Theos-Talk Archives (February 2009 Message tt00384)

Hi Govert,

I'm glad you posted what you did below.  Your posting started 
a whole series of thoughts that I would like to explore ....  with 
you and anyone else here on this forum.  Maybe even Anand will 
participate.

While I'm formulating my thoughts and trying to determine where to 
start, I just wanted to post this note and let you know that you have 
raised some important ideas and thoughts and I hope that we can 
consider these and other equally important matters and consider them 
in some detail and depth.

More in a day or two when I have more time to start putting down my 
thoughts.

Daniel

--- In theos-talk@yahoogroups.com, "Govert Schuller" <schuller@...> 
wrote:
>
> Dear Daniel and Anand,
> 
> Maybe the truth is somewhere in a third possibility in which 
everybody is seen as making both false and true statements:
> 
> 1) HPB did produce both genuine and fake phenomena and made both 
true and false claims.
> 
> 2) The Coulombs et al exposed some of the fraud, and by doing so 
think they also refuted the genuine stuff
> 
> 3) CWL was both a clairvoyant and deluded/deluding hoaxter
> 
> Therefore:
> 
> 1) There is no sufficient basis to construe HPB, CWL (or K for that 
matter) as 'sacred' persons and their writings as 'sacred' writings. 
It takes a leap of faith to do so, which is fine with me, but it's 
still a leap.
> 
> 2) There is no sufficient basis to think that HPB, CWL (and K) are 
exposed as total frauds merely by finding some fraud.
> 
> Personaly I think it's good to waver between intuitive faith and 
rational doubt, even while sharpening both one's critical rational 
apparatus and intuitive sense, and the flexibility to manage their 
interaction. 
> 
> Govert
> 
> =====================
> 
> For training purpose I'd throw out the following and see how we'll 
deal with it:
> 
> HPB claimed to have met Morya in August of 1851 somewhere in 
England. She initially had told her friend Wachtmeister he meeting 
occured in Hyde Park (London), and in her scrapbook she had written 
that it was Ramsgate (on the North Sea coast, east from London, north 
from Dover). 
> 
> HPB: "Memorable night! On a certain night by the light of the moon 
that was setting at Ramsgate on August 12, 1851,* when I met [symbol] 
the Master of my dreams!!" 
> 
> Accompanying the text is a sketch of what looks like a seaside 
harbor. See; 
http://www.katinkahesselink.net/blavatsky/articles/v1/hlc_sketchbook.h
tm
> 
> The discrepancy was explained by HPB as being a 'blind' or 
disinformation with Ramsgate the blind for Hyde Park. 
> 
> Wachtmeister: "H.P.B. told me that it was a blind, so that anyone 
casually taking up her book would not know where she had met her 
Master, and that her first interview with him had been in London as 
she had previously told me." 
> 
> Why it was important that she had to disinform others about the 
spot is not clear and there is nothing obvious about it. On the 
contrary, there doesn't seem to be any reason at all for changing the 
location. What could be deduced form the location? And which was the 
original spot and which one the blind? I ask this because it can be 
the case that, once you allow such blinds, there is no reason to 
reject double blinds, i.e. that in this case that it really was 
Ramsgate where HPB met the Master of her dreams and Hyde Park was the 
blind, but then tells her friend it was other way around. 
> 
> The above hypothesis I'm putting forward because I recently 
acquired a short but very intriguing study that does put forward a 
plausible explanation: 
> 
> S.B. Liljegren "Bulwer-Lytton's Novels and Isis Unveiled" (Uppsala -
 Copenhagen - Cambridge, MA: A.-B. Lundequistska Bokhandeln - Ejnar 
Munksgaard - Harvard University Press, 1957)
>  
> 
> Liljegren's proposal is that HPB in those days was very much 
influenced by the novels of Bulwer-Lytton, to the point of having 
developed something of an infatuation with the famous writer. With 
the help of Bulwer's son Liljegren established the fact that Bulwer 
was at Ramsgate during that summer. Both men found it "extremely 
probable" (p. 28) that, given Bulwer's status and whereabouts and 
HPB's high regard for him, that HPB's Master of her dreams was none 
other than the novelist and that she only merely saw him, but never 
met.
> 
> Now, back to this 'blind' business and fill out the full 
hypothesis: HPB had to use a double blind story about the actual 
wherabouts, Ramsgate, of her meeting with her master, as the actual 
spot might have given away the actual identity of this master, the 
novelist Bulwer-Lytton, as she might have thought it to be generally 
known that he was there that summer. (On top of that Bulwer's 
grandfather used to live close to Ramsgate and visited him in his 
youth). So, HPB's scrapbook entry is true, then she tells 
Wachtmeister it is a blind for Hyde Park, which story therefore by 
itself is the real blind to cover up the plausible deduction that her 
master of her dreams was a famous novelist and not an oriental 
prince, who recruited her for her life's work. In this light the 
latter story then of course also becomes problematic as it takes out 
one of the many parts that legitimize her life's work. 
> 
> One way to possibly rescue the 1851 HPB-Morya meet is to establish 
that the symbol she used for her master in her scrapbook could in no 
way be construed as referring to Bulwer-Lytton. In the quotes used by 
others (Goodrick-Clarke, Neff) the symbol is mostly reproduced as a 
capital m followed by the masonic triangular dots: " M.'. " In the 
reproduction of the scrapbook it actually looks more like "Mo.. " 
with the two dots just under and to the right of the o. So, "Mo" 
could be short for Morya with the two dots indicating something 
esoteric. (BTW, if it reads "Mo" that would more or less refute Paul 
K. Johnson's idea that the M stood for Mazzini, the italian 
nationalist who then resided in London).  
> 
> Any refutations or back-up for the above elaborate conjecture?
> 
> 
> 
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>