Theos-Talk Archives (April 2006 Message tt00770)

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Friends of the Wisdom: 
HEAD LEARNING OR HEART DOCTRINE?  
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Dear Friends, 
This is no blame game.  The more I think, the more I sense John Algeo, Paul Johnson, Daniel Caldwell and Katinka Hesserlink  have some fundamental ground in common.   
Different though their views are in several aspects, they all try to understand Theosophy and Theosophists (including HPB and Masters), based in Words and external, gross evidences. To it they add several degrees of inference and speculation. 
One example is  our recent debate on spiritual vows in the case of the founder of the United Lodge of Theosophists, Robert Crosbie. Daniel accuses Crosbie of not having the dead-letter, the outer shell  of an esoteric vow. 
Are esoteric vows the same as Vatican's blind obedience oaths? 
Or are they BEYOND  words, even if they USE words, because they truly happen at the HEART LEVEL, as I tried to explain? 
The answer this questions is not in a book written by HPB, but it is  in a book translated and annotated by her --  "The Voice of  the Silence".
That book, a practical instrument for aspirants to discipleship who sometimes make vows, teaches: 
"LEARN ABOVE ALL TO SEPARATE HEAD-LEARNING FROM SOUL-WISDOM, THE 'EYE' FROM THE 'HEART' DOCTRINE.  (......) BUT EVEN IGNORANCE IS BETTER THAN HEAD-LEARNING WITH NO SOULD-WISDOM TO ILLUMINATE AND GUIDE IT."  (1) 
I hope John Algeo, Daniel Caldwell, Katia Hesserlink and Paul Johnson will be able to understand that lay discipleship is a fact, and that it happens through non-verbal areas of human brain and heart. 
Not all that is beyond words is non-existent. 
All  most important experiences of a human being cannnot by expressed in words. Lay discipleship is only one of them.  Words can be and are used, but words can only point to the facts -- and even that in a limited way. 
Can vows be instruments to a commitment to blind obedience? That can be so only in exoteric, authoritarian religions/corporations. 
Now, no one  is necessarily to be blamed by that lack of understanding. Blaming is often useless, but thinking helps.
The option between the dead letter or the living spirit is one central difference between priests  (jesuits or not ) and theosophists. The latter are all independent philo-sophers, friends-of-the-wisdom, and  not parrots repeating ritualistic,  top-down formulas.  
Best regards,  Carlos Cardoso Aveline  

NOTE:
(1) "The Voice of the Silence", TPH, Wheaton, Ill., USA, 1992, see Fragment II, p. 25. 
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