Theos-Talk Archives (April 2005 Message tt00488)

Bart,
you wrote,

> I had a concept, that 
> got lots of lip service, but no backing: to have lodges create lists of 
> local speakers who would be willing to speak at lodges within traveling 
> distance; sort of like the national speaker program, but on a more local 
> level.
I remember this was done in the 60s, when there was a real resource of 
Lodges and speakers. In the greater Los Angeles area there was once a 
dozen or more Lodges and some very fine and knowledgeable speakers. The 
So.California Federation tried to set up a speaker's list, but I 
remember opposing it because I saw it (I think correctly) as a 
transparent attempt to have an official list of "approved" speakers, so 
that Lodges would know who to invite and who to shun. California Lodges, 
in those days, were very competitive, run by ego driven managers, and 
resisted any attempts by members to have them work together. Today, we 
have gone way beyond the problem of having to make lists of speakers. 
As the number of Lodges have dwindled over the years, there are few 
Lodges which still have neighboring Lodges from which to draw speakers. 
I have visited the Lodge in New York which you belong. The real estate 
must be worth millions of dollars, though that old building should have 
been raised and rebuilt many years ago. That alone scares people away, 
in spite of the fact that you are sitting on some of the most expensive 
real estate in the country. Of course, the lodge does not have the 
millions of dollars it would take to rebuild. Yet, they are one of the 
two or three top lodges in the country. That, in my mind, a sad state 
of affairs.

TSA is aware of the above problems and many more. They chose to respond 
by centralizing--which left the Lodges to fend for themselves. This is 
not going to change in the foreseeable future. Lodges are in a 
survival mode, and I think that if they are to survive in the future, 
they need to completely re-think from the ground up what they are about 
and their relevance to the communities which they serve. 
Alexandria West has had to think about these things. We need a minimum 
of 4,000 square feet of floor space to do what we need to do--10,000 
would be more realistic. Even in our Small California community, that 
would be a million dollar investment for starts. Such an investment 
requires a very solid foundation of meaningful activity to sustain 
itself and to be able to change with the times. By meaningful activity, 
I mean services which goes far beyond the traditional fare of weekly 
lectures and book sales. 
Jerry




Bart Lidofsky wrote:

> Jerry Hejka-Ekins wrote:
>
>
> > This sounds like the Lodges we used to have here in the early 1960s when 
> > I first joined the Theosophical Society. Besant Lodge in Hollywood used 
> > to typically have 100 people attending their Sunday lectures. A Picture 
> > of Krishnamurti hung on the wall, as well as pictures of Besant and 
> > Leadbeater. Times have changed and the American culture has changed 
> > quite a lot. TSA management no longer actively supports Lodges, and 
> > there are very few of them left. Besant Lodge now has very few members. 
> 	One of the reasons I formed the theoslodges group was to create a 
> backdoor for helping lodges support each other. I had a concept, that 
> got lots of lip service, but no backing: to have lodges create lists of 
> local speakers who would be willing to speak at lodges within traveling 
> distance; sort of like the national speaker program, but on a more local 
> level. I had originally thought to make theoslodges Adyar-only, but 
> would not be averse to having inter-society cooperation as it IS a 
> private, not an official, list). The only real "rule" is that it not be 
> used for simple bashing of any given Society; in other words, to stay on 
> a local level, and be constructive rather than destructive.
>
> 	Back to the issue of dwindling attendance, in New York, at least, the 
> problem is one of competition. It's especially difficult to compete with 
> groups that claim to have all the answers.
>
> 	Bart
>
>
>
>
>
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