Theos-Talk Archives (February 1995 Message tl00252)

Thanks Liesel for sharing your story of how you got to the path.
Whether you see it as evidence of an intelligence that guided you
is not clear, although you say you have the feeling at times of
being guided by something in the right direction.  For me the
synchonicities abound and have changed me over the years from a
cynical business type who would have none of this, to one who is
open to the concept of guiding intelligence that comes to our aid
when we ask for it.  If one wants to call this intelligence
Masters does not seem terribly important, except that they, in
hierarchical order, represent a kind of road map.  We could just
as easily call this intelligence: my deva or my ku or my guardian
angel.  And studying about them is not the same as trodding the
path, it is more like examining the map.  It seems to be that it
is in trodding the path, that we actually encounter the Masters
(or whatever name we cloose to call them).

Here is a story of help from "above" not given to a person, but
to a group.  In this case the Miami, Florida branch of the
Theosophical Society in America.  Those of us who lived through
the past 2 years of experience at the branch are hard pressed not
to acknowledge some kind of help.

The branch had fallen on difficult times over the years,
principally because the location of the meeting hall was in a
Miami neighborhood that, over a 30 year period, had turned into a
slum.  Membership had fallen to a low of 28 in the spring of 1993
when the then president, announced her departure from Florida to
California, consequently having to resign the presidency.  The
treasury had been depleted over several years as one effort after
another to revive the branch failed, and there was very little
money left with which to run the branch or to finance a move.
The other 6 officers were dejected and wanted to quit.

But we decided to try once more, agreeing that we would not
reopen the branch at the then location in Miami in the autumn of
1993.  We would either move somehow, or pack it in.

No sooner was the decision made to somehow move, than things
began to happen.  A friend of the TS who was not a member,
located a retail store building in a shopping center, in
Deerfield Beach, a prosperous suburb of Miami.  It was a well
lighted location with plenty of parking.  He contracted with the
seller to buy the building, putting up a substantial deposit, and
gave our TS branch a 6 month option to buy it from him.
Meanwhile, we could rent it for 6 months, while trying to sell
the old branch building in the Miami slum.  This was a great
opportunity, but why did this fellow enter into such a
transaction?

We decided to take a chance.  We did not have a really good
business plan because there was no way to know when or if we
could sell the old branch building.  We just gambled that somehow
things would work out.  So we closed the old branch building,
putting it up for sale, and moved to the new location.  We opened
a Quest bookstore, began offering a number of study groups, and
people began to come, and they began to join the T.S.  Our
moribund branch began to grow again.  Old members were reinspired
and we began to attract new members.  (The branch as of now has
110 members and continues to grow.)

Meanwhile the summer of 1993 rolled into autumn, and our 6 month
option was gradually coming to a close.  There had been no viable
offers on our old building.  Across the street from it was a
Catholic High School, and we had approached them as possible
buyers, but they seemed uninterested.  We were getting very
nervous as our option was running out.  Then, suddenly in
November 1993 with barely a month remaining on our option to buy
the new building, the Archdiocese of Miami made us a viable offer
to purchase the old building.  When we saw the Archbishop's
signature on the offer to purchase, we just knew that we were
getting help.  We closed the transaction to sell the old building
within 2 weeks of the required closing date to buy the new
building.  The cash received from othe sale of the old building
was used to close the purchase of the new building.  If this had
not happened, if the Roman Catholic Church had not come along to
buy our old building and just in time, I don't know what would
have happened, but the odds were very high that it would have
been the end of the Miami branch that had been founded in 1919.

There are those who will say that what happened to our branch was
the result of just plain hard work or dumb luck.  Certainly the
Church got a property for its money, and at a fair price, but
there were no other viable buyers.  Why did they buy it just in
time, so that our branch could continue? Some of us close to the
transaction are convinced that we got help, just the help we
needed, and just in time.  Some of us would call it a "miracle."
Is this the same kind of "miracle" as the manifesting of tea cups
or the precipitation of writing? It seems to me to be a more
important kind of "miracle".

So, to those who seem to have doubts about the reality of the
Masters as a guiding intelligence for us, I suggest that it is
worthwhile pay close attention to the synchronicities in your own
life, and that abound throughout life.  Sometimes they are not as
dramatic as a book falling off a shelf and hitting you on the
head.  Often, it is someone who comes into our life at just the
right moment and lends us a book.  But we have likely made the
first effort.  We are open to read that book, or we are looking
for some new avenue of study, or in the case of our TS branch, we
made the effort to finally move it.

I wonder if anyone else has any stories like this to share?

Sy Ginsburg