Charles Leadbeater

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all The Chakras (1927), Man Visible and Invisible (1902) and The Hidden Side of Things (1913).

A clairvoyant's map

Leadbeater writes as an observer. His books describe what he says trained clairvoyant sight shows, and he holds that such sight is a faculty latent in everyone, to be opened by purity of life and long practice and never by force. Of its kinds he counts the momentary flash, sight at a distance in space, sight into the past and the future, and the power to magnify the very small, which he says he used to look at atoms. His map of the planes, of the astral world and its people, and of the forms that thoughts take is taught in The planes and the cord; what follows is the rest of his teaching.

The aura

Man Visible and Invisible paints the aura in layers. Nearest the body is the health aura, a bluish white mist whose fine lines stand straight out from the skin in health and droop and tangle in sickness or fatigue. Through it and beyond it is the astral body, its colours changing with every feeling; beyond that the mental body, finer and steadier, coloured by the habits of thought; and around all the causal body, the vehicle of the lasting self, faint in most people and in the developed a great oval of light. The plates show the aura of the undeveloped person, the ordinary person and the developed, of the devotional type and the scientific, and of one person in anger, fear, devotion and love.

The wheels of force

The Chakras teaches that the centres are wheels, chakra being the Sanskrit for wheel: saucer-like vortices on the surface of the etheric double, where the divine life pours into the body. In the undeveloped they glow dully and turn slowly; in the developed they blaze and spin like little suns. He counts seven and gives each its number of spokes, the petals of the Indian books: four at the base of the spine, six at the spleen, ten at the navel, twelve at the heart, sixteen at the throat, ninety-six at the brow in two halves of forty-eight, and at the crown nine hundred and sixty, with twelve more at its heart.

His list differs from the Indian one in one place, and he says why. Where the Indian books set a centre near the organs of generation, he sets the spleen centre instead, holding that to arouse the lower one is fraught with danger. The spleen centre, he teaches, takes in the vitality that comes from the sun in tiny globules, breaks it into rays of seven colours and sends each to its part of the body. The Indian teaching of the centres is told in The seven centres.

The serpent fire, kundalini, sleeps at the base of the spine. Leadbeater warns that it is not to be roused before the character is purified and the right moment has come, and that to force it brings pain, illness and worse. He gives no method for rousing it, and the house gives none.

The hidden side of things

Everything about us acts on us unseen. The Hidden Side of Things teaches that every object takes on the magnetism of those who handle it and of the feelings felt near it, so that a jewel holds something of its wearers, an old house something of its history, a church the devotion of its worshippers and a shop the anxieties of its trade. Music builds forms of colour in the finer matter as it is played, and crowds, sounds and the places where people sleep, work and pray all have their influence.

From this comes a rule of daily life: to surround oneself with what is clean, beautiful and kindly made, to choose company, reading and amusement for what they leave behind, and to keep one's own thought clean, since each person sends out influence as surely as they receive it. The same law makes help possible. A thought of love sent to another, he holds, reaches them, and those who train themselves can serve in sleep as invisible helpers to the dying, the frightened and the newly dead.

The Masters and the path

The Masters and the Path sets out the inner government of the world as he describes it. At its head is the Lord of the World; beneath him stand the Buddha, the World Teacher, whom he names the Lord Maitreya, the Manu and the Mahachohan; and below them the Masters, Morya and Koot Hoomi among them, each working on one of seven rays of life. They are men who have finished human evolution and stay to help it forward.

The way to them runs through three stages of pupilship, as a pupil is first put on probation, then accepted, then made a son of the Master, one with his consciousness, and through five great initiations, of which the arhat's is the fourth and the adept's the fifth. The four qualifications for the path are those he taught with Besant: discrimination, desirelessness, good conduct and love.

The science of the sacraments

As a bishop of the Liberal Catholic Church he taught that the Mass, rightly said, builds a great form in the finer worlds over the altar, a structure raised by the words and acts of the rite and the devotion of the people, through which spiritual force pours out to bless them and the country round. He described each stage of it in The Science of the Sacraments, and held that the rite works by its own form through any validly ordained priest.