Theos-Talk Archives (May 2006 Message tt00086)

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R. Hodgson, J. Algeo, D. Caldwell, P. Johnson &  K. Hesselink 

THE  TEMPTATION  OF  LOOKING  LIKE  A  SCHOLAR  
 
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Dear Friends, 
 
Mr. Richard Hodgson, the author of the fake 1885 Report of the SPR which called H.P. Blavatsky a fraud, happened to set a general pattern later followed by researchers like Paul Johnson, John Algeo, Katinka Hesselink, Daniel Caldwell and others, who even now keep circulating the same old and proven slanders against H.P.B. 
 
All these people have some fundamental ground in common. They cared, or they care,  too much  for their own personal images as “scholars”, or “scientific-minded people”. They became politically prisoners of their own outer masks as would-be academics, or at least as  people who have a “modern and  skeptic mind".       
 
In a text significantly called  “Judges or Calumniators?”, H.P.Blavatsky writes something which perfectly applies to what we see in a handful of  21st century candidates to scholars: 
 
“A little logic, please, Messrs. Judges and Slanderers. How could the London Psychical Research Society pronounce in favour of all the phenomena described in ‘The Occult World’ and elsewhere without risking its title of ‘scientific’?  How would its acceptance of all that was attributed  to me by the phenomenalists have been received by the scientists who deny wholesale the existence of intelligent forces outside of man? It was a question  of life or death, of  the to be or not to be of Hamlet. (...)   One or the other: (a) either to declare publicly that the charges of the Coulomb lady were inventions (...)  and be flooded in a flood of ridicule, forever losing caste, as they say in India ; or (b) sailing with the current, it would have to  proclaim, in order to keep from sinking, that all the phenomena, the Mahâtmans and their agents, were a huge imposture.” (1) 
 
A deep desire to look like smart scientific guys is likely part of the motivation of our 21st century Soloviofs and Coulombs.  
 
This is  no true scholarship, though, and it does not help true scientific research.  
 
Best regards,   Carlos Cardoso Aveline  
 
            
NOTE:
 
(1) “The Collected Writings of H.P.Blavatsky”, TPH, Adyar, India/Wheaton, Ill. USA,  Volume VII, third printing,  1987, p. 335. 
 
 
 
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