Theos-Talk Archives (January 2005 Message tt00676)

krishtar wrote:
> Is it possible to study both Theosophy and the books of AAB and take advantage of it?
> As I said, I bought some second-hand books from AAB and havent read it yet.
Certainly. I know many AS members who are also TS members, and don't 
feel that they have a Divine Duty to take over the TS. As long as you 
don't take it as the One True Path(tm), it can be valuable. Also, by 
comparing it with other works, you can often see where Alice Bailey's 
own personal opinions shine through in the text, so you can eliminate 
them. Of course, it's probably a good idea not to discuss Bailey's 
prejudices with a devoted AS member, any more than it is to discuss the 
lack of historical evidence for Jesus with a devout Christian.

People tend to be blinded by people they admire. For example, in Clara 
Codd's THEOSOPHY AS THE MASTERS SEE IT, there is a clear strain of 
racism. When I mentioned this to people who knew Clara Codd, they became 
indignant, saying that Codd didn't have a racist bone in her body. If 
you read the book, what they probably saw was that she was a basically 
good person, but saw non-white peoples as somehow inferior to white 
people, and felt it was the responsibility of white people to bring the 
non-white people up to their level (so to speak).

A basic error, in my opinion, in Leadbeater, Bailey, and Codd is the 
mistaking of the current so-called "races" of humanity with that for 
whom Sinnett coined the term, "root races". What we commonly call 
"races" is a misnomer, minor genetic variations unconnected to other 
characteristics. And, even if they were right, remember that we arrived 
here from an involutionary rather than evolutionary path, meaning that, 
in many ways, members of the 3rd and 4th "root races" were higher on the 
evolutionary ladder than we are.

Bart