FROM MR. A. P. SINNETT: “OCCULTISTS MAY NOT TELL FIBS.”
Sir,—The circular bearing this title—referred to in your leading columns yesterday—was issued last July, and directly affects some questions you have lately been discussing. Under the circumstances, I hope you will kindly consent to give it fuller publicity. It was addressed to students of Occultism, and ran as follows:—
The inevitable mystery which surrounds Occultism and the Occultist has given rise in the minds of many to a strange confusion between the duty of silence and the error of untruthfulness. There are many things that the Occultist may not divulge; but equally binding is the law that he may never speak untruth. And this obligation to Truth is not confined to speech; he may never think untruth, nor act untruth. A spurious Occultism dallies with truth and falsehood, and argues that deception on the illusory physical plane is consistent with purity on the loftier planes on which the Occultist has his true life; it speaks contemptuously of “mere worldly morality”—a contempt that might be justified if it raised a higher standard, but which is out of place when the phrase is used to condone acts which the “mere worldly morality” would disdain to practise. The doctrine that the end justifies the means has proved in the past fruitful of all evil; no means that are impure can bring about an end that is good, else were the Good Law a dream and Karma a mere delusion. From these errors flows an influence mischievous to the whole Theosophical Society, undermining the stern and rigid morality necessary as a foundation for Occultism of the Right Hand Path.
Finding that this false view of Occultism is spreading in the Theosophical Society, we desire to place an record our profound aversion to it, and our conviction that morality of the loftiest type must be striven after by every one who would tread in safety the difficult ways of the Occult World. Only by rigid truthfulness in thought, speech, and act on the planes on which works our waking consciousness, can the student hope to evolve the intuiton which unerringly discerns between the true and the false in the supersensuous worlds, which recognises truth at sight and so preserves him from fatal risks in those at first confusing regions. To cloud the delicate sense of truth here is to keep it blind there; hence every teacher of Occultism has laid stress on truthfulness as the most necessary equipment of the would-be disciple. To quote a weighty utterance of a wise Indian disciple:—
“Next in importance, or perhaps equal in value, to Devotion is Truth. It is simply impossible to over-estimate the efficacy of Truth in all its phases