Comment

Comment by Mark R. Jaqua on December 22, 2009 at 8:56am

I guess one either has an intuition for the material or one doesn't, which sounds hokey, but I think is true. Like the Buddha says, one shouldn't believe anything until he is satisfied about it himself. On the "Secret Books", David Reigle did just what you talk about, and tried to find some of this material. Wizards Bookshelf has two of his books: "The Books of Kiu-Te" and "Blavatsky's Secret Books." The link is:

Comment by Mark R. Jaqua on December 6, 2009 at 9:47am

On thinking more about the lack of "19th century science" in the abridgment that Katinka mentions in her review - another advantage of HPB giving her own and the Lodge's perspective on science, is that one can get a handle on just what esoteric Theosophy's paradigm is, and how it differs from science - some of this difference in paradigm is drastic and fundamental. For instance, we take it for granted that our physical bodies generate energy from eating food - but the Theosophical paradigm is that we receive our body's energy from absorbing or withstanding the stream of prana in the environment - a basic difference (example from "Transactions," however.) The Theosophical paradigm is more all-encompassing. One can piece-together bits of the paradigm from HPB's seemingly "out-dated" comments.

Comment by Mark R. Jaqua on November 28, 2009 at 9:02am

Yeah, the original is best of course, but 99.99999999% of the people out there don't care about our fastidiousness. It might attract or interest some. One could also regard it as a "Selection" from the SD, which isn't as offensive.

Comment by christinaleestemaker on November 28, 2009 at 7:54am

i prefere in all the original, So I have the three originals from HPB 's SD.

Comment by Mark R. Jaqua on November 24, 2009 at 10:55am

Yes, nice little review, Katinka. Its good some people make an effort. One thing one can learn from the "19th century science" in the SD, perhaps, is that science is just a mental paradigm, or mental construct. If you push the basic concepts to the limits, you find that they are based on nothing absolute, but work within practical parameters.

Comment by Katinka Hesselink on November 23, 2009 at 2:44pm

yes, it's great isn't it? A very meditative version of The Secret Doctrine based mostly on the Stanzas of Dzyan. I did a bit of a review here: Introduction to the Secret Doctrine.