Theos-Talk Archives (September 2011 Message tt00034)

In my humble opinion, one of the best things that happened is the
publication of ML to APS. While there may be errors here and there, overall
many students were benefited and continuing to benefit from it. We should
always remember that real occult knowledge cannot be put in writing as one
of the Masters clearly told Sinnett, I think in the long run they were
destined to be published. If that was not the case, Sinnett would have been
told to burn them, just like Olcott was told to do so with some of the
letters he received from another Master.

There is another issue that very few tend to address. There is always a
predisposition to keep information and general advise unnecessarily secret.
The classic example is the 1900 letter in which Annie Besant was warned
about unnecessary secrecy killing many organizations. This was redacted in
the letter CJ published and came to light only in 1980s when the full letter
was published by a non Adyar source. Many believe that if ML to APS was sent
to Besant, we would never have seen any of them in full. The tendency of
unnecessary secrecy of operation that crept into TS after Besant took over
is quite obvious from what we all have seen over the years.

We all owe our gratitude for Sinnett, who was a journalist who knew the
value and role of information, who perhaps was aware what would have
happened if the letters were handed over to Besant.

MKR


On Sun, Sep 18, 2011 at 3:26 AM, Anand Gholap <AnandGholap@D4A2lnouSc7z1hyNTbgJyddbFzOgoKTHBgR0irHAb-MCZCOAtuFeC8PTp-WdW5nPlqE6dWGwo4-ZAqvn-1Q.yahoo.invalid> wrote:

> C.W. Leadbeater on why Mahatma Letters should not be published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 publicâ 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 subÂject, 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.
>
> âThe 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 Äkas, (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
> precipitatedââ"
>
> 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.â
>
> http://www.leadbeaterandbesant.org/Publication_Mahatma_Letters.html
>
>
>
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>
>
>
> ------------------------------------
>
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