Theos-Talk Archives (July 2003 Message tt00240)

--- In theos-talk@yahoogroups.com, Bart Lidofsky <bartl@s...> wrote:
> This is NOT rhetorical; it is just to understand what you mean by 
> "Masters existed". Who do you think wrote THE MAHATMA LETTERS?

Almost alll of them were written by HPB as she herself admitted. 
Admittedly she used the indefinite "amanuensis chelas" without taking 
credit, but it is clear she was one of the "amanuensis chelas" that 
she meant, and the other was Damodar. The claim is not that the 
masters wrote them but that the letters contained their thoughts 
which were passed on in mysterious fashion. Without passing 
judgement on whether that statement is true or false, the letters 
themselves do not constitute strong evidence of the existence of 
anyone except the amanuensis chelas who wrote them. There is an 
article that says the letters were written in strange manner with 
powder floating down from the air, but Annie Besant said during the 
Judge Affair that HPB merely disguised her handwriting. She was 
closer to HPB than anyone else and her testimony therefore has to be 
taken seriously, although we are not of course required to accept it 
uncritically. The Law of Economy of Hypothesis makes her testimony 
the more reasonable of the two. When BAG said that the letters 
were "HPB as Morya writing about HPB" he may or may not have been 
right, but there is no internal evidence in most of the letters to 
refute him.

The two exceptions as I see it were the Gephard Letter and the 
Shannon Letter, both of which seem to have been delivered under 
circumstances which make it extremely unlikely either HPB or Damodar 
were responsible. A weaker case, but one possibly worthy to be 
included in this select class, was a letter mailed from Sikkim, 
presumanly by the mahatma simply going into a normal post office and 
posting it in a normal manner. Someone had to post it, and it is 
unlikely it was one of the "amanuensis chelas." Ads for the others, 
though, you can take on faith that they contain the thoughts of some 
Tibetan master, and you may be right, but it is a matter of faith and 
not evidence. There is a subtle distinction to be made here between 
what is or is not true, and what can or cannot be proved. It is 
possible for something to be true and not provable, but one is not 
left with the same feeling of satisfaction as when there is strong 
evidence. Now that I have a better view of the case I no longer have 
the same degree of confidence.

That is the way it is with all of this. Most of the evidence turns 
out on close inspection not to be solid as evidence (even though the 
stories are probably absolutely true) but we do find a few stories 
hither and yon - fewer than a dozen - which are hard to set aside. 
It seems to me the most important part of Johnson's contribution was 
to point out that most of the evidence is not really evidence abd to 
force us to take a close look and see if we can find anything that is.