Slay the Slayer

The Voice teaches a graded inward withdrawal. The stages below follow the actual verses of Fragment I.

1. Deaden the senses. First withdraw from outer stimulation: “Before the Soul can hear, the image (man) has to become as deaf to roarings as to whispers, to cries of bellowing elephants as to the silvery buzzing of the golden fire-fly.” Sit still; let loud and faint, pleasant and unpleasant sense-impressions all fall equally out of grip.
2. Silence thought and turn the attention inward. “Silence thy thoughts, and fix thy whole attention on thy Master whom yet thou dost not see, but whom thou feelest.” The discursive mind is gathered to a single inner point. (“Master” in Theosophy is read both as the inner higher Self and as a teacher; the operative act is one-pointed inward attention.)
3. Slay the Slayer. Recognise that the chattering, object-making lower mind is itself the screen hiding the Real, and refuse to feed it: “The Mind is the great Slayer of the Real. Let the Disciple slay the Slayer.” This is sustained, gentle non-identification with thought — letting it subside rather than wrestling it.
4. Pass beyond the inner sounds. As the mind stills, Blavatsky describes a sequence of subtle inner “sounds” the meditator may notice — likened to the nightingale, a silver cymbal, an ocean-shell, a vina, a flute, a trumpet, distant thunder. They are described as signposts of deepening absorption, not goals — “when the six are slain and at the Master’s feet are laid, then is the pupil merged into the ONE.”
5. Merge into the Self. The end-point: “Now thy Self is lost in SELF, thyself unto THYSELF, merged in THAT SELF from whence thou first didst radiate.” The sense of a separate personal “I” dissolves into the universal Self. In practice this is returned to daily as a settled discipline: settle the body, release the senses, gather attention inward, let thought subside, rest in the silence beneath it. (Sourcing: all quoted lines are from The Voice of the Silence, Fragment I, 1889. The “inner sounds” are summarised; short phrases quoted for fidelity.)

The Voice of the Silence was written by Blavatsky in 1889 at Fontainebleau, from passages of an Eastern devotional text (“The Book of the Golden Precepts”) she said she had memorised during her training in the East.

It is her most devotional and practice-oriented work, dedicated “to the few,” and it weaves Mahayana Buddhist renunciation (“slay the Slayer” echoes the Buddha’s command to suppress the lower mind for the Higher Self) with Vedantic merging of self into Self.

It later drew commentaries from Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater.

Chasing the inner sounds/lights. Blavatsky treats these as passing signposts; making them the goal is the classic error and can tip into self-hypnotic phenomena-hunting.

• “Slaying” as violent suppression. It is stilling the lower mind, not lobotomising thought — force creates tension, not silence.
• Skipping the ethics. The Voice frames this inseparably from compassion and renunciation; pursued as a technique for personal powers it goes wrong by her own account.
• Expecting instant silence. The withdrawal is graded — senses first, then thought; rushing the inward turn just amplifies the chatter.