Our own Theosophical Society... is striving to help humanity It has no connection with any form of politics, and it is not trying to act directly in … - Charles Webster Leadbeater

The teacher... and credited with miraculous powers, undertook to prove... to the doubting monarch that the story was, at any rate, not impossible. He had... the sultan just to dip his head into the water and... and to his intense surprise found himself at once in a place entirely unknown to him — on a lonely shore, near the foot of a great mountain... time passed on; he began to get hungry... After wandering about for some time, he found some men at work felling trees in a wood, and applied to them for assistance. They... eventually took him with them to the town where they lived. Here he resided and worked for some years, gradually amassing money, and at length contrived to marry a rich wife... he spent many happy years... bringing up a family of no less than fourteen children... One day, walking by the sea-side, he... plunged into the sea for a bath; and as he raised his head and shook the water from his eyes, he was astounded to find himself standing among his old courtiers, with his teacher of long ago at his side, and a basin of water before him. It was long... before he could be brought to believe that all those years of incident and adventure had been nothing but one moment's dream, caused by the hypnotic suggestion of his teacher, and that really he had done nothing but dip his head quickly into the basin of water... Chapter 4

There are sacred rivers also — the Ganges, for example. The idea is that some great person of old has magnetised the source of the river with such powder that all the water that henceforth flows out from that source is in a true sense holy water, bearing with it his influence and his blessing. This is not an impossibility, though it would require either a great reserve of power in the beginning or some arrangement for a frequent repetition. The process is simple and comprehensible... what would be beyond the power of the ordinary man might possibly be quite easy to some one at a much higher level.

But if from a certain point of view we may think of Theosophy as a religion, we must note two great points of difference between it and what is ordinarily called religion in the West. First, it neither demands belief from its followers, nor does it even speak of belief in the sense in which that word is usually employed. The student of occult science either knows a thing or suspends his judgment about it; there is no place in his scheme for blind faith. Naturally, beginners in the study cannot yet know for themselves, so they are asked to read the results of the various observations and to deal with them as probable hypotheses--provisionally to accept and act upon them, until such time as they can prove them for themselves. Ch I