is incapable of direct perception of things as they are, merely thinks in terms of vested interest, whether in belief, in property, or in so-called spiritual status…
If you say your Society is not based on belief at all, inwardly or outwardly, then I would say that from your outward as well as your inward actions you are a factor of separation, not of unity. You have your secret rituals, secret teachings, secret Masters, all indicating separation. It is the very function of an organized society to be separate in that sense.
So, I am afraid that when you go very deeply into the matter, you, the Theosophical Society, and I, do not meet. You might like to make us meet, but that is quite a different matter – which does not mean you must leave yours and come over to this camp. There is no ‘this camp’, there are no sides to truth. Truth is Truth, one, alone; it has no sides, no paths; all paths do not lead to Truth. There is no path to Truth, it must come to you.
Krishnamurti – Talk 3, Rajghat, 06 February 1949
Fabian Society founded in London
Susan B. Anthony petitions
for suffrage
C.W. Leadbeater meets
Blavatsky and travels with her to Adyar, India
Sean O’Casey, Irish author, born
