Theos-Talk Archives (September 2011 Message tt00033)

Dear Anand and friends

My views are:

Yes. Interesting, this about not publishing the Mahatma Letters. And I am 
not one of those who find their publication in the early 20th century to 
have been done in a proper manner taking the points mentioned into account - 
and - a few other issues not mentioned in the paper by Leadbeater.

I will however write a comment on the below excerpt on the Leadbeater 
paper...

Leadbeater wrote:
"Madame Blavatsky
herself essayed the same gigantic task in her monumental work The Secret 
Doctrine;
but, wonderful as was the erudition she displayed, the arrangement was still
imperfect, and she so over-weighted her volumes with quotations from 
scientific
(perhaps sometimes only quasi-scientific) writers, and with more or less 
corroborative
testimony from all kinds of out-of-the-way sources, that it was still almost
impossible for the average man to grasp the scheme as a coherent whole. We
owe an immense debt of gratitude to Messrs. B. Keightley, A. Keightley, G.
R. S. Mead and, above all, to our President (Annie Besant), for their long
and arduous labour of systematization and re-arrangement; indeed, it was not
until the last-mentioned author (Annie Besant) published The Ancient Wisdom
that we had before us a clearly comprehensible statement of Theosophy as we
now understand it."

M. Sufilight says:
A few wellmeaning words from me, which might be able to spark som altruism 
and wisdom in the inner chambers of the spiritual hearts.

It seems to me, that our indefatigable Messiah-priest W. C. Leadbeater and 
also the political Annie Besant in her book Ancient Wisdom did not 
understand the upper triangle on Maha-Sunyata and Absolute Negation given in 
the Gelugpa Rang-Tong teachings within esoteric Buddhism - as these 
doctrines were given in the Secret Doctrine by Blavatsky - And they also 
seem to have forgotten the importance of the use of the 7 keys when writing 
a book. - And that the book the Secret Doctrine clearly was forwarded to be 
read by advanced students of wisdom teachings - and - not for the average 
man as Leabeater seem to imply. - And the word "theosophy" is - 
appearently - neither understood in a proper manner by Leadbeater in the 
above text. I have in my recent previous post here at Theos-talk sought to 
clairify this problem, which Blavatsky and other members of the 
international body of the Theosophical Society constantly was facing among 
members and by journalists in the newspapers in various countries and so on.

Well, just a few views of mine.
I do hope, that they will hit good soil - somewhere.



M. Sufilight

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Anand Gholap" <AnandGholap@NRE9KOM2XKAPYMuIq9kYdY1W0g5Z7edcUG7hgpHmayYvaUZKQ8R-ngXJkdcOYkWLcBz2HQDm4kFORZdFPw.yahoo.invalid>
To: <theos-talk@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, September 18, 2011 10:26 AM
Subject: theos-talk Leadbeater on why Mahatma Letters should not be 
published


C.W. Leadbeater on why Mahatma Letters should not be published

by

Anand Gholap

Below are extremely important passages written by Mr. C.W. Leadbeater 
regarding
Mahatma Letters. Publication of Mahatma Letters was forbidden by Mahatmas 
for
various reasons. Below we see those reasons and also disastrous implications
if they were published.
"I have mentioned various ways in which messages are received from the 
unseen
world, but there is still another type of communication which is perhaps of
more immediate interest to some of our students, and that is the message or
instruction occasionally given by a Master of the Wisdom to His pupils. Such
messages have been sent at intervals all through the history of our Society.
They have, however, been of many different kinds, and have come in diverse
ways. Some have been public- addressed, that is to say, to all enquirers; 
others
have been intended for certain groups of students only ; yet others have 
been
strictly private, containing advice or instruction to a single pupil. A vast
amount of what, now that it is systematized, we usually call Theosophical 
teaching,
came to us in the shape of phenomenally-produced letters, written (or rather
precipitated) by order of one or other of the Brotherhood to which our 
Masters
belong.

Students should, however, bear in mind that those early letters were never
intended as a complete statement of the ancient doctrine ; they were the 
answers
to a number of heterogeneous questions propounded by Messrs. Sinnett and 
Hume.
By slow degrees the outlines of that doctrine began to emerge from this 
rather
chaotic mass of revelation, and Mr. Sinnett tried to reduce it to some sort
of order in his Esoteric Buddhism.
Each of his chapters is an able statement of the information received on one
branch of the subject, but naturally there are many links missing. Madame 
Blavatsky
herself essayed the same gigantic task in her monumental work The Secret 
Doctrine;
but, wonderful as was the erudition she displayed, the arrangement was still
imperfect, and she so over-weighted her volumes with quotations from 
scientific
(perhaps sometimes only quasi-scientific) writers, and with more or less 
corroborative
testimony from all kinds of out-of-the-way sources, that it was still almost
impossible for the average man to grasp the scheme as a coherent whole. We
owe an immense debt of gratitude to Messrs. B. Keightley, A. Keightley, G.
R. S. Mead and, above all, to our President (Annie Besant), for their long
and arduous labour of systematization and re-arrangement; indeed, it was not
until the last-mentioned author (Annie Besant) published The Ancient Wisdom
that we had before us a clearly comprehensible statement of Theosophy as we
now understand it.
It was not the intention of our Masters that those original letters should
be published; indeed, in one of them the Chohan Kuthumi quite clearly 
stated:
" My letters must not be published" ; and later in the same epistle: " The
letters were not written for publication or public comment upon them, but 
for
private use, and neither M. nor I would ever give our consent to see them 
thus
handled." Mr. Sinnett promised that at his death he would leave these 
letters
to our President for preservation in the Society's archives; but most 
unfortunately
he either changed his mind or forgot to do this, and so they fell into the
hands of one who thought himself wiser in this matter than the Masters, and
therefore did just what They had forbidden, though They had given clear 
warning
that to do so "would only be making confusion worse confounded . . . would
place you in a still more difficult position, bring criticism upon the heads
of the Masters, and thus have a retarding influence on human progress and 
the
Theosophical Society ". This is very readily comprehensible to an ordinary
intellect when we see how much of purely personal matter and of advice on 
questions
of merely temporary interest those early letters contain ; still more so 
when
we remember that Madame Blavatsky said of them :
"It is hardly one out of a hundred occult letters that is ever written by 
the
hand of the Master in whose name and on whose behalf they are sent, as the
Masters have neither need nor leisure to write them ; and when a Master says
" I wrote that letter," it means only that every word in it was dictated by
Him and impressed under His direct supervision. Generally They make Their 
Chela,
whether near or far away, write (or precipitate) them, by impressing upon 
his
mind the ideas They wish expressed, and, if necessary, aiding him in the 
picture-printing
process of precipitation. It depends entirely upon the Chela's state of 
development
how accurately the ideas may be transmitted and the writing-model imitated."
(Lucifer, vol. iii, p. 93.)
Furthermore, in order to enable him to estimate aright the value in detail
of these letters, I most strongly recommend the student to re-read carefully
another of Madame Blavatsky's definite statements on this sub­ject, printed
on page 617 et seq. of the Centenary number of The Theosophist, in which she
clearly explains that the " direct supervision " mentioned above was not 
always
exercised, but that a chela was ordered to satisfy correspondents to the 
best
of his or her ability. I am not for a moment maintaining that the 
information
given in some of those letters was not of the very greatest value and 
importance
to us ; on the contrary, it was the beginning of the whole Theosophical 
revelation
; but I do say, having seen the originals, that there are some 
unquestionably
obvious mistakes in detail, and some statements that no Master, with His 
almost
omniscient knowledge, could possibly have made ; and I have no doubt that 
the
reasons for such errors are precisely those which Madame Blavatsky gives 
us."

According to H.P. Blavatsky, mistakes in precipitation of letters are quite
possible due to various reasons. Below are the paragraphs of H.P. Blavatsky
from her article Precipitation. These paragraphs explain the process of 
precipitation
and why mistakes can happen in this process.

"The work of writing the letters in question is carried on by a sort of 
psychological
telegraphy; the Mahatmas very rarely write their letters in the ordinary 
way.
An electromagnetic connection, so to say, exists on the psychological plane
between a Mahatma and his chelas, one of whom acts as his amanuensis. When
the Master wants a letter to be written in this way, he draws the attention
of the chela, whom he selects for the task, by causing an astral bell (heard
by so many of our Fellows and others) to be rung near him, just as the 
despatching
telegraph office signals to the receiving office before wiring the message.
The thoughts arising in the mind of the Mahatma are then clothed in word, 
pronounced
mentally, and forced along the astral currents he sends towards the pupil to
impinge on the brain of the latter. Thence they are borne by the 
nerve-currents
to the palms of his hands and the tips of his fingers, which rest on a piece
of magnetically prepared paper. As the thought-waves are thus impressed on
the tissue, materials are drawn to it from the ocean of ákas, (permeating 
every
atom of the sensuous universe) by an occult process, out of place here to 
describe,
and permanent marks are left. . . .

> From this it is abundantly clear that the success of such writing as above
described depends chiefly upon these things: (1) The force and the clearness
with which the thoughts are propelled and (2) the freedom of the receiving
brain from disturbance of every description. The case with the ordinary 
electric
telegraph is exactly the same. If, for some reason or other the battery 
supplying
the electric power falls below the requisite strength on any telegraph line
or there is some derangement in the receiving apparatus, the message 
transmitted
becomes either mutilated or otherwise imperfectly legible. The telegram sent
toEngland by Reuter's agent at Simla on the classification of the opinions
of Local Governments on the Criminal Procedure Amendment Bill, which excited
so much discussion, gives us a hint as to how inaccuracies might arise in 
the
process of precipitation. Such inaccuracies, in fact do very often arise as
may be gathered from what the Mahatma says in the above extract. "Bear in 
mind,"
says He, that "these letters are not written, but impressed, or 
precipitated.."

To turn to the sources of error in the precipitation. Remembering the 
circumstances
under which blunders arise in telegrams, we see that if a Mahatma somehow 
becomes
exhausted or allows his thoughts to wander off during the process, or fails
to command the requisite intensity in the astral currents along which his 
thoughts
are projected, or the distracted attention of the pupil produces 
disturbances
in his brain and nerve-centres, the success of the process is very much 
interfered
with."

http://www.leadbeaterandbesant.org/Publication_Mahatma_Letters.html



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