Theos-Talk Archives (July 2004 Message tt00206)

Hi Pedro,

First of all - HPB and the Mahatmas were of an esoteric buddhist
lineage, not an exoteric one. What's come out to the west is by
definition exoteric. 

Still, I've puzzled over the similar question of: why focuss on so
many details of the world around us: cosmogony, evolution. Why didn't
she focuss on the spiritual path and philosophy as buddhists do today?
My thoughts go in the following direction:
The times were different from what they are today. Psychology hadn't
yet found its limelight, for instance. People just hadn't en masse
found introspection and all that crap out. So it took a lot of work
before HPB found enough students to write 'The Voice of the Silence' for. 
Also - if we take brotherhood seriously - and by all accounts HPB and
the Mahatmas did - then one cannot just give something new and drop
it. One has to (from a didactical standpoint) embed the new knowledge
in something. That something was the spiritualist movement, at first
anyhow. Also, society was starting to learn how to deal with evolution
as a Darwinian concept. This concept threatened to negate all
spirituality (as it does still do today). So they gave out (or
created) something to counter that and grow from that. The form of the
Secret Doctrine is (apparently, I haven't studied the subject) very
typical for the kinds of books that were being written at the time in
the sense of gathering information from all possible sources and
coming up with some wild theory to connect the dots. Whether or not
HPB's theory was wild I'll leave up to the readers here (I don't think
so myself), but her focuss was very much determined by the time she
wrote in, I think. 

Katinka
--- In theos-talk@yahoogroups.com, Pedro Oliveira <prmoliveira@y...>
wrote:
> The connection between HPB's Teachers and Mahayana
> Buddhism is well established in "The Mahatma Letters",
> in a number of her articles and in "The Voice of the
> Silence". But although in Mahayana Buddhism emptiness
> (sunyata) is one of the core principles, it does not
> seem to occupy a prominent place neither in "The
> Secret Doctrine" nor in "The Mahatma Letters", in both
> of which evolution seems to be a central concept.
> 
> Can anyone throw light on this apparent puzzle?
> 
> 
> Pedro