Theos-Talk Archives (December 1993 Message tl00127)

Dear Eldon,

     I may not be well qualified to say why some folks dislike
my work so much, but I'll try. First and foremost, it's a
sacrilege for anyone, no matter who, to identify the Masters as
historical figures, no matter whom. Why? Because there's a
whole myth built around access to them being restricted to the
spiritually deserving. For some obscure librarian doing
detective work research to crack any of the secrets is
disturbing to that mindset. Second, the HPB who emerges in my
research is up to her neck in political coalitions and
intrigues, although finding herself on opposite sides at
various times. This is sacrilegious to those who see HPB and
the Masters as completely above political concerns.
     Others can add more points, but I would say that the
general sloppiness of presentation in ISM did not help my case
much, or the sweeping generalizations from limited evidence
that are found there. The new book is much more oriented to
just presenting the lives of the characters and the evidence of
Theosophical connections, without speculation about whys and
wherefores.
     Jerry's "nutshell" gives a seriously distorted summary of
my work. I have never suggested that everything HPB said about
the Masters was a cover story, but rather that she liberally
combined truth with "blinds" in order to protect their
identities. As for reducing everything to Sufi sources, this
is preposterous. Only two of the thirty-three characters in
the new book are Sufis; Punjabi Sikhs, whom Jerry says I
specifically reject as IDs for Masters, in fact are the largest
single category (and were in ISM as well). Of the 33, 11 are
Indian, 4 Russian, 3 English, 2 each American and Egyptian, and
1 each Hungarian, Polish, Persian, Cypriot, Spanish, Algerian,
Sikkimese Sinhalese and Tibetan. So there's absolutely no
attempt to say the Masters were all one kind of person ethnically or
religiously. I use lots of HPB material as genuine accounts of
the Masters, rather than rejecting all as fiction.
     One final note as to why this is disturbing to folks.
Approaches to HPB have always been dominated by the assumption
that she either never lied or never told the truth. My
approach assumes that she did both, plentifully, and it is up
to us to sort it all out. The fact that this is hard work and
places responsibility on our own shoulders makes it tempting to
just reject this approach and cling to the idea that HPB always
told the truth or always lied.