Spiritual Beings 2

THEOSOPHY teaches the progressive development of everything, “worlds as well as atoms,” according to The Secret Doctrine.

This “stupendous development,” say these ancient sages, “has neither conceivable beginning nor imaginable end.

To them, our ‘Universe’ is “only one of an infinite number of Universes, all links in the great Cosmic chain of Universes.”

In this view, each individual cosmos, or single human life, is the effect of its predecessor, under karmic law, and “a cause as regards its successor.”

If these lifetimes and universes are like schools, then the classrooms are stages of consciousness, urging us to greater self-awareness and spiritual development, if we are wise enough to choose that path.

Thus our lives are complex creations, a series of “progressive awakenings,” drop by drop, of individual, family, racial, national karma.

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Spiritual Beings

EVOLUTION as defined in the occultism of Theosophy, is a triple-faceted scheme — a blend of spirit, mind, and matter — “inextricably interwoven and interblended at every point.”

True and lasting self-knowledge is acquired gradually and lovingly — and largely unawares at first — through a long, but finite series of reincarnations in human form.

A major factor in our self-development lies in recognizing the continuity of life, Theosophy says — and that for the soul, there is really no such thing as death.

Self-knowledge evolves gradually out of the recognition, as the philosopher-mystic Teilhard de Chardin famously claimed, that we are “spiritual beings having a human experience,” not the other way around.

We are first and foremost spiritual beings, and humanity is our field of experience. But what happens to our human self after death? Does our consciousness die with the body?

Note this article has been updated and republished.  Please click the link below:

The Deathless Self

 

Transformations

WILLIAM BLAKE might have felt more comfortable in our century, surrounded by more like-minded souls than during his time when materialism was burgeoning.

There are more and more scientists, artists, and spiritual thinkers today who, like Blake, see what other people do not see.

Thought leaders in science are realizing that all beings, from an atom to a man, are submerged and unified in one universal divine intelligence. We are all “One Being.”

Many are realizing the truth of Blake’s poem “a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower.”

“Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,” Blake wrote, visioning a profound occult truth. It’s like “eternity in an hour,” he said — mooting thereby the uniqueness of relativity or quantum physics.

“The Observer Effect”

A commonly debated use of the term refers to quantum mechanics, where, if the outcome of an event has not been observed, it exists in a state of ‘superposition’, which is akin to being in all possible states at once. An atom’s position is only determined, the conundrum says, when it is measured.

In the famous thought experiment known as Schrödinger’s cat, the cat is supposedly neither alive nor dead until observed. However, most quantum physicists, in resolving Schrödinger’s seeming paradox, now understand that the acts of ‘observation’ and ‘measurement’ must also be defined in quantum terms before the question makes sense.

From this point of view, there is no ‘observer effect’, only one vastly entangled quantum system, as summed up by H. P. Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine (1:272) as:

“One homogeneous divine Substance-Principle,
the one radical cause.”

Healing from Inside

NEUROSCIENTISTS  have been busy for years trying to catalog the “neuronal correlates of consciousness” in the brain,

They are determined to prove that consciousness somehow originates in the gray matter between our ears.

This mechanistic view was assumed by the Human Genome Project, established to catalog the complete human DNA.

It is held that genes carry information about how we look, how well our bodies metabolize food or fight infection, and can determine even how we behave.

It was thought, therefore, that researchers would easily be able to identify specific genes underlying specific diseases, and then all diseases could be eliminated by manipulating the related genes.

But it was discovered that the seemingly simple concept was much more complex than expected.

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Soul and Shadow

NEARLY all of us humans, occult teachers say, are inexorably reincarnated into new lives of earth, yet invisibly clothed in myriads of memories from the past.

These include snippets of our innate ideas, haunting images of unrealized aspirations and desires, and our unresolved fears.

These torn pages of personal history are the underlying drivers that steer our reincarnations. This is Karma, reincarnation’s unerring “twin doctrine.”

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Karma

A New Order of Ages 2

THE gods are not without employment, wrote the Greek bishop Synesius of Cyrene (c. 373 – c. 414) – but their “descent to this earth” is not continuous.

They descend according to orderly periods of time, he said, “for the purpose of imparting a beneficent impulse in the republics of mankind.”

“For this providence is divine and most ample,” quotes W. Q. Judge in Cycles —”which frequently one man pays attention to, and affects countless multitudes of men.”

Describing the Gods, Synesius writes: “For there is indeed in the terrestrial abode the sacred tribe of heroes who pay attention to mankind, and who are able to give them assistance even in the smallest concerns:-

“This heroic tribe is, as it were, a colony from the gods established here, in order that this terrene abode may not be left destitute of a better nature.”

The Mahatmas

These “gods” are also known in India as Mahatmas. No better description of these sages can be pointed to than  W. Q. Judge explaining the Sanskrit terms in his article The Mahatmas as Ideals and Facts:

“The whole sweep, meaning, and possibility of evolution are contained in the word Mahatma,” Judge writes. “Maha is ‘great,’ Atma is ‘soul’ — and both compounded into one, mean those great souls who have triumphed before us:

“Not because they are made of different stuff and are of some strange family, but just because they are of the human race.”

A New Order of Ages

ACCORDING to a “prophecy of the Secret Books,” America is even more important to the spiritual advancement of future humanity, than its legacy of individual freedoms.

The ancient continent on which the United States was born, is the sacred ground of a bold “new order of ages” — an ideal depicted on the reverse of The Great Seal of the United States.

Charles Thomson, who coined the motto on the Great Seal, “Novus Ordo Seclorum,” was a former Latin teacher.

Inspired by a line in Virgil’s Eclogue IV, he placed the motto beneath his vision of an unfinished pyramid.

Thomson explained its significance as “the beginning of the new American Æra,” which commences from the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

But an esoteric, spiritual prophecy speaks of a still higher purpose, that of forming a union of free future souls — an amalgamation of human beings of many races — who will be self-elevated morally, physically and spiritually.

“Occult philosophy teaches that even now, under our very eyes,” Blavatsky writes in The Secret Doctrine:

“… the new Race and Races are preparing to be formed, and that it is in America that the transformation will take place, and has already silently commenced.”

The Founding Fathers, many of whom were Freemasons, were strongly influenced by a Lodge of advanced Adepts —worked behind the scenes during the formation of the new nation from the beginning.

Such perfected Adepts, once human like ourselves, were described by Synesius of Cyrene in the Fourth century as the “sacred tribe of heroes.”

One of those adepts wrote: “and we will go on in that periodical work of ours…until that day when the foundations of a new continent of thought are so firmly built, that no amount of opposition and ignorant malice … will be found to prevail.”