Theos-Talk Archives (May 1996 Message tl00425)

Eldon,
There are certain advantages to being a monster an someday I may write a book
about it, just for the fun of it.  But to more serious matters, namely living
brotherhood.
There is an old Christian ditty that goes:
"To live above with the saints I love,
Oh that will be glory.
But to live below, with the saints I know,
That's another story."
It is very easy to talk about brotherhood in the abstract and very difficult
to put it into practice.  Last summer at summer school I used the rather
nasty example of saying that "today I'm going to practice brotherhood.  I'll
kick my neighbor down the stairs tomorrw."  Well, obviously I have no
intention of kicking any of my neighbors down the stairs because I need to
borrow a lawnmower from one of them, and I happen to like them and I'm too
old for that sort of thing.  And besides, I just don't do it.  But the point
of my comment was that sometimes it is one hell of struggle.
The fact that none of us are adepts (OK, I'm almost one, :-)) means that we
all have a ways to go before we truly realize brotherhood in our normal lives
as a regular thing.  And there is nothing to be gained by beating up
ourselves about that except for an unfortunate tendency to project the
failing onto everyone else and then what happens--sibling rivalry gone
berserk!
But the strange thing is that it just sort of creeps in without being
expected and without being tried for, like when you have someone who is very
proud of how unbrotherly he can be and then someone falls down getting off
the bus a convention and he is the first one out of his chair to render
assistance.  It just becomes an instinct, leaving the realm of the abstract
and the philosophical.
And the funny thing is is that development has nothing whatever to do with
study or anything else.  It just comes from being around the TS.  And it is
something that never ceases to amaze me.
The only conclusion I can come to about it is that HPB did something truly
magickal, something we may never be able to define, when she and the others
founded the TS.  She created a new pattern in human consciousness that
influences everyone who comes into contact with it.  I see the change in my
own life (and no one on this list knows what I was like just before I joined
the TS)  and I know it is not just mellowing with age.
Brotherhood, or siblinghood, humanhood, or whatever we want to call it, is
doing, not studying.  It is just something we pick up and for that more than
anything else we honor HPB and the creators of the TS, for it is something
that transcends all of our differences of opinion and personality.

Chuck the Barbarian MTI, FTSA, MG of 5
Heretic
Troublemaker