Mrs Besant would have us believe that Theosophy is Brahmavidya. The Greek Theosophia and the Sanscrit Brahmavidya, she tells us in all good faith, are identical words and identical things. Even with Mrs Besant’s authority, I cannot accept this extraordinary identification. It can only have arisen either from her ignorance of Sanscrit or from that pervading confusion of thought and inability to perceive clear and trenchant distinctions which is the bane of Theosophical inquiry and Theosophical pronouncements.
Vidya may be represented, though not perfectly represented by sophia; but Brahman is not Theos and cannot be Theos, as even the veriest tyro in philosophy, one would think, ought to know. We all know what Brahmavidya is — the knowledge of the one both in itself and in its ultimate and fundamental relations to the world which appears in it whether as illusion or as manifestation, whether as Maya or as Lila. Does Theosophy answer to this description? Everyone knows that it does not and cannot.
The modern Theosophist tells us much about Mahatmas, Kamaloka; Devachan, people on Mars, people on the Moon, astral bodies, precipitated letters, Akashic records and a deal of other manners, of high value if true and of great interest whether true or not. But what on earth, I should like to know, has all this to do with Brahmavidya? One might just as well describe botany, zoology & entomology or for that matter, music or painting or the binomial theory or quadratic equations as Brahmavidya. In a sense they are so since everything is Brahman, — sarvam khalvidam Brahma. But language has its distinctions on which clear thinking depends, and we must insist on their being observed. All this matter of Theosophy is not Brahmavidya, but Devavidya. Devavidya is the true equivalent, so far as there can be an equivalent, of Theosophy.
I am aware that Theosophy speaks of the Logos or of several Logoi and the government of the world - not so much by any Logos as by the Mahatmas. Still, I say, that all this does not constitute Theosophy into Brahmavidya, but leaves it what it was, Devavidya. It is still not the knowledge of the One, not the knowledge that leads to salvation, but the knowledge of the Many, - of our bondage and not of our freedom, Avidya and not Vidya. I do not decry it for that reason, but it is necessary that it should be put in its right place and not blot out for us the diviner knowledge of our forefathers. Theosophy is or should be a wider and profounder Science, a knowledge that deals with other levels and movements of consciousness, planes if you like so to call them, phenomena depending on the activity of consciousness on those levels — for what is a world but the synthesis in Space and Time of a particular level of consciousness, - forming a field of consciousness with which material Science, the Science of this immediately visible world, cannot yet deal, and for the most part, not believing in it as fact, refuses to deal. Theosophy is, therefore, properly speaking, a high scientific enquiry. It is not or ought not to be a system of metaphysics or a new religion.
Excerpt from the book Essays Divine and Human by Sri Aurobindo