The Human Spark

ANIMALS are only instinctual machines, many believe. But as animal advocates attest, there is a palpable spiritual and intellectual substance to the kingdoms of nature.

Science is slowly acknowledging the fact. But the 17th Century, René Descartes, dubbed the “Father of Modern Philosophy,” started us thinking the wrong way round.

“Descartes held the living animal as being simply an automaton,” H. P. Blavatsky notes — “A ‘well wound up clock-work,’ according to Malebranche” — adding with cutting sarcasm:

“One, therefore, who adopts the Cartesian theory about the animal, would do as well to accept at once the views of the modern materialists.”

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The Fires of Mind

One Small Voice

GREEN is a multipurpose color, and lately it is the universal icon for a healthy Earth.

The concern we raise in this post is whether we have the collective will and conscience to change our destructive consumerist habits.  Maybe we are not really capable of rising to the challenge of healing our planet.

Save the Earth strategies don’t really address the driver, our economic materialism — when the economy is bad, we must buy more stuff! Just be sure to recycle.

Professions of concern that skirt issues like planned obsolescence, are disingenuous as plastic grass. But no worries. Today we’re all about red ribbons and promises of rose gardens — yep, it’s Valentine’s Day! ♥

Foolishly idealistic it might be, but we ask: shouldn’t the world’s human lovers be paying equal homage to Mother Nature — she who designed and grew those Valentine roses? And not only on these special occasions, but every day?

Many diverse cultures makeup Earth’s great family, and many are suffering. Should not the upscale élite, those few well fed and living comfortable lives — the consumers of flowers and chocolates — assist their less fortunate brothers and sisters? Or, in such difficult times as these, should the prudent watchword be: “every person for himself?”

Love and Fury

 

Paul Robertson, “Through a Glass Darkly”

COMPASSION is no mere attribute of thinking or emotion, says the Book of the Golden Precepts.

Calling it “the Law of Laws,” the  ancient precept declares that true harmony must lie in recognition of the “fitness of all things.”

Additionally, this power is described as a “shoreless universal essence,” and “the light of everlasting Right.”

Simply put, the ancient teaching says, this power is nothing short of “the law of love eternal.”

But, writes Blavatsky in Psychic and Noetic Action, “no physiologist, not even the cleverest, will ever be able to solve the mystery of the human mind, in its highest spiritual manifestation.”

Nor will they be able to understand the duality “of the psychic and the noetic—or even to comprehend the intricacies of the former on the purely material plane.”

The Liberated

Photo: barrywheeler.net

DEDICATED repetition is the foundation of all accomplishment in true art, science, and even spiritual development.

Yet success may entail much more than just ‘practice, practice’ to get to Carnegie Hall, as the saying goes.

Sweat, talent and technical skill are of course required. But the true artist also has acquired an intuitive sense of how a score ought to be performed.

Because, through an inner soul transformation, she is able to embrace the intention of the original composer, transforming that genius into an exhilarating inspiration of her own.

Every accomplished performer is no longer tied to a written score, and becomes free of the keyboard. The shift signals an artist who has the required technical foundation, and ready to develop the performance in her own inspired way.