Theos-Talk Archives (March 1995 Message tl00257)

According to Arthur Paul Patterson:

> Here, I will say some thing personal.  I will undoubtedly change
> my views but , I don't like some of what I have been reading
> about the Mahatmas because they a seem to me to be extra psychic
> sources of authority.  I prefer Emerson's acts of intuitive self
> reflection to the Mahatma letters as Scripture.

Dunno if you were aboard when this was posted before, but in any
case it bears repeating.  Col.  Olcott writes in Old Diary
Leaves:

As the co-Founder of the Society, as one who has had constant
opportunities for knowing the chosen policy and wishes of our
Masters, as one who has, under them and with their assent, borne
our flag through sixteen years of battle, I protest agains the
first giving way to the temptation to elevate either them, their
agents, or any other living or dead personage to the divine
status, of their teachings to that of infallible doctrine.  Not
one word was ever spoken, transmitted, or written to me by the
Masters that warranted such a course, nay, that did not inculcate
the very opposite.  I have been taught to lean upon myself alone,
to look to my Higher Self as my best teacher, best guide, best
example, and only savior.  I was taught that no one would or ever
would attain to the perfect knowledge save upon those lines; and
so long as you keep my in my office, I shall proclaim this as the
basis, the only basis and the palladium of the Society.  I am led
to make the above remarks by what I have seen going on of late...

What the Colonel saw going on continued to go on, in all
Theosophical groups, for a very long time.  But he obviously
foresaw it, agreed with your view of the danger of extrapsychic
authority, and tried to stop it.  What was the result? The
Society of which he was president refused to publish his
memoirs,* insufficiently adoring of HPB and the Masters for the
taste of many, and he had to go to a commercial publisher,
Dutton, to get them out.  *in book form; they had appeared in the
Theosophist first.

A followup quote from the 1900 K.H.  letter to Annie Besant:

Are we to be propitiated and made idols of.  Is the worship of a
new Trinity...to take the place of exploded creeds.  We ask not
for worship of ourselves.  The disciple should in no way be
fettered.  Beware of an Esoteric Popery...

Mindful of the paradox of quoting authorities to undermine
authoritarianism...
Paul