Theos-Talk Archives (November 2001 Message tt00026)

Would you not say I cleary label my headers?

Nos





|-----Original Message-----
|From: Eldon B Tucker [mailto:eldon@theosophy.com] 
|Sent: Friday, 2 November 2001 3:53 PM
|To: theos-talk@yahoogroups.com
|Subject: Theos-World how do you draw a line between what's 
|theosophical and non-theosophical?
|
|
|At 03:08 PM 11/2/01 +1030, you wrote:
|>As I've stated to those who have contacted me privately - 
|Where do you 
|>draw a line between theosophy and non-theosophy?
|>
|>Nos
|
|Everyone has different expectations of a theosophical
|list, and depending upon the person, something you
|say might be ok or be way off in left field.
|
|A tight definition might say only talk about quotations
|from a narrowly-selected collection of classic books.
|
|A looser definition would be to talk about the
|philosophy and general religious and metaphysical themes, 
|putting ideas in your own words.
|
|A still looser definition would be to talk about
|politics, world events, recent discoveries in
|science, historic items, and other materials that
|might have deeper meanings that we could explore.
|
|The broadest definition would be to include any item
|of interest, but I'd hope there would be some connection
|made between the materials and some deeper understanding
|of life. An example here would be to take the Bin Laden 
|terrorism and relate it to a general threat of fundamentalism 
|and how it can affect people including us, if unaware.
|
|People may find it hard to extract a deeper meaning
|from arguments for and against various political
|conflicts in the world, like the Israeli/Palestinian
|conflict. It may be possible to give all the arguments
|for either side of the situation, but the situation
|isn't getting solved here, and no deeper understanding
|may come from rehashing the various political theories.
|
|Another important thing is to be clear when we're
|joking. We can even say, "<GRIN>" or "I'm kidding!"
|prominently in the message. This is so people won't 
|misunderstand and think there's any ill-will or hatefulness involved.
|
|Coming back to your basic question, I'd say that we'd
|each need to draw our own line regarding how loose
|a definition of Theosophy we'd use. Even so, we need
|to consider who we're writing to, and make our
|writing appropriate to the people on the list. The
|same is true with public speaking. If you start a talk
|and see the audience falling asleep or reacting the
|wrong way, you've got to consider how they're responding
|and change your approach, or the talk will end up
|as a dud, and people won't come back to hear you again.
|
|If the subject line is clearly labelled, people
|can pick and choose messages they're interested in,
|and not feel bad when opening a message that isn't
|what they'd expected.
|
|-- Eldon
|
|
|
| 
|
|Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to 
|http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ 
|
|