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Re: Theos-World Re: Mr. Leadbeater is King of All Occultists

Apr 11, 2005 05:59 PM
by Jerry Hejka-Ekins


Bart,
you wrote,

I had a concept, that got lots of lip service, but no backing: to have lodges create lists of local speakers who would be willing to speak at lodges within traveling distance; sort of like the national speaker program, but on a more local level.

I remember this was done in the 60s, when there was a real resource of Lodges and speakers. In the greater Los Angeles area there was once a dozen or more Lodges and some very fine and knowledgeable speakers. The So.California Federation tried to set up a speaker's list, but I remember opposing it because I saw it (I think correctly) as a transparent attempt to have an official list of "approved" speakers, so that Lodges would know who to invite and who to shun. California Lodges, in those days, were very competitive, run by ego driven managers, and resisted any attempts by members to have them work together. Today, we have gone way beyond the problem of having to make lists of speakers. As the number of Lodges have dwindled over the years, there are few Lodges which still have neighboring Lodges from which to draw speakers.
I have visited the Lodge in New York which you belong. The real estate must be worth millions of dollars, though that old building should have been raised and rebuilt many years ago. That alone scares people away, in spite of the fact that you are sitting on some of the most expensive real estate in the country. Of course, the lodge does not have the millions of dollars it would take to rebuild. Yet, they are one of the two or three top lodges in the country. That, in my mind, a sad state of affairs.

TSA is aware of the above problems and many more. They chose to respond by centralizing--which left the Lodges to fend for themselves. This is not going to change in the foreseeable future. Lodges are in a survival mode, and I think that if they are to survive in the future, they need to completely re-think from the ground up what they are about and their relevance to the communities which they serve.
Alexandria West has had to think about these things. We need a minimum of 4,000 square feet of floor space to do what we need to do--10,000 would be more realistic. Even in our Small California community, that would be a million dollar investment for starts. Such an investment requires a very solid foundation of meaningful activity to sustain itself and to be able to change with the times. By meaningful activity, I mean services which goes far beyond the traditional fare of weekly lectures and book sales.
Jerry




Bart Lidofsky wrote:

Jerry Hejka-Ekins wrote:


This sounds like the Lodges we used to have here in the early 1960s when I first joined the Theosophical Society. Besant Lodge in Hollywood used to typically have 100 people attending their Sunday lectures. A Picture of Krishnamurti hung on the wall, as well as pictures of Besant and Leadbeater. Times have changed and the American culture has changed quite a lot. TSA management no longer actively supports Lodges, and there are very few of them left. Besant Lodge now has very few members.

One of the reasons I formed the theoslodges group was to create a backdoor for helping lodges support each other. I had a concept, that got lots of lip service, but no backing: to have lodges create lists of local speakers who would be willing to speak at lodges within traveling distance; sort of like the national speaker program, but on a more local level. I had originally thought to make theoslodges Adyar-only, but would not be averse to having inter-society cooperation as it IS a private, not an official, list). The only real "rule" is that it not be used for simple bashing of any given Society; in other words, to stay on a local level, and be constructive rather than destructive.

Back to the issue of dwindling attendance, in New York, at least, the problem is one of competition. It's especially difficult to compete with groups that claim to have all the answers.

Bart





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