Theos-Talk Archives (February 1995 Message tl00175)

In November 1992, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Miami, the Miami
Branch of the T.S.  sponsored Expo-92, a metaphysical fair.
There were many talks and workshops.  I happened to be giving one
on Gurdjieff's teaching, and afterward a young woman came up to
me and said that she was visiting Miami but lived in New York
City.  I asked her how she became interested in these kinds of
ideas.  She told me that about 5 years earlier, she was in
Doubleday's Book Store (an interesting name) in Manhattan, and
that while she was browsing, a book fell off a high shelf and hit
her on the head.  She bent down and picked it up off the floor.
The book was P.D.  Ouspensky, "In Search of the Miraculous." (For
those unfamiliar, this is the text most often used to present
Gurdjieff's teaching).  She began to read that book and couldn't
put it down.  She was hooked and has been on her quest ever
since.  She was ready to be open to ideas of this kind.  Most of
you who read this will know the feeling.  How many of us have had
similar experiences! And how many like stories have we heard!
Your own story is probably no less extraordinary.

Of course there are Masters.  I don't see them as embarassing
deadweight at all.  Jesus was one but he still had to be born and
live in a mundane body to accomplish something here.  And I'll
bet he was subject to many weaknesses of the flesh.  That doesn't
make him any less a Master.  There are often good reasons for
advanced beings to take up physical body.  K.  Paul deserves much
credit for his important research, but if Morya was the Maharajah
of Kashmir that doesn't make him any less a Master.  And what of
those incarnated as Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, others! Who of us is
high enough to sit in judgment of the level of attainment of any
of these extraordinary beings? And if they smoked, drank, cursed
or otherwise behaved badly in terms of our contemporary morality
so what.  That makes them no less Masters.  They are Masters
because they have mastered what we seek, and maybe even mastered
our hearts.  They are further "ahead" on the infinitely long path
of return.  They leave tracks on the path for us to follow, but
we each still need to tread that path ourselves.

If we simply pay attention to the synchronicities all around us,
we easily find proof of discrete intelligence guiding us in our
quest.  The more open we are to this guidance and the more
willing we are to serve others in their quest, the more obvious
this help is to us.

There is a tradition that esoteric ideas, ideas about
consciousness, are intentionally sewn into the fabric of ordinary
life by the advanced intelligence that guide us.  These ideas are
embedded in monuments, in structures, in certain paintings, in
certain music, in certain dance, of course in literature.  They
become mixed with the things of ordinary life.  But when we, each
of us, begin to sift through and discover them, then further help
is given.

I like to collect stories about how people find their way onto
the spiritual path.  One story is more extraordinary than the
next.  Mine began when, as a tourist, I visited the Borobudur,
the vast Buddhist monument on the island of Java.  I didn't know
anything about it at the time, didn't know anything about
theosophy, didn't know that it symbolized the 7 interpenetrating
bodies, the lower quaternary and the upper triad.  But there was
something about it that was unforgetable and it left me with a
lasting impression.  Only some years later when I was already a
member of the T.S.  and saw Geoffrey Hodson's book in which he
showed a painting of the permanently stationed angel that he was
able to see residing over the Borobudur, did I begin to
understand a little about this.  There's more to the story, but
I'll stop here.

Would anyone else like to tell their story of how they were
brought to the quest?

Sy Ginsburg