Theos-Talk Archives (September 1995 Message tl00432)

>>Daniel: Art if YHWH did have a hand in your creation (and he did) and you look
>>up into the Potters eyes and say "Why did you make me this way?" Or
>>make even a more foolish determination that the Pot determines what
>>will be contained within then that is your own personal choice which
>>you certainly have made of which only the Potter can by grace and mercy
>>wait for you to ask to be filled with His will.
>
>Eldon: Theosophists would generally disagree with the idea that we are but
>clay fashioned out of some potter's hand. That is a story for
>children's sunday school, not for people who want to think and understand
>how life really works. We *made ourselves*, we are our own potters.

Eldon, you are missing the point here entirely. I like this illustration a
lot because this is a gray area of which we have little information. Where
did the soul come from? Where did the mind come from? When we
individualized, the teaching suggests, we received a soul? Didn't God (or
natural law) provide us with this soul? Is this soul a temporary apparatus
which becomes filled to a point, but then replaced? Perhaps the soul is
another life form which benefits greatly by aiding us, but then when we are
capable of living without it and a more direct line of transmission from the
Monad to the Personality takes place, where does this being that was our
soul go to? Does it repeat this work somewhere else in the universe?

The same thing occurred with the mind. When we were ready to eixst in a
gross material sense, some great dhyani chohans quickened our minds? What
does this mean? Did they provide us with a temporary apparatus until ours
could become more useful? Did our lives contribute to the growth of this
temporary presence or did our lives go towards our own minds becoming more
operable at the required level?

I think Daniel is right in saying we don't choose what becomes built into
our auric aid. Karma does this. It is God's divine plan which makes certain
qualities eternal and which associates those qualities with our activities,
mental, emotional and physical. Once this buddhic body is developed, what
does it do? Leave us to a fate similar to Christ dying on the cross perhaps?

When I look up and address the potter I want to say it is good to be
unselfish and even though I am living for the benefit of another "being" I
can be fulfilled. By furthering the life which has aided me I can repay that
life and bring benefit to the universe as a whole. We find so many
references in our literature regarding forgetting the self, becoming
selfless, etc. In Buddhism, doesn't the soul or the buddhic vehicle pop
when it is no longer needed? What do we have in place of this when this
happens? Just a direct stream? I might be a different being than the one
built by all of my lives. I might be a person who DOES really choose what
to have built into my consciousness at this buddhic level.

>>This may make
>>you mad...but spiritual growth must be within the bounds of truth, or else
>>you grow wild.
>
>The fear of letting go from fixed dogma and thinking for yourself may
>make it seem so. But a fixed external anchor, attaching to a body of
>dogmatic teaching, does not protect from "going wild". It rather stifles
>and smothers the spiritual, which is a living tradition, a living sense
>of connectedness with life itself.

I'd like to provide this quote from the HOW TO STUDY THEOSOPHY pamphlet
mentioned earlier:

"This mode of thinking (she says) is what the Indians call Jnana Yoga. As
one progresses in Jnana Yoga, one finds conceptions arising which, though
one is conscious of them, one cannot express nor yet formulate into any sort
of mental picture. As time goes on these conceptions will form into mental
pictures. This is a time to be on guard and refuse to be deluded with the
idea that the new found and wonderful picture must represent reality. It
does not. As one works on, one finds the once admired picture growing dull
and unsatisfying, and finally fading out or being thrown away. This is
another danger point, because for the moment one is left in a void without
any conception to support one, and one may be tempted to revive the cast-off
picture for want of a better to cling to. The true student will, however,
work on unconcerned, and presently further formless gleams come, which again
in time give rise to a larger and more beautiful picture than the last. But
the learner will now know that no picture will ever represent the TRUTH.
This last splendid picture will grow dull and fade like the others. And so
the process goes on, until at last the mind and its pictures are transcended
and the learner enters and dwells in the World of NO FORM, but of which all
forms are narrowed reflections."