Theos-Talk Archives (July 1996 Message tl00806)

Murray ...
	*Exceedingly* well put (IMO) - framed into words something that 
has always disturbed me when I've heard words in Theosophical circles 
that condescendingly trash things like tarot, crystals, "psychism", 
"magic", channeling, etc. etc.
	Anyone that wishes to speak such things should (IMO) always 
remember that such things cannot *objectively* be assesed in a 
vacuum - tools and techniques themselves are merely that ... tools 
and techniques - the thing that *makes* them "superficial" or "deep" is 
nature of the hands that wield them, the expanse of the heart that may 
adopt them for its purposes, the immensity and discipline of the 
energy-system that chooses to utilize them ... and (IMO) the most 
important question ... the *motive* for their use. 
	Here is a "psychic", working at a "900" bill-by-the-minute phone 
line, engaged in it for purely personal gain, with no intent to serve, 
but simply to keep people calling as often and long as possible, and 
barely even actually using anything psychic. A tarot reader who learned 
that *2500 year old system of philosophy* from reading one book, and 
engages in it to fulfill an interior emptiness. A channel, who goes to a 
seminar and begins to channel immediately for others, before even 
developing the ability to tell whether or not the "entity" is one of 
stature, or merely a sublimated ego state from within their own psyche.
	But over there is an HPB, using an entire toolbox full of 
"lower siddhis" in the service of the Theosophical movement and the work 
of the Adepts. There is a tarot reader who has unlocked layer after layer 
of that system, and uses it as an *exceedingly accurate* diagnostic tool 
in her theraputic practice. There a channel who has put a decade of 
severe discipline into purifying, refining and learning to tune her 
energy-system, developed the senses and insight capable of 
discrimminating in great detail between the enormous range of interior 
existances, and offering the fruits of that development to others with 
specific work to do that concerns particular types of those existances.
	While these are the extremes - the point is, how absurd it is to 
say that "tarot", or "psychic abilities", or "channeling" is or is not 
*anything* in and of itself. Such people will often aslo hold that such 
things are "lower" while the "higher" is the intellectual appreciation 
of "deep" philosophy. Yet the indentical thing holds for that. There are 
those in whose hands the long and "deep" study of such philosophies 
increases their arrogance, their condescension, and an inflated view of 
themselves every bit as much as any of the "lower" things they 
so continually seem to feel the need to affirm their superiority over ... 
in fact the Theosophical world may have created a brand new category: The 
*deeply superficial* (-:).  
    	From my own (of course completely unreliable) clairvoyant 
observations, there is virtually no difference at all between a 
narrow-minded Theosophist and that of the average Christian 
fundamentalist - and there are very few energy-systems that look as, 
well, positively *chilling*, almost firghtening, as the ones belonging to 
those who believe *they* understand the "true" path. 

	It is not tools, techniques, or philosophies that travel the 
path. Not tools or techniques or philosophies that are "superficial" or 
"deep". It is *people*. And (IMO) nothing less than the consciousness of 
an Adept has the ability, or the right, to make a genuine assessment of 
what depth lurks in a particular person, to ascertain at what particular 
stage of development a person walking into a Lodge might be at.
	And if they walk into a Theosophical Lodge, and by 
the second meeting understand they are being, *whether overtly or not*, 
analyzed and assessed so as to be placed in categories like "superficial" 
or "borderline" or "deep" - that attitude *itself* will fundamentally 
alter the "interior Lodge" - and serve to both chase all but a few 
newcomers away, as well as create a *self-fulfilling scenerio* - in which 
those "deep thinkers" who believe very few are "ready" while most will 
not be able handle "true spiritual study" find exactly what they believe 
to be the truth ... a few stay around and most leave. They little see that 
they *themselves* have created an atmosphere that causes this to apparently
be the case. 
							Regards, -JRC