Theos-Talk Archives (April 2005 Message tt01174)

So CWL, like Hume, also must have thought on these same lines "to humour them with a hope". His hope being backed up by faulty clairvoyance.
Cass
 
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. 

"W.Dallas TenBroeck" <dalval14@earthlink.net> wrote:
Apl 19 2005

Dear Perry:

I am taking the liberty (rap me on the knuckles if I need it) in sending you
an historical (brief ?) account of the differences between HPB and "Neo"
THEOSOPHY as Annie Besant and CWL altered it.

I don't know if you have this, but I checked it out thoroughly and fund it
correct.

Alice CLEATHER one of HPB's direct pupils wrote A GREAT BETRAYAL in protest
of those changes. I also have the text of that, if you want it.

Best wishes,

Dallas
=============================

THEOSOPHY OR NEOTHEOSOPHY?
compiled by
Margaret Thomas

(Member of the Theosophical
Society, Scotland, Wales and
England, 1912-24)

Section 1. Differences in Teaching

Section 11. Immorality in the Theosophical Society

Section 111. The Case Against Anne Besant


To H.P.B. and W.Q.J.

In Their Cause, which is the Cause of true Theosophists the World Over
The Theosophical Society is dead. But there are many Theosophists in it who
are yet alive. Not knowing the history of the years since 1803-4 that led to
its downfall, and not realizing the wide divergence between Theosophy and
the present-day versions, they may go the way of the Society unless
something be done to prevent it. It is because an opportunity must be given
the earnest student to see the differences between the teachings of
Theosophy as re-stated in the 19th century by H.P.B. and those given today;
it is because an opportunity must be given the true seeker to know
previously obscured facts concerning the great wrong that brought about the
Society’s eclipse, that this work of compilation has been undertaken. Those
who prefer blind belief to knowledge will have no interest in these pages.
But those who seek to know will study them, using the references to find out
the facts for themselves and be satisfied whether they are not truths that
are here presented.

[NOTE:
This is section I. “not in columns opposite each other” but stacked instead
for user friendly material.]


SECTION I.

DIFFERENCES IN TEACHING

The book is written in all sincerity. It is meant to do even justice,
and to speak the truth alike without malice or prejudice. But it shows
neither mercy for enthroned error, nor reverence for usurped authority. It
demands for a spoliated past, that credit for its achievements which has
been too long withheld. It calls for a restitution of borrowed robes, and
the vindication of calumniated but glorious reputations………TRUTH, high-seated
upon its rock of adamant, is alone eternal and supreme." Preface to
Isis Unveiled, I, p. v.


"I dread the appearance in print of our philosophy as expounded by Mr. H
(ume). 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 philosophywill
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 pp. 304-5


"THE WISE MAN COURTS TRUTH; THE FOOL, FLATTERY."

" However it may be, let rather our ranks be made thinner, than the
Theosophical Society go on being made a spectacle to the world through the
exaggerations of some fanatics, and the attempts of various charlatans to
profit by a ready-made programme. These, by disfiguring and adapting
Occultism to their own filthy and immoral ends, bring disgrace upon the
whole movement. Some writer remarked that if one would know the enemy
against whom he has to guard himself the most, the looking-glass will give
him the best likeness of his face. This is quite true. If the first object
of our Society be not to study one’s own self, but to find fault with all
except that self, then, indeed, the T.S. is doomed to become – and it
already has in certain centers – a Society for mutual admiration…."
“On Pseudo-Theosophy”, Lucifer, March, 1889

"Theosophy is the accumulated wisdom of the ages. Mark well that it is
no fancy of one or several isolated individuals. Its uninterrupted record
extends over thousands of generations of seers. It was only formulated after
traditions from exalted beings, passed on age by age, had been tested and
verified by the independent visions of great adepts, themselves checked and
rechecked by other adepts and by centuries of experiences, during something
like eighteen million years." (See Secret Doctrine, 1. pp. 272-3).

[NOTE: All references to page numbers in H.P.B's works are to first
editions or Theosophy Company (Los Angeles) reprints, other editions being
expurgated and therefore re-paged.]

2.

"Any teaching that fits in with this Ancient Wisdom is truly Theosophy.
It must stand or fall by the test of comparison with all that has gone
before. Earnest students of today, by comparative religion and comparative
philosophy, can trace an unbroken line of dovetailed teaching within the
last five thousand years from Krishna, Buddha, Confucius and Loa Tse,
Pythagoras and Plato, Jeshu (or Jesus), Aplionius of Tyana, the Alexandrian
School, teachers of the 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th centuries to the 19th
century when Madame H.P. Blavatsky once more restated part of the aeon-old
truths for the western world."
(See Key to Theosophy, p. 243)



By the Master’s test, as by their words, H.P.B. stands, one of a long
line of Messengers, acceptable because of the other links in the chain
before her. She herself followed the Occult Law and substantiated statements
in the “Secret Doctrine”, and her other works, by historic, archeological
and scientific data, showing the teaching rooted in earlier systems of
theosophic thought. It is obviously futile, therefore, to talk of improving
and expanding the philosophy given out by her. Can later-day soi disant
Theosophical teachers stand this same test? You are invited to judge for
yourself:


THE TEACHING ON LOGOS OR DEITY OR GOD

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

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-

3.

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 o f 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


1. The Secret Doctrine teaches no Atheism except in the Hindu sense of
the word nastika or the rejection of idols, including every anthropomorphic
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” asthe
“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 in the 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

"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

4.

ON RELIGION

"I will point out the greatest, the chief cause of nearly two-thirds of
the evils that pursue humanity ever since that cause became a power. It is
religion under whatever form and in whatever nation. It is the sacerdotal
caste, the priesthood and the churches." Mahatma Letters, p. 57

Ignorance created Gods and cunning took advantage of opportunity. Look
at India and Look at Christendom and Islam, at Judaism and Fetichism. It is
priestly imposture that rendered these Gods so terrible to man, it is
religion that makes of him the selfish bigot, the fanatic that hates all
mankind out of his own sect without rendering him any better or more moral
for it. It is belief in God and Gods that makes two-thirds of humanity the
slaves of a handful of those who deceive them under the false pretence of
saying them….The Irish, Italian and Slavonian peasant will starve himself
and see his family starving and naked to feed and clothe his padre and pope.
For two thousand years India groaned under the weight of caste, Brahmins
alone feeding on the fat of the land and today the followers of Christ and
those Mahomet are cutting each other’s throats in the names of and for the
greater glory of their respective myths. Remember the sum of human misery
will never be diminished unto that day when the better portion of humanity
destroys in the name of Truth, morality, and universal charity, the altars
of these false gods.
Mahatma Letters, p. 58

The Bible, from Genesis to Revelations, is but a series of historical
records of the great struggle between white and black Magic, between the
Adepts of the right path, the Prophets, and those of the left, the Levites,
the clergy of the brutal masses….That there were two schools of Magic,
and the orthodox Levites did not belong to the holy one, is shown in the
words pronounced by the dying Jacob.
Secret Doctrine, 11. p. 211

The struggle of Bel and then of Merodach, the Sun God, with Tiamat, the
Sea and its Dragon, a “war” which ended in the defeat of the latter, has
purely cosmic and geological meaning as well as an historical one.
It is a page torn out of the History of the Secret and Sacred
Sciences, their evolution, growth and DEATH – for the profane masses. It
relates ….to the as systematic persecution of the Prophets of the
Right Path by those of the Left. The latter, having inaugurated the
birth and evolution of the sacerdotal castes, have finally led the
world into all these exoteric religions, invented to satisfy the
depraved tastes of the “hoi polloi” and the ignorant for ritualistic pomp
and the materialization of the ever immaterial and Unknowable Principle.

Secret Doctrine, 11. p. 503

5.

THEOSOPHY. As the origin and basis of all religions, it cannot be the
antagonist of any; it is indeed their purifier, revealing the valuable inner
meaning of much that has become mischievous in its external presentation by
the perverseness of ignorance and the accretions of superstitution; but it
recognizes and defends itself in each, and seeks in each to unveil its
hidden wisdom. No man in becoming a Theosophist need cease to be a
Christian, a Buddhist, a Hindu; he will but acquire a deeper insight into
his own faith.
Annie Besant, Ancient Wisdom, p. 5

If he is on God’s side he is one of us, and it does not matter in the
least whether he calls himself a Hindu, or a Buddhist, a Christian or a
Muhammadan…
J. Krishnamurti, At The Feet of the Master. p. 8

What is the object of religions?
They are given to the world by men wiser than the masses of the people
on whom they are bestowed, and are intended to quicken human evolution….all
the types need religion, so that each may reach upward to a life higher than
that which he is leading….Religions seek to evolve the moral and
intellectual nature to unfold itself.
Annie Besant, Esoteric Christianity, ps. 3 and 4

H.P.B. to Ms. Besant

But, it is quite correct to say that “having for long done the will
(i.e. put in practice the first of the Theosophical principles) she is now
beginning to know of the doctrine”. But this doctrine, let us hope, will
never lead her to make again “her communion at a Christian altar” (Italics
ours), in other words to renounce the whole and the absolute for the part
and finite…This Christianity per se cannot, in the nature of things, offer
-- neither for that matter, can any other so-called religion – as it now
stands; for all unduly exaggerate the personality of their Founders,
Christianity more than others, as it makes Jesus every God of 3 every God
and of his brother teachers in Christ (or CHRISTOS), false prophets. We
speak here of modern church Christianity, not of the mystic religion of
Christos, the LOGOS, the Western aspect of the one religious philosophy
which can bind all men together as brothers.
Lucifer,
Vol. IV, 1889, ps. 448 and 9

“Founders” of Religion

According to this view, the Founders of the great religions are members
of the one Brotherhood ……..As Theosophy of old gave birth to religions,so
in modern times does it justify and defend them.
Annie Besant, Ancient Wisdom, ps. 3 and 5 

..the Guardians of humanity… From time to time, one of them comes forth
into the world of men, as a great religious teacher, to carry on the
task of spreading a new form of the Eternal Verities, a form suitable to a
new race of civilisation. Their ranks include all the greatest Prophets of
the Faiths of the world, and while a religion lives one of these great Ones
is ever at its head, watching over it as His special charge.
Annie Besant, The Maters, p. 79

Gautama is qualified the “Divine Teacher” and at the same time “God’s
messenger”!!….Buddha has now become the messenger of one, whom He, Sania
K’houtchoo, the precious wisdom, has dethroned 2,500 years back, by
unveiling the Tabernacle and showing its emptiness.
Mahatma Letters, ps. 281-2
But we must resume the thread of our narrative with Buddha. Neither he
nor Jesus ever wrote one word of their doctrines.
Isis Unveiled, 11. p. 559
Our examination of the multitudinous religious faiths that mankind,
early and late, have professed, most assuredly indicates that they have all
been derived from one primitive source….Combined,

6.

their aggregate represents one eternal truth, separate, they are but shades
of human error and the signs of imperfection.
Isis Unveiled, 11. p 639

On Jesus and the Christ Principle
…let these unfortunate, deluded Christians know that the real Christ of
every Christian is the Vach , the “mystical Voice,” while the man – Joshu
was but a mortal like any of us an adept more by his inherent purity and
ignorance of real Evil, than by what he had learned with his initiated
Rabbis and the already (at that period) fast degenerating Egyptian
Hierophants and priests.
Mahatma Letters, p. 344

..neither knew the other John the Baptist never having heard of Jesus
who is a spiritual abstraction and no living man of that epoch.
Mahatma Letters, p. 415

Take Paul, read the little of original that is left of him in the
writings attributed to this brave, honest, sincere man, and see whether any
one can find a word therein to show that Paul meant by the word Christ
anything more than the abstract ideal of the personal divinity indwelling in
man. For, Paul, Christ is not a person but an embodied idea. “If any man is
in Christ he is a new creation, “ he is reborn, as after initiation, for the
Lord is spirit – the spirit of man. Paul was the only one of the apostles
who had understood the secret ideas underlying the teachings of Jesus,
although he had never met him. But Paul had been initiated himself; and,
bent upon inaugurating a new and broad reform, one embracing the whole of
humanity, he sincerely set his own doctrines far above the wisdom of the
ages, above the ancient Mysteries and final revelation to the epoptae. As
Professor A. Wilder well proves in a series of able articles, it was not
Jesus, but Paul who was the real founder of Christianity.
Isis Unveiled, p. 574

Again, in these researches into the remote past we have frequently found

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