Theos-Talk Archives (June 1997 Message tl00205)

	Post-modernism is like a hammer. It is useful for some things, such as
the analysis of art and literature. Unfortunately, just as using a
hammer on a dirty window will only make it clearer by making it useless,
post-modernist analysis on things such as science, mathematics, and
history makes them useless. The post-modernist belief that each person
creates his or her own reality, and the ego is supreme, is the basis of
the alteration of the New Age from a self-less movement where the
betterment of humanity is key, to a self-ish movement where personal
empowerment is key.

	Bart Lidofsky

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Keith:  I am not sure I (or anyone) really understands philisophical schools,
but we seem to have to give them names like :

1. New age
2. Post-modernism
3.  Anthroposophy
4.  THeosophy
5.  Ne0-platonism
6.  Pagan
7. Wiccan
8.  Chritstian

and so on .....

I certainly am not sure I understand post-modern analysis as opposed to
classical HPB Victorian type theosophy, but Bart, you got your lid back onsky
here about selfishness vs. unselfishness as a key to our current dillema.

Things like TV news and the internet keep us in a strange immediate contact,
yet strangely separate (as has been discussed before).  It has been easy for
me to take pot shots at people, make cheap jokes, take out my petty
irritations in this forum as opposed to trying to raise my consciousness daily
to a high level through meditation BEFORE I speak.

The point I am getting at is that so many cults like HEAVEN'S GATE have a
certain appeal because they reveal a certain exhaustion with the physical
plane and physical VEHICLES (their favorite term).  The HG people were
definitely post-modern in the sense that they had LEARNED ALL THEIR LESSONS ON
THIS PLANE (I heard this 100 times as an their excuse for suicide) and were
ready as more developed beings to attract the Masters in the UFO and go to new
worlds to learn new lessons.

Thus the old style virtues of a WORLD TEACHER as AB and Leadbeatter had hoped
Krishnimurti would be, were already superceded by the necessities of living in
the 20th century with its "souless" riches., mechanized society and crowded
population centers.

Jesus came not to win a war, or save the world, but save men from a
"soulessness".   This seems to be the theme of the Western saviour even when
in Eastern garb.  The East want enlightenment, the West wants some kind of
MOVEMENT to other states of consciousness, in UFO's, to other realms, planets,
states of being, serphira, globes etc.

What does this have to do with stealing books from the library?  Well, the
mindset seems to put personal empowerment, indeed, beyond the social good.
Yet you have strange throwbacks to a primitive revenge thinking as seen in
Timothy McVeigh.  Here is a failed idealist turned monster.   If he had
charisma, he might have become a militia leader or Hitler type.  There are a
few about.  Instead he took a simple direct approach.   What he did was
totally cowardly, and unforgiveable on a simple human plane.  Yet many seem to
project their psychological problems and failure of the failure of modern
systems like the military and the Welfare State.

HPB didn't have to deal with the problems of Marxiam and welfarism looming on
the horizon.  Victorian England was notriously cruel as documented by CHarles
DIckens.  Yet we have to deal with a certain feeling of spiritual ENTITLEMENT.
  We paid into the spiriutal system with meditation, study of the SD and all
the other difficult texts, not to mention to dues to conferences and
organizations and gurus.   Shouldn't we feel it is our DUE  to have an
immenant apotheosis of the planet, if not just and individual here and there.

Are do a lot of us just have egg on our faces?????


Keith