Hyman bloom biography of abraham

Despite his upbringing within Orthodox Judaism, by adulthood Bloom had stopped attending regular services. He began to embark on his own quest to find spiritual truth, and started to explore and read about Hinduism, Buddhism, theosophy, astrology, and the occult. He attended meetings at the Order of the Portal to learn about occult subjects; visited Boston’s Vedanta center to study Hindu philosophy; and, in the summer of 1939, read Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, the Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy, which offered Bloom a framework for thinking through esotericism in a comparative manner. Importantly, Bloom was not a stringent adherent to any one of these singular traditions, preferring instead to synthesize aspects of them together. Theosophy, an occult spiritualist movement that drew inspiration from an eclectic mixture of religious and philosophical views, was particularly attractive to Bloom. He admired theosophy’s synthesizing tendencies and its goal of connecting the individual to a spiritual totality. After reading Blavatsky’s work, Bloom had his own mystical, life-changing experience one night in the fall of 1939 when he was alone in his studio, where he saw a vision of brilliant color and fel

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