Theos-Talk Archives (January 1997 Message tt00014)

Forwarded from theos-l and theos-roots.

> Date: Wed, 29 Jan 97 13:19:30 -0800
> From: "Tim Maroney" <maroney@apple.com>
> Subject: Re: Western Style of the Mahatmas
>
> > In Indian ashrams salvation through knowledge would have sounded
> > equally ridiculous.
>
> While most of your points were well taken, I would have to argue
> with this one.  Jnana-Yoga is a well-established and longstanding
> limb of the yogic path, and it essentially consists of
> enlightenment through philosophy.
>
> For me, the main factor demonstrating the Western origin of the
> Theosophical teachings is the casual ease with which Western
> allusions are scattered through the works of supposedly Eastern
> writers.  While the (Indian or) Tibetan Koot Hoomi, for instance,
> has no difficulty dropping casual references to the Greek myth of
> Echo and St.  Paul's vision on the road, as well as to
> contemporary Western writers in great profusion and to European
> idioms everywhere, his references to actual Eastern words and
> doctrines are self-conscious, plodding, and relatively rare in
> comparison to the casual Western allusions; a very small set of
> ideas is presented over and over, and in a presentational mode
> rather than the conversational mode in which the Western ideas
> are often expressed.
>
> Here we have a writer who seems much more comfortable in one
> world than the other -- which world, then, should we think the
> writer came from?
>
> Or should we assume that Spencer's pamphlets on evolutionary
> philosophy were common reading in the ashrams and lamaseries of
> the time?
>
> Tim Maroney