Notes

Based on the Ageless Wisdom teachings as they were first given to the (Western) world by Madame Blavatsky, this volume expounds the constitution of man as a threefold spiritual being: the monad expressing itself as the human soul, which in turn expresses itself on the physical plane as the threefold human personality with a mental, emotional and physical vehicle. The book discusses the evolution of human consciousness and how its different states may be recognized on the subtle levels of etheric matter by means of clairvoyance (i.e. etheric vision).
    Three diagrams and 22 illustrations are included as photochromogravure illustrations of various states of human consciousness. In a note the author espresses "his very hearty acknowledgments to two Theosophical colleagues who have prepared for him the illustrations of this book -- to Count Maurice Prozor, who drew and coloured them for him from the life, and to Miss Gertrude Spink, who spent many days in patiently copying them with the hair-brush, in order that they might be more successfully reproduced by the photographic process."

Five of the original paintings made for this book featured in the exhibition Art of the Invisible held at Bede Gallery, Jarrow, Tyne & Wear in 1977, organised by Vince Rea. While researching material for this exhibition Mr Rea uncovered thirty-seven original watercolours and sketches which John Varley painted for this book and for Leadbeater and Besant's Thought Forms (1905) at the Theosophical Society's archives in Adyar (India).
    Six of the paintings and a diagram from this book also feature in the catalogue for the exhibition The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985, held in 1986-87 in Los Angeles, New York, and The Hague, providing the historical context for the development of the abstract paintings by the likes of Kandinsky, Klee, Mondrian, Malevich et cetera.

With a full-colour frontispiece showing the 'Signification of the colours'.

Referenced in Benjamin Creme (1996), The Ageless Wisdom Teaching, p.61.

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