So Far So Near

STUDENTS do not demand acceptance of Theosophy, pointing rather to its fundamental principles and their application.

Theosophy is not a ‘faith’ because faiths are changeable, and it is not dependent upon dogma or revelation as are modern science and religion.

The object of Theosophy is to show that all beings in nature are souls in evolution, and for humans the necessity of knowing ourselves — and becoming our own authority.

The “Wisdom-Religion” has existed from immemorial time. It offers a theory of nature and man which is founded upon knowledge acquired by the Sages of the past. It has been expressed in different ages by Krishna, Confucius and Buddha in the East, by Pythagoras, Plato and Jesus in the West.

Plato wrote about the quest for self-knowledge: “The light and spirit of the Divinity are the wings of the soul. They raise it to communion with the gods, above this earth — to become like the gods, is to become holy, just and wise.”

“That is the end for which man was created, and that ought to be his aim in the acquisition of knowledge.”

“Every one of us possesses the faculty, the interior sense, that is known by the name of intuition,” H. P. Blavatsky exclaims, “but how rare are those who know how to develop it! It is only by the aid of this faculty that men can ever see things in their true colours.”

A Fiery Life

UNDERPINNING the universe is not gravity, as taught today, but something else.

This something is a conscious electro-spiritual power described by the Tibetan word “Fohat,” according to Theosophy—a universal force that rules humans, nature and the infinite cosmos.

But physicists are stuck on gravity to support their dubious ‘standard model.’

Science still insists that gravity alone, the weakest force on Earth, runs the entire universe — though admittedly, as with magnetism, they understand very little about it.

β

A Serbian schoolgirl has amazed medics with her astonishing magnetic hands. Ten-year-old Jelena Momcilov has been picking up cutlery, coins and even metal furniture by just touching them at her family home in Zeljusa, since she first discovered her powers five years ago.

♣

Everyday One

ONENESS is most likely both an experience and a state, probably something that you cannot reach if you are afraid of it. It has to be embraced and welcomed in order to be attained.

Embracing compassion and practicing altruism are, no doubt, ways of attaining individual and global oneness. This was discussed in a previous post The Caring Spirit.

The ancients recognized the reality of spiritual being, knowing that an ever-expanding consciousness and an ever-growing understanding of existence is all that truly matters in our eternal evolutionary journey through the fields of infinitude. All the achievements of civilization depend upon it.

A Lived Reality

The underlying spiritual energies pervading any system cannot be known with physical instruments, but only by delving into the depths of our own minds and consciousness, and this requires many lives of self-purification and self-conquest. Awareness of this one Reality is critical to our future survival and of the Earth, our Mother Home.

Sufi teacher Lynn Barron wants to know: What does oneness really look like? Not as a theory, but as a lived reality in everyday life?

Be-ness

Higher states of being have their origin in a corresponding universal mind or consciousness. This is the “one absolute Reality” spoken of in The Secret Doctrine, “which antecedes all manifested, conditioned, being.”

Scientists using only materialistic methods are in no position to deny out of hand the possibility of such higher states of consciousness.

This Reality is described by H. P. Blavatsky as an “Infinite and Eternal Cause—the rootless root of ‘all that was, is, or ever shall be.'” It is not a personal god, she says, “it is ‘Be-ness’ rather than Being.”

“Duty is that which is due to Humanity, to our fellow-men, neighbours, family, and especially that which we owe to all those who are poorer and more helpless than we are ourselves, she wrote:-

“This is a debt which, if left unpaid during life, leaves us spiritually insolvent and moral bankrupts in our next incarnation. Theosophy is the quintessence of duty.”

What Would it Look Like?

What if the world embodied our highest potential? What would it look like? As the structures of modern society crumble, is it enough to respond with the same tired solutions? Or are we being called to question a set of unexamined assumptions that form the very basis of our civilization?

This 25-minute retrospective asks us to reflect on the state of the world and ourselves, and to listen more closely to what is being asked of us at this time of unprecedented global transformation.

Compassion Speaks

Now bend thy head and listen well, O Bodhisattva — Compassion speaks and saith: “Can there be bliss when all that lives must suffer? Shalt thou be saved and hear the whole world cry?”           –The Voice of the Silence

Mary Evelyn Tucker is a Senior Lecturer and Senior Scholar at Yale University where she has appointments in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies as well as the Divinity School and the Department of Religious Studies.

“We are participants in a process that will always be larger than our imagination or our best sciences can fully explain.”

Power Over Nature

Is It Too Late?

Dean Radin, Ph.D., is a researcher and author in the field of parapsychology. His professional career has focused on experimentally exploring far reaches of human consciousness, primarily phenomena like intuition, gut feelings and psi phenomena.

He is Senior Scientist at The Institute of Noetic Sciences, in Petaluma, California, and on the Adjunct Faculty at Sonoma State University.

IONS

Dean’s research has been featured in numerous magazines and he has appeared on several radio and television programs. He is the author of Entangled Minds and The Conscious Universe.

Dean believes that humankind will be able to change its behavior rapidly enough to avoid its total destruction, because necessity will drive us to do it. And he suggests that something like a global mind could be pulling us or forcing us to make the changes needed.

Love Is Indiscriminate

Adyashanti began teaching in 1996 at the request of his Zen teacher, with whom he had been studying for fourteen years.

The author of Emptiness Dancing,The Impact of Awakening, and My Secret is Silence, Adyashanti offers spontaneous and direct nondual teachings that have been compared to those of the early Zen masters and Advaita Vedanta sages.

Adyashanti describes the inclusiveness of love and how actions motivated by love have the power to unite and to change consciousness.

Human Solidarity

by H. P. Blavatsky

The Key to Theosophy

In the present state of society, especially in so-called civilized countries, we are continually brought face to face with the fact that large numbers of people are suffering from misery, poverty and disease. Their physical condition is wretched, and their mental and spiritual faculties are often almost dormant.

“On the other hand, many persons at the opposite end of the social scale are leading lives of careless indifference, material luxury, and selfish indulgence. Neither of these forms of existence is mere chance.”

Both are the effects of the conditions which surround those who are subject to them, and the neglect of social duty on the one side is most closely connected with the stunted and arrested development on the other.

In sociology, as in all branches of true science, the law of universal causation holds good. But this causation necessarily implies, as its logical outcome, that human solidarity on which Theosophy so strongly insists.

“If the action of one reacts on the lives of all, and this is the true scientific idea, then it is only by all men becoming brothers and all women sisters, and by all practising in their daily lives true brotherhood and true sisterhood, that the real human solidarity, which lies at the root of the elevation of the race, can ever be attained.”   – H. P. B.

Ubuntu

Ubuntu, a traditional African philosophy, recognizes how we are inextricably bound in each other’s humanity. Translated as, “I am because you are,” Ubuntu describes a sense of unity between people through which we each discover our own strengths and virtues. Featuring healer Credo Mutwa, GreenHouse Project director Dorah Lebelo, and former Deputy Minister of Health Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, this glimpse of South Africa shows compassion as a way of life.

It is this action and interaction, this true brotherhood and sisterhood, in which each shall live for all and all for each, which is one of the fundamental Theosophical principles that every Theosophist should be bound, not only to teach, but to carry out in his or her individual life.

The Deific Essence

“Our DEITY is neither in a paradise, nor in a particular tree, building, or mountain,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote — “it is everywhere, in every atom of the visible as of the invisible Cosmos, in, over, and around every invisible atom and divisible molecule.”

“IT is the mysterious power of evolution and involution, the omnipresent, omnipotent, and even omniscient creative potentiality.”

“Grant us our postulate that God is a universally diffused, infinite principle, and how can man alone escape from being soaked through by, and in, the Deity? We call our ‘Father in heaven’ that deific essence of which we are cognizant within us, in our heart and spiritual consciousness.”

“Universal Unity and Causation; Human Solidarity; the Law of Karma; Re-incarnation. These are the four links of the golden chain which should bind humanity into one family, one universal Brotherhood.”

Necessity is a Mother

Laboratory scientist Dean Radin believes that humankind will be able to change its behavior rapidly enough to avoid its total destruction, because necessity will drive us to do it. And he suggests that something like a global mind could be pulling us or forcing us to make the changes needed.

Future Seeing

ESOTERIC philosophy views Past, Present and Future as compound time, and only from our waking, egoic state of consciousness.

Significantly Buddha’s dying words were “all compounds are perishable.”

But in the realm of “noumena” or causal plane H. P. Blavatsky wrote (SD 1:43) the three have no validity and according to Mahayana Buddhism: “The Past time is the Present time, as also the Future, which, though it has not come into existence, still is.”

To the uninitiated concepts of duration and time Blavatsky points out, “are all derived from our sensations according to the laws of Association.” And because they are “inextricably bound up with the relativity of human knowledge” they are superficial and only temporal tools.

Because rationalist views ignore psychic experience, they must eventually fall away in the face of thousands of reported cases such as the near-death experience. Today precognition is validated by new experimental research data in parapsychology.

The Caring Spirit

FOLLOWING H. P. Blavatsky’s death in 1891, an editorial was published in the New York Daily Tribune (founded by Horace Greeley) noting:

“Madame Blavatsky held that the regeneration of mankind must be based upon the development of altruism.

“In this she was at one with the greatest thinkers, not alone of the present day, but of all time,” the Editorial acknowledged.

“And, it is becoming more and more apparent, at one with the strongest spiritual tendencies of the age.

“This alone would entitle her teachings to the candid and serious consideration of all who respect the influences that make for righteousness.”

∞

Some of  the clearest statements of Blavatsky’s ethical views, are in The Key to Theosophy with the keynote that “altruism is an integral part of self-development.”

Mind Reading Mind

ABSOLUTE certainty requires you to read a person’s mind directly.

For example, no one can know for sure Garry Kasparov’s next move, solely by studying the patterns he sets up on the chess board.

Similarly, decoding brain patterns is frustrating the neuroscientists analyzing them.

Like weather forecasting, the available data it is too often unreliable. Locating memory in the brain, researchers admit, likewise remains elusive.

Simple logic says the brain’s activity itself cannot be the source of thought, but only thought’s result. Knowing what thoughts are by studying their patterns, has proven more difficult than knowing the perfect chess move.

Because the real ‘thinker’ is positioned behind the curtain of observed consciousness, Theosophy affirms.

Ω

Ruminations

Crazy Summer Days & Pre-Autumn Ruminations

By Steve Levey

(Having a crazy summer? Me, too. I was recounting all the bizarre things that have been happening to me the last few months, when my friend Steve Levey, of Washington, D.C., offered these insightful thoughts. K. LeBeau, ed.)

PERHAPS it has something to do with (and I might be going over the top here) with the upcoming month of September in which Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, falls on the 18th. It’s just 10 days before Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, which is being celebrated on September 27 this year. Normally, Yom Kippur occurs in early October — these holy days move a bit from year to year according to the lunar cycle of reference.

“Kippurim”

Kabbalistically, Yom Kippur is considered to be the most powerful day of the year (although the Sabbaths or each Saturday from sundown Friday on, also have this power latent in them) where the previous year is considered “closed” so that the new one can have a fresh start in us.

The term “kippur” is Hebrew (oddly enough) and comes from the word “kippurim,” which means “to close. “Therefore the Torah, normally kept open to the specific place required for reading each day of the year — for the entire year, is closed on Yom Kippur. I think this is a very significant and useful practice.

My point is; I’ve always thought that the natural influences at this time of the year proved these particular days had merit. The idea being to prepare to close out the past year in terms of a consideration of what went on, which is very much like the Pythagorean review–called “nightly review,” which is to be done daily before sleep as he prescribed for his students, leaving the coming year (day) a chance to have a fresh presentation.

HPB mentions that she was surprised to see that the Christians didn’t keep these days for the New Year cycle instead of adopting the Greek one, even though the sun gods, as she groups Krishna, the Christ, etc., are to be revered around this time, culminating on January 4th, the Theosophical New Year.

Metaphysical Impressions,
Gifts for a New Cycle

Yom Kippur

I think what she was getting at is — there is a genuine metaphysical impression upon our inner natures at the so-called Jewish cycle of New Year/Yom Kippur regarding ends and beginnings, and a natural reverential drive inherent to us, around the December/January cycle. This makes the connection Theosophical (which is what the term really implies) in terms of a synthetic relationship of all of this to us in the West as well as a synthetic doctrine which cuts across all continents and periods of time.

Transition Cycles:
Out with the Old, In with the New

As I understand all of this, we need to get used to seeing these periods as transition cycles, which makes them easier to live with, because they are going to happen anyway (a little reality therapy). Although most Jews living their cyclic recognition of the Jewish calendar of events, suffer righteously during these periods of time, because they take the repentance aspect of their connection to the past too strongly instead of also considering the holy day being latent with potential rejuvenation. Here is a resemblance to Shiva as the third aspect of the Hindu trinity Trimurti — death and regeneration.

Shiva

Being raised Jewish, I saw how my mother put a special bulb containing the six-pointed star of David in a particular lamp on Yom Kippur, in memory of the dead of the previous year. Also, many Jews go to temple on the evening before, to a special Memoriam service in which Kol Nidre is sung-a particularly reverential (although beautiful) hymnal for the previously deceased.

So, Yom Kippur ends up being a day of atonement for themselves and those who died, which the Jewish temples support. All of it is grossly misunderstood or taken too literally or both, per the explanations given in rabbinical and Kabalistic writings.

Maybe one could consider taking a universal view of Kabala as compared with Esoteric Vidya (see chart):