Theos-Talk Archives (September 1998 Message tt00190)

Nicholas quoted:

Para found further on (II, 641) added below.

> No true theosophist, from the most ignorant up to the most learned,
> ought to claim infallibility for anything he may say or write upon
> occult matters.  The chief point is to admit that, in many a way,
> in the classification of either cosmic or human principles, in
> addition to mistakes in the order of evolution, and especially on
> metaphysical questions, those of us who pretend to teach others
> more ignorant than ourselves -- are all liable to err.  Thus
> mistakes have been made in "Isis Unveiled," in "Esoteric
> Buddhism"... and more than one mistake is likely to be found in the
> present work.  This cannot be helped.  For a large or even a small
> work on such abstruse subjects to be entirely exempt from error and
> blunder, it would have to be written from its first to its last
> page by a great adept, if not by an Avatar.  Then only should we
> say, "This is verily a work without sin or blemish in it!"  But, so
> long as the artist is imperfect, how can his work be perfect?
> "Endless is the search for truth!"  Let us love it and aspire to it
> for its own sake, and not for the glory or benefit a minute portion
> of its revelation may confer on us.  For who of us can presume to
> have the *whole* truth at his fingers' ends, even upon on minor
> teaching of Occultism?
>
> SD II 640

II, 641

"As to the charge that our School has not adopted the Seven-fold
classification of the Brahmins, but has confused it, it is quite unjust.  To
begin with, the "School" is one thing, its exponents (*to Europeans*) quite
another.  The latter have first to learn the A B C of practical Eastern
Occultism, before they can be made to understand correctly the tremendously
abtruse classification based on the seven distinct states of *Pragna*
(consciousness); and, above all, to realize thoroughly *what Pragna is*, in
the Eastern metaphysics.  To give a Western student that classification is
to try to make him suppose that he can account for the origin of
consciousness, by accounting for the process by which a certain knowledge,
through *only one of the states* of that consciousness, came to him; in
other words, it is to make him account for something he knows on *this*
plane, by something he knows nothing about on the other planes; *i.e.*, to
lead him from the spiritual and the psychological, direct to the
ontological.  This is why the primary, old, classification was adopted by
the Theosophists, of which classifications there are many".