num_pages: 194
description: a selection from the PREFACE:I VENTURE to think that this volume has acquired an importance that did not attach to it at first now that subsequent experience has enabled me to follow it up with a more elaborate philosophical treatise. In the later work I have endeavored to set forth the general outlines of that knowledge concerning the higher mysteries of Nature which the following pages describe as possessed by the Indian  Mahatmas or Adept Brothers. To that later work the reader whose attention may be arrested by the story told here must of course be referred ; but meanwhile the present introduction to the subject may be recommended to public notice now in a more confident tone than that which I was justified in taking up when it was first put forward. At that time the experiences I felt impelled to relate embodied no absolute promise of the systematic teaching accorded to me afterwards. Certainly those experiences in themselves appeared to me to claim telling. They seemed by far too remarkable to be left buried unfruitfully in the consciousness of the few persons concerned with them. It was true they elucidated no great principles of science; they merely suggested that for some of the abnormal phenomena which have arrested public attention during the last few years a more scientific explanation than those usually assigned might be possible. They afforded if not absolute proof at least an overwhelming assumption that living men might actually develop faculties qualified to operate freely on that superior plane of Nature beyond the reach of the physical senses which had been generally supposed accessible only to the spirits of the dead. But all was still shadowy and ill-defined. The story I had to tell revealed a magnificent possibility rather than a definite prospect. It would still perhaps have been an interesting story even if the curtain had gone down upon the situation as I left it when these pages were first put together but it would have been nothing then compared to what it has since become. Now the position in which the subject stands has altogether changed. The tentative communications addressed to me by my Mahatma correspondent in the first instance have paved the way for a long series of still more instructive and valuable letters. Assisted in other ways as well my comprehension of occult philosophy advanced so far during the two years following the first appearance of this volume that I was enabled to publish a more important statement defining the outlines of that teaching and exhibiting in a connected and intelligible shape the great esoteric theory of human evolution on this earth ( and of the cosmogony on which it depends) with which the Adepts deal. The opening which presented itself to me in 1880 proved in fact no passing adventure but the beginning of a new intellectual life. Attracted to it as I was at the time I was certainly far then from divining the magnitude of the results destined to flow from it. But now that the proportions of the revelation I have thus been happily instrumental in procuring for the service of my readers have become apparent I revert to the introductory episode of the undertaking with the certain assurance that I shall be engaging no one who will spare me his attention in any waste of time. I am bold enough to say this because the Mahatmas or great philosophical teachers of Asia into some relations with whom I was enabled to come under the circumstances described in the following narrative have now surrendered to the outer world so much of the spiritual science they have hitherto jealously guarded that the whole framework of their stupendous doctrine has grown intelligible. Fragments of esoteric truth- of that science of superphysical nature which the Adepts explore- have been thrown out into the world at large from time to time before now but in puzzling and unattractive disguises.
language: English
title: The Occult World
publisher: Theosophical Publishing Society, London