Theos-Talk Archives (August 1996 Message tl00040)

According to Ann E. Bermingham:
>
> Has TS and the Bailey group ever shook hands and decided to live in harmony as
> two separate organizations?  It doesn't seem that way.  It seems that all the
> enmity and bitterness that was once directed at Alice Bailey is now being
> transferred to anyone dares to study her material.  The one traitor has turned
> into many.

I was just reflecting on this pattern on the way to work.  Same
thing with Steiner, on a milder scale.  Both apparently wanted
to remain within the TS framework until the hostility against
their innovative, independent work became overwhelming.
(Steiner as a national section head had no right to order
people not to join the Order of the Star in the East; OTOH
Besant could have countermanded that order without expelling
the whole German Section.)

If Adyar or Wheaton demonstrated a grain of feeling
responsible to explain and defend what they have done, it
would not be so alarming.  These expulsions have the atmosphere
of "disappearances" in the Latin American model.  One day,
people are gone and no one is ever told why.

Perceiving people as traitors and acting against them in secret
is such a time-honored Theosophical tradition that it's hard to
imagine the movement without it!

PJ