Theos-Talk Archives (May 1996 Message tl00953)

At 07:42 PM 5/16/96 -0400, you wrote:
>
I'll respond to you "backwards" if I may. I don't have the vaguest idea why
I signed my first and last names to my message, but it had no connection
with trying to express a formal difference between us. No I am not angry
with you. I was, but I am no longer. Now as the "the long string of titles"
that Eldon is what might be called the "short form", the full business takes
up a fairly extended paragraph. I do it< but you will note that I do it no
longer, in what was probably a misguided attempt to remind people that my
background, experiences, and upbringing are so very different from theirs,
and in the hope that I might indicate that that is why I sometimes seem to
be "distant" or "arrogant" or perhaps most of all "strange". In a figurative
way only, it is as if I come from a distant planet, and I was trying by sort
of drawing back behind a clearly defensive screen, to remind people of that.
My childhood and youth was totally different from any of yours and I was
mistakenly hoping to be able to remind folks of that. It obviously misfired.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is use that theosophical brotherhood to
empathize a bit and try to guess what it is like to be me.

Now, as to what else you said, I accept your explanation but I can't quite
avoid the strong  feeling I have that you do truly mean to denigrate the
"psychic factor". Also, I have to say that I do not believe it at all
possible to separate Blavatsky the Seer from Blavatsky the "anything else".
She was a psychic, a paranormal, in every aspect of her life and work, and
that is true from her earliest childhood on. Unless both she and colonel
Olcott are dreadful liars her writing was paranormally produced. so then,
everything you say you believe to be important in theosophy is the result of
Blavatsky's paranormality, her psych ism. Eldon, the Secret doctrine was
allegedly copied from a book "The Stanzas of Dzyan" that she only saw on the
Astral Plane. That makes her a seer! The fact that she was a teacher too, is
irrelevant because she would have had nothing at all to teach had it not
been for her paranormal abilities. The things she had to say (aside from
that aspect of core theosophy which was copied from the Rg. Veda and
Mahayana Buddhism and perhaps from Godfrey Higgin's "Anacalysis") were all
based upon her paranormal or psychic experiences. Take away the psychic and
there's only orthodox mahayana Buddhism left.

I certainly accept your entire sincerity, though I believe it misguided. I
would ask you, in the future, no matter what your own inner feelings on the
subject are, to try to avoid the appearance of condemnation in the things
you say about paranormality. Were I the only one who feels you condemn it,
it might simply be a matter of my personal perception, but as you well know
it is not just me.

alexis