Theos-Talk Archives (July 2004 Message tt00389)

As we are free here in this group to discuss and compare some of the
differences between HPB / Mahatmas teachings and those of CWL perhaps
we can start to look at differences and discuss them as a group and
see if infact the differences are only cosmetic or philosophically
incompatable.

Maybe the first area to analyse is the subject of God.

1st quote from Mahatma letters :
"I dread the appearance in print of our philosophy as expounded by Mr.
H……..He makes
of us Agnostics!! We do not believe in God because so far, we have no
proof, etc. This is
preposterously ridiculous; if he publishes what I read, I will have
H.P.B. or Djual Kool deny the
whole thing; as I cannot permit our sacred philosophy to be so
disfigured. He says that people will not accept the whole truth; that
unless we humour them with a hope that there may be a "loving Father
and creator of ALL heaven" our philosophy will be rejected a priori. 
In such a case the less such idiots hear of our doctrines the better
for both. If they do not want the whole truth and nothing but the
truth, they are welcome. But never will they find us - - (at any rate)
- -compromising with and pandering to public prejudices."
Mahatma Letters ps. 304-5

These quotes are taken from Margaret Thomas's book Theosophy of
Neotheosophy
http://www.blavatskyarchives.com/thomas/

The teaching on Logos or Deity or God

Mahatma letters:

We say and affirm that that motion – the universal perpetual motion
which never ceases,never slackens nor increases its speed not even
during the interludes between the pralayas or "night of Brahma" but
goes on like a mill set in
motion, whether it has anything to grind or not…we say this perpetual
motion is the only eternal and uncreated Deity we are able to
recognize. To regard God as an intelligent spirit,and accept at the
same time his absolute immateriality is to conceive of a nonentity, a
blank void; to regard God as a Being, an Ego and
to place his intelligence under a bushel for some mysterious reason is
the most consummate nonsense; to endow him with intelligence in the
face of blind brutal Evil is to make of him a fiend– a most rascally
God. A being however gigantic, occupying space and having length,
breadth and thickness is most certainly a Mosaic deity.
Mahatma Letters ps. 138-9

Now from CWL :

We have in the Logos of our solar system as near an approach to a
personal (or rather, perhaps,individual) God as any reasonable man can
desire, for of Him is true everything good that has even been
predicated of a personal deity.
We cannot ascribe to Him partiality, injustice,jealousy, cruelty;
those who desire these attributes in their deity must go elsewhere. 
But so far as His system is concerned He possesses omniscience,
omnipresence, omnipotence; the love, the power, the wisdom, the glory,
all are there in fullest measure. Yet He is a mighty individual – a
trinity in unity, and God in very
truth, though removed by we know not how many stages from the
Absolute, the Un-knowable, before which even solar systems are but as
specks of cosmic dust. The sun is His chief manifestation on the
physical plane, and that may help us a little to realize some of His
qualities, and to see how everything comes from
Him…..I myself who speak to you have once seen Him in a form which is
not the form of His system. This is something which utterly transcends
all ordinary experience which has nothing to do with any of the lower
planes. The
thing became possible for me only through a very daring experiment –
the utter blending for a moment of two distinct rays or types, so that by
means of this blending a level could for a moment be touched
enormously higher than any to which either of the egos concerned could
have attained alone. He exists far above His system; he sits upon it
as a lotus throne. He is as it were
apotheosis of humanity, yet infinitely greater than humanity.
C.W. Leadbeater, The Inner Life, 1.
ps. 143-46

Now from HPB :

1. The Secret Doctrine teaches no Atheism except in the Hindu sense of
the word
nastika or the rejection of idols,including every anthromorphic god.
2. It admits a Logos or a collective"Creator" of the Universe; a Demiurgos
– in the sense implied when one speaks of an "Architect" as the
"Creator" of an edifice, whereas that Architect has never touched one
stone of it, but, while furnishing the plan, left all the manual
labour to the masons; in our case the plan was furnished by the
Ideation of the Universe, and the constructive labour was left to the
Hosts of intelligent Powers and Forces. But that Demiurgos is no
personal deity, - i.e. and imperfect extra-cosmic god, -but only the
aggregate of the Dhyan-
Chohans and the other forces.
Secret Doctrine, 1. ps.279-80

"The Logos..This highest consciousness", answer the Occultists, "is
only a synthetic unit inthe world of the manifested Logos – or on the
plane of illusion; for it is the sum total of Dhyan Chohanic
consciousnesses…..Iswara or Logos is
Spirit; or , as Occultism explains, it is a compound unity of
manifested living Spirits, the parent source and nursery of all the
mundane and terrestrial monads, plus their divine reflections which
emanate from, and return into, the Logos,
each in the culmination of its time."
Secret Doctrine, 1 p. 573

When we speak of the Deity and make it identical, hence coeval, with
Nature, the eternal and uncreate nature is meant and not your
aggregate or flitting shadows and finite unrealities. We leave it to
the hymn makers to call the visible earth or heaven, God's throne, and
our earth of mud His footstool. Our DEITY
is neither in a paradise, nor in a particular tree, building, or
mountain; it is everywhere, in every atom of the visible as of the
invisible Cosmos,
in, over, and around every invisible atom and divisible molecule; for
IT is the mysterious power of evolution and involution, the
omnipresent, omnipotent and even omniscient creative potentiality.
Key to Theosophy, p. 49

Now from C.Jinarajadasa & the Annie Besant & CW Leadbeater:

Man, the individual, evolving soul, is in truth in the image of his
Maker, and what He is in His fullness now, that man will be some day.
Hence it is that, by a certain development of faculties latent in the
human consciousness, men can
touch even now the fringe, as it were, of the Consciousness of the
LOGOS, and so, with Him, see the past as happening even now.
C. Jinarajadasa, First Principles of Theosophy, p. 29

"…in this music temple…he is bearing his share in a concert which
comes from all the worlds of the system, and these streams from all
the worlds make somehow the mighty twelve stringed lyre upon which the
LOGOS Himself plays as He sits upon the Lotus of His system. It is
impossible to put this into words; but the
writer has seen it, and knows that it is true. He hears, He responds,
and He Himself plays upon His system. Thus for the first time we have
one brief glimpse of the stupendous life which He lives among the
other LOGOI who are His peers.
Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater,
"Man: Whence, How and Whither, p.
378