Quest Magazine

Printed in the  Winter 2025  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard, "The Blavatsky Letters"   Quest 113:1, pg 17-24

 

In early 2025, the Theosophical Publishing House, completing a longstanding project, is publishing the second volume of The Letters of H.P. Blavatsky, edited by the late Jon Knebel with the assistance of Sharron Dorr, Janet Kerschner, and Nancy Grace. This volume includes letters from the years 1879 to 1883

 Some brief excerpts of these letters appear below.

They have been chosen with a view to clarifying certain misconceptions about the early Theosophical Society that have been propagated by some academic scholars.

One issue has to do with the relation of HPB to the spiritualist movement of her day. She, along with her associate Henry Steel Olcott, had been intimately involved with it, agreeing that spiritualist mediums were actually communicating with the dead. But at around the time of the Society’s founding in 1875, the Mahatmas ordered them to execute what HPB below calls a “volte-face”: an about-face. She and Olcott repudiated the idea entirely, now contending that the supposed spirits of the dead were nothing more than the discarded astral shells of the deceased (which she sometimes called “spooks”). Both she and Olcott were ordered by their Mahatmas to preach against the spiritualist doctrine, leading the movement to denounce her as a traitor.

As the letters below reveal, HPB was initially attached to spiritualism, based largely on her childhood experiences with an allegedly dead woman known below as Mrs. T—— L——. But in the end she learned that this lady was still alive. Blavatsky was forced to conclude that her contacts had been merely readings of some impressions gleaned from the astral light, along with cryptomnesia (forgotten memory).

Another issue: some scholars have contended that there were in effect two Theosophical Societies in the first decade of the organization’s existence, the first dating from the organization’s founding in 1875 to the departure of HPB and Henry Steel Olcott for India in 1878‒79. Supposedly “Western” in origin, this first TS taught the tripartite division of the human entity into three parts (spirit, soul, and body). After HPB and Olcott went to India, they supposedly came under Eastern influences, now expounding a sevenfold division of the human entity and promoting a supposedly second and different Theosophy, more Eastern in influence.

Letter 294 below indicates the truth: the supposedly Western tripartite division is not contradicted by the later seven-part division: the second schema is merely a subdivision of the first. Other scholarly claims about “two Theosophical Societies” can also be refuted, although they cannot be addressed here.

These comments suggest how a movement such as the TS can be misunderstood and misrepresented by those outside it.

Richard Smoley

 

Letter 191

August 3, 1880

Bombay

[To C. Augustin Bilière]

I do not know if I am a “great soul,” but I know that I would much prefer not to have any at all and to see it obliterated together with the body. This old carcass has plagued me for a long time and my “great soul” has only caused ingratitude and calumnies; hence, it is only an “idiot.” But—this is my personal opinion, if you please, and the Theosophical Society has nothing to do with it. I am a Buddhist to my finger tips, and I have said so for years. I believe in the soul, but a material soul which finally disappears, as should be the case with every honest soul and with every particle of matter, neither the form nor the duration of which can consequently be either infinite or immortal.

I believe in the eternity of matter as a principle, never as form, which is always temporary. I do not believe in the personal immortality of the soul or of the Ego; but I believe in the immortality and the eternity of the Universal Spirit or of the impersonal and Unique Ego; and it is then that my poor lit­tle “great soul,” finally merged with and absorbed by the great All, will find its annihilation, its Nirvana, and where it will finally rest in Universal Noth­ingness from its miserable and stormy existence. The feverish activity will be submerged in Spiritual Inactivity, the poor little individual atom in the Uni­versal All; and then H.P. Blavatsky, from a small drop of muddy water, will have become a limitless Ocean, without beginning or end.

Such is my aspiration! I’ll never be content to end up by settling down as an individual soul, whether in Nirvana or in the traditional Paradise. It would be a pretty sight indeed—the souls of James, Peter, and Susie sprawling out in Eternity with golden toothpicks in their mouths and the Beings’ coats of arms adorning their door curtains. Very philosophical, that idea. My own ambition is finally to become the All, to be at last drawn to and absorbed in Nirvana as a drop of vapor is drawn to the Ocean; and there, losing my personal individuality, to replace it by the Impersonal individuality of the Universal Essence, which the Christians and other deists call “God,” and that I and my school (which is not the Theosophical school) call the Univer­sal Cause; cause which has neither intelligence, nor desire, nor will, because it is absolute Intelligence, Desire, and Will.

Letter 226

Bombay,

December 5, 1881

[To Prince A M. Dondukov-Korsakov]

I was 35 when I saw you for the last time . . . I stayed a few weeks at Odessa with my aunt Mme. De Witte, who is still there. While there, I received a letter from a Hindu whom I knew 28 years ago in London, in extraordinary circumstances, and who made me undertake my first journey to India in 1853. In England I saw him only twice and at our last interview he said to me:

“Your destiny lies in India, but later, in 28 or thirty years. Go there and see the country.” I went there—why, I do not know! I was as in a dream. I stayed there nearly two years, travelling about and receiving money each month—from whom I have no idea, and following faithfully the itinerary given to me. I received letters from this Hindu, but I did not see him a single time during those two years. When he wrote to me: “Return to Europe and do what you like but be always ready to return”—I took my passage on the Gwalior which was wrecked near the Cape, but I was saved with some twenty others. Why did this man exercise such an influence over me? I do not yet know the reason. But had he told me to throw myself into an abyss I would not have hesitated an instant. I was afraid of him without knowing why, for no man has ever been gentler or simpler. Should you want to know more about this man, then read when you have time From the Caves and Jungles of Hindustan in Moscow Chronicle, where I write under the pen name of “Radda-Bai.” Order them to send you the pamphlet edition. My Hindu appears therein under the name of “Thakur Gulab Singh.” You will see there what he has done, the extraordi­nary phenomena attributed to him, etc. . . . I am sure it will interest you. Now he has left India for ever and has settled in Tibet (where I can go when I like, though neither Pjrevalsky nor any Englishman will enter therein, I can assure you)—and from Tibet he corresponds with the English members of our Society, keeping them entirely under his mysterious domination . . .

In 1869 I left for Egypt and from there went again to India returning in 1872. Then, having received at Odessa, in 1873, a letter in which my mysterious Hindu told me to go to Paris, I went there in March 1873 (the 2nd I think). As soon as I arrived, I received another, telling me to embark for North America, which I did without pro­testing. From there, I had to go to California, then to Yokohama where, after 19 years of separation, I saw once more my Hindu whom I found settled in a little palace, or country house, about three or four miles from Yokohama. I stayed but a week, for he sent me back to New York, after giving me detailed instructions. As soon as I arrived, I set to work. To begin with he made me preach against Spiritualism, which raised against me the 12 million “Innocents” in the United States who believe in the return in flesh and bones of their mothers-in-law, dead and eaten by worms years ago, and of their premature offspring who had forgotten to be born, but who, once discarnate, grow and increase in stature up there (for the exact locality consult the Spiritualists’ geography). What I told them in my public lectures before 4 or 5,000 people, I could not tell you. However, while believing I was talking nonsense, it appears that . . . without knowing it, I gave them elo­quent addresses, which after two years led to the birth of the Theosophical Society. Founded by myself and Colonel Olcott, formerly a rabid Spiritualist, but since meeting me, a Buddhist and an Occultist in the manner of the Rose-Croix of the Middle Ages—as fanatical an anti-Spiritualist—the Society grew visibly. All the Spiritualists, disappointed in their materialized mothers-in-law—who had forgotten in the next world the names of their daughters; all the ex-bigots, protesting against Protestantism, Catholicism, Spiritualism and other “isms,” swallowed the bait of the new philosophy that fell from the sky and became members of our Society. At the end of a year, in 1875, it was 8 to 9 thousand members strong. Then, another letter forced me to give up my lectures (Colonel Olcott taking my place) and to start and finish a book of 1,400 closely printed pages, in two large volumes called Isis Unveiled. I will not speak of it, as there is not a paper that has not mentioned it, either to tear it into a thousand pieces, or to compare it to the greatest works of philosophers past, present and to come. I wrote it quite alone, without anyone beside me to help me, in English which I then hardly knew; but, as during my lectures, it seems I wrote classical English without a mistake, quoting in support of that which I was saying from known and unknown authors, from books of which only one solitary copy existed, either in the Vatican or in the Bodleian Library, to which I could not have had access, but which in the course of time would serve to verify what I had written and avenge me on my detractors, for every word I had written was found to be correct. This work was and still is a sensation. It has been translated into several languages—among them into Siamese and Hindu, and it is—the Bible of our Theosophists. Did I write it myself? No, it was my hand and my pen. For the rest I give it up, as I myself did not understand it in the least at the time, nor do I now. The fact is that 10,000 copies of the first edition at 36 shillings we sold the first month, from which in fact I got as profit only honour and not a penny, for believing it was mere idle talk that would not be worth a single edition, I sold it to an Editor-Pub­lisher for a song, as the saying goes, while he made over 100,000 dollars, it being in its 6th edition for the past 3 years. And there we are.

Letter 228

[December 1881]

[Probably to A.O. Hume]

For over six years, from the time I was eight or nine years old until I grew up to the age of fifteen, I had an old spirit (Mrs. T——L—— she called her­self), who came every night to write through me, in the presence of my father, aunts and many other people, residents of Tiflis and Saratoff. She gave a detailed account of her life, stated where she was born (at Revel, Baltic Prov­inces), how she married, and gave the history of all her children, including a long and thrilling romance about her eldest daughter, Z—— and the suicide of her son F——, who also came at times and indulged in long rhapsodies about his sufferings as a suicide.

The old lady mentioned that she saw God and the Virgin Mary, and a host of angels, two of which bodiless creatures she introduced to our family, to the great joy of the latter, and who promised (all this through my handwrit­ings) that they would watch over me, &c., &c., tout comme il faut [“everything just as it must be”].

She even described her own death, and gave the name and address of the Lutheran pastor who administered to her the last sacrament.

She gave a detailed account of a petition she had presented to the Emperor Nicholas, and wrote it out verbatim in her own handwriting through my child’s hand.

Well, this lasted, as I said, nearly six years—my writings—in her clear old-fashioned, peculiar handwriting and grammar, in German (a language I had never learnt to write and could not even speak well) and in Russian— accumulating in these six years to a heap of MSS that would have filled ten volumes.

In those days this was not called spiritualism, but possession. But as our family priest was interested in the phenomena, he usually came and sat during our evening I with holy water near him, and a goupillon (how do you call it in English?) [“aspergillum,” used to sprinkle holy water] and so we were all safe.

Meanwhile one of my uncles had gone to Revel, and had there ascertained that there had really been such an old lady, the rich Mrs. T——L——, who, in consequence of her son’s dissolute life, had been ruined and had gone away to some relations in Norway, where she had died. My uncle also heard that her son was said to have committed suicide at a small village on the Norway coast (all correct as given by “the Spirit”).

In short all that could be verified, every detail and circumstance, was veri­fied, and found to be in accordance with my, or rather “the Spirit’s,” account; her age, number and name of children, chronological details, in fact every­thing stated.

When my uncle returned to St. Petersburg he desired to ascertain, as the last and crucial test, whether a petition, such as I had written, had ever been sent to the Emperor. Owing to his friendship with influential people in the Ministère de l’Interieur, he obtained access to the Archives, and there, as he had the correct date and year of the petition, and even the number under which it had been filed, he soon found it, and comparing it with my version sent up to him by my aunt, he found the two to be facsimiles, even to a remark in pencil written by the late Emperor on the margin, which I had reproduced as exactly as any engraver or photographer could have done.

Well, was it the genuine spirit of Mrs. L—— who had guided my medium hand? Was it really the spirit of her son F—— who had produced through me in his handwriting all those posthumous lamentations and wailings and gushing expressions of repentance?

Of course, any spiritualist would feel certain of the fact. What better identi­fication, or proof of spirit identity; what better demonstration of the survival of man after death, and of his power to revisit earth and communicate with the living, could be hoped for or even conceived?

But it was nothing of the kind, and this experience of my own, which hundreds of persons in Russia can affirm—all my own relations to begin with—constitutes, as you will see, a most perfect answer to the spiritualists.

About one year after my uncle’s visit to St. Petersburg, and when the excite­ment following this perfect verification had barely subsided, D........, an officer who had served in my father’s regiment, came to Tiflis. He had known me as a child of hardly five years old, had played constantly with me, had shown me his family portraits, had allowed me to ransack his drawers, scatter his let­ters, &c., and, amongst other things, had often shown me a miniature upon ivory of an old lady in cap and white curls and green shawl, saying it was his old aunty, and teazing [sic] me, when I said she was old and ugly, by declaring that one day I should be just as old and ugly.

To go through the whole story would be tedious; to make matters short, let me say at once that D—— was Mrs. L——’s nephew—her sister’s son.

Well, he came to see us often (I was 14 then), and one day asked for us children to be allowed to visit him in the camp. We went with our Governess, and when there I saw upon his writing-table the old miniature of his aunt, my spirit! I had quite forgotten that I had ever seen it in my childhood. I only recognized her as the spirit who for nearly six years had almost nightly vis­ited me and written through me, and I almost fainted. “It is, it is the spirit,” I screamed; “it is Mrs. T——L——.”

“Of course, it is, my old aunt; but you don’t mean to say that you have remembered all about your old play thing all these years?” said D. . . . who knew nothing about my spirit-writing. “I mean to say I see and have seen your dead aunt, if she is your aunt, every night for years; she comes to write through me.” “Dead?” he laughed, “But she is not dead. I have only just received a let­ter from her from Norway,” and he then proceeded to give full details as to where she was living and all about her.

That same day D——was let into the secret by my aunts, and told of all that had transpired through my mediumship. Never was a man more astounded than was D——and never were people more taken aback than were my vener­able aunts, spiritualists, sans le savoir [“without realizing it”].

It then came out that not only was his aunt not dead, but that her son F........., the repentant suicide, l’esprit souffrant [“the suffering spirit”], had only attempted suicide, had been cured of his wound, and was at the time (and may be to this day), employed in a counting house in Berlin.

Well then, who or what was “the intelligence” writing through my hand, giving such accurate details, dictating correctly every word of her petition, &c., and yet romancing so readily about her death, his sufferings after death, &c., &c.? Clearly despite the full proofs of identity, not the spirits of the worthy Mrs. T—- L—-, or her scapegrace son F——,  since both these were still in the land of the living. “The evil one,” said my pious aunts; “the Devil of course,” bluntly said the Priest. Elementaries, some would suppose, but according to what —— has told me, it was all the work of my own mind. I was a del­icate child. I had hereditary tendencies to extra-normal exercise of mental faculties, though, of course, perfectly unconscious then of anything of the kind. Whilst I was playing with the miniature, the old lady’s letters and other things, my fifth principle (call it animal soul, physical intelligence, mind, or what you will,) was reading and seeing all about them in the astral light, just as does the mind of a clairvoyant when in sleep; what it so saw and read was faithfully recorded in my dormant memory, although, a mere babe as I was, I had no consciousness of this.

Years after, some chance circumstance, some trifling association of ideas, again put my mind in connection with these long forgotten, or rather I should say never hitherto consciously recognized pictures, and it began one day to reproduce them. Little by little the mind, following these pictures into the astral light, was dragged as it were into the current of Mrs. L . . .’s personal and individual associations and emanations, and then the mediumistic impulse given, there was nothing to arrest it, and I became a medium, not for the transmission of messages from the dead, not for the amusement of elemen­taries, but for the objective reproduction of what my own mind read and saw in the astral light.

It will be remembered that I was weak and sickly, and that I inherited capacities for such abnormal exercise of mind—capacities which subsequent training might develop, but which at that age would have been of no avail, had not feebleness of physique, a looseness of attachment, if I may so phrase it, between the matter and spirit, of which we are all composed, abnormally, for the time, developed them. As it was, as I grew up, and gained health and strength, my mind became as closely prisoned in my physical frame as that of any other person, and all these phenomena ceased.

How, while so accurate as to so many points, my mind should have led me into killing both mother and son, and producing such orthodox lam­entations by the latter over his wicked act of self-destruction, may be more difficult to explain.

But from the first all around me were impressed with the belief that the spirit possessing me must be that of a dead person, and from this probably my mind took the impression. Who the Lutheran Pastor was who had per­formed the last sad rite, I never knew—probably some name I had heard, or seen in some book, in connection with some deathbed scene, picked out of memory by the mind to fill a gap, in what it knew.

Of the son’s attempt at suicide I must have heard in some of the mentally read letters, or have come across it or mention of it in the astral light, and must have concluded that death had followed, and since, young though I was, I knew well how sinful suicide was deemed, it is not difficult to understand how the mind worked out the apparently inevitable corollary. Of course, in a devout house like ours, God, the Virgin Mary and Angels were sure to play a part, as these had been ground into my mind from my cradle.

Of all this perception and deception, however, I was utterly unconscious. The fifth principle worked as it listed; my sixth principle [buddhi] or spiri­tual soul or consciousness was still dormant, and therefore for me the seventh principle [atman] at that time may be said not to have existed.

But I am straying from my purpose, which simply was to show that the most perfect proofs of spirit identity, I mean apparent proofs, are utterly fallacious, and that spiritualists, who base their theories on these supposed proofs, are truly building their house upon the sand.

Letter 231

Bombay,

January 31, 1882

[Addressee unknown]

“Come to our side”—the spiritualists tell us—“confess your belief in departed Spirits, & half of your burden will fall off your shoulders. You will have 20 millions of Spirits to defend you, to suffer with you”—“Never”! we answer; for we do not believe in departed Souls coming back to earth to show how much more idiotic & dull they have become in a “better world”! The world in general & sceptics especially deny the existence of the Brotherhood of our 1st section. Let them deny & be happy. Yet, there are some dozen or more persons who have seen them not only at our headquarters but elsewhere, and a few Fellows of our Society, life-long residents in India (I do not mention Hindus, as those who know our Brothers may be reckoned by thousands) who knew the adepts years before the Theos. Society came to India. Hence it is not H.P.B. who “invented them.” And to wind up, some of our members have seen those recluses since Mr. Sinnett’s book appeared. If you require their names & addresses I will cheerfully furnish them; you will find them among the most trustworthy persons (Europeans) in India . . .

The Adepts of Tibet do not belong to the Nepâl Agnostics—if so you call them, though I fancied that their belief in Swabavât and its potentiali­ties & knowledge of its actual possibilities would hardly merit that name. Our Brothers are Spiritualists in the nobler sense of the word; they are Occult­ists or Lha-pa (believers in invisible beings) and teach a philosophy which approximates Vedantism but is superior to it and not personifying that Eter­nal Principal [sic] whose alternate conditions of activity & passivity are indicated in the successive condition & dispersion of the objective universe . . .

You would “pay a prince’s ransom” to believe in the miraculous status of Koot Hoomi. Give up any such idea; he has no miraculous or super-natu­ral being or powers. Our Brothers do not believe in “miracles” and discard with contempt the very thought of them being any thing super or outside of nature. He is but one of many men who have penetrated the Mysteries, by the ancient and invariable methods. If you had honoured us with your acquain­tance at New York you might have seen his portrait hanging on the wall, & even caught a glimpse of himself—for he walked past one of our windows one evening in full view of several visitors. This fact (without his name of course) was reported in the World, when one of whose reporters was there.

Letter 235

Bombay,

1 March 1882

[To Prince A.M. Dondukov-Korsakov]

I have nothing to hide. Between the Blavatsky of 1845–65 and the Blavatsky of the years 1865–1882 there is an unbridgeable gulf. If the latter seeks to put the extinguisher on the former, it is more for the sake of human honor than for her own personal one. Between the first and the last there is the Christ and all the celestial Angels and (with) the Holy Virgin, and after the last there is the Buddha with his Nirvana and the bitter and cold conception of the sad and ridiculous fiasco of the creation of the first man in the image of and likeness of God! The first should have been annihilated even before 1865, and that in the name of humanity capable of producing in the world such a mad curiosity. As for the last, she sacrifices herself, for the first one believed and prayed, thinking that by her prayers her sins would be forgiven, placing her hope in the non compos mentis [“not of sound mind”] of humanity as a whole, in the common madness which is the result of civilization and cultured society—and the second one believes only in the negation of her own personality in its human form, and that the end of all being Nirvana, Where neither prayer nor faith in an abstraction can help, since all depends on our Karma (personal merit or demerit) . . .

You may have heard—or maybe would not listen to the rumour—that my great grandfather on my mother’s side, Prince Paul Vasilyevitch Dolgorouki, had a strange library containing hundreds of books on alchemy, magic and other occult sciences. I had devoured these volumes before the age of 15. All the devilries of the Middle Ages had found refuge in my head and soon neither Paracelsus, Khunrath nor C. Agrippa would have had anything to teach me. All of them spoke of the “marriage of the red Virgin with the Hierophant,” and of that of the “astral mineral with the Sibyl,” of the com­bination of the feminine and masculine principles in certain alchemical and magical operations. Do you know why I married old Blavatsky? Because, whereas all the young men laughed at “magical” superstitions, he believed in them! He had so often talked to me about the sorcerers of Yerivan, of the mysterious sciences of the Kourds and the Persians, that I took him in order to use him as a pass-key to the latter. But—I never was his wife, I swear it by the very hour of my death. NEVER have I been “wife Blavatsky” although I lived for a year under his roof. Neither have I been anybody’s wife as evil tongues have pretended—for I was for about ten months in search of the “astral min­eral” that had to have the “red Virgin” pure and entire, but I did not find that mineral. What I wanted and searched for was the subtle magnetism that we exchange, the human “salt,” and father Blavatsky did not have it; and to find it and obtain it, I was ready to sacrifice myself, to dishonour myself! This did not suit the old man, hence quarrels, nearly battles, till I ran away from him and came to Tiflis from Yerivan—on horseback—where I went into hid­ing with my grandmother. I swore that I would commit suicide if forced to return to him. Ah! how sad they did not let me do as I wished! Married during the spring of 1848, in the month of February (or January) 1849 I was still in search of my “salt” and human “mineral” and—the “Virgin” was still there in the full sense of the word, whilst all the time people were tearing my repu­tation to pieces at Tiflis!

Letter 293

Adyar

June 1, 1883

[To D.A. Courmes]

You are able to picture to yourself what is the One Life. You have defined it marvelously well. It is precisely that—“God in the Universe”—where everything that is has always been and will eternally remain, not as a form, as the latter changes every moment, but as substance; the latter, one and indivisible, from the mineral atom to the highest Deva, resolves itself in Parabrahm. Spirit or superior pole, matter or opposite pole. The manifested and the unmanifested, the temporary and the Eternal. We do not recognize inorganic matter. Every atom has its divine spark and is a particle of spirit, or, so to say, of petrified divinity. The essence is one, but conditions change. Take for instance sound; strike or imagine to yourself the most melodious note self-existent in eter­nity; this note resounds forever as itself, immaculate and melodious; whether it finds itself imprisoned in a beautiful piano or violin, where conditions for it are favorable, or whether it is left free, surrounded by natural conditions, in a forest for instance, the result is a melody. But let it be caught in an old dilapidated instrument, and even under the most skillful fingers it would result in nothing but a cacophony, a terrible discord.

Well, you will understand me; I can hardly express myself in French. But I see that you understand truth perfectly and your intuition is admirable. You are a Buddhist!

Letter 294

Adyar, Madras. June 23

1883

[To Nikolai Petrovich Wagner]

Why did we do a “volte-face,” Colonel and I? Because we were told by those in whom we believe more than in ourselves—“either preach the truth—or farewell.” I know that Alexander Nikolayevich doesn’t believe in this by more than two thirds. But if he just thinks about it, and you too, what’s in it for us to go against the whole world? Against spiritualists, deists, believers and sceptics, against “the god and the devil,” as the proverb goes. Wouldn’t it be a thousand times easier to follow the same old track, just digging new, inconspicuous paths. What’s my profit, what’s my reward? That all Anglo-In­dian journals labelled me an adventurer, a liar, a Russian spy etc. etc., and spiritualist journals would do the same if they were not afraid of me. Some American ones actually did say all those things about me. Look how much they respected me in America at first, when they didn’t know about my real card. And from the day the Society was founded, everything just turned upside down. You weren’t following this story, you don’t know how much we suffered for the truth. Alexander Nikolayevich doesn’t believe either in Morya, or “Kuthumi—Mahatma.” He’s mistaken. They are both real people, many personally met them in India, especially the former. He came to Bom­bay, and Olcott saw him at least twenty times in his own body, not in an astral one. I’ve known him since 1853, and had I listened to him, I wouldn’t be so sorrowful now, I would be living just like all ordinary people. Do you know why I didn’t believe him? Because I strongly believed in an anthropomor­phic god and not in One Divine Essence, in the Holy Spirit (ours, not yours), like I do now. They call me an atheist? Well, I reply that I used to be much worse than an atheist, I was an idolatress until the age of 30, while I believed in things that everyone believes in. Now I believe—because I know and I’m not afraid of dying, I’m waiting for death as deliverance. And Olcott believes in the same thing as I do, because we’ve taken the same path. We didn’t “hop from one belief to another,” we just decided to remove the mask, in which we used to believe ourselves. Having learned the truth and the entire truth, without a shadow of a doubt, we decided to stop lying to people, as well as to our own conscience. It’s a sin to blame poor Olcott—especially him, who gave everything and lost everything for the truth—his motherland, his children, the respect of all his relatives and society, who view him as a crazy enthusiast that literally became poor and ascetic and lives on a bit of rice and milk. So I’m saying, it’s a sin to blame him without hearing out the truth. You can treat me as you like: I deserved it in my past. But now, the pure spirits that I believe in and that I know exist—see that I serve the truth and the truth only; and if I were to burn at the stake tomorrow—I am ready.

And now—perhaps—you should learn about what we believe in, even though we respect the faith of others—whatever they might believe in—and we leave it be. We don’t consider ourselves infallible, and we know that there are many, many things that neither we, nor our Himalayan adepts (as they realize themselves to be) can know, because none of them—even the highest planetary spirits or Archangels, as you would call them—can see beyond the shroud of our solar system—so we don’t dogmatize. The things that we know, we know for certain from our own experience, but we never impose this knowl­edge on others. What for? A man can only believe as much as his intellectual abilities allow him to, not more than that. If it were possible to analyze our psychic feelings as easily as our brain after death, there wouldn’t be two peo­ple believing in something in the same way. What’s truth for me can be a misconception for you and—vice versa. I don’t have any right to preach my own beliefs like mathematically proven axioms. Absolutely no right. That’s why I’m with you when you say that I can be wrong. I certainly can—but not in front of my own conscience and not when I speak about things that are as clear as day to me. But you keep asking questions, you’re asking to enlighten you. I refuse to do the latter, but I’m ready to tell you everything that I’m allowed to say in The Theosophist—I’m at your disposal.

We divide the human being into three main parts: a physical, a semi-ma­terial and a purely spiritual one—that means we believe in a divine, immortal Ego. This trinity is subdivided into seven elements (it’s too long to explain and to go into metaphysical detail). You’re a scientist and you should know that everything that’s objective in the world has three aspects; and everything that’s subjective—four (Pythagoras’ tetraktys). I give examples that you’re more familiar with, from Greek mysticism and philosophy, since you didn’t study either Buddhistic or Brahmanical esoterism. Instead of laughing, with­out understanding what it’s all about, like Mendeleev did, he should have tried to understand what we mean by the “absurdity” of the quadrature of the circle. It’s the greatest mystery, la solution de ce problème [“the solution to this problem”] and it’s the only thing in the mental world that’s capable of proving to anyone in the world that the spirit is immortal and that there is a god—and it’s not extra cosmic but it’s out side of ourselves—call it Christ, Krishna, Avalokiteswara, Logos—Word—whatever, it’s all one and the same thing. Has anyone ever seen god out side of themselves? Your science will never get to the great mystery: only the “quadrature of the circle” can make you face the “One Truth” in practice (of course, in the psychic sense). We divide the matter into seven—I don’t what you call it in Russian science, forgive my ignorance—seven states or conditions. You’ve always known three of them, the fourth one—“the radiant matter”—was discovered by Crookes. There are three left. Seek, and ye shall find. We believe that the synthesis of everything is One. It’s universal, ubiquitous, uncreated and eternal, with no beginning and no end—there are seven beams coming from it. Science confirms this in the spectrum—one white beam, and six and seven starting from it. Spirit and matter—same thing. The spirit belongs to the seventh class—beyond the Cosmic matter. There’s only manifested and unmanifested matter . . .

That’s why, believing in the spiritual (purely spiritual) Ego, in “son in father and father in son,” we name the “spirit” according to this one principle. The spiritual soul of the person is inseparable from him; but in order for the per­son’s personality, his terrestrial Self (i.e. yours—professor Wagner’s, or mine) to merge with the spiritual monad and transfer to the eternity—to the adobe of pure spirits—one has to develop in oneself, i.e. in one’s animal Self, with the mind and consciousness of one’s own personality—le moi conscient [“the conscious I”], the spiritual consciousness, not just the animal one. This spiritual soul, l’ame spirituelle [“the spiritual soul”] is like an endless thread, a forming beam during cycles or periods of a conscious life, passing from one personality (terrestrial) into another. Personalities, like pearls, one after another, string onto it (reincarnation). Upon the moment of death of the physical person, his body, his animal essence and his first ethereal sheath each return to its element. There are four principles left: 1. Animal soul. 2. Consciousness of your own personality, i.e. Peter’s or Ivan’s,—or Mind. 3. Spiritual soul and 4. Spirit—different from the Primeval Essence only in the fact that it’s manifested, while the Essence is an unmanifested spirit. Thou­sands of years pass between every new materialization and the previous one . . . This time can be either rewarding or punishing for the soul. We believe in Karma, i.e. in con­sequences of every action—a good or a bad one. Every single word and every single thought leave a trace in the eternity. There is only one law in nature, it is inviolable, and this law is God. Let’s assume that the animal Self gener­ated enough spiritual Karma in itself (for example, Love, an immortal and the most spiritual feeling). The spiritual soul, together with the life-giving spirit, is filled, replete with the essence of all personal feelings inherent in the animal Ego, and it separates from the terrestrial semi-ethereal sheath of the animal soul and the terrestrial material Ego, and departs to purely spir­itual regions . . .

Now, while the pure soul, the spiritual Ego, departed to spiritual regions (it’s not a place, it’s une condition, un état [“a condition, a state”]), there is only shell left in the world of forms—what the Greek called αïδης [“Hades”]. This shell is the sediment of the terrestrial Ego that outlives the body, but when it is left without the life-giving spirit, it cannot be called a “spirit.” These shad­ows are your materialized kikimory, vampires, sucking the juices that they need for this artificial life out of mediums, using the brain and the memory of both the medium and everyone else around. This “current of medium­ship”—that Mendeleev and Tindal have no idea about—the electricity of a living being influences the shell of the deceased person like a galvanic bat­tery influences a corpse. Neither the “spirit” or the medium is to blame. The former acts unconsciously, instinctively, and the latter is irresponsible.

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Printed in the  Winter 2025  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard, "Awakening to Your Purpose: An Interview with Steve Poos-Benson"   Quest 113:1, pg 12-16

by Richard Smoley 

In 2014, Quest Books published Sent to Soar: Fulfill Your Divine Potential for Yourself and for the World by Steve Poos-Benson, a Presbyterian pastor in Littleton, Colorado. It’s a guide to spiritual self-coaching based on the assumption that, as he writes, “a divine intention is imbedded within you and that you yourself have been sent into creation” and that “we are not sent alone. To fulfill our destiny, we need to learn how to collaborate with others.”

Poos-Benson also writes that everything in his book “is far more than techniques I have dreamt up. Sent to Soar is personal.”

Poos-Benson was a first responder to the shootings at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, which shocked the entire nation. About the aftermath he writes, “I have seen many things in my years as a pastor; none of them can compare to the relief of watching parents reuniting with their teenagers that day. However, I have seen nothing emptier than watching the numbers of parents dwindle down, those remaining filled with a sick sense of dread.”

This experience, along with forty years of work as a pastor, has shaped Poos-Benson’s outlook on life and his approach to one of the most important aspects of his work: personal coaching. In September 2024, I interviewed him via Zoom on these and other subjects.

Richard Smoley: A lot of your work has to do these days with spiritual coaching. I always think of a coach as a guy in a sweatshirt with a whistle around his neck, but I gather that’s not entirely correct in this context. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about what coaching means from your point of view.

Steve Poos-Benson: I don’t wear a sweatshirt or a whistle, although sometimes I feel I should, to try to motivate people to engage their life. I have this undying belief that each of us has a divine purpose that the Creator has given to us from the moment of our conception forward. Our major job in life is to realize what that potential is, what that purpose is, and to actualize. My coaching is based around helping people discover that divine potential, what that looks like, and how to bring it to fulfillment. Although coaching has many different aspects—mental, emotional, physical—it has a spiritual aspect too, as people come to terms with who they are as a spiritual person.

Smoley: I believe you’re right; I believe that everyone does have an inbuilt divine purpose. But many people have a great deal of trouble figuring out what this is, particularly in relation to career. Many people are in jobs that don’t seem to serve a higher purpose. They might be working in a minor and apparently insignificant role for a huge company. How do you work with people in situations like this?

Poos-Benson: I think sometimes we confuse a career—making money—with our sense of purpose. If you can have a career and make money with your purpose, that’s wonderful. But oftentimes that’s not possible. You need to have that job to pay the bills, and that job might not be very fulfilling. But if you can discover your sense of purpose, it brings an overall sense of meaning to your life and your job.

Ultimately your sense of purpose might not have anything to do with your career. I have a good friend: he’s retired now, but he was a career engineer, and he designed pipelines for many different projects. He was really good as an engineer, but it wasn’t his purpose: it didn’t fill his soul. But what did fill his soul was being a martial arts instructor. He had a studio, and he loved working with little kids, teaching them martial arts, developing their confidence, their physical skills, balance, and acumen. That is what he lived for. He worked as an engineer from eight to five, but then he’d go to his tae kwon do studio, and he worked with children. That’s what fed his soul. It allowed him to find more meaning when he was working as an engineer.

If people can make money when they fulfill their purpose, that’s fantastic. But if not, you need to find your purpose in other places in your life.

Smoley: That’s a very interesting case, because this engineer was doing something extraordinarily useful for society. These pipelines are incredibly important to a huge number of people, yet he didn’t find much meaning in building them. That strikes me as a little peculiar. He didn’t seem to recognize the value of what he was doing professionally.

Poos-Benson: I should probably rephrase my point. This man loves working with his team. He’s using his skills and ability. He’s a very accomplished engineer, so you could say he does find meaning in that. But what fills his soul is putting on his dobok, his martial arts uniform, and having a classroom full of kids. You could say that he’s fulfilling his purpose in both ways.

I’ve seen him in both roles. He has a big office, he has a huge staff, and he’s a consummate professional. But to see him with kids—it’s amazing how he lights up. He feels his purpose is ultimately being fulfilled by work with these children. When he retired, he went full-time into working with kids in martial arts.

In short, if you can find meaning in both roles, that’s awesome. But if you don’t find meaning in your work, I would encourage you to try to find a greater sense of purpose outside of it.

Smoley: Could you tell us a little bit about your book, Sent to Soar: Fulfill Your Divine Potential for Yourself and for the World? It discusses these questions.

Poos-Benson: My book is at the root of what I really believe about people discovering of their sense of purpose, coming from the Creator into the world. When you develop that sense of purpose, you really begin to soar: you find meaning and hope and joy and identity. In the book, I talk about the different things that you need to do to discover your passion and a sense of purpose.

Smoley: There seems to be a number of ways to look at this question. Up to this point, we’ve been talking about meaning and purpose in terms of work and social interaction. But there seems to be another sense of purpose that seems to be equally vital, and that is a spiritual connection to higher things, to the divine. Maybe you could talk about how you integrate this into your coaching approach as well.

Poos-Benson: I’m a Presbyterian pastor, so I deal a lot with people’s spirituality.

I also coach people to talk about their past. What is their spiritual experience with their past? Some people grew up going to a church or a synagogue or a mosque, and they moved away from it. Maybe they had a traumatic experience that made them leave, or maybe the observance became a dusty, empty shell.

We talk about that past, and we deal with any trauma that might be there, because people wrestle with a great deal of spiritual trauma. Then we start looking at new possibilities.

I also help people develop a well-rounded understanding of all the world religions and spiritualities and how they work together. I like to guide people into the different world religions and their wisdom literature. If they’re curious about Buddhism, I encourage them to read about Buddhism. Taoism? Read the Tao Te Ching. If they’re interested in Hinduism, read the Bhagavad Gita. I even guide some people into the pagan religions and Wicca and help them understand earth spirituality. I try to use these basic traditions as avenues for opening their eyes to a greater sense of the Creator moving in the cosmos and in their own lives as well.

Smoley: I wonder if you could give us a capsule summary of the congregation you serve. Who are they? What are their issues?

Poos-Benson: I’ve been a pastor at Columbine United Church in Littleton, Colorado, for forty years. The cool thing about this church is that it’s ecumenical. It’s Presbyterian, Methodist, and United Church of Christ. We’re different denominations working together. But we also have people from all different denominations working here. We even have people from different faiths who come to Columbine to participate in the life.

In our congregation, we are working for progressive theology. What does it mean to be a progressive Christian in our current society? A lot of people cringe when they hear the word Christian, because they think of the conservative, evangelical side of Christendom that seems to dominate our society right now, whereas those of us who are on the progressive end of the spectrum are trying to help Christianity into a whole new era.

Progressive Christianity is very huge, very expansive. It allows me to explore all the different world religions. Our church is trying to deal with how to be a progressive Christian. We deal with a lot of social issues. We are very open to the LGBTQ+ community. We have many members who are LGBTQ+. They are church leaders, they teach, they are presidents of our congregation. They’re an integral part of what we do. We were doing gay weddings way before the denominations recognized it. We try to be on the cutting edge of social, cultural, and spiritual issues.

Smoley: The mainstream media are materialistic in outlook. The only options they present are their own secular, materialistic, agnostic to atheistic worldview versus evangelical Christianity, which is often extremely narrow-minded. The media seem to ignore this stream of progressive Christianity, Judaism, and other religions. Would you agree that that’s a problem?

Poos-Benson: I think it’s a huge problem. At this point evangelical Christianity, and the politics that it’s engaged in, has defined what it means to be a Christian today. The media pays attention to it because it’s such a political presence in our society. When people think of  what it means to be a Christian, they think of evangelical Christianity. The same is true with Islam: when people hear the word Islam, they think of Islamic fundamentalists, whereas Islam is a religion of peace and grace and mercy. The same seems to be true of Judaism. The media focus on these cultural icons, ignoring the progressive sectors within each one of these religions, which are helping them evolve into a new day.

Smoley: Today many people identify as spiritual but not religious. Could you talk a little about this trend?

Poos-Benson: It’s a huge thing, and I think it goes to the failure of religions to be spiritually dynamic places to feed people’s souls. People have gotten so frustrated with the dusty narrow-mindedness of the world religions that they have begun to leave those religions behind and branch off into finding alternative spiritualities.

I encourage that. I say, if the religion doesn’t do something for you, branch out, find something new, find something different. I think people find the spiritual in many different ways: nature, science, art, even engineering and architecture.

I always tell people to go where your soul leads you. If your soul isn’t fed by the religions, go someplace else. If you find a sense of curiosity or joy through art, theater, movies, reading, or walking in nature, go where your soul leads you, because that will ultimately open your heart up to the presence of the Creator. If your soul doesn’t lead you to religion or religions, then go where it is leading. Follow your curiosity, and follow your passion.

Smoley: Of course I agree with you, but for the sake of the interview, let me pretend that I don’t. I might retort, “That’s all very well and good, but how can you call that Christianity?”

Poos-Benson: That’s the progressive end of Christendom. A lot of people within the evangelical community consider me a heretic: an agent of Satan, an agent of the Devil. I’ve been called that on many different occasions. People have told me I’m leading my congregation to hell.

I’ve laughed at that, because I think the best of Christianity is universal. I believe in universal salvation. I believe that through God’s love, through Christ, the entire world is saved; that pushes me even further on the progressive end of the Christian spectrum. But it is, I believe, the best of Christianity, and it’s just not me. A whole host of Christians believe this way, as well as others within all the different religions. Within each of the traditions there are progressive ends. When you look at them, you see that we all start bending together to find a common vision and a common sense of interrelationship with one another as children of the Creator.

Not too long ago, I read a powerful metaphor: there is one ocean, but many shores. The great ocean washes up upon all these different shores of the different world religions, as well as alternative spiritualities. The religion, the shore, is not the goal in and of itself; rather it is the ocean. The key is to be willing to swim into and across the ocean—and meeting other people who are swimming from their different shores into the ocean.

A lot of people might say, “You’re not a Christian.” I like to say, “No, I’m the best type of Christian, because I’m a universal Christian that embraces the entire world.”

Smoley: That’s very beautiful and noble. Let’s go back to another issue with evangelicalism. Many religions, particularly the conservative, evangelical, fundamentalist sides, have a bizarre obsession with the Devil. They seem to be looking for the Devil everywhere. Everything is the Devil—that starts to look like a mental disorder, whether it’s collective or individual. If I see everything as the Devil, I have to start asking myself, what’s wrong with me?

Poos-Benson: The evangelical sector of Christianity is obsessed with the idea that we are in a spiritual battle with the Devil, with the dark forces. This obsession goes back to apocalyptic theology at the end of the first century. People were so oppressed by the Roman Empire that they began looking for relief, for God to come screaming in through the clouds and save them from their oppression. They developed apocalyptic images of horses and wild things happening in the creation.

These apocalyptic images were locked in at the end of the first century. But we have taken those apocalyptic images and put them onto our society. When people think about the Devil and Satan, they don’t really think about the Bible; they think about Dante’s Inferno. Dante gave Christendom the basic images of Satan and hell. When a lot of people think about Satan today, it’s not really from the New Testament; it’s apocalypticism, and Dante’s Inferno.

I want to give people permission to say, “I don’t believe in the Devil.” I don’t believe in the Devil. I don’t believe in a Satanic being that is out there trying to destroy our lives. That’s not a part of my worldview. I think that a God of love and grace would not create a devil to destroy what God loves the most: human beings and the creation. I would say, focus on a graceful, joyful, fulfilling, loving God, and allow those who want to believe in Satan and their own apocalyptic images and Dante’s Inferno to do so.

Smoley: That is very apt. At the same time, we still have to face the problem of evil in the world. And you’ve seen this very graphically, vividly, and horribly, because you were a first responder to the Columbine shootings. Could you talk about your response to that, and what it tells you about evil?

Poos-Benson: Thank you for bringing that up. It goes way back to 1999, when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School and began shooting and killing people. I was kind of a first responder: my church is right down the road from the high school. How could two eighteen-year-old boys dream up such a horrific vision that they wanted to destroy their entire school?

It got me thinking about evil. In his book about the subject, People of the Lie, M. Scott Peck talks about the fact that there are two opposing forces in the world. There’s a force for life—LIVE—and there’s a counterforce in the world: EVIL, which is LIVE spelled backwards.

There’s a kind of continuum whereby people choose the way they are going to live their lives. They baby-step their way into one or the other. Some people baby-step their way into bringing goodness, love, and joy into the world. Others baby-step their way into evil. They do small but increasingly destructive things. Before they know it, they’re perpetrating horrific evil.

That has been a helpful image for me: either you can daily choose to do LIVE, or you can daily choose to do EVIL. This spectrum is tilted: it’s really easy to do evil. It is hard to do good. It is hard to choose to do the good, the just, the ethical, the moral, the joyful thing.

Smoley: I see it from the perspective of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.

 The Kabbalistic tree has two pillars on its sides. One is the pillar of mercy; the other is the pillar of severity. If either one is out of balance, some kind of evil arises. If there’s too much on the side of mercy, you have gluttony and greed; if there’s too much on the side of severity, you have cruelty. Goodness, as Aristotle said, is a mean between these two.

On another subject, I get the impression from you that your own congregation is fairly evenly divided politically between Republicans and Democrats. Could you say a little bit about how that tension plays out? Is there any evidence of it in the congregation? Or does everyone get along fine and keep their opinions to themselves?

Poos-Benson: For the most part, we get along with one another. We talk about our faith, we talk about our politics, but we do it with a great deal of respect. In our church, we try to create a healthy community, where people have their political views, and we honor and respect the differences. We talk about these issues, but we don’t proselytize.

Periodically someone will come and blurt out how much they hate a given political figure; they push their politics onto people and want everybody to believe as they believe. I don’t try to change someone’s mind. I try to engage in dialogue. Let the fringes be the fringes, and focus on dialogue and healthy community. You have to be willing to sit down with people who believe differently than you and engage in a dialogue to listen to what makes them tick. What are their worldviews? Why do they believe the way they believe?

 Smoley: One fact that seems to be relevant here is that, particularly with political issues, there’s a certain reactivity in the human mind. For some reason, people—and this includes me—are often easily triggered into reactivity when certain issues or individuals come up.

It would seem that self-understanding has to do with seeing and managing one’s own reactivity. Would you agree with that?

Poos-Benson: Oh, yeah. I think it goes back to what the media is doing. The media are looking for triggers to pull. People buy headlines, they buy into media personalities. People actually look for those triggers.

I think that people have to be very aware of their own buttons. When someone tries to push those buttons to get a reaction, we can say, “OK, that’s a button. I have strong opinions, but I’m not going to allow my button to be pushed. I’m going to engage us in a healthy way and listen and either choose to respond or not respond.”

Personally, I don’t pay attention to any news sources that are button pushers. I don’t think those people are healthy and helpful in any way, shape, or form. I look for places like the Theosophical Society, which is fostering healthy dialogue and healthy education. I think people should gravitate to places like this to soften their buttons, if you will, and learn how to engage in healthy community and healthy dialogue.

Smoley: There’s another aspect to this problem. It’s not just that people have their buttons pushed. The popularity of this kind of media suggests that people want to have their buttons pushed. Their entertainment, their excitement, comes from having their buttons pushed. It’s fun for them in a weird, sick way. How do you see that?

Poos-Benson: We have a culture of reactionism. Buttons are being pushed all over the place. I believe that a spiritual person will try to find a way to step back from allowing their buttons to be pushed.

Smoley: This reminds me of the days of the Gulf War in the early nineties. A friend of mine said, “I’m getting so upset by all this news about the war.” I said, “Why don’t you just stop watching it?” She said, “I never thought of that.”

Poos-Benson: I tell people in my congregation, as well as in my coaching career, to stay away from the trauma of watching the news. Watch it once, get your information, but stop watching the loop. We’re watching the loop of the Twin Towers coming down, the loop of kids being evacuated from schools. Quit watching those loops, because that’s just trauma over and over—button pushing. Don’t get hooked. Pay attention to those things that bring you joy in life—music, theater, art, dialogue, community. Find your community.

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VOLUME 113, NUMBER 1

CONTENTS

Awakening to Your Purpose: An Interview with Steve Poos-Benson
Richard Smoley

The Blavatsky Letters

A Brief Introduction to Theosophy
Douglas Keene

Sri Krishna Prem: The Forgotten Theosophist
Jon Chapple

On the Metaphysics of Aging
Janet Macae

Unbecoming
Judith Sugg

From the Editor's Desk
Richard Smoley

Members' Forum: The Franz Hartmann Collection
Erica Georgiades and Dos McDavid

Viewpoint: In Pursuit of the Golden Fleece
Douglas Keene

 

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Presence: The Art of Being at Home in Yourself
Tracy Cochran
Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala, 2024. 256 pp., paper, $18.95.

Longtime meditator, spiritual practitioner, and writer Tracy Cochran offers insights into mindfulness and self-discovery in Presence: The Art of Being at Home in Yourself, a warm and welcoming book that is rooted in the author’s own experiences and the many discoveries she has made along the way.

Cochran, the editorial director of the spiritual quarterly Parabola and founder of the Hudson River Sangha, presents mindfulness not as a practice to be penciled in on our busy schedules but as a way of existence—a path to be walked, embraced, and lived fully. Cochran urges readers to embark on an inner pilgrimage where the end result is a state of being present, aware, and deeply connected to the essence of life.

Cochran draws contrasts between the pilgrim seeking a spiritual quick fix or a Hollywood-style vision of enlightenment and the true mindfulness that can sneak up on the seeker in the least expected ways. With wise self-deprecation, she recounts a postcollege trip across the Midwest in a disturbingly rickety VW bus to sit at the feet of a Tibetan Buddhist lama in the Rocky Mountain foothills. It took the vehicle’s breakdown on a nondescript highway for Cochran to clear her head of these visions of what enlightenment “should” look like and allow herself to truly exist in the moment.

This contrast between the sacred and the profane recurs throughout the reflective and often humorous tales that account for much of the twenty chapters of Presence. In one anecdote, Cochran’s daughter, brought along on a retreat with Thich Nhat Hạnh, interrupts a silent meal to ask if the pumpkin on the table is a fruit or a vegetable. In another, that same daughter, told by Cochran that “what you put out into the world is what you get back,” gives away her bicycle and is disappointed that no material award appears in its place.

Cochran also introduces her parents as her spiritual instructors in Presence. The destruction of their home by a hurricane becomes a lesson in nonattachment and a sanguine Stoic understanding of our lack of control of many matters in our lives. Her father, whose struggles with his memories of World War II are explored with sensitivity, teaches her that only love is lasting.

But Presence is not simply a personal spiritual memoir. Cochran includes stories from the life of Siddhartha Gautama as well as quotes and insights from a wide range of teachers and writers including Annie Dillard, Meister Eckhart, Robert Pirsig, Rainer Maria Rilke, and the current Dalai Lama.

The reader of Presence: The Art of Being at Home in Yourself comes away with the feeling of having engaged in a wide-ranging and intimate conversation with a friend. Cochran reminds us that no matter where we are or what challenges we may face, we always have the power to come home to ourselves, to find solace in the present moment, and to live our lives with grace, authenticity, and joy.

Peter Orvetti

Peter Orvetti is a writer and former divinity student residing in Washington, D.C.

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