Theos-Talk Archives (October 1996 Message tl00508)

On Fri, 18 Oct 1996, Bart Lidofsky wrote:

> 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
>
Now that Alice Bailey is mentioned here, her books are not much read in
India and there are not many who follow the teachings in her books in
India. Could it be that the symbology she has used is not attractive to
Indians? Just a thought.

MKRamadoss