Theos-Talk Archives (April 1994 Message tl00053)

John:

Eldon's letter certainly was very good.  I agree wholeheartedly about
tolerance of other viewpoints.  And I especially agree with his
metophor the kids playing the same game with different rules.  From a
certain perspective, that is exactly what is going on with the rifts
that exist in the various Tses.

Perhaps the next step after being tolerant to the alternative
world-views that exist in Theosophy is to attempt to construct a "meta"
Theosophy, which would be some kind of framework that would allow us a
comparative analysis of the various world-vies within theosophy itself.
In some respects this would be much like the way a historian can sit
and compare and describe philosophies from different eras without
showing any preference for any given era's ideas (at least *good*
historians can do this!).

As a matter of fact, I'm right now reading a book about the history of
India and you can see how many of the different interpretations in
theosophy stem from different schools of thought that have come from
India over the centuries.  And this is not just a metaphorical
comparisson.  These ancient Indian ideas are the ancestor ideas of
theosophy.  you can see how Blavatsky's ideas reflect specific Indian
schools of thought whereas Besant and Leadbeater's teachings reflect
other of India's philosophies.  I have just been realizing this as I
read and its quite an amazing discovery as far as I'm concerned.
Though there is a lot of talk about yoga, eastern philosophy and such
in theosophical circles, i think generally speaking, the average
theosophist is ignorant of the fact that almost all of the different
views in theosophy stem from different schools of ancient Indian
thought or competing interpretations of various schools.

So, again, the idea of tolerance is a big first step.  The next step in
clarifying what theosophy is would be to construct a meta-theosophy and
preferably, one that can trace the roots of the different theosophical
world views backwards in time to their origins in the metaphysics of
ancient cultures.

So, that's it for now.  If you want to post this on THEOS-L so Eldon
can see it, that would be nice.

Talk to you soon,

Don