During this period Findlay joined the Theosophical Society, which had been founded by Madame H. P. Blavatsky in 1875, and which Findlay later described as melding the philosophies of Hinduism, Buddhism and strains of Gnosticism, Orphism, Kabbalism, Sufism, with an interesting, if definite, charlatanism. Findlay notes that the society was later plagued by scandals and was ultimately repuidiated by J. Krishnamurti, the man the movement had heralded as the “World Teacher.”
Findlay’s early involvement in theosophy, while perhaps a source of embarrassment for an academic philosopher, nonetheless made its mark upon him, as it led him to embrace a perennial philosophy, which at various times has appeared under the guise of Platonism, Neoplatonism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and the Kabbalah, a philosophy which entails that the world of appearances is simply the outermost layer of being that has its center in an undifferentiated and infinite ground, and for which Findlay himself much later sought to provide a rational foundation in his Gifford Lectures at St. Andrews in 1964-5 and 1965-6, subsequently published as The Discipline of the Cave and The Transcendence of the Cave.
Findlay spent five years in the Theosophical movement, during which time he engaged in the practice of Rajat Yoga, immersed himself in Hindu and Buddhist writings, and having an unusual affinity for languages (he had excelled in Dutch, German, French, Greek and Latin) even taught himself sufficient Sanskrit to read parts of the Bhagavad-Gita in the original.
Findlay attributed to the mental discipline of his early Yoga practice a refinement in his powers of introspection that he was later to use to advantage in countering what he regarded to be the amateur, pseudo-introspection of philosophers like Wittgenstein and Gilbert Ryle. While Findlay later rejected some of the more “mythical” aspects of his yogic/mystical experiences in favor of his own brand of “rational mysticism,” (and even had a period during which he believed he had constructed a valid disproof of the existence of God) he later wrote that “a general openness to what I shall call the Uncreated Light has never left me” (My Life, p. 12).
Findlay’s experiences with, and his ultimate rejection of the specificities of the theosophical movement (e.g. the godlike “elderly brethren” said to be in communication with the leaders of the movement from their abode high in Tibet) led him to reject all particular religious doctrines. He wrote, “I came to feel that there would be something essentially wrong and even irreligious in venerating anything, however exalted, that was...tainted with specificity and contingency” (My Life, p. 12).