Theos-Talk Archives (April 2000 Message tt00021)

    My take on clairvoyance in general, if it even exists:

    There is an old Jewish story about a great healer who came to a town. The
local rabbi was unimpressed by the healer's reputation, however. The healer
declared that he would prove his healing powers. On the day of the presentation,
the healer had the usual line of sick and disabled people wishing for aid. The
first man who came up said, "I have been blind since birth. Can you make me see?"
The healer laid his hands on the blind man's eyes, prayed to God to heal the man,
and, sure enough, the man exclaimed, "I can see! I can see!" The rabbi, skeptical,
held up a red handkerchief, and asked the man, "If you can see, tell me what color
this handkerchief is." The man said, "It is red!" The audience was even more
impressed, but the rabbi was not. "If you were born blind," asked the rabbi, "then
how could you possibly know which color is which?"

    Based on the most reliable stories of clairvoyance and astral projection, it
seems clear that what is being sensed is not vision, but another sense being
interpreted as vision. It becomes sort of the opposite of Quixotism, what might be
termed Panzaism; instead of seeing giants while looking at windmills, when one
looks at giants, one sees windmills. What one sees is heavily flavored by one's
prejudices. When I read theosophical writings, I tend to look for two things,
first. They are, what are the prejudices (using the formal rather than colloquial
meaning of the word) of the author, and how hard does the author try to keep those
prejudices from influencing their work. To give one example, Blavatsky clearly has
an anti-Semitism that probably came from her upbringing and attitudes of the time.
It pops up every now and then in her work (I don't have the books in front of me,
but two examples I remember are in the early part of KEY TO THEOSOPHY and in her
fictional AN ENCHANTED LIFE. Off tangent: a LOT of her attitudes are far more
apparent in her fiction than in the bulk of her writings), but far more often she
makes statements which contradict the others.

    Leadbeater, on the other hand, tends to make little, if any effort to fight
his own prejudices in his writings (for example, anything that might contradict
his Christian beliefs he incorporates into them, which is what, in my opinion,
caused the whole Maitreya obsession in the first place, a Theosophical concept
that, with my own prejudice, I disincorporate from my beliefs). Yet, there are
many Theosophists who believe that what Leadbeater wrote was quite literally true.
One of my own prejudices is that modern science is taking us closer to Truth
(although there are definite limits in what can be discovered using modern
techniques, and even more limits in the human beings in the sciences), and if
there are multiple interpretations of Theosophical literature, one of which agrees
with modern scientific thought, then that is the interpretation one should use a a
working one until new information comes that contradicts it.

    Therefore, when it was discovered by DNA testing that Neanderthal man was not
an anscestor of modern humanity, but a failed cousin, a fact which greatly
increased the weight of the theory that humanity originally came out of Africa and
spread to the rest of the world from there, I felt that this fit in well with
Leadbeater's concept that humanity originated in one place, then crossed a desert
to spread into the rest of the world. That the desert was the Sahara rather than
the Gobi was, to me, an unimportant detail. Yet many old-time Theosophists treated
this idea as blasphemy.

    Bart Lidofsky

M K Ramadoss wrote:

> Dear Martin:
>
> At 08:05 AM 4/12/2000 -0700, you wrote:
> >Dear Ramadoss,
> >
> >Would you clarify the point brought up by someone (David) when he wrote: "He
> >>should have known Krishnamurti was not Master Maitreya.
> >
> >I never heard that. What I was told is the K. was going to be the "vehicle"
> >for the World Teacher. Something like Jesus and the Christ.
> >Please tell us if you know about it.  They are very different matter.
>
> You are right. He was supposed to be vehicle to be used by the World Teacher.
>
> >I have no doubt CWL was clairvoyant.
> >I challenge anyone to select one child in India to later become a great
> >philosopher to  millions; one whose books (from his talks, etc) and memories
> >has lifted their souls to a true understanding of the mental process and life
> >realities.
>
> Identifying K was a very remarkable find of CWL and all the credit goes to
> him.
>
> One time K was questioned about his views on CWL's clairvoyance.
>
> K's comment was that CWL was temporarily clairvoyant. Since he had known
> CWL  well, I put some credence on K's statement.
>
> Yes many got introduced to Theosophy due to CWL's works and the credit goes
> to him.
>
> mkr
>
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