Theos-Talk Archives (March 2007 Message tt00055)

Hi Nigel,

You're right, I didn't see the post you mention here:

> In a recent posting, perhaps you missed it or chose not to respond, I 
> wrote in response to the above:
> "It is in this manner which I approach the issues surrounding Bishop 
> Leadbeater. As a person he had obvious difficulties with 
> truthfulness, honesty, accuracy and self-confessed sexual practices 
> with young people. As you rightly state, most of us will also have, 
> or have had, similar difficulties with at least some of these.
> As a human being he deserves love, compassion and acceptance as an 
> evolving soul. 
> Some of his actions (and teachings) however deserve admonishment and 
> even condemnation at the highest level." (Brackets added)

It's the "deserve admonishment" part I trip up on. Why on earth? He's 
been dead and gone a long time, and some people find value in what he 
wrote. Nobody is all bad. Who among us has never made a mistake. 
Should we then be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail 
over and over for eternity?

> Were this to be a simple matter of human weakness your plea would be 
> valid. Bishop Leadbeater presumed himself to be an authority in 
> spiritual matters and shared with us his pronouncements.
> Does this then preclude us from sharing with others our own 
> experience or are we to obediently abide by his utterances? 
> Does this then obviate us from any responsibility to warn others of 
> lies, deception and outrageous behaviour we may have uncovered? 
> Doesn't evil happen when good men do nothing?

What evil do we hope to avert by beating the same old dead horse over 
and over again? Is it not possible, indeed, certain, that by 
continuing to revive old issues of wrong doing we keep the act we 
abhor itself alive, giving it life by our unwillingness to let it die 
its natural death, and that when we do that we actually perpetuate 
its repetition by others who are suggestible and sensitive to the 
lower astral elementaries which promote such acts? Do we not have the 
responsibility, since we know how this works, to allow these 
inhumanities to die, to slip into the abyss where they belong, and to 
consciously replace them in the human mental/psychic stream with 
something better? Is this not part of the Work of thesophists, for 
which so many suffered and sacrificed personal well being so that we 
may learn of it and devote ourselves to it? 

> Are you suggesting Bishop Leadbeater and Dr Besant were not trying to 
> impose their own "inherently limited personal view on the minds and 
> hearts of others"?

Who cares what they were trying to do? Is it not their problem? Why 
try to  make it ours?
> 
> It is through objectively assessing these matters, impersonally and 
> without fear or favour, that enables us to see more clearly and not 
> be deluded by some form of imposed compliance, glamour or misplaced 
> loyalty.

This may by a useful process for the individual student, necessary 
even. We all need to learn discernment in our studies. But we do not 
have the right to try to persuade others not to study someone they 
find value in because of some reason we have discovered. How would 
you feel if someone found (or pretended to find, since once the 
accusation is made it makes no difference wheter it's true or not) 
some stain in your past, and trotted it out to prove that everything 
you say is bunk and worse? Why is it a good idea to do that? I still 
don't get it.

Adelasie
>