Theos-Talk Archives (June 2003 Message tt00209)

06/22/2003 1:47 AM

Re: 2003 U L T Day LETTER

Dear Friend:

No, I did not write that. May students from various Lodges
contributed to its preparation.

The real origins and motivation for the series of annual letters
of this U L T statement are, as I recall to be found as
principles laid out in some writings by both H P B and W Q J .

These annual reports have been carried out since 1931, and have
been written by students who try to epitomize the THEOSOPHICAL
MOVEMENT as seen through the work of the U L T and other efforts.
They are also designed to serve, in mid-year, as a living and
forward moving monument to Mr. Robert Crosbie's inspiration and
dedication to the great THEOSOPHICAL MOVEMENT. To one who founded
the U L T in 1909 and passed away on July 25th 1919.

Mr. Crosbie put the main principles forward as primary ideals in
the article: THE U L T ITS MISSION AND FUTURE in the 1st issue
of the 1st Vol. of Theosophy on p. 12 ( 1912 )

[ See also in THEOSOPHY, a series of annual articles in each
July issue on the work, and specifically Vols. 38, 377, Vol. 40,
337, and, Vol. 41, p. 337 where in 3 articles supplemental
information is given. These are not reprints.]

Some of these original ideas are to be found in articles by Mr.
Judge and H P B : --

Judge Articles II 144, THE FUTURE OF THE T S
"	"	II 197,	THEOSOPHY AND THE T S
"	II 135	THE ORGANIZED LIFE OF THE T S
"	II 156	THE T S AND ITS BASIS
"	II 231	METHODS OF THEOSOPHICAL WORK

H P B Articles 1 p. 245 The THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY - ITS MISSION
AND ITS FUTURE,
H P B " I p. 223 THE ORGANIZATION OF THE T S

That is a fair amount of reading, but you will get the
fundamentals there.

I see you ask about : " "forms of expression" and "accountants
of the imagination" "

To me, they signify the many ways in which the THEOSOPHICAL
MOVEMENT is carried forward by individual efforts: advertising,
organizing and supporting study classes, writing articles for the
magazines and the Press, responding to questions and criticism of
THEOSOPHY as a philosophy, various individual means of
promulgation, etc...

And as for : "accountants of the imagination " one might surmise
that it relates to those who might question or criticize others'
ways and means of doing these things. We need to get out and do
the work ourselves. That is the only way to help the Movement.

Just think of the present opportunity. Masters write that they
"have broken the silence of centuries." Is that not significant?

H P B wrote she was their Agent and they concurred in a number of
letters.

The new cycle of effort began in 1875 -- about 128 years ago.

Most of us have lived our lives in the past 50 or so years. We
have the opportunity of giving support at a most vital growing
period, not just for ourselves, but for the Race of Humanity.
How are we responding? What are we doing ? Obviously, answers
are given interiorly to our own Spiritual Selves. We are
accountable There only.

We can well ask: what kind of Karma are we sowing, so as to reap
in the future? What is it to be ? Shall we avail ourselves of
the opportunities? Generate fresh opportunities, or lay back and
let the current push us along as it will ? Something in our
Karma has drawn us all, at this crucial stage to Theosophy. To
me, this is a challenge to do as much work as possible in the
time left.

Best wishes

Dal

------------------------------

Some relevant quotes:

ANCIENT SOURCE OF THEOSOPHY

(1.) The Secret Doctrine is the accumulated Wisdom of the Ages,
and its cosmogony alone is the most stupendous and elaborate
system: e.g., even in the exotericism of the Puranas. But such is
the mysterious power of Occult symbolism, that the facts which
have actually occupied countless generations of initiated seers
and prophets to marshal, to set down and explain, in the
bewildering series of evolutionary progress, are all recorded on
a few pages of geometrical signs and glyphs. The flashing gaze of
those seers has penetrated into the very kernel of matter, and
recorded the soul of things there, where an ordinary profane,
however learned, would have perceived but the external work of
form. But modern science believes not in the "soul of things,"
and hence will reject the whole system of ancient cosmogony. It
is useless to say that the system in question is no fancy of one
or several isolated individuals. That it is the uninterrupted
record covering thousands of generations of Seers whose
respective experiences were made to test and to verify the
traditions passed orally by one early race to another, of the
teachings of higher and exalted beings, who watched over the
childhood of Humanity. That for long ages, the "Wise Men" of the
Fifth Race, of the stock saved and rescued from the last
cataclysm and shifting of continents, had passed their lives in
learning, not teaching. How did they do so? It is answered: by
checking, testing, and verifying in every department of nature
the traditions of old by the independent visions of great adepts;
i.e., men who have developed and perfected their physical,
mental, psychic, and spiritual organisations to the utmost
possible degree. No vision of one adept was accepted till it was
checked and confirmed by the visions-so obtained as to stand as
independent evidence-of other adepts, and by centuries of
experiences." [ S D I 272-3 ]


UNIVERSAL EVOLUTION

The Secret Doctrine teaches the progressive development of
everything, worlds as well as atoms; and this stupendous
development has neither conceivable beginning nor imaginable end.
Our "Universe" is only one of an infinite number of Universes,
all of them "Sons of Necessity," because links in the great
Cosmic chain of Universes, each one standing in the relation of
an effect as regards its predecessor, and being a cause as
regards its successor.

The appearance and disappearance of the Universe are pictured as
an outbreathing and inbreathing of "the Great Breath," which is
eternal, and which, being Motion, is one of the three aspects of
the Absolute - Abstract Space and Duration being the other two.
When the "Great Breath" is projected, it is called the Divine
Breath, and is regarded as the breathing of the Unknowable
Deity - the One Existence - which breathes out a thought, as it
were, which becomes the Kosmos. (See "Isis Unveiled.") So also is
it when the Divine Breath is inspired again the Universe
disappears into the bosom of "the Great Mother," who then sleeps
"wrapped in her invisible robes." [ S D I 43 ]


CONSCIOUSNESS is UNIVERSAL

Esoteric philosophy teaches that everything lives and is
conscious, but not that all life and consciousness are similar to
those of human or even animal beings. Life we look upon as "the
one form of existence," manifesting in what is called matter; or,
as in man, what, incorrectly separating them, we name Spirit,
Soul and Matter. Matter is the vehicle for the manifestation of
soul on this plane of existence, and soul is the vehicle on a
higher plane for the manifestation of spirit, and these three are
a trinity synthesized by Life, which pervades them all. The idea
of universal life is one of those ancient conceptions which are
returning to the human mind in this century, as a consequence of
its liberation from anthropomorphic theology. [S D I 49]


The matter-moving Nous, the animating Soul, immanent in every
atom, manifested in man, latent in the stone, has different
degrees of power; and this pantheistic idea of a general
Spirit-Soul pervading all Nature is the oldest of all the
philosophical notions. [ S D I 51 ]


"To know itself or oneself, necessitates consciousness and
perception (both limited faculties in relation to any subject
except Parabrahm), to be cognized. Hence the "Eternal Breath
which knows itself not." Infinity cannot comprehend Finiteness.
The Boundless can have no relation to the bounded and the
conditioned. In the occult teachings, the Unknown and the
Unknowable MOVER, or the Self-Existing, is the absolute divine
Essence. And thus being Absolute Consciousness, and Absolute
Motion - to the limited senses of those who describe this
indescribable - it is unconsciousness and immoveableness.
Concrete consciousness cannot be predicated of abstract
Consciousness, any more than the quality wet can be predicated of
water - wetness being its own attribute and the cause of the wet
quality in other things.

Consciousness implies limitations and qualifications; something
to be conscious of, and someone to be conscious of it. But
Absolute Consciousness contains the cognizer, the thing cognized
and the cognition, all three in itself and all three one. No man
is conscious of more than that portion of his knowledge that
happens to have been recalled to his mind at any particular time,
yet such is the poverty of language that we have no term to
distinguish the knowledge not actively thought of, from knowledge
we are unable to recall to memory.

To forget is synonymous with not to remember. How much greater
must be the difficulty of finding terms to describe, and to
distinguish between, abstract metaphysical facts or differences.
It must not be forgotten, also, that we give names to things
according to the appearances they assume for ourselves. We call
absolute consciousness "unconsciousness," because it seems to us
that it must necessarily be so, just as we call the Absolute,
"Darkness," because to our finite understanding it appears quite
impenetrable, yet we recognize fully that our perception of such
things does not do them justice.

We involuntarily distinguish in our minds, for instance, between
unconscious absolute consciousness, and unconsciousness, by
secretly endowing the former with some indefinite quality that
corresponds, on a higher plane than our thoughts can reach, with
what we know as consciousness in ourselves. But this is not any
kind of consciousness that we can manage to distinguish from what
appears to us as unconsciousness." [S D I 56]


EGG or SPHERE A UNIVERSAL SYMBOL

'[The] mundane egg, contains in itself, when it emerges..."the
promise and potency" of all the Universe. Though the idea per se
is, of course, an abstraction, a symbolical mode of expression,
it is a symbol truly, as it suggests the idea of infinity as an
endless circle. It brings before the mind's eye the picture of
Kosmos emerging from and in boundless space, a Universe as
shoreless in magnitude if not as endless in its objective
manifestation.

The simile of an egg also expresses the fact taught in Occultism
that the primordial form of everything manifested, from atom to
globe, from man to angel, is spheroidal, the sphere having been
with all nations the emblem of eternity and infinity - a serpent
swallowing its tail. To realize the meaning, however, the sphere
must be thought of as seen from its centre. The field of vision
or of thought is like a sphere whose radii proceed from one's
self in every direction, and extend out into space, opening up
boundless vistas all around. It is the symbolical circle of
Pascal and the Kabalists, "whose centre is everywhere and
circumference nowhere," a conception which enters into the
compound idea of this emblem. [ S D I 65 ]




=====================================
-----Original Message-----
From: HTinSF:
Sent:	Saturday, June 21, 2003 11:34 PM
To:	dalval14@earthlink.net
Subject:	Re: 2003 U L T Day LETTER

<< Message: 2003 U L T Day LETTER:

To quote:

"While the form of meetings is subservient to content, forms of
expression can be stumbling blocks. The United Lodge of
Theosophists is
therefore at its best when its work is as transparent as
possible, and
most susceptible when made to serve the preconceptions of the
accountants of the imagination."
---
Did you wirte this? If so, could you enlarge a bit on "forms of
expression" and "accountants of the imagination"?

Thanks H