Theos-Talk Archives (November 2002 Message tt00684)

Greetings.

My name is Robert Newman. I'm an American Vaishnava and a friend of 
Bhakti Ananda Goswami, who has been active on this list recently. My 
own, much less learned angle on the Mahatma Letters and Theosophy in 
general, focuses on the denial of the supreme personality of Godhead 
in this philosophy. Unlike BAG, I am not an expert in religious 
history, nor am I what would be called a 'practicing' member of my 
faith tradition. I am a seeker of the truth, plain and simple, and I 
take it where I find it. 

It's admittedly difficult to find satisfactory, reasonable 
metaphysics in the theistic traditions, but it's there. Most 
esotericists, including myself in my younger days, see the exoteric 
aspects of these traditions and decide that they're all nonsense. 
But both Vaishnavism and Christianity (the two theistic traditions 
that I'm most knowledgeable about) contain a similar core of esoteric 
content dealing with transcendence in a most intellectually and 
emotionally satisfying way. It behooves any sincere seeker of the 
truth to view theism from this higher angle, which is not only 
satisfying but remarkably consistent from tradition to tradition (to 
get a glimpse of this last point, see some of BAG's writings at 
http://www.saragrahi.org/columns/).

Why take so much trouble? (And it is trouble, make no mistake.) 
Well, as one contributor to this list mentioned a few dozen posts 
ago, one of the criteria of truth is the testimony of credible 
people. There are many credible people who have testified to the 
personal experience of a supreme personality at the pinnacle of 
conscious experience. Coupled with the metaphysical rationale that 
intellectually gifted theists have constructed, this evidence for the 
existence of God cannot be simply dismissed or ignored. Well, it 
can, but only to one's spiritual detriment.

Robert