Alice Bailey - Autobiography

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Autobiography of Alice A. Bailey - Chapter IV

The original platform of the T.S. had been founded on the autonomy of the lodges within the various national sections but, at the time that Foster Bailey and I came into the work, this whole situation had been fundamentally changed. Those people were put into office in any lodge who were E.S. members and through them Mrs. Besant and the leaders in Adyar controlled every section and every lodge. Unless one accepted the dictum of the E.S. members in every lodge, one was in disgrace and it was almost impossible for the individual, therefore, to work in the Lodge. The sectional magazines and the international magazine, called "The Theosophist," were preoccupied with personality quarrels. Articles were given up to the attack or the defense of some individual. A strong phase of psychism was sweeping through the society due to the psychic pronouncements of Mr. Leadbeater and his extraordinary control over Mrs. Besant. The aftermath of the Leadbeater scandal was still causing much talk. Mrs. Besant's pronouncements about Krishnamurti were splitting the society wide open. Orders were going out from Adyar, based upon what were claimed to be orders to the Outer Head by one of the Masters, that every member of the Theosophical Society had to throw his interests into one or all of the three modes of work - the Co-Masonic Order, the Order of Service and an educational movement. If you did not do so you were regarded as being disloyal, inattentive to the requests of the Masters and a bad Theosophist.

Books were being published at Adyar by Mr. Leadbeater [171] that were psychic in their implications and impossible of verification, carrying a strong note of astralism. One of his major works, Man: Whence, How and Whither, was a book that proved to me the basic untrustworthiness of what he wrote. It is a book that outlines the future and the work of the Hierarchy of the future, and the curious and arresting thing to me was that the majority of the people slated to hold high office in the Hierarchy and in the future coming civilization were all Mr. Leadbeater's personal friends. I knew some of these people - worthy, kind, and mediocre, none of them intellectual giants and most of them completely unimportant. I had traveled so widely and had met so many people whom I knew to be more effective in world service, more intelligent in serving the Christ, and more truly exponents of brotherhood that my eyes were opened to the futility and uselessness of this kind of literature.

Owing to all these various causes many people were leaving the Theosophical Society in disgust and bewilderment. I have often wondered what would have been the fate of the T.S. if they had had the grit to stay in, if they had refused to be ousted, and if they had fought for the spiritual basis of the movement. But they did not and a great number of the worthwhile people got out, feeling frustrated and handicapped and unable to work. I, personally, never resigned from the society and it is only during the past few years that I have let my annual dues lapse. I am writing about this somewhat at length because it was this situation or background that made it necessary for changes to take place and out of these our work for the next twenty years took shape.

The disciples of all the Masters are everywhere in the world, working along the many different lines to bring humanity into the light and to materialize the kingdom of [172] God on earth, and the attitude of the Theosophical Society in regarding itself as the only channel and its refusal to recognize other groups and organizations as integral and equally important parts of the Theosophical Movement (not the Theosophical Society) in the world is largely responsible for its loss of prestige. It seems rather late now for the T.S., to mend its ways and to emerge from isolation and separateness and to form part of the great Theosophical Movement which is today sweeping the world. This movement is not only expressing itself through the various occult and esoteric bodies, but through the labor unions, through the plans for world unity and postwar rehabilitation, through the new vision in the political field, and through the recognition of the needs of humanity everywhere. The degeneration of the initial, beautiful impulse is heartbreaking to those of us who loved the principles and truths for which Theosophy originally stood.

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