Theos-Talk Archives (October 1999 Message tl00246)

> > > Doesn't throwing stones at
> > > ourself (we are, after all, all Theosophists) just hurt the
> > > entire Movement?  History is such a touchy subject...

*NO* - in my opinion it doesn't. "Stone-throwing" is another one of those
highly subjective terms like "brotherhood". What is perceived as
"stone-throwing" to one person is honest, well-intentioned criticism to
another ... "you aren't acting compassionate" has been a concept that has
permitted TS leaders to get away with outrageous things over the years.
Brand your critics as "unbrotherly", paint yourself as a saint suffering for
Theosophy - and then do what you want with the Society's publications and
funds.

Yes, we are all Theosophists - but we are also presumably adults - one of
the greatest errors that has been made over the years is to confuse
"brotherhood" - a concept arising out of the deep-level spiritual affinity
between the immortal aspects of our beings, and that holds regardless of
which sort of skin we wear in an incarnation,  with "being nice" - a
completely fleeting and entirely personality-level concept that varies not
only from era to era, but within a single era among different races, and
within races even amongst different regions. The adepts in the ML were
clearly compassionate - it runs like a thread throughout all of their
writings - but they most definitely - *often* - were *not* nice. They didn't
give a fig for cultural sensitivities, and quite often engaged in what by
many would be called "stone-throwing".

Achieving an entirely superficial accord in which we all relate to each
other as though we're in a damned Victorian parlour, taking enormous care
that we say nothing that will be perceived as "unbrotherly" - these thing
have *nothing* to do with the quest for either personal growth and
development, nor the formation of a dynamic, living Theosophical Society.
Learning to create a place in which the full power - the apparent good and
the apparent "bad" - is drawn out of all of us, where our sensibilities
*are* periodically seriously upset, where we *are* forced at every turn to
question our ideas, our values, to feel the point of contact with what is
temporary within us and what is permanent, *and* to learn how to discern
between the huge variety of different personality types in an international
society, *that* is what creates a genuinely growing individual, and such an
environment is what would create a TS that might survive.

The final image of a fully realized humanity is *NOT* one in which we all
dissolve into one big collective mush, but one in which we each become fully
realized stars in our own right. Its not a bowl of oatmeal, its a galaxy.
The point is not to keep attempting to reach one single *form* of
interaction where everyone agrees with everyone else, and none of us ever
say anything that can be perceived by anyone else as "stone-throwing", or
"unbrotherly", but one in which our *own* beings have become so large, so
developed, so flexible that they are able to let embrace people with vastly
different viewpoints, and styles of expressing them. And the way to *reach*
this point is not by stifling disagreement, by avoiding conflict ... but
indeed is often to engage deeply *in it*. -JRC

-JRC