Theos-Talk Archives (September 1999 Message tl00022)

>Well, isn't that a bit pessimistic?
>
>Katinka (again, the eternal optimist ;-) )

I'm neither optimistic nor pessimistic. Both are emotional orientations that
(IMO) blur vision. While it may perhaps be good to be optimistic about one's
*personal* life (it can, I suppose, help one see opportunities that one
might otherwise miss), when it comes to analyzing the reality outside of
one's own personal sphere, it becomes dangerous. If it was a few years after
the invention of the automobile, and you insisted upon being optimistic
about your stock in a wagon wheel company, your optimism wouldn't have the
foggiest effect on the fact that the company had become obselete, and within
a number of years would disappear altogether.

About the Adyar/Wheaton TS, both the personal experience of myself and a
number of people I know who have been subjected to blacklisting, and the
blatant use of membership money (including dues we ourselves paid) to
marginalize and *lie* about - as well as objective evidence (dropping
membership numbers all over, the actual removal of National Charters, by
Adyar, of at least three *countries*) as well as other behaviours and
statistics too numerous to mention all indicate an organization that is now
entirely form-side. The life-side is dead. Optimism and pessimism are
meaningless ... many organizations calcify, fold, dissolve, and disappear.
And in them there are people that are optimistic right up to the moment
legal dissolution is declared. But it alters nothing.