Theos-Talk Archives (April 2004 Message tt00031)

Dear Pedro,

This will be my last word here on this subject, not because I don't 
want to discuss it but because Theosophists routinely misconstrue 
everything I ever wrote about it and after all these years it's just 
not worthwhile to keep hacking away at the weeds of 
misunderstanding. My books on Theosophical history are certainly 
deserving of criticism on several fronts as is my book on Cayce. 
I'd be totally disheartened about my ability to make myself 
understood, in light of the wild misreadings of my books and furious 
attacks that resulted, were it not for two things: 1) no one to my 
knowledge has ever misconstrued anything whatsoever about my Cayce 
book and made that misunderstanding a basis for criticism and 2) no 
non-Theosophist has ever to my knowledge made any criticisms that 
completely misread my writings on Blavatsky. Since you seem to be a 
nice guy and not deliberately attacking on the basis of 
misrepresentation, I'll take exception to a few of your points and 
leave it at that: 

> 
> In your book ("The Masters Revealed") you developed an interesting 
> hypothesis about the identity of the "Masters", 

There is no single hypothesis but quite a few; 32 individuals 
examined as HPB's mentors and sponsors. Even if by "the Masters" 
you mean only Morya and Koot Hoomi (which my Theosophical critics 
generally do) I don't propose one or two hypotheses but rather more 
than that, different aspects of their descriptions suggesting 
multiple prototypes.

but in order to do 
> that you had either to ignore or treat in a cursory manner 
important pieces of evidence that frontally contradict your 
hypothesis.

Misreading the hypotheses, one is hardly in a position to evaluate 
what evidence supports or contradicts them.

For example, your treatment of the question 'Who wrote the Mahatma 
> Letters' falls exactly in this category. 

That is quite a noncommittal treatment which could hardly be accused 
of ignoring any evidence because it contradicts some single 
hypothesis. The conclusion is after all "Don't know, but the truth 
is probably somewhere in between the extremes"-- hardly the kind of 
position for which one would ignore/distort evidence!


It quotes a late book by 
> Sinnett but fails to examine what he said in "The Occult World" 
which based in his correspondence with K.H., for example. In short, 
you did not take into account the clear, historical evidences from 
that time(1880s), coming from a number of members of the TS, both 
from India as well as from the US and Europe.

That is not the case at all. While the treatment of such testimony 
is sketchy in TMR, the sequel devotes a very large amount of 
attention to it. You might not like *how* I took it into account, 
but I did so at great length. BTW one man's "clear, historical 
evidence" that is taken to prove his beliefs is another man's 
confusing welter of claims and counterclaims that proves nothing. 
"Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it."
Andre Gide (1869 - 1951)

Another important source of 
> testimonial evidence are HPB's letters to Sinnett. The deep sense 
of sacredness which is present in her attitude and devotion to her 
> Teacher impressed not only Sinnett and his wife, Patience, but 
many a member of the TS.

And letters to other people reveal a scornful attitude toward her 
credulous English disciples. If you are working on the basis of 
proof texts to support your religious beliefs, you will ignore those 
and concentrate on the letters to Sinnett. Looking at the whole 
picture is much more challenging, because there are multiple layers 
of evidence revealing multiple aspects of a person's character.

She made clear that her entire life was dedicated to his work. To 
think of HPB as a "maha" master manipulator, 
> psychologising influential members of the TS in order for them to 
> believe in "Mahatmas" when no Mahatmas existed, 

That is a misreading so extreme, and so contradicted by every page 
of my books, that I'm flabbergasted by it. A dozen or more authors 
before me took that position; I oppose it vehemently for hundreds of 
pages. Non-theosophists had no trouble at all understanding my 
position (real Masters, mythologized portrayals) and the first half-
dozen or so Theosophical reviewers understood it. At some point, 
the real Theosophist-of-many-years Paul Johnson got completely 
displaced by a straw man thanks to a handful of antagonistic 
Theosophists and there was not a damn thing I could do about it. 
Except move on to write about a subject not cursed by decades of 
antagonism.

is at least to 
> belittle the enormity of her dedicated service to humanity. 

I have been subjected to some ridicule for the extent to which I 
depicted the "enormity of her dedicated service to humanity" in a 
true-believerish kind of way. That criticism was more well-deserved 
than any coming from Theosophists, IMO.

snip

> existence of the Mahatmas or Adepts is an integral part of the 
> tradition of Occultism (gupta-vidya) that HPB made widely 
available through her writings. And as they themselves said, they 
are the product of a "generation of enquirers". Perhaps we who talk 
about it and speculate are just outsiders.
> 
The spiritual status and psychic powers of historical individuals is 
inaccessible to scholarly investigation. Whether it's the 
resurrection of Jesus or telepathy between HPB and her teachers, the 
historical investigator is an "outsider" to such questions and 
rightly so. But that does not devalue asking (and trying to answer) 
questions that are more accessible to historical investigation.

Here's a link to an article I wrote that puts my Theosophical 
antagonists in context of the general dilemma of researchers delving 
into spiritual movements from a historical perspective:

http://www.katinkahesselink.net/his/pj_heretic.html

Cheers,

Paul