Theos-Talk Archives (June 2004 Message tt00253)

--- In theos-talk@yahoogroups.com, "Eldon B Tucker" <eldon@t...> 
wrote:
> We could also say, for example, "Read again carefully. It 
> is a fact that most of the people in the world who are aware of Zen 
> think Zen is a joke and Zen Masters are clowns."

It is serious business but there is an aspect to it that verges on 
humor and I would wager no Zen master would attempt to disabuse you 
if that is what you thought.

I had never seen B;avatsky described as a clown until I read what 
Bart and Leon had to say. If the whole thing was a jok, that does 
raise a serious doubt in my mind as to whether or not anyone should 
take it seriously. Having been consistently unable to fnd any first 
hand evidence that anyone can materialize anything, the 
materialization phenomena seem less credible to me than the other 
theosophical phenomena and in need of more corroborating evidence 
than the others. I thought the teacup incident was pretty solid, but 
Bart has offered an ingenious explanation which proves I was wrong.

A more importan issue is whether Blavatsky or anyone else (forget 
about Leadbeater) was clairvoyant. If that was a mere uut on, then 
the whole system, or most of it anyway, falls at least halfway to the 
ground. That is much more difficult to evaluate, because people DO 
have those experiences, yet the results are immensely difficult to 
validate. If you secure information which can be verified and which 
you could not have acquired by normal eans, that serbes as a 
reasonable basis for believing that the clairvoyant experience was 
real. But if the information acquired is of such a nature that it 
could not be obtained by any normal means, it is impossible to know 
for sure whether you are seeing clearly. Thusif you awoke in the 
morning and saw clairvoyantly that your car, which was positioned 
such that you couold not see it from where you were located, had 
debeloped a flat tire, you could easily determine that this either 
was or was not true. If you determined clairvoyantly that elementals 
are the noumenal basis of forces, however, we would have a more 
difficult problem with the validation. That is one I have struggled 
with for years and do not yet have an answer for. As Blavatsky 
herself said, Swedenborg saw things quite different from what she 
taught, and both of them claimed to be clairvoyant. So how to know 
which is right? Sweenborgh deserves to be regarded with considerable 
respect IMHO, whether he was right about everything or not.

I suspect Daniel may be right about one thing. Having considered the 
nespaper stunt, which was not performed, I can think of ways to fake 
it so that even transporting a newspaper instantaneously from London 
to India in 1881 would not be completely satisfactory proof of 
materialization. Or not unless it was done under controlled 
conditions, anyway, and replicated independently by others. So it 
appears the only satisfactory evidence of a materialization would 
have to be a modern replication of the experiment. No nineteenth 
century story, however impressive, could offer final proof.