While Madame Blavatsky had the advantage of physically knowing many very advanced 'inner' and outer masters, mostly from central Asia , but also from Egypt and even North America, Alice Bailey only met her teacher Kuthumi once, in the flesh. He came to her when she was fifteen. She was visiting her aunt in around 1895 in Scotland. As an evangelical Christian, it was unlike her not to go with her family to church that Sunday, but she decided to stay home. As she sat in the 'drawing room', the door suddenly opened and a very tall man (Kuthumi - he took his name from an ancient Vedic sage who he probably was).
According to Blavatsky, he had also been Pythagoras and Nagarjuna. He is also believed to have been the fourth of the ten Sikh gurus, guru Ramdas, wearing a European suit, but darker skin and a Sikh turban on his head (he had been born into a Kashmiri Sikh family in about 1830). He walked over to her (she was mortified), sat down and gave her a talk about the life work in service to humanity she was planned to do if she could get a handle on her personality, develop some character, etc. Then she could be of some use to 'the masters'. He then got up, said he would be in touch with her in the future inwardly, periodically, until it was time, and then gave her a powerful look before leaving. Of course, she hoped it was Jesus, but it wasn't until she was age thirty-five and had joined the Theosophical Society that she saw a portrait of him and realized it was the same man.
  
A few years later she was sitting outside, and she heard a strong tone sound in her head, and then a voice, crystal clear, began speaking to her. He said he was assigned to work with her dictating some books, if she would agree. She refused! She told him she was a single mom with two daughters, and had to work, and could not afford to loose her psychological grounding and balance by becoming involved with such a thing. He said 'wise people don't make snap decisions - think it over and in two weeks I will check in again'. She forgot about it, but two weeks later he contacted her again. She refused once more. He said, 'why don't you talk it over with Kuthumi', who she was now in inner contact with at that point in her life. She took it up with Kuthumi, who explained to her that the person contacting her was his senior student and a master in his own right, and that she had been trained for this work in recent lives, so it would be much appreciated if she would at least give it a try. She consented to test it out - and found that the material was very good, so she kept going. She ended up writing eighteen books with 'the Tibetan' (as he was nicknamed), over twelve thousand pages, and another six books of her own. Another nickname the masters had for 'the Tibetan' was 'the disinherited', as they were goofing on him for having been disinherited by his father when he became a renunciate. He was also a lama in the Gelugpa sect, and his 'outer' work was being the abbot of a monastery, he was known to thousands of Tibetans, while working mainly for the higher masters behind the scenes. Bailey was very clairvoyant, and the Tibetan would show her charts via her inner vision, which she would copy down. In her later years she was sometimes too tired to see these detailed charts clearly, and friends of hers testified that at these times they would see books materialize on her desk, then she would copy from them, and then they would disappear. Blavatsky had similar experiences which help dictate her writings.
  
Bailey suggested a composite theory among several conflicting theories (Anthroposophy, Rosicrucian, Theosophy) about the incarnation of the Christ, in which Jesus was both a reincarnating soul who had already achieved Self-realization and was being used by the Logos as an avatar to initiate Christianity. Some have said they have had confirmation of this view from a number of highly advanced inner masters that Jesus was both a jivanmukti soul who won liberation through reincarnation and also an avatar, co-incarnating the Logos. Daskalos believed he was a pure incarnation of the Logos without any human/reincarnating soul aspect. Rudolph Steiner held the view that Christ, a higher being, the solar logos, entered the surrendered body of the high initiate Jesus at the time of his baptism by John the Baptist, in order to purify the karmas of the Earth which were hindering its further evolution. Bailey believed that a third presence was involved, that Jesus was also a co-incarnation with the Bodhisattva Maitreya, who formed a kind of intermediary/step down from the Logos to the earthly masters. Some disagree with Bailey on the point of Maitreya, saying he was not involved directly. What all agree upon is that something profound for this planet happened through the incarnation of the Christ.
  
This early wave of transmission of eastern teachings was most powerfully stimulated by Blavatsky.
She brought a taste of a highly esoteric version of eastern spirituality that was still very inclusive of the many traditions in which she was in contact with. Then later people like Bailey, Annie Besant, Steiner and others took up the work. In most cases, they shifted the vision to a Christo-centric one, partially due to that being easier for many Westerners in the early-20th century to relate to, but also because many of these souls, although having trained extensively in the East in previous lives, also typically had lives in the west as well, in which they were often esoteric Christians like the Rosicrucians. That had built up pretty powerful thoughtforms in their subconscious so that when they incarnated in the West this time to do this work, ended up giving a spin to what was often an inner, more Eastern inspiration coming from their inner teachers. So this first wave was not only tainted with that (which was not fatal, but limited the transmittal of the non-dual aspect of the secret teachings - which Blavatsky in fact stated that she had not fully revealed), but also came during a time when little had even been translated yet from the East, and there were not many Eastern teachers coming to the West, or westerners going there either. So the context of these early transmissions was much less informed than that available today. Even so, the theosophical publishing companies reproduced many Asian texts, and introduced milllions to such teachings. The context is different now, so a better, more profound, transmission is possible, blending the best of the 'outer teachings', such as Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Sufi, Christian, with deeper, esoteric, emergent ideas and teachings.