Theos-Talk Archives (January 2005 Message tt01074)

--- In theos-talk@yahoogroups.com, "kpauljohnson" <kpauljohnson@y...> 
wrote:
> Evidence seems substantial for distant viewing in the "physical
> plane" but how could we ever confirm alleged encounters with
> invisible entities? 

Two ways. There is an ancient document called THE CLEMENTINE 
RECOGNIGITIONSin which the argument is made that some character tried 
to see Caesarea (the ancient Roman capital of Palestine) via "distant 
viewing" and nothing he saw checked out. The writer argued, with 
considerable scientific insight for an age normally thought of as 
lacking it, that no one could trust visions of ethereal realms if we 
could not trust visions that can easily be checked out. The same 
logic applies to Cayce's nonsense. Leadbeater's expurgated stuff 
about life on Mars, which we now know to be rubbish, discredits the 
stuff we cannot check out, except for those folks to whom Leadbeater 
is a matter of make believe anyway.

The second way would be a double blind study in which multiple people 
claiming to be clairvoyant examine the same thing independently. A 
Leadbeater groupie discovering clairvoyantly that Leadbeater was 
right would not qualify as double blind. No one will of course agree 
to such an experiment, and the "visions" of cult leaders in the past 
all disagree so there is no reason to believe such a study would be 
fruitful. The problem is not that this is impossible to test using 
the scientific method, but that fundamentalists living in a make 
believe fantasy world of their own creation are not interested in the 
truth. If they were the Book of Mormon would have gone out of print 
decades ago.

The scientific method would begin with no presupposition that 
clairvoyance is impossible. People who say it cannot be true because 
they do not believe in it are not being scientific. When HPB was in 
London in the 1840s there was a Major Buckley there who was 
experimenting to see if people could read letters in sealed 
envelopes. He tested would be subjects for "clairvoyance" (I have 
only a hazy memory of the details but they had to see blue lights no 
one else could see) and claimed to have got some success. He only 
worked with a select group of subjects who demonstrated some psychic 
ability according to the tests he devised. Nobody is suggesting that 
the average person would be able to do such a thing. Unfortunately I 
am not aware that his experiments have ever been replicated so the 
story is not proof of anything without verification. Anyway, it 
always struck me as suggestive in light of Buckley's experiments that 
HPB claimed to have learned somewhere to read letters in sealed 
envelopes. It would have been very like her to seek Buckley out and 
see what he was doing. Yes, I am aware that there is a simple trick 
used by stage performers and tent preachers to make it APPEAR one is 
doing this.

> I mean that the Shrine Room, for example, was the height of poor
> judgment and if any Masters encouraged such shenanigans they were
> as lacking in wisdom as HPB, Damodar, et al.

Damodar seems to have been a believer, so the fact that he was 
writing some of the mahatma letters when Blavatsky was unavailable to 
write them herself complicates the challenge of explaining all this. 
Something else that is hard to figure at this hour is how Alexis 
Coulomh managed to knock holes in the wall, etc., for the purpose of 
discrediting Blavatsky without anyone at the compound getting wise. 
It appears he was expelled before he completed the project, but how 
did he start it undetected? The fact that the hole was not finished 
when Coulomb was kicked out, combined with the fact that the merest 
tyro in conjuring could have easily deposited letters and dishes in 
the shrine without one makes it pretty clear that the objects were 
inserted in the FRONT door and not the BACK door.

21613From: Jerry Hejka-Ekins <jjhe@c...> 
Date: Thu Jan 27, 2005 1:12pm
Subject: Re: Theos-World Re: Quote in the Key

> To be fair, some of us have been, for some years, trying to find
> independent verification of Wilder's statement and, so far, have
> been unable to do so. Has anyone else found any independent
> verification?

I have not read Diogenes Laertius in awhile and therefore cannot 
verify the citation, but his stuff is part of the Loeb Classical 
Library, which can be found in every university library and most 
larger public libraries. Wilder is not the most reliable author in 
the world.

As for there being an eclectic trend in Alexandria, there are 
fragments of writings of Numenius the Pythagorean and others which 
indicate that this was so. It only makes sense since so many cultures 
merged in that city that there would have been a tendency toward 
syncretism. We see a syncretic tendency in mythology in Herodotus 
which has some historical basis, since some of the superstitions in 
Greece were imported from Egypt.