Welcome Message to BN-SD

Dear Friends:

Welcome to the BN-SD study/discussion list covering the The Secret Doctrine, the magnum opus of Madame Helena Blavatsky. This information plus more is available at http://www.blavatsky.net/talk/ . The email for sending messages to this list is temporarily bn-sd@lists.lyris.net. Later it will be sd@blavatsky.net .

We will be studying The Secret Doctrine from cover-to-cover. However, as a matter of actual choice your contribution may refer to any location in the book at any time. If you choose a topic inside the current material that's great, but as all students of the S.D. know, references in one place lead to a whole clan of relatives scattered throughout the book. Before the long trek begins we will study an article given by HPB to Capt. Bowen. In that article there are several items HPB suggests we cover first in order to acquire an "overview" and get a "feel" for the citadel of thought being approached.

A critical document to point to at the very beginning is the article "Authorship of the Secret Doctrine." It is available at http://www.blavatsky.net/theosophy/judge/articles/authorship-of-secret-doctrine.htm The average student does not realize the rather elaborate precautions the Masters took in accepting responsibility for the contents of The Secret Doctrine, saying that it was "dictated to HPB" by Them.

When you and I study the S.D. we are being exposed to a stream of thought given us by the Masters and made available through HPB's sacrifice. Whenever mental life goes from a higher plane to a lower a scapegoat, or conduit is required - HPB was the voluntary Promethean victim for the project. This material, seriously considered, is potent karma, and like all purifying agents has to destroy as well as build. What the Master's viewpoint does indirectly is, in this student's opinion, more important
than what it does directly though there is an ample harvest on both fronts.

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This list is moderated. We require only that the tone be kept courteous to others and relevant to the Blavatsky-centered orientation of this list. The results will be archived and will be searchable by key words, by writer, by date, or by discussion thread.

There are four levels of participation available: Mail - you receive all email as it occurs on the list; Digest - in one email per day, you receive all discussion that occurred the previous day; Index - in one email per day, you recieve the subject headings of all discussion that occurred the previous day with a convenient way to retrieve any single message; Nomail - you receive nothing in the mail, but like the other participants, you can visit the archives and search over past discussions.

We expect, the archives will create a valuable study tool for those following in the footsteps of the progress of this list. But don't let that intimidate you. If anything, please be encouraged to ask questions and make comments so that the discussion may help everyone.

POLICIES

1. For the overall quality of the list, the software imposes the following limits (and sends a message if you exceed them):
a) No more than 3 messages per day per person.
b) Messages must not exceed 50K bytes.

2. Please do not send attachments for technical reasons and because we don't all have the same word processors.

3. Please choose good subject headers - to help make the archive files more useful.

Thanks for your cooperation.
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Thanks for joining!