Theos-Talk Archives (July 2004 Message tt00334)

Hallo Anand and all,

My views are:

Allright. But I was thinking that both you and others needed to learn
something.

Try reading this one again:
"There is a vast accumulation of theosophical teachings, much of it in
writings, which would-be students plough through, looking for
theosophy (Wisdom of the Gods), and wondering why it seems,
so often, self-contradictory. The simple answer is that this material
is largely time-and-culture-based. Most of it was prescribed for
specific audiences at certain times and under particular conditions.
Choosing the relevant materials for any time is a specialised task.
To try to make sense of all of it would be like taking a bundle of
medical prescriptions, issued over the years to a variety of people,
and working out one's own therapy from such largely irrelevant
papers - and without a certain specialised knowledge. Theosophical
Teaching is PRESCRIBED."

So the books you recommend - so hastily or carelessly - in the below email
of yours certainly also has some limitations
attached to them. That is some time-and-culture-based limitations.
What mistakes people --- possibly --- did in the past has less
relevance --- right now year 2004.
What should have relevance is how we relate to the present need for
spiritual teachings.
Mind you - carefully taking into account the critics of older books of the
wisdom tradition and how WE relate to such books ourselves.

I think Caldwell are thinking about the time-and-culture-based issues.
Although he sometimes seems to forget that intellectual analyzing are only
intellectual.

Well, these are just some of my views.
What are yours ?



You know...God is here. God is always ready.
Taste and Know.


from
M. Sufilight with peace and love...

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Anand Gholap" <AnandGholap@AnandGholap.org>
To: <theos-talk@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, July 25, 2004 8:09 PM
Subject: Re: Theos-World Critical works


> Dear Morten,
> You wrote exactly what I was thinking
> "The theosophical Teacher, in the first place, has to be someone who has
> experienced all the stages of the Path along which he will
> conduct his disciples. Outward observers are not capeable of
> commenting upon theosophy or The Wisdom Tradition They lack
> both the experience and the capacity to discriminate between
> real and degenerate forms. 'Who tastes, knows' is a theosophical saying.
> Equally, whoever does not taste, does not know. "
> This is the main reason why I always recommend only books of occultists
who had direct experiences like HPB, AB, CWL, C.Jinarajadasa, I.K.Taimni
etc.
> And I don't recommend books of mere intellectual interpreters and critics.
>
> Thanks Morten for writing the important point I was thinking for long
time.
> Anand Gholap
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: Morten N. Olesen
> To: theos-talk@yahoogroups.com
> Sent: Sunday, July 25, 2004 9:56 PM
> Subject: Re: Theos-World Critical works
>
>
> Hallo Anand and all,
>
> My views are:
>
> ------- Theosophical thought, Experience and Teaching -------
>
> The following could be called an interpretation of theosophy and
> theosophical writings and it intends to show, where some of the problems
> with Theosophy and its related branches are today year 2003.
>
> Thousands of book and monographs have been written on
> theosophy and the theosophists, almost all of them from the point of
view of
> other ways of thinking. The result has been chaos in the litterature,
> and confusion in the reader. Over the centuries, some of
> the world's most eminent scholars have fallen into the trap of
> trying to examine assess or consider the theosophy phenomenon
> through a set of culture-bound preconceptions.
>
> All this may not be as foolish as it looks to us today: after all, it
> is only relatively recently that students, including academics and
> people of the spirit, have begun to realise that their attitudes
> have traditionally been heavily influenced by subjectivity and
> unexanined assumptions. Although the pendulum is slowly
> swinging back, there is still no lack of people - specialists and
> others - who continue to look at anything, including theosophy and
> The Wisdom Tradition, in anything but an objective way.
>
> The main problem is that the most commentators are accustomed
> to thinking of spiritual schools as 'systems', which are more or
> less alike, and which depend upon dogma and ritual: and
> especially upon repetition and the application of continual and
> standardised pressures upon their followers.
> The theosophical path, except in degenerate forms which are not to be
> classified as theosophical, is entirely different from this.
>
> Following closely after the primary misconception is the
> general impression that all spiritual entities must strongly depend
> upon emotion. Indeed, there is a marked confusion, even in
> the most lucid writers, between spirituality and emotionalism.
> Such confusion does not exist in authentic theosophical teaching or
> study.
>
> The misconsecptions of which the above two are typical
> produce in the students a frame of mind through which he or she
> will try to approach the understanding or study of theosophy, with
> predictably useless results. For this reason high quality theosophical
> literature shows a marked rejection of ultra-formalism, of
> mental fetishes, the over-simplifications, which hamper understanding.
>
> The theosophists refer to the action of the mixture of primitive
> emotionality and irrelevant associations, which bedevil outside
> would-be observers as that of the Lower Self.
>
> It is only since the nineteen-fifties, with the discovery of the
> far-reaching effects of conditioning, brain-washing and attitude-
> engineering, that the subjective nature of virtually all
> approaches to knowledge has been perceived to the degree to
> which the theosophists, for centuries has tried to establish.
>
> The theosophists have always taught: 'Examine your assumptions;
> avoid mechanicality; distinguish faith from fixation'.
>
> The theosophical Teacher, in the first place, has to be someone who has
> experienced all the stages of the Path along which he will
> conduct his disciples. Outward observers are not capeable of
> commenting upon theosophy or The Wisdom Tradition They lack
> both the experience and the capacity to discriminate between
> real and degenerate forms. 'Who tastes, knows' is a theosophical saying.
> Equally, whoever does not taste, does not know.
>
> The validity of this concept is, naturally enough, strenously
> opposed by outward observers. But if, in any field, an unqualified
> person, lacking essential experience, decides to 'become an
> expert', it is inevitable that the specialist, the person with the
> experience, will - indeed must - assert the primacy of proper
> knowledge.
>
> It has to be remembered here that the externalists (whether
> people of the spirit or of the pen and tounge) are themselves not
> particularly to blame. Reared on the concept that anyone can, at
> will, examine anything, they are victims of their own culture's
> assumptions. After all, this approach is adequate for a large
> number of disciplines. They have merely apllied a principle
> which holds good in one area to a subject where it does not.
>
> The theosophist unlike the externalist, cannot, and does not, work
> mechanically. The projection of the message and the help which
> is given to the learner, must always vary in conformity with the
> needs of the time, the culture involved and the nature and
> potential of the student.
>
> But as soon as we say this, we can see that the real theosophical
> organisation teaching and learning differ fundamentally from all
> other 'systems'.
>
> The theosophist, in short, is aiming for a development, not to
> produce conditioned reflexes. He or she is teaching, not training.
> He or she intervenes, to provide the right stimulus at the right time
> for the right person. Such an activity is seen as chaotic by those who
> cannot perceive its purposefulness; just as the way of life in
> some open societies feels unbearably disorderly to those who
> have escaped from regimented ones: something which
> frequently happens today.
>
> The tendency to seek reassurance and regularity is common
> to all human beings. This is reflected in their cleaving to
oversimplified
> systems. It explains why many people are drawn to organisations
> which offer authority and certainty. There is nothing wrong
> with order and discipline: indeed, these are essentials to all
> human groupings. But the misuse of this proclivity in areas
> where it does not apply attentuates or delays progress. It results in
> the uncomfortable feeling, even amongst the most regimented,
> that 'there is something else.'
>
> And yet exposure to strong discipline does not itself produce
> as a reaction a necessarily wholesome affinity for truth. It is
> noticeable that coercive, regimented or rigorously intellectualist
> societies throw up weird cults and abborations, providing both
> the supply of and the demand for certain emotions.
>
> There is a vast accumulation of theosophical teachings, much of it in
> writings, which would-be students plough through, looking for
> theosophy (Wisdom of the Gods), and wondering why it seems,
> so often, self-contradictory. The simple answer is that this material
> is largely time-and-culture-based. Most of it was prescribed for
> specific audiences at certain times and under particular conditions.
> Choosing the relevant materials for any time is a specialised task.
> To try to make sense of all of it would be like taking a bundle of
> medical prescriptions, issued over the years to a variety of people,
> and working out one's own therapy from such largely irrelevant
> papers - and without a certain specialised knowledge. Theosophical
> Teaching is PRESCRIBED.
>
> Such parts of the theosophical Classics, stories, and letters
> and lectures and so on which apply to the individual and the group
> today - have to be selected and applied consciously and appropriately,
> by someone who is attuned to certain realities.
>
> This concept is especially irksome to the academic worker, who
> always has a bias towards utillising every scrap of information
> he can find, not towards assessing contemporary applicability.
> He is, in fact, in a different field from the theosophist. His attitude
> influences even general readers.
>
> If the scholar is unwilling to accept this concept, the conventional
> spiritual thinker is equally hampered. He, or she, does not wish
> to face the fact that theosophical activity is often carried out in a
way
> which does not, for the conventionalist, resemble spiritual
> matters at all. The fact that the theosophist has to script and project
his
> teaching in a manner which will work - not in a manner which
> will remind others of spirituality - arouses, if ever perceived,
> feelings of great discomfort in the conditional 'devout' man or
> woman.
>
> Yet the theosophist insists that the adherence to traditional forms is
> not a spiritual activity at all. It is only in recent years that he has
> been able to call upon the insights and experiments of the
> sociologists and psychologists to establish in current terminology,
> and hence in acceptable form, the fact that very many 'people of
> the spirit' are only religious in the sense that they have been
> conditioned to feel certain emotional responses. And that such
> people are, anthrologically speaking, little else than members
> of a tribe. These facts, written down and asserted centuries ago
> by theosophists, are now thought by modern thinkers to be a great
> new discovery.
>
> The supposedly devout are, in theosophical terms (as well as in the
> new understanding of contemporary workers in the social
> sciences) cultists but hardly people of the spirit in the theosophical
> sense.
>
> The use of authorithy figures, canonical litterature, liturgy,
> exercises, special clothes, and similarly standardised elements,
> are now plainly seen as ingredients in trainning systems which
> differ, one from the other, only in the ideas and symbols used.
> Yet, these factors linger and confuse, producing blinkered
> minds.
>
> The deluded 'Theosophists', down the centuries, are those who have
> taken temporary situations, parables and the like and
> strecthed them to apply as perennial 'truths', 'exercises' and the
> like. This kind of development, or hyperthrophy, has taken place
> in other projections than that known as theosophy. Indeed, it is this
> which is responsible for the existence of a large number of cults
> and religious bodies which are generally believed to be authentic
> and authoritathive. In, reality, the fossilization which is represented
> by such groups is the antithesis of a spiritual school.
> Instead of developing people, it imprisons them, as genuine
> theosophists have never tired of pointing out.
>
> So far has this process gone that, in most cultures, the imitation
> has all but driven out the original. The result is that,
> examining certain existing religious cults (some of them involving
> multiple millions of people and possesing great influence)
> nobody could be blamed for believeing this degenration
> to be religion itself.
>
> An fictious example:
> Recently, explaining this attitude to a famous spiritual leader,
> I received the answer; 'But it MUST be true: otherwise so many
> people would not believe it.'
> He had, clearly, not heard of Gresham's Law: 'Bad money
> drives good out.'
> I said, 'There are twice as many adherents of such-and-such a
> religion as there are of your own. By your logic THAT one
> must be true. Its success proves it. Why don't you join that one
> instead of your own?'
> It was at that point that he started shouting at me.
>
> Quality is more important than Quantity when we talk about
> theosophical members.
>
> Among theosophists, the development of Theosophical Organisations
> gives us a conspicuous example of the process which I have been
> describing. Of many of the major 'Paths' among the supposed
> theosophists of today (generally speaking), not a single one or only
very
> very few is
> traceable in its foundation to the man or woman who is named as
> its founder. Each of the 'artificial ones' came into being only after
> the founders death, formulated from some of his specific teachings
> employed for local purposes, and soon truned into a cult.
> 'Theosophical Organisations'are temporary and time-limited. None
> was started by its putative founder. When the teacher died, his
disciples,
> heroically but misguidedly, tried to preserve his teachings. The result
we
> know.
>
> All the distortions - and more - which have persisted in theosophy
> - and other - teachings are due to the presence and activity of the
> Lower Self.
> There is no intention of destroying or undermining the Lower Self. But
> the Theosophical activity and The Wisdom Tradition insists upon
> asking: does is command you, - or do you command it?
>
>
> *******
> I hope this helped you and other readers.
> Helped you and other readers to consider what is authority and what not.
> What is wanted by the Seeker is not always what is spiritually Needed.
>
> Can I learn? If I can, how do I then Learn how to Learn ?
>
>
> from
> M. Sufilight with peace and love.
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Anand Gholap" <AnandGholap@AnandGholap.org>
> To: <theos-talk@yahoogroups.com>
> Sent: Sunday, July 25, 2004 5:11 PM
> Subject: Theos-World Critical works
>
>
> > Members can write a book showing defects in HPB, mistakes in her work,
how
> she was smoker, her short temper etc. Still I would say that it is wrong
to
> write such a book. I disagree with some members who say that such
critical
> works are necessary.
> > Anand Gholap
> >
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