Theos-Talk Archives (March 1999 Message tl00088)

The Dialogues of G. de Purucker, Meeting 14

"There is today an association of theosophists who now call themselves 
The United Lodge of Theosophists. As far as I have
been able to gather, they apparently think that all esoteric inspiration 
and all receiving of new esoteric light stopped when
HPB and WQJ died -- that all the esoteric wheels stopped then and there, 
and that there remains nothing in the world for
men to live up to or aspire to in the way of a stream of illumination 
and teaching excepting the books that these two
messengers wrote and left behind them. 

Yes, The United Lodge of Theosophists are in fact bibliolaters, book 
worshipers. Because they have HPB's and WQJ's
books, the situation is not so bad; but is not this situation just what 
the sects in Christianity have degenerated into? 

Now these good and earnest people otherwise deserve credit for their 
splendid loyalty to HPB and to Judge, yet if they don't
know it themselves intellectually, they are instinctively conscious of 
the fact that they have cut themselves off from the living
stream of inspiration flowing from the Great Lodge; that their whole 
dependence is on books. They disclaim any teachers. 

Our own holy school is a Mystery-school. It is a strictly esoteric one; 
and therefore rites, ceremonials, and rituals, are
conspicuous by their absence. In the exoteric-esoteric, or 
esoteric-exoteric, Mystery-schools of Greece, for instance, a great
deal was made, both in Samothrace and Eleusis, of ritual and ceremonial, 
and these rituals and ceremonials were very
happily conceived and successfully carried out for ages. The difficulty 
and danger of course were that they distracted the
attention of the neophyte away from the essential truths, from the 
heart-light behind the ritual and the ceremonial. What were
these rituals and ceremonials? Representations in dramatic form of the 
teachings given orally and in secret in the higher
degrees, and without ritual and ceremonial."

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