Theos-Talk Archives (November 1998 Message tt00507)

Dallas, I would have been very surprised if you had ignored
my attack on Judge. However, neither the world nor its living
beings are deterministic (mechanical or predictable or even
fully understandable). I am sorry that this fact is so objectionable
to you (most physicists objected to it as well, until they
demonstrated it over and over again).


>Dear Jerry:
>
>Nature contains all and if you wish to call it deterministic,
>then so it is.  That, however does not prevent the expression of
>your free-willed opinion or of those of anyone else.
>

Of course you are welcome to your opinion. But is is hard for
me to see how modern Theosophy will ever hope to combine
its teachings with science when the most "proven" of scientific
facts (that there are basic and fundamental limits to our
knowledge) is rejected. In order to do so, we Theosophists
have to accept these limitations, call them ring-pass-nots,
and move on.


>Personally I do not see anything "deterministic" in this as it is
>the expression, logically of the universal law of progress that
>rules from Kalpa to Kalpa and beyond.

Your own words are so entirely contradictory here that I
can only surmise that you don't understand what determinism
means. The "ruling" of "universal" laws is relative and temporary
and non-linear and we as human beings will never be able to
fully understand them.


> Our experience is only the
>latest attempt to verify and add our observations to the unending
>record of
>

The idea that we can just keep adding on bits of knowledge
until we finally have complete and full knowledge is what is
called determinism, and modern science has absolutely
killed it as a valid theorm or hypothesis.  We are not
deterministic. Our observations influence what we observe.


>I think that all those subjects were known to the Adepts and to
>Judge and are not "new" because they have dawned on our
>scientific and philosophical world recently,
>

Well, this is your belief, and you are welcome to it. If you can
find some good quotes to back it up, I will read them. But you
won't, because everyone in those days thought that the
world was deterministic. Only mystics knew the truth and
not all Adepts were mystics, and I can't see from reading Judge
that he was one either. He writings all imply determinism
and linearity and the false idea that all we need is more data.
HPB on the other hand was a bit of a mystic, and she could
well have known.

>If you consider the vastness of time and the fact that Theosophy
>is a record of the study of thousands of Adepts and their
>disciples over millions of years, our recent discoveries in the
>past 125 years are only a small scratch on the immensity of time.
>

This is rather like an osctrich who prefers to hide in the sand
until unpleasant disturbances blow over. You are welcome to
that position, if you like. But 2+2 are four today and forever,
and so are the equations of relativity, quantum mechanics,
and chaos. Even the laws of Newton are still valid in a
relative sense. Newton has not been overturned, but rather
put into a bigger perpective. This may happen to modern
physics too, but it won't change the fundamental ideas.


Jerry S.