LOOKING past our relatively short physical lives on Earth, Theosophy views the soul as eternal. Further, we don’t just ‘have’ a soul, we are souls, the wisdom tradition teaches.
There are many human beings who live to a ripe old age, and according to Wikipedia, the United Nations estimated in 2009 there were 455,000 living centenarians worldwide.
Methuselah is mentioned in the Bible as living 969 years. “But I have never heard of mortal man, layman, or Adept,” H. P. Blavatsky says in The Key to Theosophy, “who could live even half the years allotted to Methuselah.”
“Some Adepts do exceed, by a good deal, what you would call the ordinary age — yet there is nothing miraculous in it, and very few of them care to live very long.”
She refers here to the Earthly body, not the Spiritual Body that high adepts have learned to occupy and control, thereby achieving self-conscious immortality — albeit invisible to uninitiated mankind.
Gautama, the Buddha, after reaching the goal of enlightenment, refused its fruition and remained on earth as a Teacher-Reformer, it is explained, and esoteric tradition teaches that he still remains in the world, invisibly watching over and protecting mankind.
Not only Gautama, but a “Wall of Protection” is built by the “accumulated efforts of long generations of Yogis, Saints and Adepts,those Buddhas of Compassion
who have woven for themselves glorious bodies in which they remain invisibly in the world, contributing towards man’s salvation.”
They do this “by influencing him to follow the Good Law and to tread the Path of Righteousness. Silently they impress the invisible atmosphere of our earth with their Ideation, thus keeping the balance on the side of right.”
Theosophy Watch 
Saludos,
An extract in letter No. XLVII of the Mahatma Letters:
“The Sun of Theosophy must shine for all, not for a part. There is more of this movement than you have yet had an inkilng of, and the work of the T.S. is linked in with similar work that is secretly going on in all parts of the world”. . . this from Master Morya.
I understand H.P.B. to be the Master´s Messenger of the Modern Theosphical Movement bringing back the teachings of the Ancient Wisdom and also one of the founders of the organization TheTheosphical Society. To say that the “Founders of the Modern Theosophical Movement” labored tirelessly in the late19th. century, to document and publicize the lost teachings of man, nature and the universe seems to me incorrect. It was the Founders of the Theosophical Society that did this work as part of the Modern Theosophical Movement. We just have to go back to the Mahatma Letter…to me it says it all.
Gracias,
Marion
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Thank you Marion, you’re point is well taken, and the post has been updated to reflect more accurately the efforts of that era. We’d been looking for that particular quote from the Letters for some time — thank you again for it! We wanted to keep the opening simple, and also paint a larger picture, so that’s why the word “Movement” was used as we did. The Master suggests the same idea of a broader effort behind the scenes.
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Jung had the experience of the interrelatedness of all things. Do you think at the end of his life that he accepted the doctrine of rebirth and karma?
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Yes Joan, we do think that Jung clearly understood and accepted reincarnation. There are many places in his writings that strongly hint of it. Thank you for your comments!
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“My life often seemed to me like a story that has no beginning and no end. I had the feeling that I was an historical fragment, an excerpt for which the preceding and succeeding text was missing. I could well imagine that I might have lived in former centuries and there encountered questions I was not yet able to answer; that I had been born again because I had not fulfilled the task given to me.” —Carl Jung
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I was reading about Manichean beliefs. Does anyone know much about Mani? He lived 200 years after Christ. The belief system extended from Tibet all the way to Egypt and was wiped out by Augustine and Christians after the council of Nicea. Think how much better life would have been had this ancient widom been accepted.
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Manichaeans were a sect which originated in the 3rd century in Persia and rapidly diffused itself in Mesopotamia and beyond the Oxus, lasting under one or another form down to the 13th century. Its founder was Mani, said to have been a Persian, whose name in Greek became Manes or Manichaios. Little can be ascertained about him, but he is said to have been a natural mystic, conscious of a mission, and endowed with the breadth of view and concentrated zeal…
(Definition of Manichaeans is extracted from the home page of The Theosophical Society, International Headquarters, Pasadena, California)
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Perhaps the most comprehensive of these publications was Manichaeische Dogmatik aus chinesischen und iranischen Texten (Manichaean Dogma from Chinese and Iranian texts), by Waldschmidt and Lentz, published in Berlin in 1933.[23] More than any other research work published before or since, this work printed, and then discussed, the original key Manichaean texts in the original scripts, and consists chiefly of sections from Chinese texts, and Middle Persian and Parthian texts transcribed with Hebrew letters. (After the Nazi party gained power in Germany, the Manichaean writings continued to be published during the 1930s, but the publishers no longer used Hebrew letters, instead transliterating the texts into Latin letters.)
Additionally, in the early 1900s, German researchers in Egypt found a large body of Manichaean works in Coptic. Though these were also damaged, many complete pages survived and were published in Berlin before World War II. Some of these Coptic Manichaean writings were destroyed during the war
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For real Theosophy IS ALTRUISM, and we cannot repeat it too often. It is brotherly love, mutual help, unswerving devotion to Truth. If once men do but realize that in these alone can true happiness be found, and never in wealth, possessions, or any selfish gratification, then the dark clouds will roll away, and a new humanity will be born upon earth. Then, the GOLDEN AGE will be there, indeed.
But if not, then the storm will burst, and our boasted western civilization and enlightenment will sink in such a sea of horror that its parallel History has never yet recorded.
Lucifer, May, 1889
H. P. Blavatsky
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