Theos-Talk Archives (December 2003 Message tt00206)

leonmaurer@aol.com wrote:
> Of course, this "exoteric" and opinionated baloney (which may also be a 
> sardonic bit of leg pulling :-) 
Given that baloney is a bunch of ingredients thrown together to make a 
fake mortadella, I wonder which side of this argument can be properly 
called "baloney".

What I see is, "See, by manipulating numbers, I can come up with 7!" 
Well, you can manipulate numbers to come up with pretty much any number 
you want. Well, I'm following the advice of Blavatsky and the Mahatmas; 
rather than just taking their word for things, I'm trying to examine 
them. And what I see is a bunch of reverse engineering. What comes next, 
the fact that the lotus flower has seven petals? But then, is seven 
significant because the lotus has seven petals, or is the lotus 
significant because it has seven petals?

You take scales of Western music as evidence of the significance of the 
number seven, yet other cultures have developed scales using other 
numbers (like the Chinese pentatonic scale, for example).

Now, Paul and Eldon have pointed out that, psychologically, the number 
7 is very appealing to human beings. But that only shows that we WANT 
the number 7 to be significant, not that it is. It also shows that, in 
teaching principles, putting them into groups of seven make them easier 
to comprehend. As Blavatsky, et al, have pointed out, the Secret 
Doctrine cannot be put into words. All that can be done is to point the 
way out. It appears that giving special significance to the number 7 is 
to confuse the map with that which is being mapped.

Bart