“To fully define Theosophy, we must consider it under all its aspects. The interior world has not been hidden from all by unpenetrable darkness. By that higher intuition acquired by Theosophia — or God-knowledge, which carries the mind from the world of form into that of formless spirit, man has been sometimes enabled in every age and every country to perceive things in the interior or invisible world.
Hence, the ‘Samadhi,’ or Dyan Yog Samadhi, of the Hindu ascetics; the ‘Daimonion-photi’ or spiritual illumination, of the Neo-Platonists; the ‘Sidereal confabulation of souls,’ of the Rosicrucians or Fire-philosophers; and, even the ecstatic trance of mystics and of the modern mesmerists and spiritualists are identical in nature, though various as to manifestation. The search after man’s divine ‘self,’ so often and so erroneously interpreted as individual communion with a personal God, was the object of every mystic, and belief in its possibility seems to have been coëval with the genesis of humanity — each people giving it another name.
Thus Plato and Plotino call ‘Noëtic work’ that which the Yogis and the Srotrya term Vidya. ‘By reflection, self-knowledge and intellectual discipline, the soul can be raised to the vision of eternal truth, goodness, and beauty — that is, to the Vision of God — this is the epopteia,’ said the Greeks. ‘To unite one’s soul to the Universal Soul,’ says Porphyry,‘requires but a perfectly pure mind. Through self-contemplation, perfect chastity, and purity of body, we may approach nearer to It, and receive, in that state, true knowledge and wonderful insight’.” (Helena Blavatsky. Collected Writings, Vol. II, p. 92)