Theos-Talk Archives (September 1995 Message tl00639)

 "A Greeting from Mrs. Annie Besant"
 [Written by invitation for the first issue of
 The International Psychic Gazette.]

"Dear Mr. Knowles,

I heartily wish success of your new Journal, which should be most
useful to our Club. So much interest is going on today in all matters of the
`Borderland' that there is ample material for a Journal such as you propose.

In the Gazette, as in the Club itself, the note of full liberty of
opinion and of research in all directions will be sounded, I am sure. That
unfettered liberty of thought and speech seems to me to be as necessary to
progress in psychical science as in all other branches of human knowledge. The
petrifying of knowledge already obtained, and then the building up of newly
made stones as a barrier against further advance, has been a consistantly
recurring phenomenon in the history of thought: then comes the necessity for
iconoclasts to shiver the obstacles to pieces, and re-open the road.

If new knowledge were plant as a seed instead of being fossilized, then
each such fragment of knowledge would grow into a tree on the side of the road
which leads to Truth, and that road would remain an ever-open avenue, with
unlimited prospects in front and fair vistas behind.

If we make no barriers out of what we have learned, the younger
generation will be able to walk on unhindered, and "what our fathers and
mothers believed" will no longer be a barrier across the way, but an
interesting milestone on the road of infinite progress. For myself, the eager
welcome of new truth is as joyous at nearly sixty-five as it was at
twenty-five; nay, far more joyous, for then the new truth was was an
earthquake, shattering old beliefs, whereas now I know that Truth's earthquakes
can only shatter error, and lay bare virgin soil which shall repay human
culture. Let the young ones, then, march forward fearlessly, and let us cheer
them on; they will win new countries for us to live in when we return."

-JRC

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