Introduction to the Study of The Secret Doctrine

[Nick the Pilot]

Hi everybody!

I have been listening to Ed Abdill's talk, "Introduction to the Study of The Secret Doctrine: Part 1".

http://www.theosophical.org/online-resourc...dio/speaker-a-j

I thought I'd share some ideas from the talk.

Mr. Abdill talks about three kinds of questions that come up from studying the Secret Doctrine:

-questions that he himself does not know the answer to
-questions on mythology that require a person knowledgeable in mythology who can answer the question
-questions that are unanswerable by the very nature of the question.

I think it is fascinating to consider how many questions about the Secret Doctrine are unanswerable by their very nature.

[Lanoo_Harvey]

I think Mr Abdill is fortunate to have had only had three kinds of questions!!!!

The SD goes into so much detail about so many subjects that you could have questions on almost every page. If you have a sound framework to start with the SD enables you to build on it, but I'm not sure it would mean much to someone just starting out.

[Nick the Pilot]

Harvey,

Well, that's the trick, isn't it? How do we take something as formidable as the SD and make it interesting for beginners? That is the challenge we face. I am glad to see that people like Mr. Abdill (and yourself) take the time to find ways to make the SD interesting to beginning students of Theosophy. We thank you all!

I always recommend that anyone who wants to study the SD should read your book first. (It's a shame your book was not mentioned in the tape.)

[Lanoo_Harvey]

Thanks for the plug, Nick

And don't forget your own guide to Dzyan.

[Nick the Pilot]

(Continuing with discussion on the mp3:)

Mr. Abdill says there are different kinds of books — entertainment, instruction, and inspiration, etc. But he puts fort the idea that The Secret Doctrine is more a book of discovery. He says it prods the student into making a leap beyond words and beyond the intellect. He says that intellectualizing should lead us to a point where there is a leap beyond it. He says there are only a few books that can do this, and that The Secret Doctrine is one of them.

[Nick the Pilot]

(Continuing with discussion on the mp3:)

Mr. Abdill talks about the word Secret in the title The Secret Doctrine. He quotes part of a poem from the beginning of the book.

“Who knows the secret? who proclaimed it here?
Whence, whence this manifold creation sprang?
The Gods themselves came later into being —
Who knows from whence this great creation sprang?
That, whence all this great creation came,
Whether Its will created or was mute,
The Most High Seer that is in highest heaven,
He knows it — or perchance even He knows not.”

Secret means that humanity is not yet ready for all of the Ancient Wisdom. The Secret Doctrine was a partial teaching, and other parts of the Ancient Wisdom will remain a secret for now.

[Nick the Pilot]

(Continuing with discussion on the mp3:)

Mr. Abdill talks about the word Dharma, and how, in the Theosophical motto motto ‘There is no religion higher than truth,’ the word ‘truth’ stands for dharma. He says that, in The Theosophical Glossary, HPB translates dharma as “the sacred law.” Mr. Abdill says, “Dharma can be translated religion, duty, doctrine, and inner reality. In one sense, your dharma is what you are inwardly, and the purpose [of] each incarnation is to bring out, to express what we are… It isn’t necessarily our dharma that we live in New York City and teach Theosophical classes… Dharma is a way to bring out what you are, or what you are meant to carry out in a particular incarnation. ...the word ‘duty’ is a dirty word in [our society] … because it sounds like ‘authority’ — someone is telling me what my duty is. Well, dharma isn’t like that … it’s more an inner reality that presses on us, to push us in directions that will reveal more of that inner nature.”

[Nick the Pilot]

(Continuing with discussion on the mp3:)

We get another aspect of the word secret. We are warned, “Don’t think final truth is in these pages.” Mr. Abdill shares with us a quote from Lao Tsu: “The Dao that can be stated is not the eternal Dao.” This is a ‘secret’ doctrine in the sense that the final truths are beyond any ability we have to express them in words. In this way the Secret Doctrine is secret.

[Nick the Pilot]

Mr. Abdill quotes HPB in saying that The Secret Doctrine was all that could be given out through the 20th century. Why is that, he asks? Mr. Abdill says that some knowledge, such as how to make an atomic bomb, could be dangerous. He points out that even the Mahatmas said they were digging into nature and exposing some truths at their own risk. It is for this reason that some knowledge is kept secret so that it is not misused -- another reason for the secrecy that is The Secret Doctrine.

[Nick the Pilot]

Mr. Abdill says that other parts of the Secret Doctrine are kept secret because it would be utterly incomprehensible to talk about them. For example, he puts forth the question, “What will we be like in the seventh root race?” He says it is like a child of three wanting to know what it would be like to be a senior citizen. How could the child possibly understand? What would be the point? Mr. Abdill says that the Secret Doctrine just glosses over the past and future root races, because a lot of such information would be utterly meaningless.

[Nick the Pilot]

Mr. Abdill asks, what is the aim of the Secret Doctrine? What is it trying to do? He quotes HPB as saying that nature is not a fortuitous concurrence of atoms. (He also points out that this was written in 1888, when the strong idea was, that was exactly what nature was.) She wanted to prove that nature wasn’t an accident. As someone once said, “To say that there is no order in the universe is tantamount to saying that the unabridged dictionary is the result of an explosion in a printing factory.” She wanted to show that there was an order, that it wasn’t an accidental process, with human beings being the greatest and grandest accident of all.

[Nick the Pilot]

HPB’s second aim in writing the Secret Doctrine was to “assign to humanity it’s rightful place in the scheme of the universe.” How do we fit into the whole? Mr. Abdill says that HPB always looked at the big picture, never looking at little pictures, rather, she always wanted to show how one aspect of the whole fit into the whole. Where does humanity fit in all of this? That was HPB’s second aim.

[Nick the Pilot]

HPB’s third aim: to rescue from degradation the archaic truths which are the basis of all religion. HPB felt that the original religious truths had been degraded, distorted, perverted, even becoming the causes of war when they had been twisted out of shape and misunderstood, where the metaphor was taken for fact. Mr. Abdill tells the Aesop’s fable of the dog who was carrying a bone in his mouth. He ran over a bridge, looked into the water, saw another bone in the reflection, dropped the first bone, jumped into the water to get the second bone, and ended up with no bone at all. Mr. Abdill asks us to imagine what would happen if this became a religion: If it became a religion, we start celebrating one day of the year when the event happened, and if you don’t believe it happened then you are probably going to go to hell. They [the perpetrators of such a religion] miss the point! They take the metaphor/myth as an actual historical event, they have missed the eternal truth upon which the metaphor was based, and all they have is the carcass, the shell.

[Lanoo_Harvey]

The power invested by religions in their leaders depends on those archaic truths NOT being rescued from degradation!

[Nick the Pilot]

Harvey,

I'm not sure I understand you...