Theos-Talk Archives (October 1996 Message tl00499)

Patrick Alessandra Jr. wrote:
>
>      I have read HPB's and AAB's works thoroughly and find only harmony
> in the ideas presented in their teachings. Vocabularies change but the
> same truths flow through them all.
	
	Everybody (including us) is a product of their time. Things which seem
obvious and taken for granted by one generation are considered not at
all obvious by the next. When the falsity of a major untruth built into
society is revealed, it can cause a VERY rapid change (take a look at
almost any movie made before 1970 and any movie after 1971, and see how
radically the attitudes towards women changed in such a short period of
time). When reading wisdom, one has to be aware of the times in order to
make sense of them. I expect that an unannotated Secret Doctrine will be
largely unreadable 100 years from now. I once gave a lecture on hypnosis
based on one of Blavatsky's articles, and it took the Theosophical
Glossary and a review of medical history to truly understand Blavatsky's
position.

	In any case, when a work contains what Ed Abdill calls "a red flag", it
becomes harder to read it. I find that of the early literature, for me,
THE MAHATMA LETTERS contains few, if any red flags, the works of
Blavatsky and Judge come after that, then come the works of Besant.
Having been brought up in an atmosphere of mini-pogroms, I have an
emotional prejudice against Christianity, which makes reading Leadbeater
to be quite difficult, although I intellectually realize that he uses
Christian symbology rather than Christianity itself. When I first looked
at Alice Bailey, I opend two books of hers at random, and read a couple
of pages. One was about how the white race was charged with bringing the
black race up to the standards of the white race. The other was how
homosexuality is the choice of evil people. I will go through the effort
of finding these references again. In any case, it colored my emotional
attitude towards Alice Bailey, and made it very difficult to read her
works. Once again, on an intellectual basis, I realize that she had
access to a great deal of wisdom; it's just hard to obtain wisdom with a
red flag waving in front of your face.

	But, once again, I must stress that the negative responses are personal
and emotional.

	Bart Lidofsky