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A United(?) Team

Aug 13, 2001 11:18 AM
by Gerald Schueler


<<<<John writes:
"I humbly suggest that our worldwide Theosophical
Movement should try and pull together a "United Team",
one that presents endless writings dealing with all
that affects humanity today, and on into the future,
in a new publication, whatever it may be named, and
even if just on the web, for starters. And that every
web site within the Theosophical arena should put a
link to this same one site, on their own sites." etc>>>>

John, two important points:

1. While I applaud your efforts, I don't see how, for example, your posting of Theosophical History ala ULT is going to help unite anyone. Your history puts virtually all Theosophical leaders and writers except HPB, Judge, and ULT leaders, in a very poor light. I personally won't consider linking to your site just because of how your history shabbily treats Tingely and de Purucker. I would think that Adyar folks would think the same about how Besant is described, and so on. While you talk a lot about "ancient history" and how we should unite, I don't find the ULT's version of history to be either correct or worthy of reading, and I certainly will not recommend that newbies read it. So I would strongly suggest that you put any United Team writings on a new/different web site.

2. The Theosophical umbrella/tent is very wide, and includes a lot of material. As Judge himself says, some is at the edges (shallow but understandable, ie exoteric) and some is deep (profound but difficult to understand, ie esoteric). Everyone agrees that newbies and non-Theosophsists will likely not understand the profound/deep stuff, but truth-to-tell much of the exoteric easy stuff is misleading and usually causes newbies to set off in wrong directions. A possible way of avoiding problems here is to grade each article on profundity - easy, medium, hard, or something along those lines, much like what we find in modern texts like the well-selling "for dummies" books. Just a thought.
A group of us decided several years ago to approach the public by using Windows Help files, but we argued so much over the basic question of "What is Theosophy?" that it never really got off the ground. Also, there used to exist a nice Theosophical magazine (Ed by Ralph Nurrie as I recall) in which we published articles of interest to the general public (like sex, for example - and I don't even want to go into the reaction we got from that one) and again we ran into more opposition from within the Theosophical rank and file than from outside. So, this all kinda comes down to how can be present a united front to the general public when we are, in fact, so fragmented within our own ranks? We not only have disagreements between TSs but within them. I frankly don't see how any real union of TSs is possible.

Jerry S.

PS. In what way do you see this United Team of writers being any different than, say, the already-existing online Theos-World, which carries articles by any Theosophist? 


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