Why this section exists.
The Theosophical Society has, from its first decade, been carried by people who could only have arrived where they did by way of a real personal question. Blavatsky in St. Petersburg, refusing the room she had been raised to. Olcott in New Jersey, looking for what would survive the Civil War he had just helped to win. Annie Besant in London, an atheist by hard reasoning before she was anything else. Krishnamurti, on the beach at Adyar, recognized by Leadbeater not because of who he had been told to be but because of the specific quality of his attention.
Each of them came to the work through their own life — not through a recruitment pamphlet, not through a polished about-us page, not through someone telling them this is what you are missing. The Society at its best has always been a meeting place for people whose questions had begun to outgrow whatever container they were carrying them in.
This section is for those questions. It is for the long, slow, autobiographical essay — the kind a person writes once they have noticed that something in their life keeps pointing in a particular direction and they want to know, in writing, what that direction actually is. We want it written with the precision of a serious essayist and the honesty of a private diary. We want the books named, the teachers named, the doubts named. We want the moment the question first showed up — sitting in an MRI unit, debugging a robot's failed grasp, holding a dying patient's hand, finishing a film — and the long working-out that followed.
What we do not want, and will refuse, is the conversion narrative. The structure that goes I was lost, then I read Blavatsky / met a teacher / went to a Gathering, and now I have arrived is exactly what every advertising department on earth knows how to write, and it lies about the actual texture of any real inner life. The path Blavatsky and her companions opened is not one that anybody arrives at the end of. We will be more interested in the essay where the writer says: here is what I thought I had figured out three years ago, and here is the question that has unmade it since.
We will also refuse the testimonial — the warm closing paragraph in which the writer thanks the Society and recommends it to others. The Society does not need recommending. If our writers do their work well, the recommendation is the essay itself.
What we are looking for, concretely
An essay between fifteen hundred and three thousand words. Written by a member or close fellow-traveller of YIT — meaning someone whose life is in regular contact with the inquiry, not someone who has read a book about it. First person. Specific. Naming particulars: which book, which teacher, which moment, which silence. Generous about doubts. Generous about the writers and traditions who got the writer there, whether or not those writers and traditions are Theosophical.
An essay can be about practice — what it is to sit in silence as a working surgeon, what it is to read the Bhagavad Gītā at twenty-three. It can be about a single book that broke something open. It can be about a person — a grandmother, a guru, a stranger on a train — whose life made the writer's question more honest. It can be about failing the inquiry: trying meditation, abandoning meditation, returning to it differently. We will publish the essays where the writer tells the truth about the work, including the parts the work has not yet given them.
The cadence
One essay a quarter would be a triumph. Twelve mediocre essays a year would not. We are not here to fill a publishing slot. The cadence is set by quality. If a quarter passes without a piece worth running, the quarter passes. The reader who comes back and finds nothing new will trust us more, not less, for the discipline.
If you want to write one
Send a short note — not a draft, not yet. Three or four sentences on the question you would write toward, the books or teachers it has crossed, the form the essay might take. Reach us at youngindiantheosophists@gmail.com. We respond when we can. If the question is the right one and the writer is willing to do the work, we will help with structure, edit hard, and publish slowly.
— The Editors, YIT