Theos-Talk Archives (January 1997 Message tl00671)

I arrived at work today planning to post on this, and found
that Titus has anticipated the issue in his own post on the
lack of experiential focus in the Theosophical movement.  Just
finished The Anatomy of Spirit, and am quite taken with Myss's
thesis that there are different developmental issues corollary
to each chakra.  Her comments about the 5th (counting upwards)
or throat chakra seem to me to encapsulate the problem of the
Theosophical movement:

"If mind and heart are not communicating clearly with each
other, one will dominate the other.  When our minds are in the
lead, we suffer emotionally because we turn emotional data into
an enemy.  We seek to control all situations and relationships
and maintain authority over emotions.  When our hearts are in
the lead, we tend to maintain the illusion that all is well.
Whether the mind is in the lead or the heart, will is motivated
by fear and the futile goal of control, not by a sense of
internal security."(pp. 229-30)

The developmental challenge of the person or organization whose
center of gravity is the throat chakra is to establish
communication and balance between feeling and thinking.  To
build the antaskarana between higher and lower manas, in
Theosopheze, perhaps.  But what is found in most Theosophical
literature is a rigid hierarchical insistence that the mental
is "higher" than the emotional, that adepts have to give up sex
and other personal feelings, and so forth.  Emotions are
expressed in abundance, but there is a real unconsciousness of
them, a dwelling consciously in thoughts and a denial of
feelings, that is characteristic of Theosophical history from
the early days on.

For example, HPB and Olcott hated each other after 1885 and
apparently never really communicated openly about it; spewed
their feelings about to others but pretended it was all about
things that could be grasped by the mind.  This set up a
pathological pattern for subsequent generations.  Besant,
Leadbeater and Krishnamurti had tremendous emotional energies
in their relationship, but intellectualized and rationalized
everything so that none of these issues were dealt with in a
healthy way.  Then Krishnamurti either experienced or feigned
amnesia about it all, perpetuated the pattern of pretending to
live on a mental plane while enmeshed in a very
emotional/passionate situation with the Rajagopals.  Denial
everywhere you look.  In recent years I have experienced very
intense emotional energy directed my way from Theosophists, who
to a man insist that the issues are not about feeling at all,
purely about thinking, and that to perceive it any other way is
a sign of weakness or imbalance, etc.  So in short, and I have
to run because someone needs to fax on this line, it appears
that there's a systemic denial or avoidance of feeling and a
pretense of rising above it into thinking, running through
Theosophical history from its beginnings to the present.
That's why there's such a failure to recognize that people need
the practical experiential focus Titus was talking about.  It's
like a split-brain experiment.  The left hand doesn't know what
the right hand is doing, and vice versa, and this has crippled
the movement IMO.