World of Love

 

John Paul Strain, Thought of the Great Spirit

NATIVE Americans showed their gratitude to Mother Nature whenever they hunted food, or took from Her material for clothing or shelter. At those times a simple, symbolic ritual of thanks was performed on the spot.

Animals, rocks, trees, and the Earth itself were all divine spirits.

It was an ethic driven by a spiritual recognition of Oneness, and something of that original spirit  survives in our own culture each year on Thanksgiving week — mixed, of course, with the inevitable commercialism.

(Listen to: Mother’s Song)

For our new cyclic shift, however, we urgently need a global spiritual worldview, based on the heart and soul wisdom of our elders.

And there are many signs that such a new shift— embodied in the work of a growing number of compassionate groups and individuals around the world — is taking shape along the original lines of Theosophical inspiration.

The Look that Heals

DUALITY rules our conscious existence, for example neither light or darkness can ever appear alone. They are inseparable — rearrange one on life’s canvas, and you change the other.

As metaphors for “spirit and matter,” the twins are emblematized on the back of the U. S. dollar— matter pictured as a heavy pyramid base, but with its capstone removed — in its place a spiritual eye of blazing light.

Ironically, or perhaps knowingly, the Founders coupled money, arguably the root of all evil, with the most spiritual symbol of an “All Seeing Eye” — known also to occultists as “The Third Eye.”

Yet experience seems to show that choosing selfish material values, and ignoring conscience, we end up trapped in perpetual cycles of crisis like oil spills.

That both sides of The Great Seal of the United States appear together on the back of the dollar bill, should be an ever-present reminder of our dual nature. We are an industrialized, material culture, yet profess higher values of justice, freedom and equality.

The human brain, home of the third eye, “is simply the canal between two planes,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote, “the psycho-spiritual and the material.”

∞

We are usually unaware of this duality, because the organ of the spiritual eye is hidden, Theosophy says, in the pineal gland at the back of our brain.

The eye is also mentioned in Matthew 6:22, Luke 11:34:

“The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.”

The Red Book

Reprinted from The Red Book by C. G. Jung (c) Foundation of the Works of C. G. Jung.

THOSE attracted to Theosophy and to Occultism are becoming every day more numerous. With every inquiry lies the potency and promise of genuine spiritual development.

The Masters of Wisdom in every age set up no barriers against any one’s approach. Their works and lives are not limited to adepts, saints, and the “purest of heart.”

The humblest searcher would not be made to feel discouraged by the sense of his own shortcomings, or by the perception of the difficulties at every step on his journey of self-realization.

This week we feature the work and life of one of the humblest and fearless of searchers, the renowned writer-artist-occultist-psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. The exhibit of his Red Book at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City ends January 25, 2010.

Buddha’s Big Fish

CHOOSING Theosophical principles of Universal Unity and Harmony over brutality, the country of Bhutan has a developed “a unique way of judging the development of its society,” says the Humane Society International.

Bhutan accomplishes this, the Society reports, “by measuring its GNH (Gross National Happiness), rather than the more conventional GNP (Gross National Product).”

“In Bhutan the concept of GNH is based on the premise that, for human society, true progress takes place when material and spiritual advancement occur side by side, complementing and reinforcing each other.”