Theos-Talk Archives (January 2004 Message tt00080)

--- In theos-talk@yahoogroups.com, "krishtar_a" <krishtar_a@b...> 
wrote:
> I know we must not to become simple-minded, credulous people

Yes, I agree. There ard two levels on which one can examine these 
things, though.

I think it was in Camille Flammarion;s book L'INCONNU that I read 
this story. Some years ago members of a French scientific academy 
met one night to discuss claims that had been made tnat meteors fall 
occasionally from the sky. Instead of doing anything resembling 
scientiffic research they exqamined the opinions of learned doctors 
and arrived at the reasonable conclusion that since iron exists on 
the ground and not in the sky, there could therefore be no such 
things as meteors and that claims to the contrary were therefore 
false.

What made this particularly absurd was that when they left the 
building to go home, some of them raised their little eyes to the sky 
and discovered that a meteor shower was coming down at the monent 
they were denying the existence of such phenomena.

So people who have not seen the phenomenon, but who merely squint at 
ink marks on a printed page the way Theosophists do must either 
accept the stories on faith or else question the integrity of the 
story tellers, as someone used to do who no longer belongs to this 
group but who was at one time its most intellohgent poster.

Someone who has seen the phenomenon does not tend to question the 
integrity of others who say they have also seen it. What he does 
instread is question WHAT IT MEANS. If the observer is intelligent 
and honest he takes reeasonable steps to rule out imposture, a 
practice which has been condemned on this list as "aggressive 
skepticism." I am skeptical, albeit not aggressively so, about 
Yogananda's unrotting corpse, for example. In cases where imposture 
has been ruled out and what has been observed appears to be a genuine 
phenomenon of nature that question of how it should be interpreted 
may never be answered satisfatoriy, but the effort to find an answer 
leads to all sorts of intellectual adventures and insights which make 
it worthwhile.