They inherited the same map. Then they argued over its borders.
Between 1888 and 1927 a handful of investigators described the structure of the human being and the worlds it moves through. They were not strangers – they read each other’s work, worked together, and built on what came before. They also disagreed, sometimes sharply. That argument is the interesting part, and it is why we teach the map as a route rather than a doctrine.
the chart
Start at the bottom. The chart is drawn as an ascent, and the ascent is the curriculum.
Dense, Liquid, Gaseous
The three states of matter anyone can point at. Bone and blood and breath. Every practice starts here, because it is the only part of the map you can verify without any special faculty – and a body running on four hours’ sleep will not detect anything subtler than its own exhaustion. This is The Dense.
The Four Ethers
Above gaseous, the older investigators described four further physical subdivisions they called ethers – still physical in their scheme, but not visible to ordinary sight. Together they make up what they called the etheric double: the energy body of the vessel you live in. The fourth and densest ether sits closest to the skin, and it is the layer most people mean when they say a body has a fuzzy edge, or that they felt heat in someone’s hands. This is The Etheric.
The Crossing
The small marker between the two brackets. Below it, everything
is happening in a body with an address. Above it, you have to learn to arrive deliberately and remember it afterwards. That crossing is a skill, and it is trainable.
Astral, First and Second
The lower astral, and where ordinary dreaming happens. Closest to waking life and most densely populated with your own material – which is why so much early dream content turns out to be about yesterday rather than anything grander. Recall is won here, and nothing above it works without it. This is The Threshold.
Astral, Third to Fifth
Where movement becomes possible and symbols stop behaving like a dictionary. This is where the astral body and astral travel material sits – understanding the plane, and understanding yourself inside it. The literature disagrees considerably about what is genuinely here and what is reflection. We teach the disagreement rather than resolving it for you. This is The Currents.
Astral, Sixth and Seventh
The upper astral, reaching toward the mental plane. The method carries you through all seven subplanes to prepare for that bridge. Practically, this is where the return trip matters most: experience at this level that never changes an ordinary Tuesday is experience that has not landed. This is The Bridge.
One caution. Drawn out, the chart looks settled – seven neat rows above, seven below. It was never that tidy. The people who made these maps disagreed about the number of subdivisions and about what the words meant. It is a working diagram, not a survey.
who drew it
Helena Blavatsky
1888 – laid the ground plan in The Secret Doctrine.
Besant & Leadbeater
1896-1902 – collaborators. Named the subdivisions we use.
A.E. Powell
1925-27 – compiled and cross-checked the above. Said so openly.
Alice Bailey
Later – came out of the same Theosophical current and extended it.
where they disagree
Where they disagree
It would be tidier to present this map as settled. It isn’t, and pretending otherwise would be the first dishonest thing on this page.
The people who drew these charts were working from claimed direct observation, and they contradicted each other – about how many subdivisions there are, what belongs in which, and in several cases what the words themselves mean. After Blavatsky died in 1891, the disagreement became public and occasionally bitter. Her followers coined the term Neo-Theosophy for what Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater taught afterwards, and they did not mean it kindly. Margaret Thomas published a book around 1924 setting the two accounts side by side, column against column, so readers could judge for themselves.
We think that argument is the most useful thing in the literature. A tradition where everyone agrees is a tradition nobody has tested. Here are five of the disagreements that touch directly on what we teach.
The most consequential disagreement, and the one almost no modern book flags. In Blavatsky’s scheme the astral body is the linga-sharira – an inert mould, a vehicle of life, which disperses shortly after the physical body dies. In the later Besant and Leadbeater usage the term slides toward kama-rupa, the desire body: an active instrument of cognition with appetites of its own that can take control of a person who loses their temper.
The Mahatma Letters complain explicitly about the two being confused, calling them as different as body and mind. So when a contemporary book tells you what your astral body does, it is worth asking which of these two things it means – because nearly every one of them inherited the confusion without noticing.
Where we land:
We use the term in the later sense – the active vehicle, the thing that has appetites and can be navigated – because that is what the modern literature means and what our own workshops describe. But we say so out loud rather than pretending the word has one settled meaning. In practice the naming matters less than you would think: what you can test is whether you detect a difference, whether it repeats, and whether you can produce it on purpose. A student who can do that has learned something real regardless of whose vocabulary they use for it.
Leadbeater taught that each night a person leaves the physical body, withdraws into the astral vehicle – which does not tire and therefore needs no rest – and is then free to move about the astral world. Nearly every astral projection book written since rests on that account, usually without attribution.
Blavatsky’s framework does not support that reading, because her linga-sharira is not the sort of thing that goes travelling. Which leaves a real question: when you are dreaming, is something of you moving, or is something being received? These are different claims with different tests.
Where we land:
The YANGU Method teaches conscious entry and deliberate navigation, so in practice we work from the assumption that there is somewhere to go and something that goes there. What we will not claim is that this settles the metaphysics. From the inside, travelling and receiving feel identical – that is precisely why the argument has lasted a century. What is testable is narrower and more useful: can you arrive on purpose, can you act once you are there, and can you bring back something you did not already know. We teach the protocol that produces those results and leave the larger question genuinely open.
Almost every chakra chart in circulation today – the colours, the petal counts, the placements – descends from Leadbeater’s The Chakras (1927). It is a specific, detailed, confident account, and it is the reason a system originating in Indian tantric literature reaches most Western readers looking the way it does.
Blavatsky, William Q. Judge and later G. de Purucker described things differently enough that people have written whole comparisons of the gaps. If you have only ever seen the Leadbeater version, you have seen one investigator’s report presented as consensus.
Where we land:
We teach the Leadbeater system, because it is the shared vocabulary and there is no point pretending otherwise when every book and diagram you will encounter uses it. But we introduce it as one investigator’s report rather than as anatomy. The workshop asks you to record what you actually perceive at each site before you are shown what you are supposed to perceive – and if your findings diverge from the chart, that is data, not error.
Besant and Leadbeater introduced “permanent atoms” – physical carriers of continuity, persisting from one life into the next. Blavatsky used the Buddhist skandhas and meant something considerably less mechanical by it.
The disagreement is about whether continuity is a thing you could in principle locate, or a pattern that reassembles. That distinction sounds academic until you try to test either version.
Where we land:
No position. This academy teaches practice, and nothing we ask you to do depends on resolving it. Continuity between lives is not testable by any protocol we can hand you, which puts it outside what we are willing to teach as knowledge. We find the question interesting and we are happy to discuss it on a call. We are not going to charge you for an answer to it.
This is the argument underneath all the others. Besant and Leadbeater used clairvoyance as a research method – in Occult Chemistry they examine atoms by it and publish the results as findings. G.R.S. Mead and others rejected the whole approach, holding that no amount of confident inner sight settles a question of fact.
It is a live argument and it is not decidable from the armchair. It is also the one disagreement on this list that the academy has to take a position on, because it determines what we can honestly claim to teach you.
Where we land:
Nothing here is asked to be taken on authority – not the map, not the people who drew it, and not us. You are given a protocol, a way to record what happens, and the expectation that you will write down results that contradict us as readily as results that confirm us. That is the only position consistent with the rest of this page.
how we use it
We teach it as a route, not a doctrine
You are not asked to believe any of this. The map tells you what to attempt next and in what order; whether it holds up is something you establish yourself, one variable at a time, written down. A framework you have tested is worth more than one you have accepted.
Sources and attribution
This page draws on the Theosophical literature of 1888–1927 – principally Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, the works of Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater, and A.E. Powell’s later compilations of both. Where these writers disagreed, we have tried to show the disagreement rather than pick a winner; Margaret Thomas’s Theosophy Versus Neo-Theosophy (c. 1924) sets many of those differences side by side and is worth reading directly.
All diagrams on this page are drawn originally. The five-stage structure is the academy’s own organization of this material and should not be attributed to any of the authors named. 4E’s Academy has no affiliation with any organization that publishes or has published these writers.
Nothing here is asked to be taken on authority, including the map itself.