Theos-Talk Archives (May 2006 Message tt00792)

Daniel,

I have not seen some of this material before and don't feel
comfortable commenting on it at this time, but I do wonder why you
want to attribute the very last paragraph as being about Laura
Holloway?  Was this made obvious in some other correspondence?  Are
you saying that LH was a conscious agent of Dugpas or are we looking
at some weaker sense wherein her lifetime of dabbling in mediumship
made her a valuable tool for some sort of TS test?  I am not sure what
you are trying to say.  Whatever it is, it seems we are once again
trying to go behind the curtain, string together private letters and
try to speculate what they might mean all to the detriment of the
reputation of Laura Holloway.  Is this necessary?  What will it prove?

Bruce



--- In theos-talk@yahoogroups.com, "danielhcaldwell"
<danielhcaldwell@...> wrote:
>
> Mrs. Holloway and Mr. Judge
> 
> [Excerpted from an unpublished manuscript]
> 
> In early April 1884, W.Q. Judge writes from Paris to Mrs. Laura 
> Holloway:
> 
> "…For several days, until yesterday, I have had the most awful blues 
> that ever were. So bad indeed that H. P. B. was very much worried. 
> It seemed impossible to stave them off, and as they were accompanied 
> with an uncontrollable desire to weep, I was in a bad way. 
> 
> "She said I had got into my past current, and also that in going 
> about I HAD ABSORBED SOME OLD ELEMENTARIES which SHE SAW about me. 
> 
> "She gave me to wear all day her talisman ring, which is of great 
> value and strength. It has a double triangle and the Sanscrit 
> for `life' on it. THIS HELPED ME, but all the while I felt that 
> something was to be done by me. . . . "  caps added.
> 
> H.P. Blavatsky elsewhere gives a graphic description of elementaries 
> and what SHE COULD SEE:
> 
> "....It stands to reason that this mere earthly refuse, irresistibly 
> drawn to the earth, cannot follow the soul and spirit — these 
> highest principles of man's being. With horror and disgust I often 
> observed how a reanimated shadow of this kind separated itself from 
> the inside of the medium; how, separating itself from his astral 
> body and clad in someone else's vesture, it pretended to be 
> someone's relation, causing the person to go into ecstasies and 
> making people open wide their hearts and their embraces to these 
> shadows whom they sincerely believed to be their dear fathers and 
> brothers, resuscitated to convince them of life eternal, as well as 
> to see them... Oh, if they only knew the truth, if they only 
> believed! If they saw, as I have often seen, a monstrous, bodiless 
> creature seizing hold of someone present at these spiritistic 
> sorceries! It wraps the man as if with a black shroud, and slowly 
> disappears in him as if drawn into his body by each of his living 
> pores." A letter to one of her relatives in Russia.
> 
> It should also be remembered that during the previous year (1883)  
> Mr. Judge had been CLOSELY  associated with Mrs. Laura Holloway in 
> Brooklyn, New York.
> 
> Laura Holloway revealed years later the following:
> 
> "For many years there was a small group of people who met each 
> Sabbath evening in the home of one of their number for the purposes 
> of social and spiritual recreation. They were people who earnestly 
> desired to know aright, all that each could learn and whose right to 
> receive wisdom was based upon their willingness to impart what of 
> light they had already gained by persistent and well-directed 
> effort."
> 
> "Into this friendly circle Mr. Judge was early admitted as one who 
> was far ahead of his associates in philosophic and metaphysical 
> studies. He was an addition to the group highly appreciated and he 
> was often moved by gratitude to express his thanks for the ready 
> sympathy and good fellowship he enjoyed. At the period to which 
> allusion is now being made, he was not a robust man, but was 
> suffering from the effects of a fever contracted while on a trip in 
> South America; mentally he was at his best, and socially he was a 
> witty, companionable person, sometimes gay, always agreeable, and 
> ever eager to talk on the subject of Theosophy. . . . "
> 
> "Among the individuals that composed this group was a nature [Laura 
> Holloway herself] that had some natural but untrained gifts of 
> clairvoyance, and to this one Mr. Judge gave more of his confidence 
> than to the others -- not thereby robbing them, but, NEEDING THE 
> ASSISTANCE THIS PSYCHIC COULD SOMETIMES GIVE HIM, he revealed more 
> of his mind to that one. But each and all shared alike in all 
> the `visions' seen and reported, and between them all, there grew to 
> be a STRONG MAGNETIC TIE, which united them in their investigations, 
> and held them together in spirit, as long as they lived." The Word, 
> November 1915. Caps added.
> 
> Here is what Master K.H. wrote about Mrs. Holloway and her 
> connection with elementaries:
> 
> "You cannot acquire psychic power until the causes of psychic 
> debility are removed. Your trouble is, that you "cannot take in" the 
> doctrine of shells. You have scarcely learned the elements of self-
> control in psychism; your vivid creative imagination evokes illusive 
> creatures, coined the instant before in the mint of your mind; 
> unknown to yourself. As yet you have not acquired the exact method 
> of detecting the false from the true, since you have not yet 
> comprehended the doctrine of shells. 
> 
> "Whether you sit for friends in America or London, or elsewhere as 
> medium — though you now hate the word — or seeress, or revelator, 
> since you have scarcely learned the elements of self-control, in 
> psychism, you must suffer bad consequences. You draw to yourself the 
> nearest and strongest influences — often evil — and absorb them, and 
> are psychically stifled or narcotised by them. The airs become 
> peopled with resuscitated phantoms."
> 
> "….How can you know the real from the unreal, the true from the 
> false? Only by self-development. How get that? By first carefully 
> guarding yourself against the causes of self-deception, and chief 
> among them, the holding of intercourse with elementaries as before, 
> whether to please friends (?), or gratify your own curiosity."  
> Letter 17, 
> http://www.blavatskyarchives.com/hollowayml.htm
> 
> In another STILL unpublished letter from Master K.H. to Madame 
> Blavatsky, he writes the following concerning Mrs. Holloway: 
> 
> "She labors under the very kind but erroneous & injurious notion 
> that since she has done it (consoling the elementaries) ALL HER 
> LIFE – she cannot be doing wrong in continuing to do so.  Fatal 
> error!  She has, she does wrong, a most serious one to herself:  for 
> she has thereby been for years systematically destroying her health. 
> This relationship during the course of which the unclean shells have 
> been constantly absorbing a part of her vitality brought her to 
> become the highly nervous & sickly sensitive.  The more they are 
> encouraged the more serious it comes for her, & they may even kill 
> her if she heeds us not.  
> 
> "And let her be impressed with the fact that whenever she thinks she 
> sees a chela appearing with, or seeming to take an interest, or show 
> any connection with those astral vampires – she yields simply to the 
> cunning & crafty ways of the Shells.  No Gelukpa  chela ever meddles 
> with the earth-bound remnants of humanity, nor will any of our chela
> [s] – high or law – encourage such an intercourse by his 
> presence. . . ." caps added.
> 
> In 1886, H.P. Blavatsky gives the following estimation of Mrs. 
> Holloway in a letter to A.P. Sinnett:
> 
> "...The first bomb-shell from the Dugpa world came from America; you 
> welcomed and warmed it in your own breast. . . . The Dugpa element 
> triumphed fully at one time -- why? because you believed in one 
> [Laura Holloway] who was sent by the opposing powers for the 
> destruction of the [Theosophical] Society and permitted to act as 
> she and others did by the 'higher powers,' as you call them, whose 
> duty it was not to interfere in the great probation save at the last 
> moment. To this day you are unable to say what was true, what 
> false...." The Mahatma Letters, No. 141.
>