Theos-Talk Archives (January 2008 Message tt00218)

The use of  "personal" experience as our ultimate determinant for 
that which is "right" or "wrong" can be a highly flawed process.

After all, how much and which part of our self makes these 
determinations? More often than not, isn't it our heavily programmed, 
habit conditioned personality, founded in its inherited and acquired 
fears, preferences, attachments and identifications? 
To continually insist on ourselves and our experience to be our final 
arbiter, can in itself be just another strong dogma, one perhaps 
lacking humility and potentially possessing not an inconsiderable 
amount of fear-based pride.

How are we to approach the works of Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr or 
Pauli, each giants in their field? Yes, they made mistakes, but are 
we to diminish or even devalue the profundity of their pronouncements 
simply because we have not experienced or perhaps even understood for 
ourselves their mental discoveries? Are we even to consider ourselves 
on an equal footing, insisting that we will accept nothing they have 
written and proven until we "discover" or "experience" it for 
ourselves?

Of course we need guard against blindly following another's 
pronouncements and we need keep open our mind for new discoveries and 
new ways of looking at things. In potential we are told we each have 
unlimited capacities. But let us not presume from our programmed, 
possibly arrogant, mundane mind that we are all equal in mental and 
spiritual functioning at this point in time.

Madame Blavatsky and her teachers maintained an age-old tradition, 
that of endeavouring to bring the inexpressible truths of life into 
the vernacular and mental culture of the day. We are told 
the "unthinkable and unspeakable" cannot be written or spoken, 
therefore a structure is erected by mental, and in this case, 
spiritual giants in an attempt to ferry us to the "other shore." It 
is available for us to accept or reject; it is for us to choose our 
direction and method; it is for us to do the paddling; it is even for 
us to build the boat. What they have done is provide what some 
empiricists might consider a less than perfectly described schematic, 
which however, with deep study and continued application might become 
apparent to us, and which may indeed assist us in our attempts to 
uncover the actual process and purpose of life in this dimension of 
existence.

If we cannot, or do not wish to recognise that Madame Blavatsky and 
her teachers possessed extraordinary and demonstrable fore-knowledge, 
knowledge and occult abilities, then that is our choice. If we choose 
to focus on what we believe or perceive to be shortcomings, that too 
we are free to do. Were they absolutely accurate and correct in all 
they said and did? Are there other traditions which may work for the 
same "type" of western-minded person? Perhaps or perhaps not, the 
empirical western mind's clamouring for dotted i's and crossed t's 
possibly blinding us from that which truly is. But to consider some 
of those who followed in their name to have equal credibility in this 
field of expertise is a matter for considerable debate. To consider 
ourselves as having equal credibility, from our personal experience, 
is perhaps just a little presumptuous?

Nigel C