Theos-Talk Archives (February 2002 Message tt00069)

Hey Jerry,

Re the middle, you and others might be interested in the survey of 
spiritual types on the opening page of beliefnet at
http://www.beliefnet.com

which yields scores that categorize one as (from least to most 
religiously dogmatic):

hardcore skeptic
spiritual dabbler
active spiritual seeker
spiritual straddler
old-fashioned seeker
questioning believer
confident believer
candidate for clergy

I came out as an active spiritual seeker, which seems fair. Bet 
you're around there too. However, I wonder if the test is too 
slanted to Christians, so that dogmatic Theosophists won't show up as 
such since the dogmas they adhere to aren't the standard ones.

You wrote:
> Dallas and others are very secure and content in their Theosophical 
belief system, their devotion (worship?) to Blavatsky, and they 
dislike anyone rocking their boat (including me).

Confident believers/candidates for clergy

> Brigitte and Steve are secure with their own ideas of Theosophy and 
Blavatsky which they feel is based on their own unbiased research.
I am not feeling secure at all, and for the most part, my jury is 
still out. I feel somewhere between these two camps. 

You are.

> As long as one sees Theosophy as a finger pointing to Truth, and 
not Truth itself, it probably doesn't matter.

Which is of course how HPB advised seeing it, most of the time.

snip

> Because it is psychologically important. If one is to progress on 
a Path, one must respect and honor the Teacher(s) of that Path, and 
Blavatsky herself today stands at the forefront of all of the various 
Theosophical linages that exist today. If she is wrong, then so is 
Besant, and Judge, and G de Purucker, and so on. Why psychologically 
important? Because one has to start with faith - one's Path always 
starts with faith in the guru or teacher. 

Not sure that's true, unless qualified. That is, to the extent that 
I have followed a path, it's the one shown by Cayce. Yet I've never 
had unqualified faith in his pronouncements-- just faith that his 
advice was generally helpful to people and worth applying to see if 
it works for me-- which it has. (This approach seems more common 
than not among others who have been in Search for God groups with 
me.) Similarly, someone approaching Theosophy might have faith in 
some theosophical ideals, but not the whole belief system or claims 
about its origin. Yet you say: 

> Without faith in Blavatsky and her Masters, the TM goes right down 
the proverbial drain.
> 
And while this merits further exploration, I'd say that HPB herself, 
in most of her commentary, would disagree and say that one can be a 
perfectly good Theosophist and TS member without any faith in either 
herself or the Masters. Then again, there are passages that go the 
other way.

And since the ARE appears to be in trouble, perhaps in part due to a 
loss of faith in Cayce and his Source, your point may be generally 
valid. If so, however, I find that rather ominous. Everywhere else 
in life, we are mature enough to realize that no one is all bad or 
all good, that no one has all the answers, etc. And yet in the realm 
of spiritual movements, unless we can project all goodness and all 
truth onto the source, we can't follow the path? That means that 
there is something inherently infantile about religious adherence, 
that we can't be adult about it. Doesn't it?

Cheers,

Paul