Theos-Talk Archives (March 2005 Message tt00340)

Hi Adelasie,

Further thoughts about the discussion dynamics:
> 
> I knew I could rely on you for a succinct explanation, and I 
> appreciate the trouble you took to provide it. And on St. Paddy's 
Day too...
> 
Memetics is in the same column for me as Jungian psychology-- makes 
perfect sense and works so well at explaining things, but how much 
evidence and reason support either one? I don't know but they are 
both intuitively appealing. One could apply Jungian notions of 
shadow projection to the whole CWL mess, too.

> > Thanks. I "went" to 18th century North Carolina, a nice place to
> > visit but...
> 
> Really? I've been wandering around in 17th-18th Century 
Massachusetts and Europe, reading my latest fav author, Neal 
Stephenson, "The Baroque Cycle,"and find life there strangely 
familiar and amazingly less convenient. But ever stimulating. 
> 
All my recent research has been on paternal ancestors but my 
mother's Quaker folks had a bizarre experience in Puritan 
Massachusetts. The wife and children were all Quakers but the 
father wasn't-- they were Nicholsons-- and the father drowned at 
sea. In something that foreshadowed the witch craze, the locals 
decided that the Quaker family must have killed the nonQuaker father 
by some kind of diabolical means. The bereaved widow and sons were 
publicly beaten and put in stocks. Not long after that the 
Nicholsons became one of North Carolina's first settler families!
> 
snip

>
> Perhaps it's a personality thing, but I find it very distasteful, 
> dredging up unsavory facts or innuendoes about other people, dead 
> or alive. It feels sticky and dark, like mean gossip. It seems 
>somehow dangerous in itself, as though it could overwhelm one's 
>better instincts, drag one down into the same dark world, make one 
>lose one's sense of balance, of sanity. Maybe it's just me?

No, I actually think that most of us here at theos-talk feel a sense 
of disgust/horror/vertigo when looking into the Leadbeaterian 
abyss. Personally I can't read him without feeling contaminated.
But Radha tried to transfer that feeling into making it seem as if 
there is something inherently prurient about comparing CWL's 
teachings to HPB's.

And I wonder really what purpose is served, beyond the sort of 
dreadfully delicious sensation of wallowing in the worst we can 
imagine? You seem to be saying this is the way it is and I am asking 
but does it have to stay this way? 
> > 
Moving beyond the Theosophical framework, do most popular movies and 
TV and books have to forever and always be about violence and sex? 
As a public librarian I like to imagine I'm purveying something 
nobler than pop culture schlock, but people's reading tastes are 
sometimes just as creepy as their taste in movies or TV. "Wallowing 
in the worst we can imagine" is exactly the thrill of fiction that 
focuses, for example, on horrors befalling children. 


> Indeed they can, and do. Sometimes it is useful to focus attention 
on the process. We can ask ourselves, why do we find this essentially
> salacious material so very interesting? Is this really what we 
want to spend our time and energy on? What purpose does it serve? 

And what is going on with all the fascination in US media with 
celebrity trials? Why are we supposed to be obsessed with the 
deaths of Laci Peterson and Bonnie Lee Bakley, but blithely 
indifferent to tens of thousands Iraqis whose deaths were paid for 
with our tax dollars?

Some 
> will find it important to them, and that's fine. But maybe there 
are some who just never thought about choosing what to think about, 
what to react to, how to evaluate what comes across the ether to 
lodge in their consciousness forever. 
> 

Most, not just some, IMO!

It isn't so much a matter of telling others what to be interested 
in. Not on my part. Honest. I can't stand being told what to think, 
do, want, like or anything else. I'm more interested in bringing some
> light on our collective process. We may have an opportunity here, 
to focus a bit on self-control, on self-responsibility. We can look 
> around and see everywhere in the word the results of some pretty 
> immature bahavior on the part of humanity. Is that what we want to 
> perpetuate? Or do we want to do it a bit better?
> 
I guess with CWL we are caught in a double bind. To completely 
avoid the horrifying aspects of his life is to allow his admirers to 
intimidate us into silence. But to wallow in them is to give 
ammunition to those who would wish to deflect attention from CWL to 
those who point out his flaws.

Pondering,

Paul